The ad world is in a seismic clusterf***.
I’m not telling you anything new here, but we need to be really honest with ourselves as to whether we can handle the change and survive this dramatic paradigm shift in the communications business. When I described my views to our creative team yesterday, an unassuming, 26-year-old copywriter summed it up as follows:
Work harder, for longer and for less.
Be faster, have better ideas and be more strategic.
Hire staff, fire staff, celebrate and empower.
Scrape data, work a brief and create great ideas.
Entertain, converse and sell.
Get together, be sociable, embrace the industry.
Be real-time… all the time.
It’s time to stop adopting and adapting.
It’s Crunch Time.
I love his honesty. You feel his pain and also his excitement. He sounds ‘on the edge’ while still seemingly able to take on the challenge, while backing it up with data… in real time.
This is today’s world of communication. We’ve not created it this way. Consumers (through their technology addictions) have got firmly hooked on the mobile drip. And whilst in the region consumers are more comfortable with brands than elsewhere in the world, we believe they’d prefer our ads, videos, animations, gifs, visuals and copy to be removed from their mobile screens altogether. This is our new baseline.
At Hug, we are not trying to be disruptive for the sake of it. We are focusing really hard on trying to get better at accommodating what the market and consumers are demanding. We have removed our previous tag line ‘love digital’ because we believe it’s now redundant.
Whilst making money remains a core objective for our business, we have accepted that we need to work off lower margins and succeed via regional and global scale. It may not be glamorous, but we want to apply ‘consistency and quality’ on scale. Much like a successful QSR brand (Hardees), rolling out their winning formula of curly fries across multiple markets.
We are adamant that our work should be judged by results and not subjectivity. We can all be experts in creative indecision and opinion, but would rather our partners renew their contracts due to results, hard work and our drive for innovation.
We strongly refute the legacy giants of the past, dictating what constitutes media success. We live by the minute, learn, recalibrate and re-launch until we hit the KPIs.
Even those of us who are old are forced to live young. With an average agency age of 25, we are learning to harness the arrogance, impatience and sometimes naïve self belief of our team to breakthrough the clutter.
We also house a responsibility to both challenge ourselves and challenge the industry to speak out and speak up. We’re no longer on a digital mission, but on a mission to be straight talking and tackle real issues with real clarity.