Real Chris Tran

Raising a child

Posted by Chris Tran 19 Dec 2011 No Comments »

Looking back, I often realize that I was very lucky to have been born to the parents that I have, and to have the siblings that I have. Sure, we didn’t grow up rich, but my parents were able to instill in (honestly) a rather shiftless son the values of hardwork, perserverance and just enough ambition to be dangerous. I am very blessed to have my parents, and I am sure that I have not said this enough to them.

Writing that doesn’t mean I will be rectifying this error anytime soon.

But beyond looking back, if I look to the left and the right, I realize that my parents are not the sort of parents that I would like to be. To be honest, when I raise a family, I want to raise children in much the same way my older brother raised my nephew. And no, it is not because they ended up with a talented (dance troupe, captain of track team, Princeton) and well-behaved son.

They expressed a lot of foresight and thought into raising him. In raising him, they put all their eggs in one basket, doubled-down and doubled-down again.

As I stalked the streets of Saigon tonight, I reflected back on what I was missing in my upbringing. What are the key experiences that I wish I had had growing up, not as a means of regret or FOMS (Fear of Missing Something), but to better understand how these deficiencies may have impacted my own personality.

This is all conjecture and solipsism and egoism. But hey, you came to this blog to hear me ramble. I’m not taking the fall for this.

I remember quite clearly a fight (or whatever teenagers call pushing and yelling nowadays) with my neighbor, Greg, one year my junior, average student and on the hockey team. To sum up a rather naive and arrogant argument, I told him that he would be a failure in life because of his bad (average) grades, and that he would end up working for me.

Yes. I was an endearing piece of shit.

You see, I had somehow developed into an academic snob. My worldview was narrow, as all teenage perspectives are. However, couple that with crippling low self-esteem, and you find yourself with a chubby Asian kid who believes that the only things that he is good at, are luckily, the only things that matter.

It’s funny how these things work out, huh?

And that’s the genius of my nephew’s upbringing. My brother and his wife made a point to have Tim try everything. Musical instruments, painting, various sports. I remember one visit where Tim was learning how to draw. This accomplished a couple things.

First, his parents were able to determine pretty quickly what he was good at, and what he liked. The pretty clear, primary objective.

But secondly, whether they realize it or not, what happened was that Tim realized how much effort it takes to become average/skilled/good in things other than school. To have exposure on the “maker” side of arts, sports and performance immunizes him from the condescension that I felt growing up. The condescending attitude I had to the athletes and artists around me, because they weren’t “smart.”

Whatever the fuck “smart” means.

Whereas Tim can go to a concert, look at a painting, and really understand the effort and work that goes into a thing. And see things for what they really are, and remain humble, despite his own personal accomplishments. Humility is something we don’t have enough these days. And Tim, because he has tried almost everything, is better equipped than most.

And that goes double for his uncle Chris.

Just moving

Posted by Chris Tran 12 Dec 2011 No Comments »

I’m going to wait a couple days before posting this, just so people don’t know exactly what I’m up to….

—

This morning, I woke up at the appointed time (roughly 6:30), and instead of getting off my ass and getting to the gym, or even getting off my ass and getting to the bathroom to do bathroomy stuff, I just there. And laid there. And I continued to lie there for about 2-2.5 hours.

I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t want to get up. Nor did I have any burning need to do any deep thoughts. In fact, my main train of thinking was along the lines of “Oh what’s the use of getting up, I don’t have much to do today. Might as well just stay here and compost.” To be fair, I didn’t actually think “compost” but it is something that I wish I had thought of.

I imagine that we all hit days like this, where we feel like all we do is treading water, and we’re going nowhere. Going nowhere fast. And it is very easy to get caught in the trap of saying “if all this effort changes nothing, then why do anything at all?”

And as I write this post, I realized what activity I do regularly that changes very little in the short run, and that’s exercise. I am proudly a rat on a treadmill at the gym, because I believe firmly that it makes me a better rat. A little bit stronger. A little bit smarter, and hopefully a little bit crisis resistant.

