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Five Golden Rules In Advertising

A couple of weeks ago I was at Ad:Tech and besides meeting some companies who treated us like idiots and some that didn’t, there was a pretty decent talk by three creative directors with their own set of “Five golden rules” in advertising.

The first and the last creative directors gave typical rules like stay true to the brand etc. Very advertising in the ’90s or web1.0. Now one of them gave five points that were much, much more relevant to this day and age:

1. Understand your consumer
2. Own an issue, stand for something
3. Spark & manage a conversation
4. Involve your audience
5. Aim for impact

Alright understand your consumer and aim for impact are normal, but while the other two were talking about transmitting one-way messages, at least he mentioned “conversation” and involving the audience.

If you’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to an agency to do your advertising, wouldn’t you rather it be an interactive, engaging effort instead of one of 2 million “impressions” that registered in their peripheral vision for all of two seconds? Because if you’re still engaged in the transmit model (i.e one way monologue) as opposed to conversation and two way dialogue, it seems like a waste of time. Especially if your demo is Gen Y.

Tags: ad:tech, advertising, advertising advice, conversation marketing, creative directors, engaging your audience, five golden rules, gen y demographic, one way monologue, reaching out to gen y, Singapore, transmitting messages, two way dialogue

Posted in Gen Y, Marketing, mainstream media | 4 Comments »

Companies Need To Stop Thinking Gen Y Are Idiots

Yesterday I was at the ad:tech conference Future Generation track (for students) and the second session of the day was with OMD, and it was very… scammy.

First they came and they said “We don’t want to tell you what life in an ad agency is like, we want you to live it”. So they broke the crowd of students into groups, gave them a brief about a brand and in-game advertising and sent them off to brainstorm.

Now, I don’t know what companies think, but we’re not stupid. It was so terribly obvious that they wanted to farm for ideas and were poorly disguising it as “live the exciting life of an ad agency!” It would’ve been fine if they said “So we wanna know what the new consumer - you guys - think about putting ads in games. Here are some of ideas, do you think it’ll work?”. You want a 140 people test-group or the ideas of 140 business and communications students? Just say so. Openly.

The best part of it all? After the students presented their ideas/pitches, OMD said “They were all so brilliant, we want to keep them!” and then proceeded to collect the paper on which the pitches were written.

If that doesn’t smell of theft I don’t know what does.

And we’re supposed to want to work for employers like that?

I don’t think so.

Tags: ad:tech, employers think gen y is stupid, employers think we're stupid, future generation track, idea farming, idea theft, omd, Singapore, stop thinking we're stupid

Posted in Poor Practices, Singapore | 10 Comments »