The Future of Advertising

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Illustrations by Tavis Coburn

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Illustrations by Tavis Coburn

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Twenty creative directors, planners, media strategists, and account executives from agencies across the country are down on all fours on the floor of a 100-year-old tenement on Manhattan's Lower East Side. They are each staring down at a blank poster-size sheet of paper, contemplating their most abject fears about their careers, their livelihoods, and their future. They have reason to worry. They are, after all, in the business of advertising.

This slight three-story brick building on the edge of Chinatown has been taken over by Hyper Island, a school based in Sweden renowned for producing the most coveted digital talent in the ad industry. That school is located in an old prison on the Baltic Sea, and students are taught that there are no boundaries when it comes to digital marketing.

Last summer, the Swedes at Hyper Island recognized that where there's panic, there's opportunity, and opened this New York branch. Like the many foreigners who settled in this downtown locale before, the school arrived with its own set of promises -- to drag the denizens of Madison Avenue into the 21st century. While its students back in Sweden are "digital natives," these elder New Yorkers are "digital immigrants," who have gathered for three days of hard-core immersion in dealing with the chaos digital technology has wrought on their industry. "Something digital immigrants would do," explains one instructor, "is make a phone call to make sure someone received an email."

Most of the men and women here -- average age: 38 -- have worked at agencies for more than a decade. Such tenure used to be considered an asset, but these days it's more of a liability. They're all well aware that coding is now prized over copywriting and that a résumé that includes Xbox and Google is more desirable than one featuring stints at BBDO or Grey.

Step one of their therapy, of course, is admitting there is a problem. In this room where Swedish pastries litter a couple of Ikea tables, they have been told that their first assignment is to "put [their] digital stinky fish on the table." So each supplicant finds some space on the floor and rolls out that big blank sheet of paper. Eventually, everyone writes something, and after a few minutes, the group gathers in a circle -- a safe space -- where one by one they voice their insecurities. The first person stands up. "I walk around in fear and loathing, dazed and confused," he says. Another confesses, "I'm a person who's petrified to fail." One by one, they exhale the cold fears of an entire industry: "I feel like I'm standing here and there are a thousand baseballs dropping from the sky and I don't know which ones to catch." "I left my cushy job at a global agency. Actually, I didn't leave; I was pushed out." "I kind of feel like the digital world is a gated world. It's wide open, but I don't even know enough to walk in." "This whole 'collaboration, we'll work together as a team' breaking down of the creative director and art director team -- I find it fucking difficult."

Depending on how you look at it, the next 72 hours are either a communal hazing or a primer on today's rules of marketing. Creative teams, the participants are told, now need to behave more like improv actors -- "story building" instead of storytelling -- so they can respond in real time to an unpredictable audience. Marketing actually needs to be useful -- "use-vertising" instead of advertising -- which means that you must think more like a product developer than an entertainer. While campaigns once promised glossy anthemic concepts, perfected before being shipped off to the waiting client, digital is incremental, experimental, continually optimized -- "perpetual beta" -- and never, ever finished. "Digital will fuck you up and the way your agencies are built to make money, staff things, price things," says the instructor. "You guys have to change your DNA, and you're going to have tough decisions." Later, there's an entire lesson on letting go of egos. Throughout the session, instructors remind the novitiates that these new rules are certain to change completely, and soon.

[ CHAOS ]

Like a beetle preserved in amber, the practice of advertising has sat virtually unchanged for the last half-century. Before 1960, ad making was a solitary practice. Copywriters toiled away on words to pitch a product, then handed them off to an art director who translated them into an illustration or photograph. Creative director Bill Bernbach (the B in DDB) changed all that when he recognized that pairing wordsmith and artist could spark genius. That simple move ignited the industry's creative revolution, raising the practice of advertising from sleazy salesmanship to some permutation of art.

The ad business became an assembly line as predictable as Henry Ford's. The client (whose goal was to get the word out about a product) paid an agency's account executive (whose job was to lure the client and then keep him happy), who briefed the brand planner (whose research uncovered the big consumer insight), who briefed the media planner (who decided which channel -- radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, or TV -- to advertise in). Then the copywriter/art director team would pass on its work (a big idea typically represented by storyboards for a 30-second TV commercial) to the producer (who worked with a director and editors to film and edit the commercial). Thanks to the media buyer (whose job was to wine-and-dine media companies to lower the price of TV spots, print pages, or radio slots), the ad would get funneled, like relatively fresh sausage, into some combination of those five mass media, which were anything but equal. TV ruled the world. After all, it not only reached a mass audience but was also the most expensive medium -- and the more the client spent, the more money the ad agency made.

That was then. Over the past few years, because of a combination of Internet disintermediation, recession, and corporate blindness, the assembly line has been obliterated -- economically, organizationally, and culturally. In the ad business, the relatively good life of 2007 is as remote as the whiskey highs of 1962. "Here we go again," moans Andy Nibley, the former CEO of ad agency Marsteller who, over the past decade, has also been the CEO of the digital arms of both Reuters and Universal Music. "First the news business, then the music business, then advertising. Is there any industry I get involved in that doesn't get destroyed by digital technology?"