Of course, having realized this, I realized I compounded this issue by spending another couple hours this morning watching HIMYM and High Stakes Poker reruns…

The Wrong Thing

Posted by Chris Tran 07 Dec 2011 No Comments »

While I was running New Media Edge, a continuing frustration for me was that we always had to turn out compromised work. Advertising’s conceit is that it gets to turn out quick, high impact ideas with a good-sized media budget. Advertising people strut around saying ‘we know what people like’ and ‘we know what people respond to.’ And for the most part, they do.

Clients on the other hand make decisions on what agency to work with based upon experience. Heck, they make the decision TO work with an agency with the clear understanding that there are things they (client) do not know, and need someone else (agency) to explain for them. This is the way the world should work.

However, anyone in advertising has to realize that the client will always override the decisions of the agency. This is not an exception. This is one of the core rules of engagement, and anyone who thinks differently is in for a rude awakening.

Advertising is a services industry, which ultimately means that we are not in control of the work that puts out. We have a lot of input, but the responsibility of what comes out is the client’s. It is their brand that is printed on the advertising, and ultimately, good or bad advertising is confirmed or driven by them.

And there are many times where the client and the agency disagree. The client will say that the agency doesn’t understand the brand, or the point of the campaign. The agency might say the client is being too blunt with their message, or worse, just boring. But at the end of the day, the client will always win.

It is not the client’s job to try and convince the agency, but instead the agency’s job to try to convince the client. The client’s duty is to give the agency enough time to explain its position, and to try and convince the client. If the agency manages to convince the client, then everyone is happy. However, most conflict ends with the agency unable to convince the client, and the agency walks away feeling ill-used and frustrated.

Which is probably the unhealthy way to look at it. It’s something that has affected me a lot, and I have tried to convince client’s to do the right thing. Of course, the “right thing” is “my thing,” which establishes that the client POV is the “wrong thing.”

Both sides ultimately want what’s best for the campaign, but I often think the way we go about these discussions is fundamentally flawed.

An Annoying Post

Posted by Chris Tran 07 Dec 2011 No Comments »

So, I haven’t written in a while, and I think my hiatus was a very natural accident. That isn’t to say that it is excusable, but the more I dwell about the damage my pauses in writing creates, the less progress I make. That is to say, beating myself up about not writing doesn’t do much, except highlight my failures.

And I run the risk of having a blog full of posts about my failure to write. But without writing this post, I won’t be able to move on.

It came to be when I skipped two days in a row. And after skipping those two days, I had set an expectation for myself to make a “big comeback” and to write something thoughtful, deep, touching. In other words, something to show that I had been productive for those two days (in contemplation, writing drafts etc) – essentially giving myself cover for those two days.

In setting that expectation, it made it even harder for me to write anything. I couldn’t come up with anything ‘worthy’ of those two days, and really, ‘worthy’ is an imaginary standard set by myself, for myself. I acknowledge that I probably compose 70% of the audience of this website.

So, what am I trying to prove?

Days turned into weeks, and weeks have turned into months. Well, a month a half I think.

So, back to posting I go. There will be a lot of poor posts. Some good ones, and hopefully the occasional nugget of gold. And I will miss days. And no longer will I try to fill them in with fantastic posts.

I just went down that road, and nothing productive lies down there.

Some days…

Posted by Chris Tran 01 Nov 2011 No Comments »

I just want to fly kites.

The Future is a Clean Slate

Posted by Chris Tran 01 Nov 2011 1 Comment »

Granted that some of my friends call me ‘Schedule,’ it should be plain that I live and die by my planner. While at NME, my days were simply too packed with meetings and deadlines for me to ever have a chance of remembering everything. Getting me from meeting to meeting, office to office, somehow became non-mission critical. My phone, Outlook calendar and Google worked together to ensure that I got from meeting to meeting.

And yesterday morning, that system failed me. I woke up at a good hour, went to the bank, and returned only to find that I had missed a call with someone I really admire. I think we all have someone like that in our lives. A man or woman that is larger than life, that you always point to and say “If I was in his situation, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.” Or rather, “Some day, I hope to grow up to be her.”

You know those sorts of people. The giants that surround us, that are only apparent when you get to know them.

