002: Previously on The Future of Advertising
Here's the backstory for the fifth iteration of the curriculum—and why the past 30 years have been so dramatic.
Thanks to all who’ve subscribed! The course begins Monday, January 23. I’ll send out a “Before” post setting up the first class a day or two earlier. Then a “During” post capturing the actual session late Monday evening. And finally, an “After” message on Wednesday, January 25. This will be the rhythm of the newsletter—three posts each week—until the course ends May 8.
I started my advertising career in 1992, just prior to the “corporate dawn” of the Internet, back before everyone had email. In fact, I wrote print ads for one of the telcos promoting this newfangled thing called “email.” I coded an HTML agency website in 1994 because Craigman said I should, then got roped into overseeing the 1.0 version of VW dotcom in 1997.
I feel very fortunate to have straddled two eras, to witness a room filled with computers replace a room filled with mechanical artists. Then to place URLs into print and broadcast content because we desired inter-action with consumers. And now, maybe I can prompt an artificial intelligence to write the rest of these missives.
I wrote a curriculum and taught my first class in 1999. It was called “So You Think You Want My Job,” and was offered by the Boston Ad Fed to ad career-curious people not quite ready to build a portfolio.
Teaching people how advertising worked, and how they might get a career started prior to the Internet was relatively simple: Focus on Ideas. Write a killer headline. Devise a breathtaking visual solution. Script a hilarious moment. What we didn’t focus on at all was the medium. Things like CMYK and even 24fps were elements fretted over by others in the idea-making supply chain.
It’s relatively safe to posit there was zero innovation in advertising mediums from 1940 to 1990, hence the pure focus on ideas. Art Directors, Copywriters, Account People and Marketers rarely had to consider how their ideas technically got from a napkin into a magazine or onto one of the three TV networks. Okay, I’ll give you scratch-n-sniff inserts. And to be abundantly clear I’m not diminishing the craft of graphic design or the challenge of photography or the genius of film editing here. I’m not belittling artistry—of which there was an abundance during the Golden Age of Advertising. Far from it. But…
Our predecessors never had to architect and code the medium their ideas would live within.
I think that’s a pretty huge distinction.
It’s one thing to have an idea, and just know whatever you come up with will live within an 8 inch x 11 inch printed publication using four colors; just like all the other ads in the magazine. Your competitive set all plays by the same constraints. It’s quite another scenario to decide your idea works best coded at a dimension of your choosing, in a color space of your choosing, and a key aspect of your idea is people interact with the idea and that changes how the idea appears next. In this new reality, Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” becomes much more poignant.
In my mind, the future of advertising started around October 27, 1994.
Since that time, idea people working in advertising have experienced a radical, and fast-moving transformation. In less than 30 years the pillars of an industry have been utterly replaced, from (thousands of) print media to (literally just two) digital empires. From the relative simplicity and certainty you could run your ad on just one of three networks and reach most of America, to a hot mess of platforms, schedules, formats, pricing, and efficacy reaching ever more tribal and smaller audiences.
And then we’ve been subsumed, very personally, in the rise of social. Can you imagine Bill Bernbach and his Mad Men wrapping their heads around a TikTok ad—where it’s not just the idea you create, but the creator’s role also kind of matters? Never mind responding to comments?
Clearly, microprocessors and software revolutionized almost everything humans engage in. But the sheer magnitude and pace of change within advertising is pretty amazing. And it’s had a huge impact on every facet of the industry, from business intelligence to audience insights to ideation and production, never mind measurement and results.
I think it helps to recognize the shift, to understand this context. No less because a decent portion of today’s business leaders earned their bones before the Internet arrived. They remember a different set of rules.
And yes, the centrality and reductive necessity of ideas still prevails.
So that’s the broader context my Future of Advertising course lives within.
It all started in 2007
At the time, I was exiting an Executive Creative Director role at Carmichael Lynch to co-found Hello Viking, an agency predicated on code and conversation. I made a shift from a decades-old shop who’s reputation was firmly cemented in iconic print ads to an undefined, virtual business, who’s output was bits not atoms.
And I agreed to spin up a curriculum at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design focused on the future of advertising—everything that wasn’t print, TV, radio. We wanted to offer a smorgasbord, more or less, of all the new things including new ways of thinking about audience, targeting, content, and production.
In prepping the very first class, I wrote:
“No wonder the industry seems to be in such positive, mutating turmoil. I wonder if my class will appreciate how amazing, even daunting, advertising has gotten in such a short period of time? But I don't have to wonder why so many marketers and advertising veterans continue to flinch at all these tectonic shifts.”
Those first 15 sessions 15 years ago began with strategy and the primacy of ideas, moved through now quaint topics like blogging, widgets, Flash banner ads, all things “viral,” and ended with students presenting campaign ideas integrating all of the above. Probably the best aspect of teaching all these years has been the generosity of guest speakers who came in to illuminate everything. (Pro Tip: If you want to teach something as diverse and obscure as “the future,” get much smarter people than yourself to come talk.)
Structurally, the course in 2023 remains the same:
Understand context and strategy
Dive deep into all the new
Make great work
It’s going to be a lot of fun. And if you subscribe, you can ride along for all the insights.