Not to be all Manichaean about it, but you can bet your bottom diphthong that's where I'm going. Manichaeanism was, about 1800 years ago a popular religion that saw in the world a battle of two forces. Light, good, kindness versus darkness, bad and evil.
Obviously, for the purposes of a dopey blog on advertising, I've simplified things quite a bit. Suffice to say the world of Manichaeanism is a binary world. A world without gradations. A world much like the political one amerika is living through now. And has been for a while.
You're either upstanding or you ate Buttons, the cat.
Way back in the early 60s, reactionary republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater said, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” It seems that 60 years later Goldwater's thinking prevails, not that of the candidate who defeated him 6.5 votes to 3.5. Lyndon Johnson.
There's a galloping trend of Manichaeanism in the ad business as well.
Here are three or four instances:
1.
Doing ads designed to win awards vs. Doing good ads for real clients and hoping they win awards.
2.
Crafting a personal brand vs. Being good and earning your reputation.
3.
Proclaiming that being kind/equitable/fair/transparent are part of your 'core values' vs. actually being/ kind/ equitable/ fair/
transparent.
4.
Announcing you're a 'best place to work' vs. being a good place to work.
To my eyes, most of the dark side derives from trying to be acclaimed without actually doing anything worthy of praise. And too often, in too many ways, practiced by too many people Manichaeanism seems to prevail.
Ergo, short cuts and expedience win out over hard-work and diligence.
There are no short cuts to building a proper brand. Any short cut you take for expedience's sake will eventually bite you in the ass. If you don't do the hard-work of watering the rose, the bloom will eventually be off the rose.
Years ago when I worked on a major international business machine account, they had a problem. Because they made so much money selling hardware--in particular mainframes and other servers--they had underinvested in building a "cloud."
By the time they finally did try to sell their cloud services, Amazon, Google and Microsoft had already attained market dominance. I remember one Saturday morning reading an article in the Weekend Wall Street Journal about the trillion dollar cloud market.
My client had less than a two-percent share.
This is after spending billions on advertising promoting their cloud.
If you have less than two-percent share of anything, you should probably fold your tent. I'd bet the reason so many relationships fail is that one party feels they're getting less than two-percent share of the other party's time. That's why human relationships fail. And agency relationships too.
The two-percent share thing bothered me. It was a failure on the part of the agency to do right by the client.
Even though I had already resigned from helping run that account, after 12 years on it, I was still invested in its success.
I wrote a note to the CEO of North America--a long-time colleague and a friend.
"X," I wrote, "2-percent share. We need to do something before we get fired. We need to show we're leading the business not a vendor to the business.
"We need to sell the capabilities of all of the tentacles of WPP. I can't do that. You can. But what I can do is write a mission. What we're going to do to define the assignment, rally our forces and fix our clients' principle problem."
"What's your idea," X wrote back.
"5-2-10. A five year plan to leverage all the resources of the world's largest communications company so that our client can get to ten-percent marketshare." (I figured ten-percent was the threshold of major player-hood.Z)
X backed off.
That's not what agencies do anymore. Now, we'd make a virtual cloud-nine installation and hand out hairnets and free umbrellas. We'd produce a case-study video and claim we got a billion impressions and show some bottle blonde newsreader gushing over the "cloud journey." "Bob, today news-team seven went inside a cloud!"
I was fired about eight months later, X left about three months after I did.
In fact, over the last five years, the agency has halved itself. That's like McDonald's closing 20,000 restaurants out of the 40,000 they operate. Or the NFL closing the entire AFC. Or a racehorse running on just two legs.
In our Manichaean universe, that's enough to win you Network of the Year.
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