And it was with my giant that I had missed a call. He lives in California now, and he had to stay late at his office to take the call. And I made him sit around for an hour or more, waiting for a call that never came. Wasting valuable time that he could have spent with his family on a Sunday evening, and instead had lost to my irresponsible ass.

I had made some configuration changes on my phone lately, and it did not alert me to the call. This is not an excuse, nor an attempt at shirking responsibility. I am declaring that I should have tested the system after the reconfiguration, and I am totally at fault.

And truth be told, having missed the call put a major damper on my morning. I tried to track him down, and sent him an email. He didn’t respond yesterday, but thankfully he responded today. A succinct, “That’s ok. We’ll talk again sometime,” made me a little bit less miserable, and made me glad that this person I respect understands that things happen. And certain things do not happen on purpose.

Also yesterday morning, I discovered that a domain I had registered for a friend had expired without me noticing it. She hadn’t noticed it either, but some of her clients had noticed it, which could have put a massive crimp in her plans. She called me yesterday morning, and luckily I was able to re-register it without anyone stealing the domain. A minor professional catastrophe was averted for her. I had inadvertently wounded myself again, but luckily, was just a flesh wound. She’s easy going, and we are taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

So, this morning, this post which I meant to write yesterday, I am struck by an unattributed quote that I heard yesterday.

No matter what your past is, your future is a clean slate.

I am a big fan of redemption. My own personal redemption. I believe that I am always trying harder. That I am imperfect and that most times, my heart is in the right place. We all hit those moments of desperation and compromise. Things go poorly. We make mistakes. We are human and get lost in the weeds.

We get knocked down. We get pummeled. Not by the world, but rather ourselves. Man has a savage capacity for self-mutilation.

And then we pick ourselves up.

Those who do not acknowledge the past are doomed to repeat it. Our ability to grow as individuals is very much predicated on our ability to self-assess and take concrete actions to modify behavior.

For instance. This morning, I uninstalled League of Legends from my machine. LOL is some sort of bastard child of Real Time Strategy Games (RTS) and Third person adventure games. I discovered it through my old college friends, and my curiosity was reinforced as it was mentioned by a nephew and a online comic I regularly read. And I have been hooked on it for the past two months.

I have lost roughly 20 hours a week to League of Legends. And this morning, I have stopped that temporal hemorrhaging.

At first, I thought, “I’ll just try and see what it is like. It is free, after all.” And then, it became, “I’m terrible at this game. I should continue to play to get good enough to evaluate what it is like.” Which later became, “I’m pretty good at this game, run from me you fuckers.”

Which goes to show that I spent roughly three hours a day, to achieve flow in a game that in the long run, doesn’t benefit me at all. In the short run, I could argue that it relaxed me. Though unemployment is plenty relaxing as it is.

So, I hope to have kicked this bad habit. And that this will allow me to put in three hours of something a bit more productive in its place.

And for my missed connection, and my expired domain. I have corrected the causes of those problems. Taken the blame and apologized, and hope that those specific problems won’t happen again.

But I know that I will make problems again. Just not those problems, and not on purpose. And I am lucky that the people around me are generous, kind, and are human.

And hoping to see me improve for a better tomorrow.

Mental Fitness

Posted by Chris Tran 29 Oct 2011 No Comments »

I have put some thought into writing a manifesto for myself. Less to lead a movement, and more to continue digesting and codifying myself. A little bit of perspective is good. Too much turns into egoism and way too much turns into solipsism. (I had to look up solipsism to make sure I was using it the correct way.)

As I thought about what a Tran Manifesto (Tranifesto!) would look like, I realized that I am always in training.

Ask anyone about my eating habits, and they’ll tell you that I am dieting. Ask Sandip, and he’ll tell you that the Chris Tran diet means “eating everything and calling it a diet.” Some days, he’s not far wrong. But then again, I’ve also lost close to 30 lbs in the last 6 months, so I think my diet is doing ok.

I am always engaging in some consistent form of physical exercise. It used to be swing dancing, and before that it was kung fu and boxing. Nowadays, I’m running around 15 miles a week, and am once again, boxing twice a week. Tomorrow, I get to do a vertical marathon, though it is likely I will be hung over and puking all over the place.

