Faris Yakob, chief technology strategist at McCann Erickson in New York just dethroned the King.
I’m thinking it must take an agitated Englishman to do that…
As the economics of cultural production continue to be radically decentralised, as more ‘consumers’ become ‘producers’ of content, content monetisation comes under the renewed threat of free. It’s economically very difficult to compete with people who don’t do things for the money. Among the media of the masses, content isn’t king, it’s a republic.
Yakob goes on to say in his Contagious Magazine piece that the term “branded content” is used distinguish the things people want to spend time with versus those they don’t. He then questions why we don’t simply reimagine what we want advertising to be. Yakob’s premise is that we can put content, or entertainment, as the case may be, inside the ads we make.
I agree.
What a load of hogwash. He’s at Mccann? Some visionary. Over intellectualizing persuasive selling, making believe it’s something it’s not (entertainment) is how we got in our current mess. No more blowhards we need copywriters and art directors.
So much judgement in so small a space. Impressive.
First, one’s place of employment doesn’t define a person. Would you like Faris better if he worked at Naked? Because that’s where he was before McCann. I credit him and McCann for believing in one another.
Now for the fun part…”Over intellectualizing persuasive selling, making believe it’s something it’s not (entertainment) is how we got in our current mess.” Really? I thought we got in this mess because advertising sucks and people hate it.
I do find some common ground in your last point. I want to see the creative people at agencies stretch well beyond their ridiculously comfortable zones and actually make something worth making. In the end, no one, me included, will care if it’s called “advertising,” “advertainment,” “branded content” or any of the other labels we’re sticking on things these days. We’ll care if it’s good.