The ad you never should have made
Have you heard about Shazam? If you own a smartphone you probably have. And you probably know exactly what Shazam does, right? One more question. Have you ever seen an ad for Shazam? I haven’t, and I’m guessing a lot of people haven’t seen one neither. Shazam is a service so simple it doesn’t need advertising
Since it’s birth the advertising industry has specialized itself in selling bad products through advertising, where today they actually should be specialized advising companies how build products that advertise their selves.
If we want ad agencies to be relevant in the future we need to convince brands to help with the R&D of their new products. Instead of hiring agencies to invent a brandpromise and advertise across media old and new, hire agencies to help building a product or a service that doesn’t need a promise, nor a USP.
When reading Mel Exon from BBH post on ‘Agencies Moving Upstream’ I ran along this quote:
“Sometimes strategic and creative time is best spent thinking of new product or service innovations for clients. Ad agencies have developed amazing innovations for clients, and I think the best example of this is the Happy Meal for McDonalds. Just this week I heard CP+B is testing a new product for Kraft Mac and Cheese for the Grill.”
Mel proposes some steps we can take to move more upstream in a client’s business starting at an execution level, moving up to strategy (where most of the agencies stand today), further up to R&D ending up in Venture Capital, where agencies are no longer hired, but an actual partner in developping the business.
But do we belong as far upstream as Mel suggests? We do. In this video David Pogue, tech columnist at NY Times, points out where brands fail to build products or services that fail. Not because they lack innovation, but because they are built from a technological point of view.
