What connects Fergus O’Hare, Director of Facebook Creative Shop, APAC, with Alasdair Lennox, Executive Creative Director, EMEA, Fitch? Apart from their focus on emerging markets, the meeting point of their thoughts happened at Goafest, the annual gathering of the advertising profession. In separate presentations, both spoke about advertising bringing together the streams of art and science.
“There is a lot of creative output using data and there are wonderful insights available just by asking the right questions,” says O’Hare (at right in picture). In New York, the Facebook team has data scientists embedded within the creative teams. “They spot these wonderful insights that our campaigns are built on,” he says.
The other point of discussion that comes up is the role of the in-house agency. Globally the biggest clients in the business, from Samsung and American Express to Coca-Cola, have in-house ad agencies. But Lennox (on left in picture) feels that clients are no longer blindly pushing business to their in-house agencies. “In the last two or three pitches that I have been involved, the client’s in-house teams are also pitching for the same business,” he says. Importantly, the future in-house agency might be outside of the client’s office as well. Increasingly, in-house agency teams are pitching for businesses from other industries as well (of course, not their direct competitors). “That boils down to the fact that many clients are realising that they do not have all the creative answers and are willing to collaborate,” says Lennox.
So O’Hare is confident that the existing set of ad agencies will not turn into dinosaurs as all the digital agencies do not turn out really creative work. He speaks of the time there was an iconic shift when people started building banner advertising. “The ones who created banner ads used to be paid exorbitant salaries. It got to a point when consumers wanted something other than banners and the traditional agency guys were brought back. You can always have a great career if you are game for change,” says O’Hare, defending the current agency structure.
He says the solution lies in going back to doing things the simple, straight way. “We need to train agencies to adapt their skills to a new medium. For all the new media, Facebook, Instagram, Oculus Rift, there is only one answer like it was true to advertising of the past. The creative rendition has to be simple, it has to be beautiful,” he says.
Lennox adds that the problem preventing advertising creatives from coming up with new-age ideas is the current agency structures.
“Ad agencies have so many layers. Creative people are often told what to do because they are responsible for the salaries of everyone. They are warned not to mess up as the client might leave. As a result, creatives stop being brave,” he says. Social media help creatives do the work they want to do, for which they will be appreciated.
O’Hare takes the discussion back to the union of art and science. “If you do hypotheses with your creative idea in a data scientist world, we can prove they are right with data. Then there will not be seven people tampering with your idea,” he says. “The strong creative teams can get hypotheses quicker and faster,” he says.
Retail therapy In the retail industry there is a great divide on how to prepare for the digital world. “The retailers are quite late to the party. They have so many legacy systems that your payment CRM and everything else sits in there. It’s easy to say, let’s create a road map and make the digital enterprise happen,” says Lennox. However, execution is another story altogether. So a lot of innovation happens in a small start-up. “There’s an enormous challenge for mature brands and retailers,” he says.