And mentally, I am always reading and always thinking about writing. The writing habit is coming hard for me, but I’m getting there. As Anne Lamott says, I’m getting there “Word by Word.” I am training to make my verbal muscles stronger. When I flex my literary side, I want people to be WOWed by my literary sixpack. And it certainly is training. Warts and all, I am forcing my brain to become more writerly. To write better. To write strongly. To bring my ideas to life with words.

And a new path of training for me has recently opened up.

I was listening to the always excellent startup podcast Mixergy, where Jonathan Fields was being interviewed on his new book “The Uncertainty Book.” Btw, the book has the most excellent tagline of “Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance.” From what I understand, the book is a list of case studies of successful entrepreneurs. And from those case studies, Fields highlights some of the best practices and habits of these entrepreneurs.

One of the habits that Fields brought up in the interview was of meditation. Many successful entrepreneurs have meditation practices; they meditate daily. Coincidentally, Steve Jobs was one of these people. I had stumbled upon a four page excerpt of a Steve Jobs graphic novel called “The Zen of Steve Jobs.”

“I need to work and you have me walking around fucking rocks.” – Steve Jobs

I had thought that meditation was mainly used as a tool of stress reduction. People meditate to relax. And in the interview, Fields outlines mindfulness meditation. It is less about alleviating stress, and more about living in the moment. In a way, it is about trying to achieve flow. Listening to the interview, I couldn’t help but hope that it was a path opening up to blissful productivity.

We live in an information age, where success is less a function of how physically fit you are, but better correlated to how mentally fit you are. Mental fitness to me includes being witty, being able to think laterally (orthogonally, non-Euclidian geometrically), handle stressful situation, adapt to new situations, being decisive and following through. It is a weird combination of mind and heart.

Fields makes an interesting observation. We spend a lot of time training our bodies, through diet and exercise. Yet we spend almost zero time training our minds.

We just expect our brains to be fit, without expending any effort to actually getting them into shape.

It isn’t to say that we don’t train our brains at all. Most of us who try to achieve things with our lives read and attend classes in efforts to educate ourselves. We have hobbies that tangentially help our brain’s development.

But we do very few things that are just for developing our brain.

And for me, my next new good habit will be to practice mindfulness meditation each day. I have started doing it for 10minutes each day, and it is extremely difficult. 10 minutes seems like forever, and I have enlisted an Android app called “Meditation Helper,” to help keep me honest.

I just have to keep outsourcing non-mission critical systems.

Mindfulness meditation should open me up to new ideas, adapt more quickly to situations and most importantly, pull me emotionally out of the decision making processes. I think my staff would say that I sometimes do things that “feel right” more often than doing the “smart thing.” Luckily, more often than not, “feeling right” happens to turn out “all right.”

But sometimes, I get emotional. I get moody, and the strength of my personality can make the entire office moody. My personality can be quite overwhelming, and it is a power that I need to keep in check. If I am happy, then I should wholeheartedly let that joy bleed into everything I do, and everyone around me. But everyone has bad days, and my bad days should not infect everyone, and ruin their days. This, I have done before, and it is an unhealthy by-product of passion.

Passion is important, but it needs to be tempered with tact and maturity. Otherwise, passion can turn into raving or delusions.

And so I’m exercising. To build my mind into a muscle, so that whenever I want to flex passion, body, mind and heart get united and I can move worlds.

On Flow

Posted by Chris Tran 28 Oct 2011 No Comments »

About a week ago, my phone broke and I found myself bereft of its electronic wisdom. Essentially, I had offloaded as much discipline and memory power to it as possible, and once it broke, I found myself crippled.

Part of me feels that I should avoid the word ‘crippled,’ as it is unkind to the handicapped. So be it. Without my smartphone, I am crippled. I am much less than I am with my phone.

