Ways to make money

Neat article Andrew, but I should say that for businesses looking to entrust their image to a communications agency, the reality is far from that of Don Draper. Creative Directors today do come up with and 'pass' good ideas in their groups, but these ideas are then put to focus groups and researched and run through 'algorithms' and 'methodologies' which nobody but the engineers and experts understand (I would refer you to 'Andrea' the program which supposedly gauges the effectiveness of a new idea based on a patented formula which is illegal for anybody to discuss outside the company, mentioned in Luke Sullivan's Hey Whipple). For the Oracle position, we've merely fired the person and hired a computer. The result has actually been worse, because so-called rigor in subjecting creative ideas to surveys and focus groups and computer programs produces a chilling effect, i.e. innovation is so based on out-of-box thinking that any attempt to frame 'what works' will be arbitrary, and once you quash enough great ideas on arbitrary grounds, even the most creative wells dry up.

Apple wouldn't be here without Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs wouldn't be here were it not for his relationship with his advertisers, with Lee Clow at TBWA Chiat Day specifically. And this is a relationship of trust, Jobs knows that Clow knows what they're doing, that agencies employ better idea-testing methodologies than clients and that communicating to the consumer IS THERE JOB. They respect one another enough not to feed the others' work into a machine or a panel of lay-persons pulled off the street.

I understand firms worry not only about the agency they hire but the quality of their ideas, that it's hard to trust someone who has only toured your factory without having sweat or bled or eaten there, who isn't a part of the clients' culture. But an outside opinion from a human genius of great insight is worth a thousand supercomputers any day. Who do you want on your side, Leonardo da Vinci or one of his machines?

I'm not saying as clients and seekers of innovation you should kow tow to everything Don Draper says, what I'm saying is there needs to be a dialogue, and it has to be one based on human experience. Saying 'MIT rejects the proposals to improve our company because the algorithm came back negative' is much harder to bear than 'we reject the proposals because our experience leans toward this push failing'. Recently I read an article on a top creative agency getting involved in product design and working with clients to create products which are DESIGNED for the marketplace, so that production and communication are integrated into one package.

The link is here http://creativity-online.com/?action=news:artic...

How does the CEO of this agency ask to be judged on their success? Profits for your company, which is to say by the people who actually buy your product, as opposed to being judged by the people who you're paying to judge them. This, I believe is the real future of business, it's to use research to help generate revolutionary ideas, not analyze or break them down. Analysis is only useful before and after a great business idea, for everything else there's straight human discussion.

Online ads with some tracking helps, but it’s still not possible to entirely know whether the ad campaign reach the audience.

First grateful because I'm glad the world of advertising and marketing is continuing to evolve in a way that's relevant to ME. It's all about ME so yay! Now an Uber Calculator will decide what kinds of messages will be sent my way and I will no longer have to fuss over midget cowboys eating tiny little hamburgers. Things will be engineered to my exact demographic (which is easy! I'm a 27-year-old, conservatively-liberal lesbian who grew up all over the world as an Army brat in a Christian household who now lives in San Francisco but only because of the beautiful landscape and the availability of both Tibentan cuisine and buffalo wings) and this will save me a great deal of time in deciding what toilet paper I am going to purchase.

Depressed in that at some point it seems there will be such nuanced and niched messaging sent my way that I will never be marketed to by anything other than algorithms' precise decisions about how I am supposedly going to respond. My response will be engineered in a cart-before-horse-kind-of way and I won't have any other option(s). Also, I will no longer be able to complain about how midget cowboys eating tiny burgers are getting on my nerves. (Just like something is now missing in my dad's life as he can no longer complain about telemarketers at dinner. I know he was able to use those annoying calls as an excuse to be cranky. Now he's forced to stare inward at his own life.) And while I appreciate the higher level of human talent taking place despite its use for marketing and advertising…it's being used for marketing and advertising. Neat, but just a teensy bit sad.

As for the oracle question, my $.02 is that the curtain is being pulled off the wizards simply due to the ability of more people to understand the pulse of society due to the social Web.