Is Mad. Ave. Ready To Go Naked?

Jon Wilkins, one of three founders of Naked Communications, was speaking at an ad-industry confab last January in London. The stylishly groomed 38-year-old Brit had just finished telling a room of 100 or so of his peers that their industry is institutionally incapable of giving clients the smartest ideas. How ad agencies and media agencies that decide where ads run are built like factories, focused on one output (and that output is their handcuff). How a new model needs to emerge, one that can provide unbiased advice to marketers. And lo and behold, he's the one selling it. Naked sells only ideas, not outputs in the shape of 30-second spots.

As he finished, someone in the audience complained, "You're saying everything's changing and it's not."

Before Wilkins could respond, one of his clients intercepted the challenge. "I used to kid myself I wasn't going bald," said Mark Finney, the clearly hairless head of media for Orange, Europe's third-largest wireless carrier. "I'd pull my hair forward, I'd cover it over this way, I'd look in the mirror and think, It's never going to happen to me. Then suddenly I started realizing I looked really stupid. . . . I hate to say it, but Jon's right and you're wrong. You're covering your baldness, and at a certain point, you're going to look stupid."

Finney was channeling the frustration of every marketer struggling with the question, How do I get my ad agencies to rethink how to reach my customer? After years of mass denial--of declining advertising effectiveness, of disruptive technologies such as the Internet and TiVo changing long-entrenched consumer behavior--the ad industry is finally beginning to acknowledge its baldness. Much of the response has come in the form of splintered, specialized approaches: buzz marketing, ambient marketing, product placement, you name it. But does anyone genuinely believe a one-hit gimmick like spraying graffiti on a billboard is the salvation of advertising?

Wilkins, along with his two partners in Naked, Will Collin, a boy-faced 38-year-old with buzzed blond hair, and John Harlow, 37, a scruffier-looking James Dean with piercing blue eyes, think they have a solution. The future of advertising is getting all the folks responsible for a company's brand together to brainstorm the answer to this seemingly simple question: What's the right message communicated in the right way through the right channel in order to effectively reach the right consumer? The answer may not be a TV spot. It may not even be anything that falls under the traditional domain of advertising or marketing.

Naked, whose name stems from the idea that companies need to approach how they communicate with customers in the purest form, isn't an advertising agency or even a media-planning firm. Although its founders left senior posts at one of Europe's largest media agencies in 1999 to start Naked, their creation is something between an ad-and-media shop and a consultancy. Its 65 strategists--former media planners, management consultants, journalists--insert themselves at the heart of the creative process, at the behest of the client or sometimes even an ad agency looking for a creative spark. Their value, the founders say, isn't in making sure the best advertising ideas get executed, but that the best nonadvertising ones do, too.

Naked's approach has started to gain traction in Europe. Nineteen clients--from Honda to Nokia--rely on the firm to shape their UK strategy. In the past year, it has won 23 projects from companies such as Nike and Unilever. Some 60 European ad agencies, including the across-the-pond outposts of BBDO, Leo Burnett, and Lowe, have brought Naked into their ad-creation process. The firm's fans credit it with unleashing creativity that had been stifled by bureaucracy for years. "Consultants come and flatten out an idea and almost round off the interesting edges, and what Naked does is push the idea to a less comfortable place," says Tony Wright, president and CEO of Lowe.

Now Collin, Wilkins, and Harlow are preparing to bring Naked to the United States. They expect to open a New York office by the end of the year--perhaps in the über-hip Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, strategically located far from the media and advertising world's Manhattan hub. They've already lined up a couple of American accounts to work on--Coca-Cola's Minute Maid brand and Nokia's multimedia division, which puts games and videos on its cell phones.