Change The World panel at the PSFK Conference London

In this 50 minute video from the PSFK Conference London, Piers Fawkes (PSFK) chairs a pane with Russell Davies (OIA), George Parker (Madscam), Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture) and Johnny Vulkan (Anomaly). What is the future role of the marketing industry? Should we be making a difference or just more noise?

• “If you apply creativity to business it’s amazing what you can achieve” - eg: Hugh MacLeod
• At Anomaly only 1 client pays a conventional fee. Everything else remuneration is based on success… creates a good dynamic - sense of partnership, less likely to splurge…
• “We don’t need large organisations anymore - but they’re not going to suddenly disappear”
• “Internet has made everything transparent… the only protection you really have is to be genuine and not be a dick”
• Brand is becoming a dirty word… It’s a thin veneer pasted over a product… In this era of transparency brand is something that gets earned, it’s not something that marketers build

Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture):

• “Traditional buy-sell model is changing… What’s happening now is that demand is first and supply has to adapt to meet demand”… Applies to ad agencies too - we don’t make sausages or cars but we do “make desire”… Future will be about collaboration. Web 2.0 is showing it’s happening for consumers, but it’s not happening in business yet.
• “Whole world operates on three flows of information - news, WOM and marketing”.. problem is marketing people aren’t taking responsibility for what we do/advise… we don’t price the externalities in.
• Demand is exploding in the developing workd and there’s not enough resources to go round. Next 10-15 years there’ll be food/water/commodity shortages so we need to figure out a way to consume less

George Parker (Madscam):

• Big Dumb Agencies (BDA’s) all belong to publicly traded companies. They have to report their numbers every 3 months or else get hurt by markets, thus they can’t afford to operate like Anomaly (remuneration based on success) as that’s not as reliably predictable in terms of growth.
• Not all old agencies are bad though… eg: Goody Silverstein are 22 years old but have changed with the times
• “After the next nuclear holocaust there’ll be cockroaches and ad people” (!!)

Russell Davies (OIA):

• “90% of agencies were always crap. It’s not like something’s been changed by the arrival of the Internet”
• “Agencies are like car dealers, they got really rich in the 80’s and don’t know what to do next”
• “Marketing is a failed science… Marketing used to provide the thought leadership in commerce for businesses, but now they’re looking to designers & technologists as they’re smarter/more open…”
• If I was in business I’d be thinking of advertising agencies “You have some elegant 2.0 theories, so please just go do something”
• “Everyone assumes everything is a subset of a marketing problem, and we’;ll fix the world by fixing marketing. That just isn’t true”… There are things we can do, but shouldn’t kid ourselves
• “There’s a generation of people brought up in Planning who are just fed up of only thinking…”
• A lot of old models are based on concept that “someone else has ideas and then you present it to each other for a year”… based on old system where you needed to make it last a year because you got paid based on time taken.
• “If you never said the word ‘brand’ again and said only product, company, reputation, things would get a lot clearer”. Referred to a South American blog AdStructure(?) on which a key guy from old school of advertising admitted that 40 years of brand/marketing theory just doesn’t work.