The power of choice

The most powerful and liberating thing that we as people fortunate enough to live in a democratic country have is the ability to choose. The higher up the economic scale one is, the greater the choice. Most white collar workers live in the upper echelons of the socio-economic strata, and thus we are the group with the greatest number of choices. This is indeed a privileged place to be.

Consider for a moment the blue collar workers around us: the security guards; the gardeners; the ladies who wash our cups and clean our bathrooms. The majority live three or four times the distance from work than the rest of us. They have no cars, they rely on buses and taxis. They rise hours before we do in order to have the office ready for us on arrival. Their educational and economic circumstances dictate that their choices are more limited than those of us with houses nearby and private cars to get us here.  They must not only work, but feed and clothe many more in their family, somehow managing from payday to payday where any deviation from the anticipated norm can spell disaster. These good people represent the majority of South Africans, and most consider themselves fortunate to have a job. Many support other family members who just can’t get work.

White collar workers are a minority group, way smaller than the giant pool of unemployed. The majority of our employees fall into this fortunate minority. Yet we are also the most critical and vocal and demanding. This is a natural order – the empowered have more platforms, louder voices, more opportunities and shoulder much less risk when expressing a viewpoint. We are, in short, the fortunate ones.

We are most fortunate in that we have the greatest variety of choices. From what car we choose to drive to where we choose to live to which company we choose to work for and even who we choose as a life partner (not everyone enjoys even that primary choice). But with choice comes power, and with power responsibility.

Robin Banks is a motivational speaker who comes from a small Coloured community on the outskirts of Soweto. He talks about the two types of ABC people. The first type is the Attitude Beliefs Choice group while the second is the Accusation Blame Complaint type. I think it’s a rather neat summation, albeit oversimplified. Nobody sits entirely in one group or the other, we each have a mix of the two. The personal challenge is thus where we place our emphasis. Because that is a choice we do have – we can and do choose type one or type two multiple times every day of our lives.

I subscribe to the position that our belief systems define our reality. The world is bursting with countless examples that prove this. We choose our belief systems, and we can choose to change or adapt them. There’s a well-known author, activist and politician by the name of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969 into a tangled labyrinth of clan and ethnic conflict. As a traditional Muslim Somali, she was circumcised and sewn up at the age of 11 without surgical equipment or anaesthesia under customary law before the war forced her family’s relocation to Saudi Arabia and later Kenya. She eventually turned her back on Islam and her family and clan, escaping to the Netherlands and gaining asylum. She faced endless persecution for her radical opposition to the oppression of women and free thought in hard-line Islamic movements, including numerous death threats. Ayaan chose to change her belief system, against unimaginable & unthinkable odds, and redefined her reality.

We as TBWA\Durban are not attempting anything as daunting as redefining our reality, but we are trying to consolidate it. The Tribe is a manifestation of this. The Tribe is of all of our making; it was birthed in your request for a return to a tighter community. So, each of us has a choice. We can choose to be an active member of the Attitude Beliefs Choice group or of the Accusation Blame Complaint one.  It’s up to you.

Durban's creative talent - deeper than a petri dish?

A year ago I moved to Durban from Johannesburg armed with two decades’ experience in the advertising industry in Johannesburg, London and the Middle East. In all that time I can barely recall a Durban based agency poking its head above the hedge of banality to flash its brilliance to the creative world. One or two exceptions gained a flutter of prominence only to recede with the tide. This is hardly surprising for the simple reason that it’s really difficult to sustain a high level of creativity in an uncreative landscape. The competition isn’t there and the talent suppressed. I admit to having had a preconceived idea of creativity in Durban, much like its culinary equivalent, as a barren wasteland.

That old truism of perception is reality applies here. A cursory look through the creative highlights of the South African industry reveals a paltry, virtually nonexistent presence from the East coast. Sure, Durban is limited in respect of its client base, but the truth is that our industry, while dwarfed by Johannesburg, is no smaller than Cape Town’s. Yet this does not translate into competition in the creativity stakes.

