"I'm gonna get medieval on ya!" - That means I'm gonna talk advertising for a bit here...

Remember the scene in the movie Pulp Fiction, where that line came up? Yes, there was a man in a more than compromising position with a black rubber ball in his mouth. That's how most people feel when you say you're going to talk advertising. Because as Hugh says in the cartoon here, when you talk advertising, people think you're going to talk like advertising, and they truly don't like that. With good reason. Advertising in the past has talked down to people, but now, slowly, with the advent of social networking and consumer conversations happening in a larger space than much advertising occupies, advertising companies are coming to realize that they need to be talking with people instead of talking at them. Thank god.

That said, and before people start to think that I don't like advertising, I'd like to say stop. I love advertising. In fact tomorrow morning I'm having a meeting with the head of possibly the largest agency in Munich. "I'm Lovin' It!" Advertising, that is. And every once in awhile I find something truly enlightening in that universe that just makes me sit up and smile. This week, I found three of those things.

I AM THE CLIENT! - The first thing I found is a blog called "I AM THE CLIENT". This was forwarded to me by a pal at DDB and is positively the funniest agency blog I have yet to read. Yup, there go my readers. But I don't want to be just an advertising blog anyway so who cares. On to the story. I AM THE CLIENT is written, ostensibly, by a guy named Dave Knockles, who claims to be quite possibly the word's greatest marketing director - and it is a positive hoot. Here's an entry from a recent post:

"I got out of bed feeling so perky, I could have hung a week's laundry off my stalk-on. GOOD DAY TO YOU, WORLD! - Why such expansive morning wood? - Because today was my first day with my new agency. And I was so excited about telling them what the first campaign is going to be, I almost dry-humped the postman! - So, I breezed into the agency at 11am, virtually bang on time for my 10am meeting."

Don't think that's funny? You must be a girl. Whatever the case I do recommend you check it out. It's racy for sure, but refreshing in a business that could use a whole lot more good humour these days.

MEDIABLIPS - My next find was MediaBlips, a site dedicated to highlighting advertising and marketing blogs. I found this curiously from my Statcounter stats, as someone had found me through this site. Upon further investigation I looked into MediaBlips and found out that they had already found me and had given WWED a score of 108 - without me having done a single thing. So that's not so bad. You can check the box below and see if I've gone up or down from this post. They track Seth Godin as well and he gets a score of 158, so I'm just 50 points away from a guy who's written 10 best-selling marketing books. Hmm, there's an idea. I should write a book!

CarlsonCreative - My final discovery of the week was one of an old friend who was the first and best designer at CarlsonCreative, Inc. in Seoul, the first 100% Foreign Invested agency in Korea. Nam Mee-Hyun came to work for us with just about a year's worth of not very impressive experience and went on to not only get our agency into the New York Art Directors Show, but to help us win significant business from British American Tobacco, Samsung, LG, The Korean Ministry of Finance and many other clients. She had written me last week looking for a letter of recommendation upon her graduation from the Pratt Institute in New York with a Masters degree in Communications Design. Imagine that, an employee who wins an award from one of the most prestigeous creative shows in the world before she gets her degree from one of the most prestigeous design schools in the world. I was more than happy to write the letter - in fact, I was delighted. The poster on the left, with the New York and Seoul subways combined, was designed by MeeHyun to promote our agency's sponsorship of the New York Art Directors Show in Seoul upon the inclusion of our work. We were the only agency in Korea to have enjoyed that particular distinction that year, 1999. Exactly ten years ago. Happy anniversary, MeeHyun!

And cheers Adfolks! That wasn't so bad, was it? I've had a very nice week so far.

Marketing Predictions 2009

From deep in the epicenter of the marketing brain-trust, right here in Vietnam, come my predictions for the industry in 2009. And how, you may ask, might I be equipped to delve deep inside the world of marketing from the vantage point of this very developing market? Because this is where I believe the immediate future of the business lies, not necessarily in Vietnam, but in markets like Vietnam, who can provide a petrie dish for embrionic business ideas before they are launched into larger markets. And I have not been the first person to have this idea. That credit goes first this year to Sir Martin Sorrell, who, aside from possibly being the most creative man in contemporary marketing, due to his Dell project and other WPP initiatives, has made no secret of his intention to focus his company's growth in emerging markets as opposed to the developed ones who are most certainly at the beginning of a global recession that will last anywhere from ten to eighteen months, depending on who you listen to. Developing market growth in advertising and marketing has been forcast for 25% whilst mature markets like the States, Europe and Japan will most certainly clock in well below ten percent, and could even reach into the negative numbers in some sectors, automotive and banking included.

