How finding innovation’s home is critical to advertising success
There has been a lot of discussion recently, including here on The Drum, about what the place of innovation is within the world of advertising.
What likely started as an opportunity to expand the number of revenue streams in agencies is slowly proving to be a failed experiment. Ogilvy Labs is only the most recent example of a group of good and smart people in the world of advertising shuttering their experiment with innovation. But why? There are a few reasons, but they all have to do with context.
Marketing innovation vs. product and service innovation
Innovation that happens within advertising agencies is (usually) innovation around the ways that brands can get their message out in the world. This is not an attempt to downplay the role of advertising. It’s important for any company to innovate its product, and in the case of advertising agencies, that’s their ads. How you deliver those ads needs to constantly evolve, both in what you say, but also in the varying ways that you deliver that message.
Companies in the advertising industry are not exempt from the need for R&D – especially because of the recent limitations placed on advertising in the digital space. In fact, it’s likely more important for companies saddled with creating surprise to be living on the cutting edge.
The late management guru, Peter Drucker, said there are two disciplines in every company: marketing and R&D. For as much as advertising agencies spend on marketing themselves out in the world – someone please calculate the hours spent on the creation of award show submissions – they should be willing to view a group like Ogilvy Labs outside the confines of a traditional P&L. Ogilvy Labs should have been held responsible for creating value, but the real question is whether an innovation group within an agency should be held responsible for its own revenue stream.
The audience issue
The problem is that the places where these groups are being asked to grow their work from is traditional innovation groups within their clients’ companies. But marketers come to agencies for ads, not for innovation. You wouldn’t go to your baker for questions about a rib-eye. Why then would you go to an advertiser for questions of innovation? Creativity is not a universal writ of credibility to solve all problems.
We feel comfortable saying this because many strategists at Sylvain Labs are 'advertising refugees'. While solving problems further up the product lifecycle (ie opportunity development, consumer insight, product concepting, user experience, etc) requires similar strategic muscles as that in advertising, it’s not the same. The clients you work with come from different backgrounds. They are focused on different issues. The language they speak is different. The tools used to solve these problems are different. Advertising talent, working in an advertising agency surrounded by other advertising talent being asked to work on product development is probably not the best environment for success. You don’t truly learn a new language living among speakers of your native tongue. Certainly not fluently.
Respect for what companies mean by innovation
Some of the issue, we think, boils down to simple semantics. There are some agencies out there that have done innovation in the ways that clients think about innovation – the development of new products and services, the evolution of business models, or the incremental evolution of products or brands. While there are some successful examples of innovation at agencies (VBP Orange for example), we question whether most agencies are speaking the same language as the people who actually buy innovation.
It is more than simply assembling a team of smart people and asking them to make something new. Innovation really is the merger of science and whimsy. It is creativity and it is strategy, yes, but most importantly it’s imagination applied to other people’s business challenges. When approaching innovation as an advertising agency solving problems, you’re starting out equipped solely with advertising tools. The danger is trying to use square tools for a round problem.
The advertising industry has to ask itself if getting into innovation is just about making more money. If so, then it can make better, more innovative, and effective advertising. However, when the advertising industry says it wants to do innovation, it needs to start from a place of respecting the problem it’s trying to solve. Advertising can be more innovative, but Innovation (with a capital ‘I’) isn’t advertising.
Alain Sylvain is the chief executive of Sylvain Labs