So I was genuinely surprised on discovering, bit by bit over my first year in residence, that Durban is brimming with creative talent. Creativity, in the broader sense of the word, is absolutely alive and well and throwing a kickass party every week. It’s there in the street art, the markets, the music, the cultural art, the design culture, the galleries, the coffee shops and the architecture. Sadly, its profile plummets at that uncomfortable juncture where art meets commerce – aka the communications industry.

Setting out to understand why a vibrant and original creative culture fails to translate into commerce, I stumbled upon the following factors:

1. Students of the commercial arts (advertising, design, digital, etc) have Johannesburg and Cape Town on their radars, but Durban just doesn’t feature. 
2. Durban agencies aren’t inspiring their home grown talent to join their ranks.

This was quite a revelation to me, and one that I know will rankle some of my contemporaries, competitors and colleagues alike. Yet it’s the truth. I’ve been to the colleges and campuses, spoken to hundreds of students, and few of them are looking to their back gardens for the produce to feed their careers.

Several factors influence this thinking. One is the creative profile of Jo’burg and Cape Town agencies. These are the names up in lights that pull the moths. Another is the opportunity factor – most students believe they will earn more and be exposed to more elsewhere. Another is what I call the scope factor – the breadth and depth of clients and brands based in those other cities provides greater choice. To the less articulate, it is simply a matter of headspace - the need to spread their wings - but I believe this is a generalisation of the factors above.

The ones who don’t want to pass up their beloved lifestyles are the ones with the ambition to start their own business, so Durban is awash with Mom and Pop shops offering slivers of talent that don’t  amount to much. Without scale they struggle. A limited client base means fewer opportunities for creative expression, fewer jobs, less diversity and a heavily diminished risk appetite. Few agencies have the temerity to push their clients when they’re uncertain if they can pay salaries at month end.

So it’s up to the big players to change the landscape, because it’s the big players who shoulder the responsibility for the future of the industry. We have to raise our game not one or two notches, but a whole ladder of rungs. As in any industry, it’s the “responsibility” of the brand leaders to drive the market. It’s the responsible thing to do because if the leaders don’t they’ll be displaced by others. This is as true of capitalism as it is of democracy.

The opportunity has arrived most timeously. Our industry is undergoing real revolution, some of it driven within but most of it from external factors beyond our control. The other day Nokia CEO Stephen Elop issued a surprisingly frank memo to staff declaring that the company was standing on a burning platform (read it here). So too is the advertising industry. Durban isn’t the epicentre of our industry, so it will take longer for the heat and smoke to reach us. That’s one view. Another is that the burning platform is an ideal opportunity to steal the march on the slower, more complacent players in Jo’burg and Cape Town. With the abundance of young creative talent emerging from the thick KZN bushveld, I know which option I’m choosing.

Advertising and marketing have never been so much fun

Too many meetings, process, budgets, staffing issues. Shit, creative people just want to make stuff. And in big, fat agencies process gets in the way of doing things.

Perhaps. But it’s also true that in a lot of these agencies the things that people historically have made were TV spots, campaigns and messages.  Executions over which a few people could exercise complete control.  Concepts that had a beginning, middle and end.  Along with a media plan that also adhered to a start and stop date.  You came up with an idea.  Then you sold it, produced it, ran it, entered it, and moved on.

If that’s your idea of fun, then obviously you’re not having any. This is the age of Pepsi Refresh, Ford Fiesta Movement, Burberry’s  <http://edwardboches.com/burberry-is-in-the-content-business> never ending content stream and brands like OK Cupid  <http://blog.okcupid.com/> doing it themselves.