Aside from the more obvious growth projections, working in a market like this provides a window into consumer behaviour and insights that will be the future of marketing engines for at least my lifetime in the business and a blueprint of how the Asian market, and I mean the Asian market alone, will be the salvation of global business in any great number of ways over the next 50 years. Before I launch into the predictions phase of this post, lets rewind to a few of my past entries and collect a little data: In February, my post, "Are The Boggerati Missing The Market" began to point out the importance of Asia on the Internet with Korea, China and Vietnam playing major digital roles. In March, I followed up with "Old Numbers: Good Morning Vietnam", a post that pointed out, quite simply, Asia's Internet dominance in the world - currently, and for the rest of the future as anybody living will know it. I'm including a graph here showing Asia's Internet penetration superiority. But it wasn't until June when the pieces began to fall into place for me with the post "Martin Sorrell and The Siliconmunists Storm Saigon" where the link between traditional advertising and digital became blurry and started to seem like almost the same thing - because the company that Sir Martin bought into in Vietnam, is as much a media company as it is an advertising agency - not disimilar to the kind of company Dentsu in Japan was after being forged from the remnants of the ministries of information and propaganda after WWII. SocialJulio on Twitter furthered my thinking in this area with a flip/flop speculation that Google will buy Publicis, just days after Sorrell did his Vietnam deal. At virtually the same time as all of this, the US banking failure started to unfold as Fannie, Freddie and Lehman all represented by Dewey, Cheatham and Howe began to go belly up as illustrated by Brian Romero in my post, "America: Land of the Free, Home of the Slave" and continued with the mass bailouts requested in September as chronicled in my "Billion Here/Billion There" entry. All the while I continued my social marketing education with eclectic posts like, "Attracton vs. Conversion - How To Power Your Blog", a mix of exotic street observation, social theory, marketing and business speculation, that propelled The Wild Wild East Dailies to a Technorati rank well inside the top 1/2% of blogs worldwide - clearly there was a convergence of all this disparate thinking waiting in the wings. By fall it was beginning to hit me. Watching the Vietnam Advertising Association stumble through a quietly launched Advertising Institute and a mysteriously promoted awards show I began to wonder if they had ever heard of the Internet, much less thought of it as a means to promote their initiatives - but then I realized that this was not just a Vietnamese phenomenen but a global one when the local BIG SHOW, a distinctly multinational event, managed their advertising show without a digital category or even a website to show for it - all on the heels of a more than successful first BarCampSaigon, a digital non-conference held at RMIT University, the picture became crystal clear: If traditional advertising and digital didn't converge, they would kill each other, because neither one will be going very far without the other.

And so now, without further adieu, even though I've sufficiently let parts of the cat out of the bag - my Marketing Predictions for 2009:

#1) Traditional Advertising Expenditures (TV, Radio, Print) will shrink by 20% due to world financial contractions + the lack of Olympic and US Political spend - digital spend will more than double. And where do I get these numbers you ask? Well, I read all the industry data I can and then just pull them out of my ass of course. It's nearly as accurate as any Wall Street dartboard technique or the studied predictions of most financial analysts.

#2) Y&R will cease to exist. Or if you don't like that name, say DDB or Leo Burnett or any other once great agency brand that's been marginalized by it's present holding company. Maybe it's Grey or another. The point here is not to get the name right but to predict the end of a once great name. Why? Because when push comes to shove, somebody's going to get shoved out. It's not rocket science. Why did WPP create an entirely new agency to service Dell when they already had three perfectly good ones? Because the nature of the business is changing and some dinosaur needs to die.
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#3) Google will Buy Publicis. Because Publicis already bought the search business from Google? Well maybe. And maybe there are enough synergies to have it all make sense. It seems as if this buying business has the possibility of going two different ways. Plan "B" is discussed in the next prediction.
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#4) WPP will buy VinaGame. I know this is strictly a local prediction, but let's widen it to include the idea that it makes sense to buy digital delivery systems while they're available at reasonable rates to have waiting in the wings for clients who will want them anyway in the not-so-distant-future. Why not buy AOL? Advertising holding companies buying digital delivery media makes perfect sense because it guarantees that any message can be uniquely targeted right through to the final consumer with no weak links in the chain - and gives the digital company access to creative content providers who can create branded vehicles for clients - like the soap operas became for Procter & Gamble so many years ago.

So those are my calls for 2009. You can rake me over the coals on the financials until the cows come home because I haven't done financials on any of this, that's Sir Martin's job - but if you do that, you're missing the point - the point being is that we have two very complimentary businesses going through two very different trajectories right now - digital on the way up and traditional on the way down. There's bound to be some creative destruction in the middle.

For more information about Brand Marketing Training in Vietnam, go here <.

