John Winsor

Will Madison Avenue Become the La Brea Tar Pits of the Ad Industry?

The news that Ladies' Home Journal was turning to crowdsourcing as a way forward was a bit of a shock to me. The first company I started, Sports and Fitness Publishing, was a magazine company. You could say that I have ink in my blood. My Dad, Grandfather and Great Grandfather were all newspaper publishers. Almost every summer job I had in High School and College was working at the Canton Daily Ledger, my hometown paper. I loved being a reporter, selling local advertising and working in the press. There was something magical about waking up every morning and with an idea of what might be the news that day and by 3 o'clock be looking at a finished, printed newspaper fulfilling the vision of being at the center of the community dialogue. Unfortunately, those days are long gone for the newspaper industry.

What once were stalwarts of the media landscape now look more like dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. New forms are born from the skeletons of the old.

When I started Sports and Fitness Publishing I couldn't afford a staff of writers to write every article, like we did at the Ledger. With technology, two types of work evolved. We kept in house all of the management, client services and editorial skills but we free-lanced experts that might be more into a sport than a great writer. For Women's Sports and Fitness I couldn't see hiring a staff writer that could write a credible article about climbing Everest one month and doing the Ironman Triathlon the next. The editors provided the vision, hired the writers, edited their work and produced the magazine. 

If you want to call it crowdsourcing, a term that certainly wasn't around then, so be it. It was an economic imperative that we ran the company that way. And, it worked pretty well. We eventually sold the company to Conde Nast.

It's one thing to have a small Boulder-based magazine company use crowdsourcing but quite another to have one of the vaunted Seven Sister magazines turn to crowdsourcing as a way to allow their readers to write the magazine. I'm sure it's an economic imperative with slipping revenues (ad pages were down 13.6%), loss of subscribers and rising print costs. Technology is wreaking havoc on these once untouchable magazine properties as people find new, cheaper ways to get and exchange information.

The ad agency business is not far behind. There have been lots of great examples over the years of people experimenting with outsourced and freelance creative and strategy. In fact, the industry as a whole uses freelancers more than anyone would like to admit. Similarly, technology and the social web are changing what the very essence of advertising is. Just like the Seven Sisters who were built on 100s of pages of spread advertisers big agencies are still built on TV advertising. It's where the big costs are and hence where an agency can charge the biggest fees. (Check out my earlier post Fees, Lies and Advertising for a POV) My sense is that it won't be long be for you'll see the big venerated agencies like Y&R, BBDO, McCann, Saatchi and JWT turn to crowdsourcing, like Ladies’ Home Journal, as they will have to change their business models radically to cope with technology driven paradigm shifts.

The future of Ladies' Home Journal and the rest of the Seven Sisters will be a radically smaller in-house staff of editors, management and client services folks with the majority of the content being produced by a digitally organized crowd of freelance contributors and readers. (HuffingtonPost seems to have this dialed). It won't be long before big agencies follow suit. My sense is that a current 2000 person agency will become a 200 person agency made up of very talented creatives, strategists and account folks that all know how to harness the power of abundance. Sure, fees will drop substantially. Agencies will get a lot smaller. In the end a lot of the waste and puffery that agencies are so well known for will be gone. Egos will be in check. 

This radical wave that's sweeping over the industry has only just begun. Like any tidal wave of change, the more nimble, forward thinking agencies and holding companies will thrive and the bigger more, lumbering organizations will get swept under just like the dinosaurs that perished in the La Brea tar pits.

Not to fear, there will be even more work for talented creatives, strategists and account folks  who will still produce great work using new technologies to aggregate and groom great ideas, not much unlike Ladies' Home Journal is planning to do.

 

Selective Memory

Charlie, one of my ten year old sons, got a homework assignment last night. He was to use a dictionary to find the Guide Words for dfferent words. I had forgotten what Guide Words are. If you're like me, they are the words at the top of the page in a dictionary that guide the search for the word you're looking for. Guide words are an artifact of the analogue dictionary and not really needed using an online dictionary.

So, that meant finding a Dictionary. First our house. None. Then 3 nieghbors. Nope. The fourth nieghbor is a high school drama and english teacher. Sure enough, he had a few. I asked to borrow one but he kindly suggested we keep it snince he hadn't opened it up in years. I had forgotten how beautiful a great dictionary is. 

While technology changes our access to new ways of doing things exponentially culture tends to change much more slowly and incrementally. There's a lot of tension between these two growth curves. And, with this tension comes selective memory. 

Ten People Who Influenced Me in 2011

Reflecting back on 2011 what sticks out are some of the profoundly smart people in the ad industry I had a chance to connect with last year. Through multiple conversations with each person on the list my thinking shifted and I was inspired. The ad industry is in the midst of profound change. Lot’s of folks have taken the “protect the flanks” approach with looking at the change in the industry as the glass is half empty. This group of leaders and thinkers represents a different, more positive outlook.

