Image Credit: Getty Images, Sigfrid López/Flickr
Three similar comments at recent talks gave us something to think about on the subject of advertising and its future. Speakers from Mozilla, Anomaly, and Thrillist all have discussed the same notion: that they don’t spend money on advertising.
At the Influx Curated event in San Francisco recently, Paul Kim who runs Mozilla’s marketing, talked about how the tech company turned to the community to help get the word out about their products and organizing ‘download drives’ on certain days.
At the PSFK Conference NYC 09 Carl Johnson of Anomaly talked about the IP projects his agency develop. He told the audience they don’t spend a penny on advertising the companies they create and that they develop the brands by making deals with retailers and other partners that are mutually beneficial.
And at the Good Ideas Salon in New York in June during Internet Week, Ben Lerer of the Thrillist email newsletters described how he and his co-founder were told by his investors that they were not to spend a single penny on marketing and therefore resorted to more guerrilla activities to grow the subscriber database.
It’s interesting to hear stories like this about how emerging companies are still actively engaged in marketing but they’re avoiding advertising cost. Instead they are looking for innovative ways to collaborate with partners and the the community.
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There are still costs associated with guerrilla marketing activities. The benefit of spending money on building communities are the long term relationships and reduced costs.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Interesting thoughts.
I’m a big fan of Anomaly, I like the people I meet from there and also respect their work.
As far as I’m aware, they do make money from traditional advertising – for example their Umbro projects. By making statements such as, ” they don’t spend a penny on advertising the companies they create” aren’t they shooting themselves in the foot a little?
If I was a client, my first question would be, “then why should we spend money on advertising with you?”
As a side note, I always smile when I see Guerrilla companies advertise in trade press. Can’t be very good guerrilla marketers can they? I’m thinking of SVA advertising their Guerrilla marketing module on the subways by way of example :)
July 30th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Anomaly are certainly worth watching. Though it’s also worth noting that everyone featured on their website spent time in leadership positions in leading advertising agencies, and that they make a point of celebrating that in their bios. Good for them (and the rest of us) for shaking up the conversation. It will be interesting to see whether apples actually can fall from trees.
July 30th, 2009 at 11:37 am
@floyd re: anomaly – they are actually showing a way forward that uses creativity more broadly than is normally applied. the reason so many ad agencies are becoming increasingly irrelevant is they only play in their ad sized sandbox and can be poor collaborators with other agencies or other disciplines. i think the point of anomaly’s quote is to say, “we’re not assuming advertising is the answer, and we can help you figure out a multiple of business and brand building methods”
anyway, the big secret the advertising world has yet to realize is that it’s not about making ads but rather creating meaningful and lasting connections with people in broader culture. and that many of the ways of doing this aren’t native to madison avenue.
July 30th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I couldn’t agree more with you Conn.
It amazes me how the BDA’s have so much trouble thinking outside of their tv boxes and simply don’t “get it” and are extremely “fascist” in their approach to comms.
Not all of them, I’m fortunate to work with some fantastic teams at the big agencies (I’m looking at BBH here amongst others).
July 30th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Definitely a train of thought worth coming back to periodically. I used to work with a web startup, centsports.com, before taking a job at an interactive agency. Centsports never spent money on advertising or marketing while I was there and its traffic grew to be quite substantial before I left.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
if traditional advertising is dead, what’s all that crap in Times Square?
July 30th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
@ Baby-son, that is marketing directors and CDs having a big wank over their egos.
July 30th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Advertising is proving less and less effective when trying to reach increasingly fragmented markets. I term this style of marketing unidirectional, in that it originates from the brand and attempts to disrupt potential consumers in their day to day activities. Marketing through collaborative networks is what i term omnidirectional and instead of attempting to disrupt consumers is an act of influence between consumers where the transactional message is a based on a number of motivators, sharing, collaboration, reputation etc. But the interesting idea is that it isn’t an act of direct disruption, it’s done because typically it benefits both parties in some degree. This is a radical transformation of how a brand can communicate, by using the power of the network to communicate the brand message instead of random and fragmented attempts to do the same via traditional unidirectional means. Twitter me at @BrandDynamics for more insights
July 31st, 2009 at 2:00 am