It’s fortunate that this is an industry built on telling great stories because I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for a well-told story.
It’s not just the entertainment value of a good story; it’s the idea that when we take a step back and look at how challenges used to get solved in an era when technology wasn’t there to save the day, creative solutions invariably seemed to present themselves.
I’m of the belief that the challenges of evolving and staying relevant in the face of a changing media landscape, vast and technologically complex though they may be, are the same kind of challenges our predecessors faced, albeit in a different era and in a different contextual setting.
Take the way social platforms are evolving – it’s truly frightening. The pace at which these canvases have changed in less than a decade is scary. Yet even this can be related to an ad industry struggle from the past. It is one that I recently read about in a Dave Trott piece that he narrates in his classic storytelling style, about a Frenchman named Jean-Claude, who was banned from putting up poster ads on French roadsides in 1964.
His media landscape changed and his business was ruined overnight. But he evolved.
He saw residents of Lyon waiting in the rain for buses, so he sought permission to put up bus shelters on the condition he was allowed to display his posters inside them. He applied the same logic to public toilets, bike racks and other street furniture around the world, eventually building up a business now worth over $3.5 billion a year, before he passed away earlier this year.
Jean-Claude was the founder of a company he named after himself: JC Decaux.
The world’s largest outdoor advertising business came about as an accidental solution to a completely different problem. Creative evolution on that level is something we should all aspire to.
Digital citizens are effectively banning existing forms of advertising from their screens. It’s not even about ad-blockers and similar filtering technology any more; they’re simply scrolling past. We need to channel our inner Jean-Claude to find creative solutions to this challenge.
The intelligent targeting we used to champion a year ago to identify the ‘segment of one’ and personalise advertising to every individual is already here. Just last week I was on TripAdvisor; moments later I was targeted by an ad on Twitter featuring the exact destination and hotel I was looking at. I was as impressed as I was freaked out, but I should have been neither. This is in the realm of every brand, planner and creative and it isn’t new any more; it’s just good use of data and should be accepted as the baseline, before the discussion turns to creative and content.
TV production has always been considered first because it requires a bigger production budget, but we don’t need to just stop at adapting it to online channels. For example, we could go beyond that and create portrait videos for mobile platforms, landscape for desktop and alternative sequenced ads for different portals. As Snapchat launch their much anticipated vertical video ads in the region next year, the prominence of letterbox video formats will fall even further and we’ll all be thinking portrait-first. The baseline is shifting once more.
Now imagine for a moment if those media spaces were cut off from us tomorrow. What would we do? How would we evolve? This is where the fun begins. The feature set at our disposal on digital and social channels is now so vast that we don’t necessarily need to rely on ad space in news feeds to get by.
How about dark social? Those exchanges that are occurring in private networks unseen by brands? Chatbots are a huge part of this, and Facebook’s development of Messenger and acquisition of WhatsApp are a pointer to how big this could become. The furore over the sharing of contact data between WhatsApp and Facebook means I don’t think it’ll be long before TripAdvisor send me a WhatsApp message about a destination I’m interested in like they did on Twitter. Impressive, scary, or, again, just the norm?
Where does disappearing content fit into this mix? We haven’t fully figured out the complexities of content that stays online permanently, yet our audiences have moved to communicating through messages that disappear once they’ve been seen. Apple’s bundled a self-destroying message feature into iMessage, Instagram Stories does the same thing as Snapchat, and their whole platform is built around messaging that’s literally here today, gone tomorrow. Another challenge, another evolution.
Those messages are best broadcast live – so we have to evolve our thinking to consider where live streaming video fits into this mix. Periscope and Facebook Live have already hedged their bets on this, and rumours continue that Instagram and Snapchat will be launching live video streaming functionality soon as well. More changes for us to adapt to.
Suddenly we’re in a world that doesn’t involve permanent, ad-supported campaigns heavily reliant on intelligent use of data for targeting. Instead we’re focusing on time-sensitive, disappearing messages on private networks, produced live in real-time, that we can’t plan for in structured editorial calendars.
Got all of that?
Now start thinking about how you might turn everything you just read into an immersive, virtual, 360-degree experience. Because artificial intelligence and augmented reality are coming too, and soon experiences won’t need to have happened to be broadcast; we’ll be able to create them in worlds that doesn’t even exist.
Jean-Claude Decaux had it right, evolving to the circumstances around him. Our platforms have evolved. We have to move with them.
Mazher Abidi, Head of social media at Initiative