Monthly Archives: August 2015

Donald Trump, The Clickbait Candidate

Intellectually, I hate clickbait. But do I click on it? You bet. Usually before I stop to think. It hits me in the quick and dirty (in every sense of the word) part of my brain. Much as I know I should be better than this, I find myself clicking through more viscerally tantalizing slideshows than I would care to admit. Humans, of which I number myself one, are suckers for sensationalism.

So, I admit to human foibles. But in doing so, I stress that they’re something we should strive to overcome. Ration should rule the day. We should not embrace a future that’s built on the pushing of our collective hot buttons.

That’s why the current ascendency of one Mr. Trump is scaring the hell out of me.

Donald Trump is not stupid. He’s built his campaign to be one massive, ongoing A/B clickbait test. He floats Outrageous Remark A against Outrageous Remark B to see which generates the biggest response. He’s probing the collective psyche of America to see what goes viral. And he knows that virality cannot live in the middle of the road. It has to live in the extreme margins. In order to be sensational, you have to provoke senses. You have to push buttons. To get people to love you, you also have to get people to hate you. It was an inevitable evolution of politicking in the Age of the Internet.

To this point, Trumps tactics appear to be working. He’s distancing his Republican opponents by increasing margins (the latest has him doubling Jeb Bush’s support, at 32% vs 16%). He’s even closing in on Hilary Clinton, trailing by just 6% in a recent poll. Trump’s sledgehammer-subtle attack on the quick and dirty shortcuts of our brains seems to be triumphing over any rational appeal to the slow and reasoned loops of logic.

But is this really how we want our leaders to be chosen?

In 1856, America was edging closer to the ideological precipice of the Civil War. It was a time when it was easy to ignite hair-triggered passions. And the country was captivated by one senatorial race in particular – in the state of Illinois. There, incumbent Stephen A. Douglas was running against a little known lawyer who had served one largely unremarkable term in Congress. His name was Abraham Lincoln. As part of the campaign, Douglas agreed to debate Lincoln on what was the only real issue of the election – the future of slavery. Prior to the debates, popular opinion had it that Douglas would eviscerate Lincoln.

lincolndouglasThe series of seven debates were spread around the state over a period of 56 days. The stakes were profound. Over 14% of the US population was black. Of them, almost 90% were slaves. The future of the union revolved on the thorny question of the legality of slavery. No matter what side of the issue you were on, whatever came out of your mouth was guaranteed to be provocative.

Each debate was 3 hours in length. The first speaker spoke for 60 minutes, the other candidate had 90 minutes to respond, and the first speaker had an additional 30 minutes as a rejoinder. In total, that was 21 hours of usually eloquent political debate. The full text of all speeches were published almost verbatim in the nation’s newspapers (papers usually fixed the grammatical errors of whichever candidate they were supporting, while leaving the opponent’s remarks in rough form.) Lincoln got off to a rough start, but hit his stride midway through the debates. By the final two debates, in Quincy and Alton, most everyone who was at objective felt that Lincoln was the clear winner. He ended up losing the senatorial race to Douglas, but emerged as the national champion of abolitionists. The momentum from those debates eventually carried him into the presidency 4 years later.

In these debates, Lincoln managed to do something extraordinary. He reframed the slavery debate – moving it from a question of social equality to one of legal liberty. This sidestepped some of the fiercely held beliefs and allowed for a more rational examination of the question. Beliefs are the bedrock of the quick and dirty mechanisms of our mind. It’s relatively easy to connect with someone’s beliefs. You just have to know the right buttons to push. It’s much more difficult to encourage people to think, as Lincoln did, and push them to question their beliefs. Beliefs act as bulwarks against open and rational consideration.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the term, a bulwark is a great wall built to keep things out. Like, for example, a great wall on the US/Mexican border.

Can Alphabet Spark Corporate Innovation?

As I was reading Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators, which chronicles the rise of the digital revolution, something struck me. From Charles Babbage to Sergey Brin, the arc of digital innovation has gone through three very distinct stages.

In the beginning of the digital revolution, some 150 years ago, the innovator was the inventor and the gentleman scientist. They maintained and nurtured academic networks but often worked alone. The primary way they spread ideas was through publishing them in journals. If, as in the case of Charles Babbage and his Differential Engine, there was prototyping required, they would find a patron and then hire the people required to fabricate the prototype. They did this because they could. In this time, innovation was not a particularly resource-intensive endeavor.

