The economics of scam

Ok, this is my one and only rant on scam.

If Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, spent a couple of days looking at the economics of scam, what would he say? I'm not Steven Levitt, but here's my guess.

Scam takes 3 points off of an agency's margin every year - yeah, I said it!

Why? 

Money: A huge additional draw on already scarce resources. Simply put, chasing awards with scam (as against real work paid for by clients) costs an awful lot of incremental time and money - money that I believe could be put to better use. 

Morale: When I started in the industry, awards were a movement for motivation; increasingly they have become a rite of passage...without them you don't get to progress. It’s also a morale downer for the rest of the agency who don’t get to play at the awards game - a fact that can eroding trust and respect within the other departments who see scam put above real work in the creative pecking order.

Clients: Every hour spent on scam is an hour less spent working on actual client  business. Today, with clients more demanding than ever and competitors more ferocious than ever, this is suicide. Ask yourself; are you better off winning an award for something that doesn't really exist that no-one will ever see, or trying to do better work on real client business?

Inflation: Win more awards, get better jobs, get paid more, win more awards, get better jobs, get paid more...and round it goes. Agencies are creating creative salary inflation and using the company’s money to do so. I say pay great creatives great salaries for real, not made up, work. Creatives remain the engines of our industry and they should be paid as such.

The Emperor’s Clothes: Scam work is a scam in and of itself. No-one believes it’s real and everyone sees it coming a mile off - clients, colleagues, other creatives, journalists, everyone. A very well known industry expert shared some data with my former agency last year which said that, in his 2010 survey, the most important thing clients looked for from agencies was “creativity” and the least important thing they looked for was “awards”. Some of my creatives colleagues (you know who you are) couldn’t understand the incredibly obvious distinction - a distinction that clients clearly got!

I'm not a creative hater, not by a long shot. But I am a selective award hater - at least when it comes to awards given to scam work. 

The over emphasis on awards creates and the proliferation of scam in those awards shows creates a false economy in our industry. Furthermore, it wastes money, time and energy that should be put to better use - hence my 3 points of the margin lost guesstimate. Too often it doesn't reward real effort on real business - which is so much harder than cranking out a scam ad for some local museum - and it can create a false sense of achievement and standing.

The problem is that we've convinced ourselves that we need awards - the amount of times I've heard "if we don't play the awards game, we won't get the best creatives". I think that may have been true in the past, but today's best agencies increasingly look for real work on real clients - maybe they always did. You show up at BBH or Weiden with a bag full of scam metal and you won't be taken seriously.

Young creatives, don't take a puff of that award joint. Do great work on whatever clients you get the chance to work on, be proud of pushing work from crap to acceptable, and from acceptable to great.  Jump on real opportunities to surprise the world with your creativity and by all means enter your best work into the best awards. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that's all that matters, because if you do, it’s a hard one to get out of and once you have that reputation, you have it for life.

The consistent push back I get on this subject is that clients in the region rarely give agencies the opportunity to do "good work". I'm sorry, I think that simply shows a cock eyed understanding the business we are in and a distorted view of what constitutes "good work". But that's for another time.

Stepping quietly down from my soapbox....

Now, bring on the firestorm of indignation....

Honestly speaking

Honestly speaking

My proposal for an Anti-Dictator Low Earth Satellite Internet Access program

I don't know if this exists already, my five minutes of googling the topic left me equally convinced that it does AND doesn't exist already, but I have an idea of how to get round those pesky dictators shutting off the Internet mid-revolution.

I think that the United Nations should have a handful of low earth satellites on hand that they can quickly position over a country or a city to provide Internet coverage for the people; even if their feared leader has switched it off.

 The only way for a dictator to get round this would be to shoot a UN satellite out of the sky which, even for Gaddafi-level crazy, would seem like a pretty risky proposition these days.

The cost wouldn't be cheap but maybe the UN could offset the venture by selling the music streaming rights to iTunes or by allowing the US to mount Stinger missiles on the satellites and use them as drones during non-revolutionary peace time periods.

If anyone knows how I could fund this as a start up, please let me know, I think demand is only going to grow...

The NASA of healthcare...

Interesting news today that a bunch of big tech firms are clubbing together to help the Stanford Medical Centre build a new $2bn hospital. From what I can grasp this would become something of a skunk work hospital showcasing, testing and creating state of the art new healthcare technology products.

What a genius idea. It could be the NASA of healthcare - which we surely need!

This is the kind of innovation and innovative thinking that America (everywhere) needs - especially today.

Ironic that this is happening the same week that congress is trying to "Cut to success" taking chunks out of the Obama budget - education, healthcare, long term investment and other luxury items!!!!

