Ditching the Creatives ?

Zeitgeist time - I was reading an article in today's Economist about trends in online advertising when a friend emailed me today about a discussion with 2 marketing agency people, they were saying that the "Creatives" do not have all the powers they used to. I had picked up similar trends last year when researching the Future of Online Advertising work, but I suspect its becoming far more piquant as the downturn gathers speed - and as online advertising becomes ever more measurable, as the Economist article notes:

In brand advertising, “rich media” ads are taking over from banners. These allow users to interact by clicking, so their engagement can be tracked.

All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales. This is one reason why online advertising should suffer less than other sorts.

In other words, its becoming clearer which half of advertising works, and the arcane creative arts will increasingly struggle to justify their place at table heads as measurement becomes prevalent.

Also, these notes on the New Advertising.

The industry is also cautiously excited about two new forms of online advertising. The first is video. So far nobody has found a way to advertise inside online clips on a large scale. YouTube, which Google bought for no less than $1.65 billion two years ago, is “a huge end-user success,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s boss, “and we’re awaiting the monetisation.”

......

If something close to one is in fact near, it may not come from YouTube. Ads on Hulu, a video site that is a joint venture between Mr Zucker’s NBC Universal and News Corp, another media giant, appear to be selling well.

Our research for the Future of Online Media corroborates this, that quality video to quality audiences is gathering the "hit head" of video advertising leaving the rest to scrabble for the slim pickings in the long tail. But as for Social Media:

The other hope is for ads on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. They are experimenting with a variety of advertising formats, though none has yet proved very successful. Their big weakness is that users go to social-networking sites to socialise, not to shop (as they might on search engines). Their biggest strength is that users spend so much time there. Two years ago 11% of time spent online was at Yahoo! and MSN, two web portals; now their share is down to 5%, and 5% of online time is spent at YouTube and Facebook.

Online traffic, in other words, is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective and is therefore cheap. This, says Ms [Mary] Meeker, presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.

Perhaps this is the last refuge of the unmeasurable artifice in Ads, at least for a while - so maybe all is not lost for the Creatives just yet......

Actually, I think the Creative will always have a role, its just that it was overweighted when Advertising was largely unmeasurable.

(There is also an article on Mobile advertising, saying its coming of age - but its come of age so many times before, one just keeps the virtual Barmitzvah tent open all the time )