My friend Chris Zobrist was surprised when I told him that I did my own grocery shopping. ”I outsource as much as I can. Anything that someone else can do, I have done.” Wise words. Since then, my cleaning lady, who already cleans my house, washes my clothes and irons my shirts, has begun packing/unpacking my luggage, paying my utilities and of course, buying my groceries. It is intensely liberating, and allows me to focus more energy on things that matter.

Likewise, my phone has become the storage depot of my contacts, my weight loss progress (how many calories I’ve consumed, my weight), my spending habits, and of course, a myriad of entertainment/educational options to distract me from my day. I take notes on my phone, and am learning how to forward them to my issue tracking system. The issue tracking system is my own advanced ToDo list system, which keeps me productive.

With my issue tracking system, I am always either executing on things on the list, or adding things to it.

My calendar serves much the same purpose. At any given point, I try and have my life planned, or at least, the tasks that I need to have done outlined. A given day might look like:

Wake.
Check schedule for today’s activities.
Check email. Answer things that can be answered immediately, or add to Issue tracker if they require more thought.
Go to activities as scheduled.
During free periods, go to Issue tracker and either

Execute tasks in order
Add/organize tasks
Enter time in timetracker

And that’s pretty much my professional life.

I am trying to build good habits, and one of them is in becoming a productivity machine. I want to become a robot when I am working. Somewhere in my brain, there should be an on/off switch for the Id and SuperEgo. Screw pleasure and morality. I want my Ego at the forefront of my brain (forebrain?), and I want it to just execute like a mothafucka.

If I can get my reptilian brain revved up during production, I can change the world. I guess, this is my own journey to achieving Flow.

About a year ago, while I was with New Media Edge, I took a sneaky trip to Kuala Lumpur one Tuesday night. I never told my bosses or my staff, but I had gone to an event in KL called the Guerilla Entrepreneurs Seminar. At that point, I was a little frustrated with the lack of progress we were making. I had only been in the role for about two months, the team was still being built (we only had about five people at this point), and I felt like I was missing something important.

Honestly, I don’t know if I needed more advice on Sales, Management, Positioning or any of the other myriad skills you need to start and run an agency. And do not be mistaken, running New Media Edge was very much an entrepreneurial experience. We had to find our own clients and hire our own people. I was lucky to work under some very experienced and savvy people.

However, two months into any job, you don’t want to ask for too much help. Displays of weakness so early in a job are rarely a good idea.

So, I went to KL, and met there Vishen Lakhiani, CEO of MindValley. To this day, I am unsure of what MindValley does, but they seem successful and Vishen is certainly a dynamic speaker.
rstr

Flow is the art of effortless productivity.

After reading Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken,” I learned that Flow is very much the state that people fall into while they are playing games. She postulates that games are a different kind of work. Whether you are playing Farmville or Countestrike, rest assured that you are being productive and that effort and energy are being consumed.

The magical thing about games is that you do work, without getting any real reward.

And while you are playing a game, not only are you working, you are working HARD.

I am reading “I’m Feeling Lucky” by Douglas Edwards right now. Edwards was employee #59 at Google, and in this insider’s scoop on the Search company, he notes how everyone is rated in various disciplines. Not just work related ratings, like who is the best coder or the best deal negotiator, but rather in totally unrelated things. For example, they had a rowing machine there with a piece of paper taped above it called “Google Rowing Club.” And they competed to see who could produce the highest number of watts in the lowest amount of time.

I know. Rowing machines have weird metrics.

I am unsure if it was intentional or not, but this artificial atmosphere of competition created its own culture, and one that weeded out a certain type of personality. Sitting at that rowing machine, I can’t help but imagine that I would push myself a little harder each day to get onto the top 5 list of the Rowing Club, and having achieved that, I would bust my ass to climb the ladder to number one. Now imagine a place where everything is like that, from who eats the fastest to settling arguments via Soulcalibur.

In such a place, the competitive would thrive, and wallflowers would wilt and fade away.

In adding a point system to everything, I can’t help but wonder if they pushed their engineers into a constant state of flow. Flow can come from many different ways. In a sports team, flow can come from mutual trust and mutual dependencies. I will deliver what you need, because I trust you to deliver what I need. Myself, working in a vacuum alone, I need to focus on being productive alone, and set my own milestones and force myself to be accountable.