But, as we moved into the 20th century, things changed. For the next 6 decades, Isaacson’s innovators tended to be found in one of three places: an university, a government funded lab or a corporate lab. Innovators were generally cogs in much bigger machines. Why? Because the scope of innovation had changed. It had become much more resource hungry. You needed the bulk of a Bell Labs in order to turn out a prototypical transistor.

One also gets the sense that many of the innovators Isaacson profiles were barely tolerated within these more corporate environments. Brilliance often comes coupled with abrasiveness as its dance partner. Many of the forebears of the digital revolution seem to be – not to put too fine a point on it – assholes. If you read between the lines you get the sense that both the innovator and their place of innovation would be immeasurably happier if their paths diverged. But, given the realities of the world at the time, they both needed each other.

Starting in the Sixties, a new breed of innovator emerged – the innovative entrepreneur. Almost without exception, they started within a larger organizational context, but soon found a way to break free and build a company around their innovativeness. Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and Sergey Brin – all took a new path to innovation. Thanks to the introduction of venture capital, innovation could become the road to riches.

This all becomes more than academically interesting in the light of Google’s announced corporate re-org. Essentially, they’re trying to buck the trend of innovative evolution. Page and Brin feel that innovation can still be contained within the boundaries of a corporate structure, as long as that structure is – well – innovative enough.

In theory, their logic looks sound. The biggest complaint I hear from current Googlers is their feeling of inconsequentiality within a massive organization. Breaking the big boat into a bunch of smaller life rafts could solve that problem. If you could somehow provide innovators with enough room to stretch their mental muscles and yet support them with the enormous resources Google/Alphabet has at their disposal, it seems like a no-lose scenario. Essentially, Alphabet should be able to provide a steroid powered incubator for innovation.

Yet, I remain skeptical. I suspect innovation may defy the best-laid corporate logic. You can sketch out an org-chart that seems like a stable platform for entrepreneurialism, but I think the entrepreneurs may still squeeze out through the cracks. Even if they’re not egotistical jerks, they are, by their very nature, individualistic. They defy authority. Their dreams are tough to contain. Where you see a supportive incubator, they see a restrictive cage. Corporations tend to excel at incremental innovation, but disruptive innovation comes from individuals who don’t play nice at company picnics. And that’s the type of innovation that Alphabet is betting on.

Alphabet is an interesting development in corporate structures. I hope it works. But I’m not sure you can harness entrepreneurialism because it, like information and the human spirit, yearns to be free.

Why Disruptive Change is Disruptive

There were a lot of responses to my last column, looking at why agencies and clients have hit the point of irreconcilable differences. Many of those responses were in agreement. In fact, none were in outright disagreement. This surprised me. A lot of Online Spin readers are people who work for very big agencies. I can only conclude that you elected to show your dissention through your silence.

But there were many that fell in the “Yeah-but” category:

Tiffany Lyman Otten wrote,

“This, like anything, is a sign simply that agencies must evolve – again.

Jill Montaigne adds,

“Yet, our own ongoing advertiser conversations confirm that rather than walking away from their traditional agency relationships, clients desperately need and want their agencies to evolve.”

David Vawter chimes in,

“As long as there is something to sell, people will be needed to create and produce the ideas that sell it.”

Agreed. But…

All of the above comments pointed to a new trend in the marketing ecosystem – that of a network of specialists, often in the form of micro-agencies, that appear to be finding niches to hang on to in the tidal wave of change that is sweeping over our industry.

I used to head one of these agencies. Our area of specialty was in user behavior with search interfaces. We did well in this niche. So well, in fact, that we were eventually acquired by a bigger agency. Bigger agencies are always vertically integrated. As such, they offer clients the one-stop shop model. They move to that model because that is the model they know. It is the model they are programmed to create. It is an organizational form that is dictated by their P&L targets. There is no operational wiggle-room here. They simply can’t become anything else.

Tiffany, Jill and several others all used the word evolve, like it is a magical formula for survival. But evolution is like a tree. Once your branch has been determined, you have to evolve outward from that branch. You can’t suddenly leap to another branch. If you’re a chimpanzee, you can’t suddenly decide one day to evolve into a budgie. You can evolve into a new type of chimpanzee, but you’re still a chimpanzee.

What does happen in evolution, however, is that the environment changes so drastically that the tree is dramatically pruned. Some branches are lopped off, so that new branches can sprout. This is called punctuated equilibrium, and, as I’ve said before, this is what I believe we’re going through right now in marketing. Yes, as David rightly notes, “As long as there is something to sell, people will be needed to create and produce the ideas that sell it.” It’s just that the form that takes may be dramatically different that what we currently know. It could be – correction – will be a marketing ecosystem that will be dominated by new species of marketers.

