The document calls for advertising agencies to take a more radical approach in three key areas: 1) Focus on outcomes rather than outputs and think beyond traditional advertising to solve clients' business problems, 2) Stop thinking about their work in a vacuum and better understand cultural trends, and 3) Break away from narcissism and putting themselves at the center to instead focus on understanding people's real interests. It advocates for smaller, more experimental ideas and a culture of continual learning and improvement.

1. A Time For True Radicals
Gareth Kay
Chief Strategy Officer, Associate Partner
Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, San Francisco

2. Why radical?

4. Professional Radicals

5. radical (adj.)
thoroughgoing or extreme, especially as
regards change from accepted or traditional
forms: a radical change in the policy of a
company.
favoring drastic political, economic, or
social reforms: radical ideas; radical and
anarchistic ideologues.
Source: Merriam-Webster

6. radical (adj.)
of or going to the root or origin;
fundamental: a radical difference
Source: Merriam-Webster

7. Let us be in no doubt,
it’s time to be radical

8. What we’re doing isn’t working
“In most cateogries, a brand’s market share is
stationary”
Brands in 4 out of 5 categories seen as increasingly
homogenous
Less than 1 in 10 ads seen as different
3 x $ spent on price cutting compared to brand
building in CPG
Source: Andrew Ehrenberg; Copernicus Consulting; McKinsey

10. We’re less valued by clients
1 out of 4 clients don’t believe what we do boosts
corporate profitability
3 out of 5 clients think we don’t offer good value for
money
2 out of 5 think we don’t work well in a team
1 in 10 think we are doing a good job in evolving
our services for the digital age
Source: IPA/ISBA; CMO Council 2010

11. We’re finding it hard to find and
retain the best talent
Not just low starting salaries but ‘low degree of
difficulty’
Spend less on training and development per person
than Starbucks spend on their baristas
Less than 1 in 2 employees believe their agency is
committed to continuous development
Source: AAAA

12. Yet, our response seems to be this

13. 6
(hopefully
helpful)
thoughts
TODAY

14. “Being realistic is
the most commonly
traveled road to
mediocrity.”
- Will Smith

15. 1
Let’s think about
what we can create,
not just what our
muscle memory
tells us to make

16. “Here’s the TV ad,
now what’s the problem?”

17. “The task of any imaginative agency, any creative
company, is to understand and serve its client’s
business problem. Too often, our business has
sliced and diced its tasks in the style of a sub-
prime mortgage bundler. A corporate task set by
the chief executive, reframed as a comms task by
the marketing director, refined by the brand
consultancy and reduced by the ad agency to the
stuff advertising can do: grow awareness, nurture
engagement. Too many links, too indirect and
weak a connection between commercial
possibilities and creative resolution.”
- Laurence Green, Founding Partner of 101

18. “The further backward
you can look, the farther
forward you can see.”
- Winston Churchill

21. Let’s stop defining ourself by
output and start defining
ourself by outcome

22. Let’s be rewarded
for good behavior

24. hack (n.)
the most ingenious and
effective solution to a problem
Source: Merriam-Webster

27. 2 Stop thinking
our work exists
in a vacuum

28. Why is our reference
almost exclusively
other ads?

29. The reality is what we
make exists in culture

30. “Creative firms of all kinds
(including ours) know that
they must evolve at LEAST
as fast as the world is
changing around them”
- Tom Kelley, IDEO

31. While culture has changed
massively in the last 60 years,
we’ve been massively dumb

32. Digital ideas or
ideas for a digital world?

33. “Advertising can’t have
a future if it continues
living in the past.”
- Steve Henry

34. Effective ideas demand we
create our own culture of
continual re-invention

35. 3 No more
narcissism

36. We are narcissists.

37. We create fake ‘movements’ for
things people don’t care about

38. “Often our biggest mistake
is believing that, in general,
customers care a lot about
your brand. They do not. ”
- Patrick Barwise

39. “Nobody reads advertising.
People read what they
want to read and
sometimes it’s an ad.”
- Howard Luck Gossage

40. We need to understand
what people are interested
in and work back from there

41. Build bridges

43. “We’ve moved from a
downloading culture to
an uploading culture.”
- Charles Vallance

44. We need to get better at
designing for gaps

46. Put people at the heart
of everything we do

47. 4
Get out of
the messaging
business

50. Ideas that do

54. Stop communicating a
product and start making
communication products

55. 5
Break the
tyranny of big

57. The bigger, the better

60. The biggest ideas disappear

62. "Square is elegant. The user's flow
through payment or application has been
reduced to the fewest possible steps; the
app has minimal features. He espouses a
tremendously attractive belief that good
industrial design wins customers' trust by
disappearing."

63. What if we thought smaller
about the things we make?

65. What if we stitched smaller
ideas togther to create a
long idea?

68. Google
Books
Blogspot
Youtube
Google
Google Google Scholar
411 Search
Google
Docs
Organize the
world’s information
Google and make it
Shopping universally
accessible and Google
useful. labs Chrome
Browser
Google
Maps Google.org
Google
sketch Fossil fuel
Challenge
Source: John Grant, ‘The Brand Innovation Manifesto’

69. “Like any company we require a
profit to stay in business. But it is not
the reason we are in business. The
thing that has not changed from day
one is the desire to make people
think about the world we live in.
This is, and always will be, why
we are in business.”
Dave Hieatt

74. Photo:
Andrew
Hovells
(aka
Northern
Planner)

75. Photo:
Andrew
Hovells
(aka
Northern
Planner)

76. Think small

77. 6
Let’s start
learning again

79. ‘From suck to non-suck’
Pixar

80. Eradicate the pointless
quest for perfection

81. “The show doesn’t go on
because it’s ready; it goes
on because it’s 11.30”
Lorne Michaels

82. Minimum viable product

83. Source: Albion London

84. Source: Albion London

86. Communications R&D

87. 70/20/10

88. Build a culture of
experimentation

91. “If you don’t like change,
you’re going to like
irrelevance even less”
- Gen. Eric Shinseki

92. Thank you for listening
@garethk
gplus.to/garethk