John Drake

2017 Advertising Spending Forecast

Reviewing some numbers today and global ad spending rose 5.2% in 2016. Looking ahead, spending is forecast to grow in 2017 but not at the same rate as last year. WARC anticipates a growth rate of 3.6%. (No Olympics or U.S. Presidential election.)

In the U.S., the ad spending growth rate was 5.8% which was the highest rate of growth since 2010. It's always amazing to be reminded that ad spending in the U.S. represents around one third of global ad spending--we spend around $180B advertising to ourselves.

There are no surprises in the breakdown of spending forecasts by medium this year...

Having Programmatic In-House

My definition of programmatic media is advertising that has less waste because it's individually selected for each person.

At the agency, we're big believers that having programmatic capabilities in-house brings notable advantages.

A new post on Drake Cooper, and a nice interview by the folks at Thalamus, expand on why.

How To Think About Ad Blockers

After reading, what felt like, every notable article and post on ad blocking around the release of iOS 9, I put together this piece over on the Drake Cooper blog. 

Ad blocking is something that's worth really getting your head around. And once you do, there are a few sensible ways to think about it.

Talking Programmatic

I enjoy talking about programmatic media. Thanks to the team at Thalamus for the good conversation.

Real Time Outdoor

Here's an artificially intelligent billboard with an algorithm attached. The board evolves over time to show the most effective ads that it can based on people's reactions. Copy, layout, font and image can all be mixed and matched, automatically, in real time. The point is that it gets smarter, choosing less and less solutions until it finds the best mix...

"We are not suggesting a diminished role for creative but we know technology will be playing a greater part in what we do." 

 

There's an important nuance to monitor with this particular approach for creativity. It's one thing to have various executions and then optimize to the highest performing one; that's wonderful. And there's a beauty in taking design elements that prove to work in one area and trying to spread them across others.

 

But this AI creative design approach starts to get close to literal group design without guidance. Incorporating everyone together and then spitting out one idea is a risk. Like what GM did with their initiative to "give the people what they want" and use extensive focus groups to arrive at the design of the quickly-pulled Aztek.

 

Said one company exec back then: "By the time it was done, it came out as this horrible, least-common-denominator vehicle where everyone said, 'How could you put that on the road?'" 

Jay Chiat on Web Ads

Why do you think no one has figured out a way to make traditional ads work on the Web?

"It’s the same problem we originally had with television. We had the new technicians doing it first, you didn’t have the artists. That’s where we are now. We’re just beginning to get the artists. Once they get a hold of it, and grasp it and understand how to use it, it will get better."

-Jay Chiat, 1999

 

Cannes Media Grand Prix

The Red Light App

 

Be Someone Who Sees The Future

Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.

Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.

That's from this Warren Ellis piece.

Netflix In One Third Of Homes

I remember when I received my first Netflix DVD in the mail. To now read that Netflix penetration has reached 36 percent of US TV households points to an organization that has done a phenomenal job remaining consistent with what people want.

Here's the latest report from Nielsen on how we're using TV and content in the home today.

Creativity In Programmatic Media

There was a time in the early 2000s when media planning experienced a renaissance. Spurred largely by Crispin Porter + Bogusky and their phenomenal work for Mini, media choices were suddenly much more creative. A personal favorite was how the Crispin team thought that the staples, which held together a Rolling Stone magazine, could be painted yellow for a Mini to motor around them.

Since then, many brands — often with the help of technology — have pushed the bounds of creative media planning into exciting places, from British Airways’ #lookup to IBM’s “smarter cities.”

It’s this lens of creative thinking that makes programmatic media so damn exciting. There's four ways we push our programmatic media to be creative at DC, which were posted on ProgrammaticAdvertising.org last week.