We tend to equate evolution with change – but evolution is a very specific kind of change. It’s change in response to environmental pressures. And while individual species can evolve, so can entire ecosystems. In that bigger picture, some species will emerge and thrive and others will disappear. What is happening to agencies now is just a ripple effect from a much bigger environmental change – analogous to a planet size asteroid slamming into the business and marketing ecosystem that evolved over the past two centuries.

Big agencies are the result of corporate evolution in the previous ecosystem. We are quick to take them to task for being slow, or dumb, or oblivious to client needs. And perhaps, in the new ecosystem, those things are true. But those are the characteristics of the species. No agency intends to be dumb or unresponsive. It’s just an evolutionary mismatch caused by massive disruption in the environment.

These things happen. It’s actually a good thing. Joseph Schumpeter called it Creative Destruction. But, as the name implies, it’s a zero sum game. For something to be created, something has to be destroyed.

Why Agencies and Clients are Calling It Quits

“Love on the Rocks – ain’t no surprise.”

Neil Diamond

In yesterday’s Online Spin, Maarten Albarda signaled the imminent break up of agencies and clients. Communication is close to zero. Fingers are being pointed. The whisper campaign has turned into outright hostility.

When relationships end, it can be because one of the parties is just not trying. But that isn’t the case here. I believe agencies are truly trying to patch things up. They are trying to understand their one-time life partner. They are desperately gobbling up niche shops and investing in technology in order to respark the flame. And the same is true, I believe, on the client side. They want to feel loved again by their agency of record.

I think what’s happening here is more akin to a break up that happens because circumstances have changed and the respective parties haven’t been able to keep up. This is more like high school sweethearts looking at each other 20 years hence and realizing that what once bonded them is long gone. And, if that’s true, it might be helpful to look back and see what happened.

The problem here is that the agency is a child of a marketplace that is rapidly disappearing. It is the result of the creation of the “Visible Hand” market. In his book of the same name, Alfred Chandler went to great lengths (over 600 pages) to chronicle the rise of the modern organization. The modern concept of an advertising agency was a by-product of that. Vertically integrated organizations came about to overcome some inherent inefficiencies in the market – notably the problem of geography and the lack of a functional marketplace network that came with rapid expansions in production and transportation capabilities. Essentially, markets grew too rapidly for Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” to be able to effectively balance through market dynamics. Organizations grew to mammoth size in order to provide internal efficiencies that allowed for greater profitability. You had to be big to be competitive. Agents of all types filled the gaps that were inevitable in a rapidly expanding market place. Essentially an agent bridged the gap between two or more separate nodes in a market network. They were the business equivalent of Mark Granovetter’s “weak tie.”

Through the 20th century advertising agents evolved into creative houses – which is where they hit their golden period. But why was this creativity needed? Essentially, agencies evolved when advances in production and distribution technologies weren’t enough to expand markets anymore. Suddenly, companies needed agencies to create demand in existing and identified markets through the sparking desire. This was the final hurray of the “visible hand” marketplace.

But the explosion of networking technologies and the reduction of transactional friction is turning the “visible hand” market back into the “invisible hand” market of Adam Smith – driven by the natural laws of marketplaces. The networks of the marketplace are becoming more connected than ever.

This is a highly dynamic, cyclical market. Straight line strategic planning doesn’t work here. And straight line strategic planning is a fundamental requirement of an agency relationship. That level of stasis is needed to overcome the inherent gaps in a third party relationship. Even under the best of circumstances, an arm’s length relationship can’t effectively “make sense” of the market environment and react quickly enough to maneuver in this marketplace. And, as Albarda points out, the client-agency relationship is far from healthy.

The ironic part is all of this is that what was once an agency’s strength – its position as a bridge between existing networks, has turned into its greatest vulnerability. Technology has essential removed the gaps in the market itself, allowing clients to become more effectively linked to natural networks of customers through emerging channels that are also increasingly mediated by technology. Middlemen are no longer needed. Those gaps have disappeared. But the gap that has always been there, between the agent and the client, not only still exists, but is widening with the breakdown of the relationship. Agencies are like bridges without a river to span.

If you read the common complaints from both sides in the presentations Albarda references , they all come from the ever-widening schism that has come from a drastic change in the market itself. Simply put, the market has evolved to the point where agency relationships are no longer tenable. We on the agency side keep saying we need to reinvent ourselves, but that’s like saying that a dog has to reinvent itself to become a fish – it’s just not in our DNA.