But some of us are actually having a lot of fun doing things other than TV spots. We’re re-inventing the old model.  Experimenting with crowdsourcing.  Building things that have utility.  Mastering augmented reality. <http://edwardboches.posterous.com/a-demonstation-of-olympus-pen-augmented-reali>  Leveraging social media and communities. Learning new tactics. Working with digital creatives. Trying out the emerging platforms. Figuring out how to be inventive with geo-based, mobile technology.  And, yes, making videos.

Read the comments underneath the AdAge piece and you’re reminded that all marketing these days is about ongoing conversation, interaction, and ways to include the reader/customer/prospect. (Even if some of the comments lament the end of the good old days.) Great ideas and storytelling remain essential but they’re but one aspect of creativity in the post digital, neo-social, me-focused age of connectivity.

Consider the challenges that most clients bring to agencies. They’re looking for new ways to involve customers in product development. Striving to leverage their employees in the manner of Best Buy. <>  Hoping to influence with new content; some of which they create, some of which they inspire others to create. They’re interested in leveraging third-party apps and platforms or building Grateful Dead-like  <http://edwardboches.com/marketing-lessons-from-the-grateful-dead> loyalty programs. Even dreaming of an eco-system that actually allows prospects to enter via doors that could be labeled search, discover, learn, connect, share or transact.

Smart marketers know that somewhere between product experience, community participation, social responsibility, gaming dynamics, and crowdsourcing is the new thirty-second TV commercial.

And they’re challenging their agencies to figure out better ways to combine content, UX, social media, utility, mobile and new opt-in retail applications into something coherent, measurable and even predictable.

Solving that problem is definitely more complicated than making a TV commercial.  It calls for a new set of skills, a lot more meetings, or at least a familiarity with new digital collaboration tools.  But it still calls for creativity. And it can even be fun.

Big agencies stuck in old process and production models can’t adjust. I’ve attended enough seminars and spoken at enough conferences to know that many are struggling to figure it out. But whether they do or not remains to be seen. I can only imagine how miserable it must be to work in a place that knows how to do one thing and have that one thing less in demand than it’s ever been.

The smaller, more interesting shops however — especially alternative or digital agencies – are having a blast.  We’re finding inspiration from outside our industry.  Learning to think like Ideo, <http://www.ideo.com/>  watching the tactics of companies like Undercurrent, <http://undercurrent.com/>  even trying our own versions of what Ty Montague has recently formalized with Co.  <http://www.shootonline.com/go/news-view.rs-web3-2909211-1284741028-2.Rosemarie-Ryan--Ty-Montague--Neil-Parker--Richard-Schatzberger-Launch-Co---Identify-Co--Conspirators.html> 

Ad Age paints a bleak picture of the business. But they’ve chosen to focus on people who are leaving places that can’t or won’t embrace real change.  However, look into some of the newer, smaller, more nimble agencies, where digital and social thinking reign, and you not only see plenty of creativity, you find an industry that’s more fun than it’s ever been. 

Predictions and such like

In January this year I stuck my neck out of my tortoise shell and made 10 predictions for the year ahead. It’s time to investigate how wrong I was.

Prediction # 1: We will be challenged as Durban's number one agency. Not in terms of scale, but in areas of specialisation. Other players will challenge our dominance with specialist services that could make us look out of touch. Are we going to observe passively?

Review # 1: Happily we weren’t challenged, at least not this year. But the threat is still very large, so let’s not lure ourselves into any false sense of security here. More importantly, we made some big strides in upping our game in the diversified skills area, and a heavy focus here will continue into 2011. Just not at the expense of anything else.

Prediction # 2: We will fill some of the gaps in our offering and present a more united and organised front that clients will be happy to pay a premium for. How are you going to help in delivering this?

Review # 2: Bingo, passed that one. Just look at what we’re doing with My SPAR and Tops as examples of this. Plenty more to do but we’re out of the blocks and in the game.

Prediction # 3: The shift of budget away from traditional advertising channels will increase in intensity. How do we exploit this opportunity?