North African revolution, brought to you by BNP PARIBAS

Maybe I'm cynical, but I was somewhat taken aback to see BNP Paribas running this ad on BBC World tonight in-between the news of Libya's potential fall and the rest of the unrest in the ME. Nice media placement, lucky/unlucky co-incidence, cynical marketing ploy.... you decide.....






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30BLYRDtaBU

This is a reality TV show that could catch on....

Advertising would be great if it were more like design....

The wonderful designer Michael Beirut on 'Clients'
















http://www.swiss-miss.com/2010/02/creativemornings-video-michael-bierut.html

Enough of the 'winning talk' all the time

Lucy Kellaway is the best. She puts her finger on the subject or the needless grinding positivity about everything an organization does these days and stands up for Stephen Elop for his extraordinary email last week that took his own organization to task for opportunities missed.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5e9b21f0-362c-11e0-9b3b-00144feabdc0.html

Chiat Day's old ad about why they lost the Honda business back in the day is a nice example and a breath of fresh air from the usual "What, that big global loss? Oh no, that was only 1% of the business we picked up this year...." Ha!

Enjoy.

Change is good...

To me the prospect of faster and more prolific change (especially out here in Asia) is what gets me out of bed (albeit late) in the morning.

A nice bit from Fareed's GPS a couple of weeks back where, a frankly relieved looking, Tony Blair reflected on the change he inflicted on the British population.

I'm not a burn your bra liberal, but....

If I'm getting this spot right - and I've seen it a lot as it's running non stop on Star Cricket channel during the ashes debacle - then i'm Neil appalled from Holland Village!

The story seems to be about a series of indian men who are rushing to get to work and are apparently running late. Towards the end of the spot we realize that their job is to be human light bulbs for their masters because of the teeth whitening effect of Happydent chewing gum... Sometimes they're illuminating the tennis court with their dazzling teeth, sometimes their heads are the headlights on their bosses cars and sometimes they are simply part of the human chandelier that their bosses use to light their dinner time.

REALLY? Thats here we are in 2011? That's how India wants to present itself (albeit via a chewing gum brand) on Asia-wide TV?

Shame. Or am I being way too sensitive?

Xmas inspired cut and paste creativity

Lovely home made re-mix/cut of the 1965 Rudolf the red nosed reindeer stop motion animation along with The Police Roxanne. All done by a guy at home with a simple piece of software (pro-tools). So far a quarter of a million views, likely a lot more by xmas.

I wonder how long it would have taken your average BDA to come up with something like this and how much it'd cost...

Except they wouldn't have made this because the ECD would have said it's been done before, the art director would have demanded we re-shoot the reindeer scenes, the client would have made us take out the abominable snowman (for the sake of the children and to be able to run it before the 9pm watershed) and the media guys would have said we can only afford a :20

Merry xmas everyone...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N4EFVgtB0Y

What a leak of one of China's diplomatic cables might read like

I DON'T THINK BLOGGING IS SIMPLY ABOUT RE-POSTING OTHER PEOPLE'S STUFF, BUT THIS IS TOO GOOD NOT TO RE-POST.

A MUST READ FROM THE OFTEN SMUG BUT IN THIS CASE SPOT ON TOM FRIEDMAN . . . . .

OP-ED COLUMNIST 

From WikiChina

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN 

Published: November 30, 2010

While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? 

I suspect the cable would read like this:

Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing

TOP SECRET/Subject: America today.

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. 

It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon you.

In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals.

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America.

Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America.

Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.

China Embassy Washington
.

Speechless

Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Wikileaks...

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future....

A lovely quote that I use in as many presentations as I can is from Arthur C. Clarke 


"If we have leaned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative".

He wrote this in 1951 but it's never been more true.

Check out this Newsweek article from 1995 (Clifford Stoll) about how over blown the Internet was...

http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html


And I quote....

"They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.


Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."


Hee hee.

In an increasingly networked (globalized) world, this is an alarming chart

We (the greater we) need the US economy to begin to bounce back properly - and, as such, this chart is scary.

Asia/fast growing economies are doing better than most, but if these huge developed markets fail to spark, it'll hold everyone back, encourage more trade barriers and hold back the very globalization that has fueled Asia's growth (and others) over the past decade.

But, in my opinion, America needs to start to believe in itself and stop whining about the state of the world and its part in it. This changing of the economic guard (to a significant degree) should not be a surprise and if the developed world could find it in themselves to embrace and work with it rather than become more protectionist I think everyone would work out better in the medium to long term. Maybe if the dems and republicans stopped ripping themselves apart 24/7 on TV the general public might have a bit more confidence.....

WTF has happened to Obama the great communicator - and how the Democrats need a major overhaul of their messaging strategy

What has happened to Obama the great communicator and how the Democrats need an overhaul of their messaging strategy (in my opinion).

I'm shocked and saddened to say that I'm starting to give up with Obama - at least on his skills as a communicator and his ability to control the democratic message.