For more on Creativity, Education and the like, check below:

"Do Our Schools Kill Creativity?" - Sir Ken Robinson
Brand Marketing and Staff Training in Vietnam
2009 Marketing Predictions
The Language Barrier - An Asian Business Conundrum

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago

The death of a colleague: Perspective II

I did not have the best of days. Life was not kind. There was money involved. Let's just leave it at that. But it made me think about what I love to do for a living. It made me think about the creation of things and how it beats working in a bank or factory – how cool a job creativity really is and how blessed we are.

Excerpt from Wild Wild East:

"Today, a man named Paul Tilley jumped from a hotel in Chicago. He was 40 years old. I did not know Mr. Tilley, but he worked in the same business as I at DDB in Chicago, a rival of Leo Burnett. Mr. Tilley started at DDB the same year I left Burnett and started my own company (ADWEEK) in Korea – 1997. Paul's story made me think about what might have happened to me had I remained in Chicago instead of starting a business in a foreign country, a very scary thing in itself.

I know now, very clearly, that I have much less money than I did in my Chicago days, that I am no longer married, that I no longer have a lake house in Michigan, and that I am no longer a Vice President for the most famous and respected agency Chicago has ever produced – and that I live in Vietnam. But I do remember looking at my boss, a very nice man, one time at Burnett in the 90s and realizing that he was not a happy man. His teenagers had suburban drug and sex issues, his wife had issues and his Lexus had issues. He was being told how and what to manage and he couldn't do it his own way. The company owned him, totally. To him, work wasn't creative anymore. The bad guys were winning more business and he was getting screwed on all sides. But he was an extremely well paid, yet decidedly unhappy man.

I know there was a definite point where I told myself, "I don't want to be him in ten years". I don't know exactly what day that was but I'm sure there was one."

A recent post on a website here in Vietnam stated this: "Remember, many of the expatriate residents in this crowded and polluted burg are here not just out of love for the place but also because they felt oppressed by their position in various hierarchies back home."

Today, a man jumped from a building in Chicago to his death from the business of creating things. And that made me very sad, but gave me a lot of perspective.

These days I spend much more time selling, taking care of clients, looking for new business and managing the business of the business than I do actually creating things. Ha! That fun now gets largely left up to the younger people. But I work everyday, at sometimes not very glamorous jobs, in sometimes not very glamorous situations, in a certified "developing country" looking for that next creative bone, like an old dog who just can't shake a habit. But it's enough to keep me going. Just the idea of it.

Sometimes, the world of business gets in the way of our ability to create – because we let it. Relationships atrophy, the magic of that "white sheet of paper" becomes an albatross and many times it's all about money. I can't say that having a lot less money makes my life any better than anyone else's but I can tell you that it makes it a lot easier to tell people what you are not willing to do. If there's no money in the deal, you will do far fewer stupid things and the fewer stupid things one does, at least theoretically, the happier ones life will be.

I have at least put a limit on the stupid things I do – but the one reason I do that, is that I am deathly scared of loosing, not just the ability, but the opportunity to create. And creating things is what I love and do best. I know the minute that I start to regard it as just a job and not a passion, that I will have lost the battle.

Whatever mirage I need to maintain perspective. I am privileged to be able to create things for a living. Everyday. And just keep digging.

For more on the "Perspective" or "Little Things" series, click below:

My Morning Wake-Up Call - Perspective XX: The Little Things XII
We'll Have A Gay Old Time - Perspective XIX: The Little Things XII
"Rolled Foggy Disposed Ricepaper" - Perspective XVIII: The Little Things XI
Joyeux Noel - Perspective XVII: The Little Things X
Lunch With Obama - Perspective XVI: The Little Things IX
One Motley Crue On The Bus Today - Perspective XV: The Little Things VIII
Attraction vs. Conversion: How To Power Your Blog - Perspective XIV: The Little Things VII
A glass box full of deep fried chicken heads - Perspective XIII: The Little Things VI
Seoul Searching - Perspective XII
He Would Have Shot Me 40 Years Ago - Perspective XI: The Little Things V
Chomsky on Colour & Sleep - Perspective X: The Little Things IV.2
Running With Scizzors - Perspective IX: The Little Things IV
Henry Miler II - Perspective VIII : The Little Things III.1
Henry Miller - Perspective VII: The Little Things III
Big Brother - Perspective VI: The Little Things II
This Carnival of Life! - Perspective V
The Art Walk - Perspective IV: The Little Things
Bentley #5 - Perspective III.2
Bentley vs. Vespa - Perspective III.1
Bentleys Invade Vietnam - Perspective III
Death Of A Colleague - Perspective II
Perspective