21st century advertising.

When I started reading Marc Ruxin's HuffPo piece entitled "The New Creative Department" I was prepared to feel dissatisfied over not having reached yet another moving goal post that defines a next gen advertising agency.


Marc posits that what marketers need in today's media and cultural landscape is "a creative team that can manufacture content in an age where news feeds, social games, Pandora, daily deals, photo sharing, on demand or time-shifted video competes with live television, magazines, movies and radio."


I agree.  And I'm also proud to say that Barrie D'Rozario Murphy is doing this every day for its clients.  When we stand up to give our credentials presentation here's what we show:

• Mobile games to promote United's Travel Options.  (Check them out on iTunes, they've been played nine million times and counting.)
• Station Domination take-over to help Dell connect with hard to reach IT decision makers in D.C.
• Social media campaign for Applied Materials' burgeoning solar division.  (Follow The Sun on Twitter @TweetFromTheSun.)
• iPad app to help Medtronic's customer-facing employees tell the corporate story.
• Street marketing buzz gangs to launch eBikes at Best Buy.
• QR codes for Compellent that imbue static collateral with the sight, sound and motion of customer testimonial films.
• SMS-enabled airport banners to show video demonstrations of United Airlines' new International First and Business Class sleeper seats, as well as a microsite to help road warriors track the roll out.
• Viral film for the Chambers Hotel that won a Gold Lion at Cannes.
• Documentary films to capture the vitality of Del Webb's residents.
• Rich media to allow women to design Chamilia bracelets in the unit itself.
• And, yes, some award-winning TV and print for all our clients.

So what's the moral of the story?  First, I'm proud to partner with Bob Barrie and Stuart D'Rozario and the creative teams they lead; second, it's been my observation that those who write how the our industry needs to change must take more time to observe what successful agencies such as Goodby, Wieden, Crispin, Anomaly, etc. are already doing; finally, let's not call it "creative content" – it's advertising.

Don't discount natural demand.

Yet more evidence that discounts seldom build incremental sales.  Instead, they tend to pull forward demand and reduce profitability.

According to a study out of the University of California, Berkeley, the government's "Cash For Clunkers" incentive increased car and truck sales by 360,000 units.  Sounds great until you read that sales for the next seven months were down by 360,000 units.  That was a $1.4B investment in discounting natural demand  (360k units x $4k/unit).

My purpose here isn't to criticize this specific program.  As economic and social policy, it put more money back into the consumer's wallet and helped remove less fuel-efficient cars from the road.

But this does reinforce what we see time after time in marketing – straight cash incentives (coupons, cash back) tend to discount sales marketers are likely to get anyway.  The best promotions tend to be those designed to change preference and long-term demand – e.g., discounts targeted at competitive customers (register-generated coupons targeting competitive users, online retargeting to reach competitive customers with a trial offer, member-get-a-member referral offers) or incentives to stimulate sales during off-peak periods (fly this summer, get a discount next winter).