March 2009 — Kevin Rothermel

Hey! I found the missing advertising talent. And they seem to be doing just fine.

So after much anticipation, it turned out that I wasn't actually able to go to SXSW. Which was a bummer, and yet another reason why I'm ready for this whole economy thing to pass. The good news though, is that we happened to be heading to Austin for some research during the last couple days of the event. So while we didn't get the panel goodness, we did absorb some learning from some friends who did go, and we had a great time.

After checking into our hotel, I remarked on Twitter that everyone looked like they worked with the Interwebs, but then later I realized that they looked surprisingly similar to junior and mid-level advertising people. Except of course that they were driving Porsches and talking about running companies. And that made me sad. But then it also made me think about all of the conversation I've heard about how advertising is having trouble attracting new talent. Which is funny when you think about the way young people are treated by this business. Understanding why there is a lack of new talent isn't exactly rocket science.

Advertising simply isn't the only way to make a career being creative anymore. Creative people can now just start their own business, call all of the shots, make all of the money, and have a good time building a completely original brand (yep, I said brand.) Whereas the advertising experience is typically something along the lines of paying your own way to go to New York to interview, being offered $30k to work in Manhattan, and then being reminded about how lucky you are, every day, for being allowed The Honour of working 80-hours a week for someone who got rich for knowing how to tell dick jokes in-between TV shows. I've been very lucky to have avoided most of that, having worked for some of the most incredible people in the business, in both talent and in graciousness, but I've heard some terrible stories from friends that I've made along the way. And it makes me think that agencies are broken in a more fundamental way than most people like to talk about.

The agency world is still operating under the assumption that they are the one place to go for creative folks. And while it still is high on the list of a lot of people, myself included, it doesn't seem like the business is doing a very good job of bringing in the kinds of people who know how to be what marketing needs to become as we hurtle into a strange and uncertain future. Some agencies are attempting to, but often it seems like more often than not they are just bringing in weirdos for the sake and novelty of it rather than bringing in people who actually know how to do stuff. But I'm starting to get the feeling that the people who know how to do this stuff aren't there for the easy taking, as they've all chosen a more appealing route. Working for themselves. Living the life of an entrepreneur rather than an employee. Working 18-hours a day for themselves rather than someone else.

Advertising is having trouble attracting new talent because it's not trying to attract new talent. The business is still counting on a fading mystique to lure people who love it into working in it. And while all of this might be over-generalized, I am more and more convinced that until the industry addresses this problem in a real way, it doesn't matter how much change they talk about, agencies will continue to slide into mediocrity and lose relevance with clients.

Perfection and moving on from the 20th Century Anomaly

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of perfection. People strive for it, beat themselves up to attain it, and then beat themselves up when they fail to get there. Luxury brands like Lexus like to use the idea of perfection as a part of their product and marketing philosophy. Kids all strive to grow up with perfect grades, have the perfect body, look perfect every day, and eventually lead the perfect life. Now more than ever, good enough isn’t actually good enough (though the collapse of the economy may fix that.)

Perfect implies a singular answer. One way of being. It speaks to cultural references of having a chosen one, and probably somewhat to the idea of monotheism. There’s one right thing to believe in, and there’s one right way to go about believing in that one right thing. The future is often thought of as a place of singularity as well.

I think what is so interesting about perfection is that our survival as a species largely has depended on our ability to be imperfect. We are problem solvers. And our brain rewards us for mastering new problems. We have been set up by evolution to be generalists who are rewarded for becoming more and more so. Imperfection is our game. And we’re really good at it.

Perfection by it's nature is boring. It implies conforming to an already established convention. We can't learn anything new from something that is perfect, and learning something new is what our brains thrive on and reward us for. Once we've memorized a pattern, our brains no longer provide that jolt of dopamine that it did the first time we learned that pattern. It's no longer interesting or fun.

So what?

I think that a lot of the changes in media that are happening now are a result of humans being generalists and boredom with the last century of perfected mass communications…the 20th Century Anomaly. Before the Twentieth Century Anomaly, people communicated with each other around camp fires, in letters, and in other very social and very decentralized ways. As with everything else, communicating had problems of its own that had to be solved as society evolved, and sometimes it was needed to solve other problems. So people innovated to solve those problems and everything was working well, until communicating evolved into mass communications, at which point innovation was taken out of the hands of the people by both cost and required knowledge. Once communicating was largely taken out of the hands of the great unwashed masses, things became fairly calm and predictable. In order to innovate communications, people had to become very educated and very lucky to get into the right places from where they could innovate. And frankly communicating had become a business model; there was too much money flowing to risk innovation.

