interested in innovation and creativity

Why The Agency.com Youtube Subway Pitch Ruled

Posted: August 3rd, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Marketing | 12 Comments »

Steve Rubel thinks its lame and in fact accuses Agency.com of holding the subway brand hostage, Steve Hall says don’t do it and especially don’t say “dude”, Bjoern at Site-9 calls it part of the cluelesstrain and readers here are split down the middle, as are some other bloggers, like Scott at Experience Planner and even podcaster jumped into the fray at PostBubble.com.

Holding a brand hostage? Seriously the subway brand has got way more problems than the Agency pitch, Jared for one, and the sandwiches second. I actually think Coudal should get the job because they demonstrated some brand insight when they choked on the subway sandwich and said “man, this sucks”. Anyway, I think what Agency.com did was a very smart move. The online advertising environment is changing, and the web is still stuck on banners, intersticials and flash orgies that are more appealing to marketers than actual customers. In many ways I think your opinion on the Agency.com bit will have much to do with how you see the health of interactive agencies businesses. If you think interactive agencies are on the totally wrong track, then you probably think the pitch was overall a good idea, if you think interactive agencies have a good thing going and can keep doing what they’re doing then you probably think the pitch was a terrible idea. Let me ask you, where did flickr, youtube, yelp, myspace etc all come from? Big agencies?

Let me give you some insight why i think this is a big win, no matter what the fall out. In a world where agencies shit their pants at the idea of failure they tend to be more conservative than the companies that hire them. They cave to clients cost constraints, and totally skip the important “creative” bit at the beginning and then waste a tonne of money on the execution. That being the case Agency.com just did an experiment in the “fuzzy front end”, no money on the line, no deadline, just some ideas and some playtime.

Todays marketing and advertising environment is totally turned on its head, and now is the time for experimentation and prototyping, and measureing what happens. To succeed every agency needs to have about half a dozen cheap, experimental projects like that running all the time, and many need to fail, and fail fast. If you are not experimenting with social media then you are an observer and you will get fucked if your business is to understand it better.

Now i’m sure they do just have a couple of execs to deal with on a deal level, but what is the impact on the franchise system? It is one of the biggest franchises in the US so they have an awful lot of stakeholders, I wonder if a viral pitch is a way to gain recognition by an incredibly wide audience? If the two execs hated it but 20,000 franchise owners were all a “buzz” with it, would it sway opinion? A subversive pitch?

But is it viral? I agree you can’t create something and dub it viral, in face agency.com previously fell at the first post with their non-viral “don’t read” campaign for Audible.com, (BTW we need a catchy name for things that aren’t viral, benign advertising? inoculated campaigns?). Anyway, it is viral, it’s viral because people are talking about, sending it around, and watching it 20,000 views since july 31st, that’s 10,000 yesterday since I posted. Agency has even started it’s own blog about the phenomonom, it’s called WhenWeRollWeRollBig hat tip Logic & Emotion

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You’ve seen the movie, now buy the tshirt

  • Rodrigo

    Agencies are doing what clients ask. We all know that clients, with few exceptions, impose such tight brand, time, financial or risk-taking constraints that innovation is choked.

    I wouldn’t blame the agencies for the state of affairs; neither the clients. There are defensible, pragmatic reasons why neither party will suddently push the envelope far out.

    So, absolutely, trying to do something with YouTube (or Flickr, et al) is a good idea. Doing that as an agency is a great idea for its people to understand the mechanics of it all.

    What I’m cricising is the content, the value, of the agency.com video.

    I think Chicken Little was shite and that The Strokes suck. I am criticising this “output” not the entire movie or music industry.

    The agency.com video, IMHO is a terrible piece of client-facing material. I would not have released it. It doesn’t meet any of the client communication goals that I hold dear.

  • http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com Paul McEnany

    Karl – I think that was the sound of the nail getting hit on the head.

  • karl long

    Thanks Paul, I think, unless you’re agree with Rodrigo :-)

    Rodrigo, I totally see your point, but I actually do blame agencies for not pushing clients. It is an agencies responsibility to push the creative envelope, that is what they should be paid for. IMHO that’s why boutiques keep pushing the envelope, as i think conservatism, lack luster creativity, and safe solutions come with scale and success. It is touch to criticize an entire industry, because there is obviously tonnes of great work getting done, along with the mediocre, but what I will say is that advertising and marketing industry is at a crossroads where imagination, creativity and engagement is down one road, and safe, mundane, unimaginative is down the other.

    Ford Bold Moves failed in this arena, and yet their movies were polished, they met the “client communication” goals i’m sure, but they lacked the surprise that makes something remarkable, or viral.

    The coke show quietly failed, not through lack of execution, it was beautifully crafted, but it did not spark any participation (it launched with 14 videos and now has 10). If anything it was too polished, too well designed, but it failed to engage the imagination of potential participants who were all on youtube and not at coke.com

    The problem for many agencies is they make there money on the execution, not the idea, and clients are used to paying for execution and not for ideas. This is an enormous culture shift for agencies, because in social media the execution is pretty cheap, it’s the ideas that matter.

