Look out! The geek in the mail room just took over your Ad Agency.
Last week I went to a top ad agency to bid on a application project they needed to create for a large consumer client. The meeting was 3 hours long with three top executives. Ad guys (and gals) who wanted to make the proposed project as viral and interactive as possible. I found myself talking about new media for half the meeting since they wanted to learn as much as possible about it. Perhaps more than I had expected since I was there to talk about my presentation. They seemed thrilled. When I left the meeting I was completely drained. Felt beat up! What the heck just happened??
The next day I found out they went with someone else who in fact had proposed 4 times more for the same project? I'm sure you would assume -- and rightly so -- that they went with a large company or something. In fact, they went with a freelance guy like myself who also works in Los Angeles, does the same work quality, but just charged four times more more for the same project. Did his price tag make them trust him more? I was.... ecstatic.
Loosing out on a bid can happen, but that's not what made me surprisingly glad.
It dawned on me that the multi-billion dollar ad world...that swaggering world of luxury offices, overpaid marketing guru's and endless posturing... was coming down. Yes, just like the travel business, the music business, the banking business...basically anything the web can reconfigure. The three hour meeting I had was not about my bid at all, it was them trying to understand what the hell hit their industry!
During the meeting I remember being asked tons of new media questions. I found myself having to explain some of its features more in detail than normal since it was in relation to the product I was bidding on. I could hear myself thinking " Birdie you are such a geek..you're tech-talking yourself out of this bid!". The truth was that the agency was out of touch. The industry changed over night and they were scrambling to figure it out. Dare I say the ad world is starting to have a very tough time justifying its million Dollar invoices to clients.
So with search engine optimization, social media, aps, creative-suite5, cloud computing and a plithera of other ad marketing tools, the playing field for the ad industry has become open game to a new bread of brand engineers. Perhaps they best check the basement, since the mail room guy may know infintely more about new media than the gang upstairs.