The reality is that change always happens. You can choose to look at it as a threat or an opportunity.

Thanks to conversations with this group I’m more stoked than ever.

1. Rishad Tobaccowala – Just saying his name makes you smarter. Spending time with Rishad makes you realize that the future will be what it is. That it’s just advertising and nobody's going to die. Rishad’s steady, thoughtful point of view gives you confidence in pusuing your own path.
2. Doug Moore – Doug’s willingness to innovate in the way advertising is done is inspiring. His balance to produce great work while looking for ways to change the model is something that more people will do in 2012.
3. David Jones – If you want to imagine what the holding company of the future might look like talk to David. His willingness to honestly address the biggest issues in the industry is inspiring. I just finished his new book, Who Cares Wins. It’s an important read for anyone in advertising.
4. Mark-Hans Richer - MH's ability to take an iconic brand and challenge the way to interact with customers and fans is an example of where advertising is going.
5. John Partilla – Every conversation with John is so full of positivity that you feel stoked. He’s one of the really good guys.
6. Alex Bogusky – Although it’s been 2 years since I’ve had the opportunity to work with Alex day to day I admire his fearlessness now more than ever.
7. Ty Montague – As a fellow traveller over the horizon of advertising, it’s been a joy to hang with Ty. His upcoming book is a powerhouse and shifts the paradigm of what storytelling can do for brands.
8. Bob Lord – A conversation with Bob makes you realize that all of this talk about new digital tools and the combination digital and traditional advertising has been going on for a lot longer than the current crop of gurus might want to admit. That experience brings wisdom. In every conversation a bit of it falls your way.
9. Tim Malbon – Hanging out with Tim gets you stoked to roll up your sleeves and start making stuff. The world is wide open for those who want to start making, experimenting and building.
10. Alasdair Lloyd-Jones – Alasdair has this wonderful way of poking holes in your argument in such a positive way. When you finish a conversation with him and your ideas have evolved to a much better place it’s hard to realize that he’s had that effect. His a bit of a strategic jui jitsu master.

There were also many other brilliant minds that I had the good fortune of intersecting. Thanks to all for giving so much.

Here’s to creating more momentum in 2012 to the changes that are already underway in the industry. 

 

Mr. Horton, We’re Leaning in to Help American Airlines

Mr. Horton,
 
When we read the news of American Airlines filing for Chapter 11, we were inspired by the “take the bull by the horns” attitude. Because we didn’t see it as a move of weakness. But rather, a move of courage. The world has changed not only for the airline industry, but also for every other industry and company out there. A combination of economic and technology realities mixed with consumer demand has made it necessary for all CEOs to re-examine everything. And do whatever it takes. 
 
We’re seeing the same thing in the business of advertising. The old “FTE-based” (full time employee) business model is a dinosaur. It’s a compensation model that actually encourages agencies to move slower and put more staff on a piece of business to make more money. And, pardon the pun, it just won’t fly anymore. Which is why, in 2009, we started Victors & Spoils under a whole different model. One based on allowing a vast crowd of creatives to ideate against a business problem, shaped by a few select industry veterans. A model that merges technology and the irresistible force of creative collaboration to deliver businesses more thinking for more realistic cost.
 
So, in an effort of helping you achieve your goal of industry competitiveness, with a more attractive agency payment structure, we’ve decided to act as if we’re working together already. We’ve written and launched a creative brief aimed at helping you reinvent your airline as you restructure. And we’ve put this brief to our crowd of 6,000+ creatives - offering $10,000 of our own toward the ideas we think can best help American Airlines become a more nimble airline, one that can change the way we think about air travel and solve some of the biggest issues for customers. 
 
But we’d love to let you pick the ideas you like best, yourselves. So please, give us a shout or send us a tweet and let’s schedule some time to show you this fantastic work. And who knows? If you like what you see, maybe you’ll also restructure with a more nimble agency relationship – to match your more nimble airline. 
 
Thank you for your courage and vision. 
 
Best,
 
John

Are you Talking the Talk or Building the Tech?

One of the most amazing and wonderful things in the last couple of years here at Victors & Spoils has been dynamic tension that’s been created between being an advertising agency and a tech start-up. That tension that’s been created by mashing up the two cultures has been profound for me.

When we started we noticed that even the most tech-based agencies were analogue at their core. We asked ourselves a couple of questions. First, what would happen if we took the functions of a typical ad agency and digitized them? The way we communicate. How we work in a massively distributed way across the globe. Hence, we created Agency Machine. Taking an analogue business process and making it digital is a messy affair, full of trials and errors. All said, it’s working pretty darn well and gives us the ability to scale globally and rapidly.