Review # 3: Well, my pet iguana could have predicted that so I won’t claim any great insight. More importantly we’ve made big strides towards exploiting these opportunities to the benefit of our clients and our own business.

Prediction # 4: Our 5 top clients will finally turn on the digital light and will be looking for a strategic and creative partner. Are we equipped to be that partner?

Review # 4: SPAR: check. TOPS: check. BDF: check. Build It: not checked. Sara Lee: check. 2010: check. 5 out of 6 isn’t bad. And yes, we are equipped.

Prediction # 5: Tiger Woods will return from the bunker and the world will forget about his indiscretions. Accenture will regret dropping him while Nike will reap the benefit of his comeback. The reality is that Accenture needs a phenomenon like Tiger to sell its dreadfully boring product, while Nike understands the role of brand ambassadors. There's a lesson in this for us and our clients.

Review # 5: While Tiger’s not out of the sand trap he is still a major force despite not winning a tournament. He hardly crashed and burned though, returning to the circuit in April and running close a few times. And Nike is still his major sponsor.

Prediction # 6: The course through 2010 will be bumpy and perilous, but full of opportunities. Will we have the wisdom to distinguish the perils from the opportunities and the courage to take the gaps?

Review # 6: I don’t think anyone will argue with the bumpy and perilous prediction. Nor should we ignore the opportunities that we spotted and took. We retained Sara Lee for a full year against the odds. We invested in skills and resources that will secure us a greater share of the future – if we play it right.

Prediction # 7: Globally the advertising industry will continue to go backwards as clients pressurise their marketers to demonstrate ROI. We can wait to see what New York or London or Hong Kong does to respond or we can take responsibility for our own back yard.

Review # 7: The industry took more knocks in 2010 but is showing early signs of renewal. Locally we just got on with it.

Prediction # 8: Broadband costs will plummet in the next 12 months making affordable broad based internet access a reality in SA. Cellphone browsing will overtake desktop browsing as the primary online interface and Mobi sites will double or treble in quantity. How will this affect our media strategies?

Review # 8: Damn right they have and about time too. Helped along by the enforced lowering of interconnect tariffs and dramatically increased bandwidth. The last mile is still an obstacle to genuine affordable broad based access but we’ve made great strides in the past year.

Prediction # 9: The Jupiter Drawing Room/Metropolitan Republic (SA's largest independent agency) will lose one of its largest clients - because it cannot sustain service levels. What kind of agency would an ABSA, an MTN or an Edcon choose?

Review # 9: Well that didn’t happen, but Vodacom has put its retail business out to pitch after growing up inside FCB. I’ll stick my neck out further and re-predict this in 2011, it’s just a matter of time.

Prediction # 10: The 2010 World Cup will be a staggering success both as a competition and for the South African economy. Will you watch it pass by on TV like every one before it or will you get out and get involved?

Review # 10: No question the event was a roaring success, but the jury’s still split on the economic benefits. I still believe they will come in time. And we got involved in a big way with our own Fan Park. Thanks to all involved in those great efforts.

So, 8 out of 10 isn't bad, even though 2 of those are sitters. Once I’ve had a chance to clear my head and catch some sunshine I will post my 2011 predictions. Make sure you clear your head too, we’re going to need to be extra sharp in 2011.

Predictions and such like

In January this year I stuck my neck out of my tortoise shell and made 10 predictions for the year ahead. It’s time to investigate how wrong I was.

Prediction # 1: We will be challenged as Durban's number one agency. Not in terms of scale, but in areas of specialisation. Other players will challenge our dominance with specialist services that could make us look out of touch. Are we going to observe passively?

Review # 1: Happily we weren’t challenged, at least not this year. But the threat is still very large, so let’s not lure ourselves into any false sense of security here. More importantly, we made some big strides in upping our game in the diversified skills area, and a heavy focus here will continue into 2011. Just not at the expense of anything else.

Prediction # 2: We will fill some of the gaps in our offering and present a more united and organised front that clients will be happy to pay a premium for. How are you going to help in delivering this?

