A funny thing happened to me on the way to watch the new Nike “Write the Future” TV spot @addy_dren had just tweeted. An obnoxious Honey Bunches of Oats banner ad took over the page.
Yes, that’s right. On my way to willingly engage with one ad, another one intrusively stopped me from watching it.
To quote Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.”
Sean Duffy wrote a provocative post recently on TalentZoo.com titled “Advertising Agencies: Kiss Your Creative Teams Goodbye.” He contends that to maximize the potential of digital media, traditional agencies must be willing to restructure the venerated copywriter/art director team. As you might imagine, the eye-popping title of the post led to a flurry of emotionally-charged user comments. Ah, digital. How do we love thee? Let us count the ways.
Reactions fell neatly into Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Let’s examine reactions to the post through the lens of each of these stages. When assembled, the individual responses paint a great picture of the psychological and emotional transition the advertising industry as a whole is currently experiencing. C’mon it’ll be fun, I promise.
Sara Santiago wrote a great little post (a love letter, she calls it) last week about dailymile. For those not familiar with dailymile, it’s essentially an unbranded descendant of the groundbreaking Nike+ site created by R/GA a few years back. dailymile has taken the concept a bit further, allowing not only runners, but anyone actively training (cycling, swimming, strength-training) the ability to track their efforts and share it with other members of the community.
It’s amazing how well digital has connected the dots for runners, but that’s always a matter of identifying key user insights. First of all, the majority of us are fanatics. Why else would anyone go out and run all those brutally monotonous miles? Runners are also obsessive (no surprise) about keeping track of personal progress. All those endless miles, all those hills, all those repeats become a body of work. They become a story of individual growth, an epic on a personal level. They are the equivalent of the most timeless of stories: the quest.
Just Sayin' is where we take what's in our head and put it into words. And pixels. While we know it would be far more interesting to have these discussions with us in person over a pot of Translator XD coffee, this is the best that current technology allows for. Patience. We're working on it.
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