Next we thought about what we could build for our clients. It’s something that has intrigued me for a while, and was an inspiration for Alex Bogusky and me to write Baked-In. Lot’s of agencies talk about building their own IP but their own structure gets in the way.  Forty percent of the Victors & Spoils team is here to build proprietary technology. We feel it’s the only way to go beyond just building campaigns for clients to building platforms that scale across media and can be massively scalable. Yesterday we launched our second tech product, Fan Machine, working with Harley-Davidson as our launch client. Mark-Hans Richer, Dino Bernnachi and their team at Harley-Davidson have been great partners in exploring ways to shift the paradigm of how advertising is created. We want to make the experience better for creatives, customers and brands by cutting out fat and facilitating faster, deeper conversations between brands, consumers and creatives.

Agency Machine and Fan Machine are just the start of what we’re building. It’s not just about creating great work, it’s also about building the digital tools to change the way campaigns are born and executed.  

Crowdsourcing is not an Industry

I just got back from the 2^nd Annual CrowdConf. It was great to see how many new digital tools are being developed to abundance of the crowd. You could feel the momentum of a whole new way of working emerging from this collection of start-ups.

It did feel a bit like this young group of companies was trying to develop into an industry. While there needs to be standards developed to do things like protect people’s rights as new ways of working are developed, crowdsourcing is not an industry. Crowdsourcing is a tool. Each of us are using the tool to disrupt the status quo in our own industries. Whether it’s Trada, uTest, Crowdflower, Poptent or Victors & Spoils we’re not focused on competing with each other but compete with companies in our own industries that are built on old business models.

Instead of an industry crowdsourcing is more of a collective, one in which people openly share ideas and solutions to problems. This kind of collaboration keeps me energized.

The world is changing fast and how we all work is only one aspect of that.

 

 

Victors & Spoils Guide to Successful Collaboration (Part 2: Common Ground)

NOTE: Koert Bakker is our Director of Strategy here at Victors & Spoils. He's been doing some great thinking about the future of brands in our new collaborative world. This is Part 2. Enjoy the post and look for more great stuff from Koert.

Last week I wrote about how brands can empower consumers with collaborative tools – from basic social media engagement leading up to entire collaborative systems. But empowerment is really only half of the story for a collaborative brand. The other part is Common Ground.

Collaboration is simply put people and brands working together to achieve a shared goal. This means that a positive collaborative relationship can only exist if people have affinity for a brand (think of passion brands like Apple, Nike and Harley-Davidson)­­­, or when people share an interest with a brand. For instance, few people have affinity for GE, but many people have affinity for the environment. So brand and consumers can still find each other in GE:Ecomagination.

Simply put, it’s not enough for brands to provide collaborative tools. They also need people who want to use these tools, for which you need Common Ground.

Empowerment and Common Ground are the two main dimensions that describe a collaborative relationship. There are basically 4 types of collaborative relationships (and many sub-types that I won’t go into now):

 

 

 1. Pretenders

Many brands are jumping on the collaborative bandwagon with social media initiatives or creative competitions. For instance, 3M Submit Your Idea or Nokia Tune Remake. But there’s no collaborative relationship if people don’t know about the Empowerment tools, or don’t care about them. These brands have started their collaborative journey; next step is to either increase relevance of their tools or to better promote them.

 2. Potentials

These are brands that people want to collaborate with, but the brands don’t yet offer the tools to do so - at the risk of losing opportunity or goodwill. It’s not a bad position to start from; next step is to start developing collaborative tools and put people’s energy to use. Harley-Davidson and DC Shoes are great examples here.

3. Newbies

In this case there’s hardly an existing relationship; both Empowerment and Common Ground are at a low level. This can be the case with existing brands that are out of touch or with entirely new brands and startups. Next step for existing brands is to become genuinely interested in what people are passionate about – otherwise they may soon become irrelevant. New brands and startups have the opportunity to build a brand from scratch and work with consumers to figure out what the brand will become, simultaneously building Empowerment and Common Ground. Brikki.com (crowdsourced children’s stories) is an example of a completely new idea that has the potential to grow with its consumers from day 1. AirBnB is an example of a startup that went this route already. By involving consumers early on AirBnB was pushed beyond what the founders initially envisioned the brand to be, with an active community as a result.

4. Collaborators

There are many possible scenario’s here, with the most iconic relationship type being the collaborative system where reciprocity can come from anywhere in the ecosystem. Not many brands have achieved this status yet, but many are well on their way such as Threadless, AirBnB and American Express OPEN. A typical next step for Collaborators is to increase engagement with all people (not just innovators and creators), consumer segments and other stakeholders. Other typical next steps include expanding the collaboration arena (e.g. beyond digital into physical spaces) and turning one-off collaborative initiatives into an integral part of a brand’s product offering and communication.

