Does the Ad Biz Need to Think More Like the the Movie Biz?

There was a Golden Age in Hollywood.  A time when the best creative and technical  innovators flooded into the US. It was a time when more risks were taken in story, plot and the definition of a mass market product.  Picture the recent portrayal of Howard Hughes in Scorsese's "The Aviator" passionately trying to produce "Hell's Angels". The nay sayers thought he was mad....but he was crafting something that people had not seen yet.  In marketing speak...he was ahead of the market. 

Point blank this is where the ad biz needs to get.  Not listening to consumers to give them point by point what they superficially "seem to be" asking for, but rather pull out and analyze what they are saying and doing in order to deliver stuff that they had not imagined.  A factory of ideas rather than messages.  A supporter and cultivator of authentic sources of creativity.

A couple of good articles over the last week touch on this.  I also wrote a piece for Admap, "Can Consumers Own the Brand" last year that touched on the same points.   Branding now requires a deeper process, yet the dilemma of unearthing consumer niches and their nuances calls for a major overhaul. It takes time to cultivate and invent the intangibles necessary to a brand’s longevity. Keeping a brand cool and relevant means finding authentic sources of influence sooner than the influencers

Bob Garfield in Advertising Age writes: "It all flows from a single concept: What if the wisdom of the crowd were harnessed and its powerunleashed, unfettered by outmoded intellectual-property laws and uninhibited by the dictates of Management? The question has many answers. One is that ad agencies had better reconsider their reason for existing."

 "If the conversation is dominated by consumers themselves, and they�re paying scant attention to the self-interested blather of the marketer, who needs ads -- offline, online or otherwise? This raises the question of what agencies are left to do. Maybe the answer is obvious: to manage, focus, exploit, maybe even co-opt the open conversation. The real question may be whether the agency world is culturally equipped for the task"

John Hegarty of BBH states in a recent interview in The Independent:  "We've moved from the age of interruption to the age of engagement, from a passive consumer to an active consumer who basically doesn't just sit back and wait for things to be delivered but who goes and seeks things out. A whole new mind-set is needed in the way you create and develop work and how you plan your media."