Prime invited Mario Gamper, former Creative Director and Digital Director of German advertising agency Scholz & Friends Berlin to reason on advertising. He quit his job one year ago to travel around the world, meeting with thought leaders in advertising and business. These meetings and the thoughts they provoked are further developed in his forthcoming book “Ideas Will Travel”.
OK. So everyone agrees that the advertising industry is changing. And many people are starting to understand that dividing the industry into traditional and digital is becoming useless fast. But where are we going? I am pretty convinced we’re entering an age in which advertisers will begin to think like magicians. But first things first.
I started my project ideaswilltravel.com in 2010 because I was tired. Tired of being dragged against my will into the shiny-new-objects-game that the technorati have become so great at playing in their corner of the media world. Instead I wanted to focus my thoughts and my clients on ideas again. I wanted to talk about stories that can reach an audience, even though their media experience is as saturated as it is fragmented. Those stories have become rare.
So, I went looking for people who create these stories. The crazy guys who are building a different connection between products and people. The fools who are thinking and acting like the social-digital communication infrastructure was already in place, when it wasn’t even close. I sent a bunch of emails and asked those creative leaders if I could visit them. And off I went to 365 days of new media reality school.
When projects were available, I dove in headlong. Among others, I designed a tourism ARG (alternate reality game) for No Mimes Media in L.A., tried to be a funny TV-show writer for a beer company at Naked Communications in London, and developed some subculture activation ideas at Platoon Kunsthalle in Seoul, Korea. Most of the time, I wasn’t exactly best in class.
For the very first interview I conducted, I picked a scenic London street cafe. Then I spent the next two days trying to figure out what Naked’s Creative Director Jim Thornton was saying about great stories under all that traffic noise.
In my tourism ARG, I designed a time-travel espionage story that cleverly guided visitors through various layers of Berlin’s rich history. My ambition was to only use the powers of a well-connected smartphone. However, not being used to write wildly branching non-linear stories, I would have left many of my players stranded in no-winstates somewhere in the middle of Berlin.
I also had to find out that some of my “lead-agency” attitudes were less than useful. Joining a brainstorming at North Kingdom for a 3D projection project, I was questioning the brief way too much, ignoring how much had already been done and agreed upon by others. Had I had my naive intern will, people in South Africa would never have been able to create their very own 3D-projection. Instead they probably would have had to wiggle flashlights.
Seeing that my first approaches were usually slightly buggy was a. humbling, and b. incredibly valuable. It proved to me, once and for all, that the skills of an internationally awarded adman had been officially rendered small change in the new media world. I was in beta again, and loving it.
Thankfully, some things worked surprisingly well. Visiting the award winning Costa Rican Eco Lodge La Cusinga, I was looking at their social media strategy and working on ways to extend it. Part of which was an ecotourism blog I started. In only four weeks, it reached more readers than my advertising blog had reached all year. So Yay! for that.
Finally, sometimes just listening to people is enough to make you smarter. Some of the high points? 60 minutes with Sid Lee’s strategist Bertrand Cesvet, which makes you realize the depth behind the deceivingly easy read “Conversational Capital”: one of the most valuable books about Social Media, and it doesn’t even mention Twitter!
For all those wondering what doing Social Business is like, nothing beats a conversation with Harish Hande, the CEO of Selco and India’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Hande started selling solar-mini-panels to poor farmers in the state of Karnataka more than 15 years ago. His business plan: improve the life in Indian villages by bringing them reliable electricity. Between a meeting with Barack Obama and a speech engagement at the Davos Summit, Hande kindly sat down with me, and explained the similarity of doing business in a rural societey and in social networks like Facebook. It’s all about earning trust and re-earning it again and again. A school year indeed it was. Trying to sum it up isn’t easy, but I would outline five clear changes to the advertising world that I grew up in.
1. DATA IS KING. AND QUEEN
It’s not like the analogue age didn’t produce any data. A simple face to face conversation is incredibly rich in information: voice, posture, facial muscle tension. It’s actually so much information, computers are yet unable to decode it. What’s new in the digital age is not the amount of data. It’s the fact that it will be recorded as raw material! It’s not just data about individuals, but about their social interactions, too. There is so much value to be created from working with this it’s mindblowing. Whether we’re talking apps, livesocial interaction, trending topics, or just dazzling infographics... if you’re a creative, you better honor the power of data – or face the consequences.
2. IN A "SOCIAL" WORLD, REAL STORIES WIN
Despite the importance of digital data, the creators I met hardly talked about technology. When Seoul creative agency Postvisual talked about their Nike billboard that lets you interact with Olympic champion Kim Yuna, they talked about story. When No Mimes Media talked about involving 19,000 people in “The Hunt”, their transmedia experience for Cisco, they talked about story. Because in a truly social media world, the only kind of message that gets passed on is the one that is worth retelling to friends. Obviously, your story still needs to know of the limits of technology, but more often than not, you’re able to surpass those limits or push them ahead as you go further. As one of the producers at North Kingdom told me, being a good storyteller lets you “take a client by the hand and walk him through the fog”.
3. COLLABORATION IS NO LONGER A BUZZWORD
For the last years we have heard how social networks will create larger scale collaboration across borders. I hardly ever saw it before, but I did on this trip. Sid Lee’s new Adidascampaign was created by teams across borders. NY agency Anomaly keeps their core team small and adds experts at demand. And when I met Boulder’s crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils, they had just won the Harley Davidson account by asking their open network of creatives to send in ideas. The winning idea came from a guy out of Kentucky who owns an online T-shirt shop.
4. CREATIVE EXCELLENCE MEETS HUMILITY
Get ready for a big difference in creative culture: The Creative Director transforms from Schoolyard Bully into Master of Ceremony. As we move from singular performance to collaborative effort, Gorilla-chestbeating becomes unneccessary, and most likely unvaluable, too. All the Creative Directors I met stressed the fact that their biggest challenge was no longer getting quality ideas, but having everyone move in sync. Johnny Vulcan from Anomaly describes the new dream combination: “We must have strong creative opinions in order to inspire the experts. But we need humility to allow experts to lead us during execution.”
5. WE'RE ENTERING THE NEO-MAGICAL AGE
As silly as it is, we all like to make predictions. This is mine: We are entering a phase were the combined powers of digital technology and social data will allow us to create radically new experiences, that can only be called magical. Audiences will marvel at their beauty but they will no longer understand the powers behind them. What’s more, these powers will increase at warp speed. The stories and experiences that advertisers can develop will no longer be bound by the logic of space, gravity and mechanics. From stories that follow us through the day to context sentient apps, from personalized billboards to mobile assistants that guess what we want to do next – we will enjoy the freedom of true magicians to conjure up whatever we can imagine.
What we do with these powers is the true challenge of the Neo-Magical Age of Advertising.
Mario Gamper is an advertising survivor. He can still remember the day the first computer was dragged into his office. He has embraced the changes in the advertising industry ever since. Gamper has won international awards for print ads, PR-campaigns, websites, displays and blogs. After taking a year off for his ”Ideas will travel” project, he is now back in Berlin, working happily as Creative Consultant, Teacher and Copywriter.