 

Victors & Spoils Guide to Successful Collaboration (part 1: Empowerment)

NOTE: From time to time, I invite folks to write guest posts. Koert Bakker is our Director of Strategy here at Victors & Spoils. He's our big brain. And, he's been doing some great thinking about the future of brands in our new collaborative world. Enjoy the post and look for more great stuff from Koert.

I’m excited by how new technology empowers social change – and marketing in the slipstream of that. When the ability to control production and distribution of information was a scarce resource, it was easy for brands to influence the way people perceived them. Those days are gone. Production and distribution of information have become abundant. Fueled by cognitive surplus and digital tools, people demand access to brands. For instance, Coca-Cola’s original Facebook page was created by two fans, Dusty and Michael. When Coca-Cola found out how popular the page was, they had to contact Dusty and Michael and ask permission if they could please participate in their own brand! Which they gracefully allowed. I admire brands that embrace collaboration instead of fight it. At Victors & Spoils we recently analyzed over 200 brands and five categories of brands emerged thatsuccessfully empower people with collaborative tools:

1. Social Media Engagement

This is basically collaboration 101; brands engaging with people in online conversations. Think of Old Spice, Best BuyTwelpforce and Strip To Your SmartWool.

2. Crowdsourcing

These are brands that tap into people’s collective brainpower and invite them to submit ideas that deliver against a setof rules - a brief. Think of Pepsi Max & Doritos Crash the Superbowl or Virgin America’s Toronto Provocateur. 

3. Co-creation

Co-creation involves working on new product and service ideas together with the customers who are going to buy them. An obvious example is My Starbuck, but I’m also really struck by Nike 6.0 ID Nation StyleLab, which effectively turns Nike ID’s original mass customization (people designing their own shoe) into co-creation (people being ableto buy shoes that other people designed).

4. Collaborative Consumption

With crowdsourcing and co-creation people help brands produce better products. But the other side of the coin, collaborative consumption, is also getting more popular, from car-sharing (Zip Car, Greenwheels) and bike-sharing (Vélib, B-Cycle) to group buying power (Groupon,Walmart CrowdSaver).

5. Collaborative System

Finally, new business models are emerging that place collaboration at their core. The brand is shaped by an ecosystem of participants. Successful recent examples are Threadless, AirBnB and American Express OPEN.

(Next week Part 2: Common Ground)

The Rise of the Hybrid Organization

We’ve all been hearing a lot over the last couple of years that pure digital companies are shifting the paradigm of business. You see it everywhere. Public digital companies are valued much higher than analogue companies. Digital companies can scale must faster using the relatively free resource of the internet. (think magazine publishing. It’s the difference between putting ink on paper and shipping magazines to hitting the publishing button in a browser.)

Certainly, the paradigm has shifted. But has there been a bit too much hype? I get a chance to see a lot of business plans here in Boulder. Everyone seems to have the philosophy that if we raise a few million dollars, write some code, launch an app, then millions of customers will come. I’m not so sure. I was especially interested in New York Times article about Groupon.

Sure, Groupon has made an old business, couponing, more efficient but is it so paradigm shifting that it’s value defies gravity? After reading the article it sure feels like the business proposition that Groupon and other deal sites are built on is flimsy at best.

The news yesterday of Federated Media and Lijit merging (disclaimer: I was on the Board of Directors of Lijit.) makes me think that there is a rise of a new type of organization, The Hybrid Organization. John Batelle and the Federated Media team have done an amazing job of connecting brands to the best of the independent web. That kind of connection takes a lot of human relationships. It’s strategic thinking, problem solving and creativity. Those aren’t easily digitized. Lijit, on the other hand, has created an amazing digital advertising engine.

Seth Levine, a managing director at Foundry Group and fellow Lijit board member explains the combination the best. 

The Federated Media/Lijit combination harnesses the best of the old and the new, the digital and the analogue, to create this new Hybrid Organization.

There’s no doubt that they will be successful.

 

Thank You

Those are two words I don’t say enough. I was reminded of that this last week with the passing of my father-in-law, Harry Johnson. Harry was an amazing guy. He was an entrepreneur and had a career that spanned a few different industries.

The most inspiring thing about Harry was his infectious positivity. He was always interested in you. You were always the center of a conversation with him. There was always a little chuckle. Always a smile. And, a deep sense of gratitude you could see in his eyes.

One of the favorite Johnson family stories was that no matter who showed up to the front door, a friend of one of the kids or a door-to-door vacuum salesman, they were always invited in for dinner. To Harry, family was the center of the universe. And, everyone was family.

It’s not about what we do for a living, how good we are at something but it’s about being human and sharing the infectious positive energy that we as humans have, if we only let ourselves tap into it.

Thank you, Harry. What a wonderfully positive influence you had on me and everyone else that knew you.