Ideas for a Smarter, Faster World

Not that long ago, I got the chance to speak at Advertising Week DC, and presented a case study of a piece we did for DeVry University. I call it a “piece,” but really it’s a whole bunch of tightly-meshed moving parts that include a mobile app; a live, projected classroom presentation, a 3D world with avatars and quirky aliens, a site, custom email follow-up, and some social tools that, collectively, help establish an engaging and ongoing relationship between DeVry and prospective students.

The “piece” is cool — which is probably why it was a Mobi finalist in two categories — with the likes of Fanta and Comedy Central. But the presentation I gave wasn’t just about the mechanics of the parts. It was about the kind of thinking that defines — or should define — creative in a contemporary agency setting.

When I started in the business, which was longer ago than I will specify here, I was a copywriter. I worked with words. They paired me with an art director, who’s specialty was pictures. Together, our job was to combine words and pictures, and fit them into a pre-determined space, defined primarily by physical dimensions or time. Occasionally, when we were paying close attention, context also entered into it. Our goal was to be really clever with those words and pictures — clever enough to distract a target from his or her primary goal, just long enough to get in a good word about our client’s brand. And that was the essence of advertising creativity: Being really good at combining words and pictures, in spaces someone had already set aside for you.

I don’t have to tell you that times have changed for you to know that times have changed. The opportunity, technology, and culture certainly exist in our digital world for creatives to think, not just in terms of words and pictures, but in terms of, “What if?”

Beyond working in predetermined spaces, creatives are now required to think in terms of experience — and that doesn’t just open new doors, so much as it removes the concept of closed doors altogether. Online, anything is possible — or a reasonable and accepted facsimile of anything is possible, anyway — which means when you’re creating you can pretty much create anything in the way of an experience for a prospective fan of your client’s brand. The question isn’t “What’s the headline?” so much as it is: “What happens next?” and “What if it/they did this?” All of which makes advertising in general, and creative in particular, harder than it used to be. More fun, but harder.

In order to combat that difficulty, and assign some sort of predictable monetary value to pieces of an endless online space, we’ve carved that space into lots of more predictable units of predetermined size and shape. There are banners, sites, microsites, fan pages, groups, tweets, and a whole host of other pre-defined spaces on the web, just waiting for creatives to fill them. Pretty much all of them are extremely useful — some, even critical. All benefit from the creatives’ skill. But if you take them all — every last one of them — and pile them together, they still don’t make even a tiny dent in the universe of possibilities. The web isn’t a zero-sum game like broadcast or printed publications. There can always be more pixels. Which means the pixels can always do something to create an experience that no one has experienced yet.

Words and pictures are still important. In fact, that’s an understatement. Recent studies finally prove what creatives have known all along — that the quality of the creative has a huge impact on the effectiveness of online advertising. But words and pictures aren’t the only elements of creative anymore. Creative has moving parts. Lots of them. When they mesh together properly, they create an experience. And that experience can be, literally, anything. If you want to make it good, understanding existing and emerging tools is the cost of entry. If, however, you want to change the game, begin with a simple question:

“What if?”