The GMT+8 Life

Before I start, let me say I am not a technology laggard, a Facebook hater or in general a person who longs for a life more simple; filled with rotary phones and weekends at the allotment.

With that said, I gave a lecture last week at a University in Singapore (yeah, I know, scary) and was enjoying a post presentation coffee when I was approached by one of the students from the lecture. For about ten minutes, this nice guy gave me his point of view about all things technology and new media and why it was revolutionizing the world – all delivered with a Def Con 3 level of self confidence that only 3/4 of an MBA can give you.

My point to him was, that while all of this new stuff was exciting and consequential, it was important not to miss the fact that the underlying human motivations have not really changed and that these things he was fawning over were symptomatic of a more important and slower moving thing – humanity.

As you can imagine, this didn’t go down too well and the new media fawn-fest went on. I finally gave him an example of why I believed that the fundamentals of marketing had not in fact changed despite all the changes. My example was a simple one, that what’s at the heart of new media isn’t new at all, in fact it’s very old.

Since time began, humans have been about sociability – things that today we would readily attribute to things of a social media nature – storytelling, connecting, talking, sharing opinions, getting closer (1-2-1), building communities and exercising word of mouth. It’s just that in the past, before we lived in blocks of flats and flew around in planes, we didn’t need social media or things like that – in Roman times, the equivalent of ‘signing in’ to Facebook was knocking on a neighbor’s front door. Ebay was the forum and tweeting was done via a distinctly bricks and mortar pedestal called the Rostra.

To me, new media is simply old media fundamentals brought to life through new and constantly changing technology. What’s at the core remains pretty much the same – I think the quote is something like “technology changes, people don’t” – and I think we’d do well to keep this in mind.

Clay Shirky agrees with me too, which is nice. In a recent (excellent) McKinsey podcast he said the following of today’s net-generation “they’re not different kinds of people than we were when we were their age, human nature hasn’t changed. But, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity [and today the opportunities open to people are different and greater]” I couldn’t have put it better myself, really.

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 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….

Over drinks the other night with my friend Dave C, who is a senior global client out here, we were reflecting on the lack of no-bullshit straight talk in the business these days. It seems everything is so exaggerated and hyped up; from the flowery self aggrandizing internal announcements that seem to fill the corporate inbox, to the excruciating positioning videos that abound on YouTube (one in particular that got a serious kicking recently on the blogs). We seem to have forgotten, if indeed we ever knew, that sometimes being straight with people is the most effective way to go.

Lucy Kellaway captured it nicely in her FT article last week where she praised Stephen Elsop’s memo to Nokia staff for its inspiration through (brutal) honesty not hyperbole – although the share price is through the floor!

When I think back to some of the best people I’ve worked with, they were often the ones who, when we clearly had nothing of note in the art bag, said so and explained why. People who, when the client had a crazy idea, said it was crazy (albeit in the nicest way possible way) and suggested what might work instead.

So, my CNY resolution, is to work on being more straightforward and to tell the unvarnished truth as often as possible – couched appropriately. I took it for a spin with a client this morning and it worked a treat; what a liberating feeling, you should try it.