  • http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ David

    “The coke show quietly failed, not through lack of execution, it was
    beautifully crafted, but it did not spark any participation (it
    launched with 14 videos and now has 10). If anything it was too
    polished, too well designed, but it failed to engage the imagination”

    Karl, I know where you are going with this—but when I talk about execution, it doesn’t always mean “polished”

    Why couldn’t acom produce something that was more raw? Why did it have to feel like acting? C’mon. This isn’t about sqeulching risktaking or creativity or innovation.

    And here’s the deal. Clients only let you push them when they feel like they can TRUST you. When you put their interests first. Then they hand over the keys.

    If we have to talk about imagination, the acom video didn’t leave any room for it. In my opinion.

    This could end up being a good thing for them. Time will tell. But I still think the video and the entire effort could have been a much more compelling experience. If there is a winner here it might be use because we get to have some great conversations around this.

  • karl long

    Well David, I actually think we are in agreement that their execution was questionable, and when it comes to interpreting the video that really is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe I think they deserve more leeway because they are doing something new, with very little experience, and very little in the way of external guidance. I don’t think anyone has nailed “agency viral” or “social media marketing”, so experimenting and measurement is all we have.

    I hope there are plenty more videos like this for us to throw tomatoes at and applaud. I hope that over the next few years we see the emergence of some super creative, fun, “social media agencies”.

    And your right, the conversation around this is very interesting.

    Cheers,

    Karl

  • http://www.scottweisbrod.com Scott Weisbrod

    Check out what Agency has created.

  • karl long

    Thanks Scott, I had come across that earlier, very interesting. It kind of implys that this is what they planned all along :-) I’m on the fence as to whether they are that clever :-)

    Actually, i’m sure they are not that clever:
    Domain Name: WHENWEROLLWEROLLBIG.COM
    Administrative Contact , Technical Contact :
    AGENCY.COM
    hostmaster@agency.com
    488 Madison Avenue
    New York, NY 10022
    US
    Phone: 212 358 2600

    Record expires on 02-Aug-2008
    Record created on 02-Aug-2006

  • http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2006/08/04/agentur-pitcht-sich-selbst-ueber-youtube/ Basic Thinking Blog » Agentur pitcht sich selbst über YouTube

    [...] Egal, was die Experten und Praktiker sagen, Hauptsache es polarisiert. Und genau da habe ich den leisen Verdacht, dass Agency wohl sehr bewusst einen polarisierenden Ansatz gewählt hat. Denn wer schaut sich sonst freiwillig ein doofes Pitchvideo an? Niemand. Eben! Zumal so wenig Fingerspitzengefühl, wie das Video einem vorgaukelt, kann man einfach nicht haben :-) Und der Mist funktioniert sogar so gut, dass ein weiterer Konkurrent gar ein Fake-Video gedreht hat. Ja, sakra, auch noch nachgeahmt zu werden ist die Krönung! [...]

  • http://darmano.typepad.com/ David Armano

    “they are doing something new, with very little experience, and very little in the way of external guidance.”

    Karl, Agency.com has been doing pitch videos for years. I still have a few on my harddrive if you want to see them. We did man on the street , etc etc. This is nothing new. The ditribution was new (YOUTube)—but the content was not.

    Can’t we seperate the distribution from the content and judge them individually?

    Idea to film pitch: Yes.
    Idea to make it viral on YouTube: Yes.
    Actual execution of video: No

  • http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com/hee_haw_marketing/2006/08/its_the_links_i.html Hee-Haw Marketing

    It’s the Links I Love, My Friend…

    Social Media: Who’s Hot, Who’s Not – The Viral GardenMack takes a look at the rankings of the top Social Media sites. YouTube continues to kickarse. I hope they keep hanging on, but some other smaller sites have a more…

  • http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/ sean moffitt

    I have yet to see a more balanced set of comments about Agency.com’s initiative – I think your reader’s comments are quite down the line and accurate. Risk-taking idea, clever use of content channel (I’m sure this has me-too-itis written all over it once the dust has settled) but arrogant, shmarmy and lacking brand isnght – absolutely.

    It seems like the comments, positive or negative, are along tribal lines –I looked at the first two pages of Google and it seems like if you had an advertising orientation or a brand hangup, this sucked. If you were in PR, you were split down the line. If you were an online person or social media activist, you thought the idea was strong even though there were good parts of it you would send back to the cutting room floor.

    The question at the end of the day that I’ve been trying to find out is “did they get the account” – it seems quiet on their latest news end of their website…perhaps Subway’s execs came away running scared.

    Thansk for the insight and coverage.

  • http://gaborvida.com/?p=7 gabor vida » Where Viral and Spam Meet

    [...] There has been a lot of chatter about Agency.com’s Subway pitch. Some love it, some hate it, most find it trite and simply moved on. At first, I fell in the trite camp and was well on my way to moving on. Then I took a look at the heated debate raging in the comments on sites like Adrants, Adfreak and blogs such as Experience Curve and The Next Wave. [...]