Eventually technology fixed that situation by once again empowering the general public in communicating. The old world order, which was very comfortable, was probably as close to perfect as this industry has ever been, or will ever be again. While this bored most people to tears, some people became addicted to this. They are used to having a perfected way of doing things, the lack of which has them scrambling to figure out what the new rules are. They are looking for their footing by trying to find the way to be a perfect marketer right now. This is most evident in the amount of people on Twitter who like to prescribe the "right way" to Twitter.

Unfortunately for them, I think that the democratization of communications as well as the democratization of technological creation has returned communicating to the hands of the imperfect generalist, and we've probably seen the last days of the perfected media landscape. In the new world that we live in, trying to figure out the "right way" to do things will prove to be a Sisyphean task. While people are falling all over themselves to become masters of the new way, the landscape will still be moving under them. This is because of two things:

If we're talking about social media type things, we're talking about billions of individuals. What works for one person will not work for everyone else. What one person is interested in reading does not apply to everyone else. There's not one right way to communicate.

The democratization of technological know how, combined with the ease with which people can now create their own software and hardware, combined with the democratization of distribution provided by the internet, combined with our desire to keep learning and experiencing new things, makes me think that we're never going to see the stability of the 20th century in media ever again. We've now entered what I can only imagine will be a permanent state of innovation driven change.

In this new world, perfection rarely exists, and when it does, odds are that it is boring or old news. We now live in a post perfection world, which is great, because it's what our brains were set up to deal with. I think that given this new reality, there are no shortcuts, there are no 10 commandments, and there's certainly no proprietary model that can effectively solve marketing problems. Despite our allure to the perfect solution, anyone who claims to know the perfect way to market right now is either lying or incredible wrong. I think that the best thing that can be done from a marketing standpoint is to keep immersed in culture and consumer behavior, and use that knowledge to solve problems in the unique way with which every problem needs to be addressed. Like we've done for millions of years.

Nominated for Post of Last Month, go back in time to vote!

I was hoping to have this issue solved by now, but having just found out that I had a post that was nominated for Niel Perkin's Post of the Month (thanks to Tom for nominating me and to Niel for actually including it) a few weeks ago made me realize that my current RSS set-up isn't doing me any favors.

I had things set up in daily folders. Each weekday had its own alotted feeds, which I would read daily on the Bart coming in to work. The problem with that system though is that feeds like TechCrunch and PSFK were still bullying feeds from regular bloggers out of the picture. Also, I downloaded the Kindle app for iPhone and have been reading books on Bart all the while neglecting my feed reader. All of which kept me from knowing to spam people for Post of the Month votes. Bummer.

So now I'm reorganizing again, this time with one folder that is filled with regular bloggers, things that I really want to read, to be read daily. Then I may divide up the rest in to subject specific folders, though I'm still skeptical of that system. In fact, I'm now thinking of eliminating a lot of stuff that I feel like I need to read in favor of things that I want to read. Twitter should bring anything else interesting to my attention … I think. So here goes another great reorganziation.

What happens when an online game becomes a bank?

Those who have been paying attention to virtual worlds for awhile have likely seen all kinds of stories about the transactions taking place within these digital places. Most stories have revolved around people buying and selling earned character attributes, rare items, and how sweatshops have sprung up in which people to grind away in virtual worlds to generate assets in characters or items to sell to lazy American gamers. Well, I think things are about to get more serious, as Ars Technica is reporting that the makers of Entropia Universe have been granted a banking license in Sweden.

MindArk PE AB, the company behind sci-fi MMO Entropia Universe will apparently be able to let players conduct real-world banking from within its online game. Of course, Entropia Universe actually features a cash-based economy already, where players can exchange real money for game currency at an exchange rate of 10:1 (ten in-game dollars to one U.S. dollar) and then buy in-game items with the money; the game itself has proven to be incredibly successful, having generated over $420 million last year.

Now, though, MindArk's going to be just like a bank in the real world: it will be backed by Sweden's $60,000 deposit insurance, offer interest-bearing accounts for its clients, feature direct deposit options, let players pay bills online, and apparently will offer loans to customers.

I'm clearly not an expert in financial issues, but it seems as though adding banking to the economies within virtual worlds could have some profound implications for real life. It raises issues in my mind about things like money moving effortlessly and untracked across borders; the millions (and eventually billions) of dollars in transactions that are going to be taking place outside of traditional nation based economies; could a country like Sweden eventually become the dominant global financial power simply by hosting the billions of dollars in financial transactions that people from across the globe are wielding within virtual worlds? What happens if something like World of Warcraft becomes the world's biggest economy? And most importantly, will Donald Trump buy Habbo Hotel and turn it into a tacky casino and virtual boxing venue?

Sometimes I think things are about a decade or so away from getting really weird.

Month: March 2009

Hey! I found the missing advertising talent. And they seem to be doing just fine.

Perfection and moving on from the 20th Century Anomaly

Nominated for Post of Last Month, go back in time to vote!

What happens when an online game becomes a bank?

How to install a viral ad