…building relationships, profile and learning through blogging.
Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid writes a serious and insightful bit on why he thinks blogging is an early signal about what advertising could be, absent the bumpf and bluster … and cost.
Extracted from the gapingvoid blog
Having spent a good portion of my early career in has-been, stuffy, conservative agencies, I’ve done my fair share of fantasising about what I’d do if the has-been, stuffy conservative client ever got around to letting the team and I come up with anarchic, crazy, cutting-edge stunts, the kind Steve writes about so well.
Of course, it never happened.
But maybe that’s a good thing. The older I get, the less these crazy stunts seem like career-building exercises, and the more they just seem like “re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic”.
I think the game has moved on.
Here’s an example. Ask me to name what I think is the most brilliant piece of new advertising I’ve come across in the last 5 years.
My answer would not be some big, funky-dunky campaign from a company like Apple or Volkswagon.
My answer would not be something from some edgy, hipster, in-your-face creative hot-shop in downtown Manhattan or London.
My answer would be Robert Scoble, a regular guy with a regular job who blogs regularly about the company he works for. That company happens to be Microsoft.
I seriously believe Robert, on Microsoft’s behalf, is making more advertising history at this very moment than all the creative hot-shops combined. He is changing the game beyond all recognition. The hot-shops are not.
And he’s probably doing it at less than 1% of the price the conventional agencies are used to charging.
So if you find yourself working in advertising, you now have two choices:
1. Try to prove folks like me wrong or
2. Get with the program.
A lot of people will opt for Choice Number 1. A lot of them will lose everything.
I think he’s right.
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