Review # 2: Bingo, passed that one. Just look at what we’re doing with My SPAR and Tops as examples of this. Plenty more to do but we’re out of the blocks and in the game.

Prediction # 3: The shift of budget away from traditional advertising channels will increase in intensity. How do we exploit this opportunity?

Review # 3: Well, my pet iguana could have predicted that so I won’t claim any great insight. More importantly we’ve made big strides towards exploiting these opportunities to the benefit of our clients and our own business.

Prediction # 4: Our 5 top clients will finally turn on the digital light and will be looking for a strategic and creative partner. Are we equipped to be that partner?

Review # 4: SPAR: check. TOPS: check. BDF: check. Build It: not checked. Sara Lee: check. 2010: check. 5 out of 6 isn’t bad. And yes, we are equipped.

Prediction # 5: Tiger Woods will return from the bunker and the world will forget about his indiscretions. Accenture will regret dropping him while Nike will reap the benefit of his comeback. The reality is that Accenture needs a phenomenon like Tiger to sell its dreadfully boring product, while Nike understands the role of brand ambassadors. There's a lesson in this for us and our clients.

Review # 5: While Tiger’s not out of the sand trap he is still a major force despite not winning a tournament. He hardly crashed and burned though, returning to the circuit in April and running close a few times. And Nike is still his major sponsor.

Prediction # 6: The course through 2010 will be bumpy and perilous, but full of opportunities. Will we have the wisdom to distinguish the perils from the opportunities and the courage to take the gaps?

Review # 6: I don’t think anyone will argue with the bumpy and perilous prediction. Nor should we ignore the opportunities that we spotted and took. We retained Sara Lee for a full year against the odds. We invested in skills and resources that will secure us a greater share of the future – if we play it right.

Prediction # 7: Globally the advertising industry will continue to go backwards as clients pressurise their marketers to demonstrate ROI. We can wait to see what New York or London or Hong Kong does to respond or we can take responsibility for our own back yard.

Review # 7: The industry took more knocks in 2010 but is showing early signs of renewal. Locally we just got on with it.

Prediction # 8: Broadband costs will plummet in the next 12 months making affordable broad based internet access a reality in SA. Cellphone browsing will overtake desktop browsing as the primary online interface and Mobi sites will double or treble in quantity. How will this affect our media strategies?

Review # 8: Damn right they have and about time too. Helped along by the enforced lowering of interconnect tariffs and dramatically increased bandwidth. The last mile is still an obstacle to genuine affordable broad based access but we’ve made great strides in the past year.

Prediction # 9: The Jupiter Drawing Room/Metropolitan Republic (SA's largest independent agency) will lose one of its largest clients - because it cannot sustain service levels. What kind of agency would an ABSA, an MTN or an Edcon choose?

Review # 9: Well that didn’t happen, but Vodacom has put its retail business out to pitch after growing up inside FCB. I’ll stick my neck out further and re-predict this in 2011, it’s just a matter of time.

Prediction # 10: The 2010 World Cup will be a staggering success both as a competition and for the South African economy. Will you watch it pass by on TV like every one before it or will you get out and get involved?

Review # 10: No question the event was a roaring success, but the jury’s still split on the economic benefits. I still believe they will come in time. And we got involved in a big way with our own Fan Park. Thanks to all involved in those great efforts.

Once I’ve had a chance to clear my head and catch some sunshine I will post my 2011 predictions. Make sure you clear your head too, we’re going to need to be extra sharp in 2011.

Justin McCarthy TBWA\GROUP\DURBAN

Managing Director Tel: 

+27 31 267 6761

Fax: 

+27 31 266 1566

Cell: 

+27 83 200 3759

Web: 

www.tbwa.co.za

Agency of the decade, AdReview 2010
Winner of Africa’s first ever Black Pencil from D&AD
No. 1 Bafana Bafana Fan

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