To myself. In a vacuum, robots do it best.

The Evolution of Agencies (Part 2)

Posted by Chris Tran 15 Oct 2011 1 Comment »

CRM to the forefront

Traditional marketing activities are very front-loaded. Advertisers and agencies spend the majority of their time trying to get sales, and to convince customers to try (trial) or convert to their brand. There has not been a lot of attention until late in creating real relationships with customers. The only industry segments that have paid much attention to fostering long term connections with consumers include:

Airlines/Travel
Finance
Ecommerce

For everything else, it just did not make fiscal sense for brands to put their customers into CRM programs. It simply was too expensive to manage as Cost per User, or even Cost per Customer. This has changed as two shifts have taken place:

Technology has made CRM programs much cheaper and scalable (i.e. lower Cost per Customer)
Social media gives each customer the chance to become a brand advocate/champion.

Or as Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen writes:

Customer service is the new media department.

When you look at the most successful brands on Twitter or Facebook (Zappos, Southwest), the story is very much centered around great customer service. A focused social media strategy is the easiest way to build Word of Mouth, and a cornerstone of that strategy needs to be a CRM program.

The CRM program identifies :

Customers with influence
What their problems are
How to deliver great customer service

Advertising agencies will start working in hand with customer service programs. Imagine websites, full of testimonials to be spread out via social media. And operations departments structured to deliver fantastic service, to give people real, credible reasons to believe in a service.

Online buzz will become a barometer of a brand’s health. And this buzz will be driven increasingly by great customer service.

Utility not Persuasion

The rise of branded mobile applications has shown that consumers are willing to interact with brands as long as they have something to gain. ”What’s in it for me” will continue to drive the conversation, as despite their best delusions, people will not become fans of Pantene or Head and Shoulders without either showing tangibly, how the brands make consumers’ lives better.

After all, isn’t the foundation of any advertising is the promise, “use our product, and your life will improve?”

Huggies had a great application for tourists in New York City, which showed on a map (and GPS) where the closest public bathrooms are. Mini Cooper has MiniMiles, which is a live loyalty system for their car owners. It also updates them with their maintenance schedules.

Nike Plus is a fantastic example, where a simple USB device tracks how much I run, and how often. Using that, I can track my progress (distance, speed, frequency and calories burned) and challenge friends. Running is a very solitary activity, and Nike has turned it around, and made it into a social one. Nike had been losing traction to other brands in its positioning, and Nike Plus has helped it regain its market leader position.

Digital Departments will disappear

I wrote about Digital Manifest Destiny, a concept liberally borrowed from people smarter than me. Essentially, it states:

All content will eventually be digital.

And as a result, all advertising will be digital also. Right now, there is an artificial divide between digital and traditional agencies, when really, ideas should be platform agnostic (and scalable!). And in so doing, every creative and account person should understand digital and how it operates in today’s world.

This is what we have done at Edge, where our combined Creative and Account management departments can handle both online and offline media. No campaign will ever be only digital, and similarly, the number of campaigns that are totally offline will decline to zero.

Agencies will start having creative technologists, essentially people who understand how technology can be used to deliver advertising ideas.

Big agencies will acquire digital agencies, and those digital agencies that survive will either die or become internet startups.

The Evolution of Agencies (Part 1)

Posted by Chris Tran 14 Oct 2011 No Comments »

Advertising agencies are at an inflection point.

Viral marketing is forcing creatives to act as both content and advertising.
Media fragmentation is breaking traditional media and PR models.
Creativity is being democratized. Agencies are no longer the sole source of ideas, and the Internet has made it simple to borrow concepts from other markets.
Everything is becoming digital, which redefines the role of Research companies. Creative agencies will need to understand technology.
Too many providers are creating intense price pressure.

These are all things that I saw first hand at Edge.

The fundamentals of advertising are changing. In the past years, and in the coming years, we will see a massive change in how advertising takes place. Already, creative directors work hand in hand with digital producers to ensure that what is proposed is executable. Real-time A/B testing is replacing focus groups.

The world is becoming a faster, leaner place. The lines between publishers, agencies and advertisers is blurring.

