Boiling the Leno Thing Down

Every once in a while, you see a picture that takes a news story and basically explains it better than any interview or analysis can.  As my friend John Shomaker said as a preface to his email,

"Money chart. Ridiculous discounts to other shows. Did you ever see it - horrible. Not funny at all, and yet Leno thought it was a different format. Same show, just earlier, but with horrible writers."

I guess that about covers it for Jay Leno.  Sorry man.  You're just not that funny.

Sterling Cooper What Happened to You?

As a shameless tag along to last night's Mad Men premiere, I want to develop a hypothesis that I've been kicking around about how agencies, companies, and other elements of the marketing value chain have evolved since 1963.

Back in the 1960s, I've heard from some reputable sources, agencies were much more "do it all marketing companies." The distinctions we make today between a digital agency, an old line agency, an experiential marketing agency, and a marketing strategy firm would be foreign and meaningless back then, because agencies, in many cases, handled all elements of a client's customer facing presence. This was marketing in it purest form. The agency handled research, ideas, creation of message, art, and getting it out to the market. In many cases, agency folks would do things they had no idea how to do, but succeeded anyway. From what I've heard, it was (even removing all the booze, womanizing, and other crap,) a much more exciting time.

I work in a marketing consultancy. We do things that agencies would have done in the 1960s without knowing they were doing them. Did they do those things as well as a specialist would do today? Probably not--but I'm also willing to bet that marketing has lost something to over-specialization and fragmentation. Having all of the people thinking about a brand under one roof has huge benefits. Network effects drove huge creative outbursts and incredible innovation in marketing in the 1960s and 1970s. This is similar to a Google today, at least what I imagine Google to be. You have a company trying to do a whole bunch of cool stuff; specialization has not yet occurred, and innovation happens.

Much more of marketing has been brought in house by companies trying to save money. A lot of this was definitely good, but I think it can also be stagnating. Having people working on your customer facing presence who were working on, say, London Fog last year has benefits. I'm not saying that companies should look to "re outsource" the marketing function, but it's an interesting idea. H1: A company that came along today looking to trade on network effects of multiple creatives handling all elements of a company's customer facing presence... from sales to TV to database to you name it... and really executed on it (and not just said it) might actually be able to make some serious hay.

This is why it would be tough to make a Mad Men today about a company in the "marketing business". If you were going to make a show that good about a company today, it would probably take place at Google. Actually, let's try "company shows" most emblematic of their decade:

• 1960s: Mad Men (Advertising)
• 1980s: L.A. Law (Legal)
• 1990s: Office Space (IT.. ok, it's a movie, but give me a better one)
• 2000s: Project Runway (Fashion)

Seems like a Google show needs to get made.

P.S. As far as Mad Men last night, while initially underwhelmed, I've been thinking about the episode all morning, which probably means it was actually really good. I didn't like the birth flashback at first, but I now think it was really clever. I loved the London Fog sales call, and I guess the thing that struck me there was that Don was essentially out of ideas and looked pretty impotent. The Sal scene with the bellhop was so awkward but great... and finally Pete's behavior as the junior executive we love to hate reached new levels. Lots of great aesthetic pieces too--the Japanese porn, the Stolichnaya as a cuban cigar equivalent, the use of raincoats as metaphor for (staying in the closet; hiding from the past)... By the way I'm headed to Baltimore tonight. Should I be worried?

What if Don Draper was a B2B Marketer?

I was watching the Mad Men season finale last night on my DVR, thinking how ironic it was that I was (1) watching a show about advertising and (2) watching said show on a DVR. A show about advertising. Or for another example, if you like, a show about a show... actually a show about a show in the context of a real company (30 Rock). Have we reached the postmodern singularity event where all media implodes on itself in a giant self-aware fusion reaction? Or how about this. I was watching a show about advertising on a DVR instead of watching an historic 30 minute address by Obama. And in the show, the background plot line was Kennedy's addresses to the country on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I see all this as a good thing for advertisers, and here's why. I am watching something. I am engaged in something in a way that I wasn't ten years ago. Ten years ago, television had reached its nadir. It was clear that post-Seinfeld, there wasn't anything not on HBO that truly captured the zeitgeist out there. But now, we have all kinds of zeitgeist forming going on all over the spectrum. SNL has managed to massively elevate its profile courtesy of Tina Feylin. John Stewart of The Daily Show continues to function as the zeitgeist puppet master. Mad Men has somehow broken into the mainstream from AMC. Quality--at least for a few shows--is way, way up.

What's down is distribution. The switch to digital signals this fall is symbolic for most, but it does mark an important turning point. Video in all its forms will become one massive feed. Accessed through Apple TV, DVRs, "live", via Browser, or via handset, it doesn't really matter anymore. The content creation is being decoupled from the distribution--and thank God!

I guess this is really the democratization of content. The doomsayers who think that we'll see the death of (the novel; the TV show; the sitcom; the drama; etc. etc.) are clearly spectacularly wrong. We are actually seeing quality improve because monetization potential is and will be going way up. Why has Mad Men been able to spend $2.5 M / show on AMC? Because they can now distribute on Apple TV / ITunes. Why is GE investing so much in SNL? Because they are getting huge pageviews on the NBC domain for SNL skits (bite sized, perfect for office viewing).

My possibly naiive hope is that we'll get smarter and better entertained over the next ten years, and that marketers will thrive. As we have access to everything we want, we'll be more and more targetable. Just as email marketers crave the "opt in", video marketers crave the audience that cares. There are monetization technicalities--such as the fact that there's no advertising in Apple's model--but I believe that this will work itself out through the free market. Not sure exactly how yet.

So what if Don Draper were a B2B marketer? I think he'd quit his agency and become a consumer focused Digital marketer. So I guess my post title was misleading. Sorry.