The dems seems to have a total inability to band effectively together, pick a few (only a few) winning talking points, stick to them and ruthlessly out the republicans on their nonsense.

The republicans are far superior at this and (with some exceptions from the teabaggers)  all sing off the same simple clear song sheet - smaller government, lower taxes, cut spending and strong on national security. They are also incredibly good at framing issues with language (read "don't think about an elephant" for the full story - great book by george lakoff) - pro-life/pro-choice, bush tax cuts, Obamacare, war on terror etc. 

The dems are all over the place on messaging and they are terribly divided - they need the old advertising lesson of throwing six tennis balls at someone vs. One...

As an interested viewer of the appallingly partisan state of affairs right now it seems obvious that the dems have a bunch of really clear strong points that are not getting through to the gen pub - unless they scour the political media and analyze it in great detail.

1.  Republicans don't care about poor people - while lobbying hard for continuing George bush's pro-millionaire tax cuts this week they voted down a bill for continuing unemployment benefits for struggling Americans. WTF? 

2.  Obama saved the American car industry and with it 1.3m jobs - GMs float on the stock exchange this week was the biggest in history (bigger than google). Right now all the big us car companies are back in profit for the first time since 2005. He took a tough decision that the party of NO mocked and it worked and yet they are still criticizing him for it. Why? And when are we going to out them on it?


3.  The republicans are using national security as a political tool and it's putting the American people in real danger. The party who started an illegal war, water tortured, wiretapped and extraordinarily renditioned while in power is screaming constitutional over reach (reach around?) over the TSA's new scanner/pat down procedures. Ridiculous hypocrisy. 100,000 troops are putting their life on the line every day, its time for the 99% of the population for whom they are sacrificing to do their part - in this case a slightly uncomfortable frisking only for those who refuse the scan. Surely a small price to pay and a welcome spirit of "everybody has a part to play" that has been forgotten. 

The republicans are also blocking the signing of the Start treaty against the advice of the chairman of the joint chiefs and other military leadership? Why? It's just politics and a chance to skewer Obama at the expense of American security.

4.  The republican party's intransigence and partisanship is holding back the confidence of the American people to pull out of this recession in the way the business community has - and the public needs to know this. 

The business community in the US has pulled steeply out of the recession in a way that ordinary people have not - 5 straight quarters of economic growth, corporate profits were the highest on record last quarter since the govt began recording in 1950 and corporate profits as a % of US economic growth over the last 3 decades are at nearly the highest point they've ever been today - up from the lowest point when when Obama took over. 

The constant sniping, criticism, blame gaming and painting of gloomy pictures can only leave the American public unsure, worried, cautious and unlikely to start spending, investing or employing. All of this politics is not harming business, it's not harming the republicans but it sure is harming the country's morale. 

At a time when the country needs to pull together and gee itself up, shame on the politicians who do the opposite for their own political gain.

5.  The deficit and W's tax cuts - the dems need to do much better job on this one. The right have succeeded in every occasion (normally unchallenged) in painting Obamas plans to let the tax cuts run out as "an Obama tax increase". This is rewriting history. I don't exactly remember the details, but I believe the only way W could get these tax cuts (in good economic times) through the congress was to agree to a term limit for them. So, this isn't Obama increasing taxes, this is the End of a policy written by bush and agreed by bush and supported by the republicans. The fact that Obama is willing to extend them for the middle class is a good thing. If it were me, 

I wouldn't extend them at all because then they are simply an extension of bush's policies. How about a brand new Obama tax cut beginning Jan 1? Reframe it like that and republicans would be fighting to increase the Obama tax cuts rather than extend the bush tax cuts. . . .


Grow some balls democrats, stop in fighting, learn to take and control the message and for christ sake read George lakoff's book about framing issues and stop letting the republicans run the communications board.

Happy thanksgiving and let's hope the witch of wassilla runs in 2012 - for all our sakes...

It's not a fad

Ahead of the curve, disrupting, resisting the usual. All of these are what we talk about in our industry as rules to live by. And yet we rarely do. Nice to see a big serious (and likely stodgy) company such as the FT embrace new things. The FT is subsidizing iPad purchases for all it's staff and giving masterclass lessons to get people up to speed on this important new platform - which is, after all, what it is.

Who will be the first agency to do this? I bought an iPad very early on for my former agency and struggled to get it through the 'resist the usual' finance Dept. I guess it's resist the usual, to a point...

Click below for the story

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/11/18/financial-times-gives-ipad-bonuses-to-staff/

There speaks a client who knows his business

"We have 100% awareness, we have been in all the big wars, what we have is a perception problem"
Bruce Jasurda, CMO of the US Army.

Churchill on Lawrence of Arabia....

I know a few people for whom I could say the same...