And this blurring allows many other types of companies to enter in the advertising agency’s domain. That domain traditionally consists of:

Strategy (understand consumer insights)
Creative (develop ideas to connect consumer insights with brand)
Media (deliver these ideas to consumers where they are most receptive)
Research (understanding consumers and how they react to advertising)
Production (building and bringing ideas to life)

And for each of these core services, a raft of competitors are appearing.

In Strategy:

Management consulting firms (BCG, McKinsey)
Brand consultancy firms

In Creative:

Publishers
Crowdsourcing

In Media:

Search companies
Social media companies
Advertising networks

In Research:

Online panels
Digital measurement

In Production:

Off-shore Freelancers
Publishers
Client in-house IT departments

And in this age of economic recession, advertisers are looking for ways to save on costs. And these boutique services can claim that they deliver quality and a lower price point. Publishers are throwing in creative and production services in gratis as part of a large media buy. According to the IAB, 52% of advertisers expect to do more creative with publishers, versus 27% more creative with agencies. These should be good trends for advertisers.

What is great for advertisers is not always great for agencies.

Agencies are getting disconnected. More and more, advertisers are taking on the role of general contractor in an advertising campaign, going direct to suppliers and leaving agencies in the cold. Luckily, agencies are nimble creatures – small, and full of smart, social and creative people. There is no question that agencies will survive into the digital age – the only question is “what will they turn into?”

It was not so long ago that every agency had its own internal media department. Bulk discounts forced agencies to re-evaluate their organizational structures, resulting in independent media agencies. Media agencies that were later consolidated and acquired – media agencies like GroupM and Vivaki.

So, will digital agencies become:

Media brand owners?
Content collaborators?
Program producers?
Brand guardians?
Social community managers?

Engage, not interrupt

The agency model of the past was all about interrupting media consumption habits. It is all about finding content (TV, print) that consumers are loyal to, and interrupting it. For example, TVCs will always air just before a big cliffhanger. Scriptwriters actually have processes in place to ensure they hit the correct commercial breaks.

And the agency of the future will have to engage with consumers. ”Brands need to become social” is already a cliche, yet few brands have succeeded in coming alive online. Old Spice was social a couple of years ago, but has largely become irrelevant. Agencies are probably the only organization structure with the critical mass necessary to crack the engagement problem.

And in engagement (vs. interruption), a whole new set of metrics are being developed. In addition to exposure metrics like, Reach, Frequency and CPM, engagement metrics will have to measure attentiveness (CTR and Interaction Rate), Receptivity (dwell time, conversion rates), and buzz potential (shares, likes). And these metrics need to be fed back into the strategic and creative processes.

Reach, frequency and CPM are good measures of efficiency.
Attentiveness, Receptivity and Buzz Potential are good measures of effectiveness.

And ultimately, agencies will probably learn how to engage many small audiences for a long time (participation platform), instead of engaging a large audience for a short time (TVC).

Scalable Ideas

Ideas will need to work on a variety of different platforms. No longer will a strategy be just “TVC adapted to OOH and print,” but instead follow consumers and work wherever they consume content. An idea will have to work at minimum on:

TVC
Print
Banner
OOH
Social

Essentially, you’ll want your idea to be effective on TV, in magazines, on web portals, out on the streets and while you are on Facebook or instant messenger. Right now, few ideas are able to meet this standard. All agencies believe that the scalability ideas will have to evolve. Big ideas will have to truly become Big.

Media is evolving.

Over the last year, the Paid/Owned/Media model has been much discussed. The industry’s understanding here is still very shallow, but at its minimum, Paid Media will include:

Activations (in-store and external)
Traditional Media (OOH, TVC, Print, Radio)
POSM
Advertorials

Earned Media will include:

Public Relations
Blogs
Viral videos

Owned media will include:

Branded media properties
Packaging (absolut did it first)

And as we focus less on interruption, and more on engagement, our strategic planning will change.

The media story will change into the touch point story. Media agencies will figure out where best to touch their audiences. It will be less about the hammer, and more about the scalpel.

(to be continued)