The Consumer as Agency of the Year?
Monday, January 8th, 2007
First Time makes “You” the person of the year. Now AdAge makes The Consumer the Agency of the Year. But Jonah Bloom says they didn’t copy Time…that they had the idea first…yeah sure…whatever.
Anyway…
It would have been FCBdraft except for that little Wal-Mart fisasco. But in the AdAge panel re-vote, a real agency like…say Goodby, was beat out, in large part, because of a piece created by two guys (one a juggler and one a lawyer) with way too much time on their hands. The now infamous Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment — millions watched it, hundreds of media outlets covered it and the mint in question enjoyed a 15% spike in sales.
Sure I watched them. You probably did too. I even wrote a blog about one of the experiments. They are all over YouTube and damn near every blog and industry rag. You couldn’t help but watch — in the same way you can’t help but look while passing a car accident. Or pause to watch a funny snippet on TV’s America’s Bloopers of someone getting kicked in the balls. It’s our nature. Our voyeuristic curiosity to enjoy something funny, chuckle at something stupid happening to other people, ponder something strangely off-beat or gawk at something we don’t routinely see.
But…did they set out to increase sales like an agency would be tasked to do? With a real strategic focus? Doubtful. These guys just wanted their 15 minutes of fame. And they found a very visual, funny, ninth-grade-science-class way of getting it that we all thought was fun to watch and share. The impact on the products involved was most likely…a lucky accident. Something they didn’t even remotely consider until after they started getting so much buzz.
I think the consumer-in-control, consumer generated content, consumer is king/queen issue is a major one facing the advertising industry and thankfully pushing the agency industry to step it up and embrace a real conversation with consumers. But for the industry publication to vote The Consumer as agency of the Year? That’s a real stretch to me.
From the AdAge story:
From an agency perspective, there are exactly three ways to look at the rise of consumer control. The first view is like something out of the Book of Revelation — all conquest, war, famine and death. Happily, the ad industry, thanks to countless foretellings of the death of the 30-second spot and pretty much every other Madison Avenue institution, by now has gotten used to apocalyptic visions of its future, so this will mean minimal leaps out of windows.
The second way of looking at this is to pretty much reject the notion that there’s any fundamental change at all. This is perhaps best espoused by Euro RSCG New York Executive Creative Director Jeff Kling, who responds thusly to the suggestion that consumers could one day unseat agencies at the right hand of marketers: “I think the idea that this represents a threat to ad agencies is patently absurd and drummed up to have something interesting to discuss. I don’t know anyone who fears for his job. Companies have always wanted to gain control over what’s said about them. It used to be letters to the editor; now it’s consumer-generated content. Advertising has the same role it’s always had, and managing and leveraging all that content that’s out there is classic creative direction.”
We arrive rather dialectically at the third way: an acknowledgment that there are lessons to be learned but those lessons don’t necessarily herald the end of the ad agency as we know it.