…building relationships, profile and learning through blogging.
Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid writes a serious and insightful bit on why he thinks blogging is an early signal about what advertising could be, absent the bumpf and bluster … and cost.
Extracted from the gapingvoid blog
Having spent a good portion of my early career in has-been, stuffy, conservative agencies, I’ve done my fair share of fantasising about what I’d do if the has-been, stuffy conservative client ever got around to letting the team and I come up with anarchic, crazy, cutting-edge stunts, the kind Steve writes about so well.
Of course, it never happened.
But maybe that’s a good thing. The older I get, the less these crazy stunts seem like career-building exercises, and the more they just seem like “re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic”.
I think the game has moved on.
Here’s an example. Ask me to name what I think is the most brilliant piece of new advertising I’ve come across in the last 5 years.
My answer would not be some big, funky-dunky campaign from a company like Apple or Volkswagon.
My answer would not be something from some edgy, hipster, in-your-face creative hot-shop in downtown Manhattan or London.
My answer would be Robert Scoble, a regular guy with a regular job who blogs regularly about the company he works for. That company happens to be Microsoft.
I seriously believe Robert, on Microsoft’s behalf, is making more advertising history at this very moment than all the creative hot-shops combined. He is changing the game beyond all recognition. The hot-shops are not.
And he’s probably doing it at less than 1% of the price the conventional agencies are used to charging.
So if you find yourself working in advertising, you now have two choices:
1. Try to prove folks like me wrong or
2. Get with the program.
A lot of people will opt for Choice Number 1. A lot of them will lose everything.
I think he’s right.
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November 27, 2004 at 4:53 am
Anonymous
Why?
November 27, 2004 at 1:57 pm
Anonymous
Man oh man.
Either I gotta get a life, or you do, or we both do
I remember when you quit blogging for about 3 or 4 months. I was SO sad.
I got up this morning at about 7.00 a.m. (Saturday) after going out last night with a couple of friends. We went to a party at a sailing and rugby clubhous … the guy and gal I went with, and me … all in our mid-to-late ’40’s, were the oldest people there, and old enough to be most everyone else’s parents, if we had had kids in our early ’20’s. We left early, and went back to james’ house and polished off a bottle of wine, and talked about … you know, the Kleptones, U2, advertising as one-way push versus a two-way more-or-less real conversation, middle-age awakening, sex, Desperate Housewives … you know the typical Friday night corporate workshop or graduate school seminar, wine-induced.
When I woke this morning, the first thing i did was check my email (that is, after throwing the covers back .. the iBook is in easy reach, on the desk.
This guy bmo left a comment saying “Why ?”. I’m assuming he meant why I thought scoble was /is right, and my mouth tasted like last night’s beer and wine, and my head hurt … so I went back to bed, and I lay there for most of the next two hours, drifting in and out of slightly-hungover-sleep, thinking to myself …
Is he serious ? nah, bmo’s just sardonic. Does he really actually want to know why I think Hugh Macleod is right ? Ok, maybe he does .. but if he does, what about all that crapo he writes on his BS moffatt blog ? Doesn’t he believe this stuff about, you know, voice, and actually talking about a products warts and hemorrhoids and all ? or maybe he’s just being a snap-happy smart-ass, and can’t help himself … like when he noted on Tom Matrullo’s blog, in an off-handed semi-0smart ass way “Oh, That’s a rhetorical question”, and Tom - bless his heart - commented back “Was it ?”
Anyway, yes … I gotta get a life. When I spend my Satruday mornings lying in bed thinking about blog comments and the power of an authentic voice actually talking to, and with, customers and potential customers, and being honest, in thios world where brown kids are getting blown up, beaten, undernourished and … you know … yadda yadda yadda.
Yes, I think Hugh Macleod is right, even tho’ things might not changte in that direction or to that way of doing things overnight (see a recent post just a bit down the blog “Turtles All The Way Up”, or Hugh Macleod;’s recent post where he said he thought “wirearchy” was interesting but that then there were all these interesting, and quite powerfully embedded, Noo Yawk social hierarchies, and, and, and …
I can still tell I had one beer too many last night. I think I’ll lay down and rest, and so help me Jebus, I will not think about blog comments.
November 27, 2004 at 4:40 pm
Anonymous
I lied. I’m still thinking about them.
November 27, 2004 at 7:13 pm
Anonymous
If it comforts you at all, Jon, I had far too much to drink last night and had to be poured onto my doorstep. While lying in bed with the bed spinning under me, I thought people just want something real to cling to while all those kids are getting blown up to protect their employers’ investments.
Real, in a world that seems fake and full of poseurs, means someone who will give up a bit of their time to hear what other people think about and care about.