Please Make it Stop
Discussions About Digital, Advertising, and Digital Advertising
Welcome to the first in a new and no doubt highly irregular series of discussions, debates and ill-informed rants about a topic that is boringly close to my heart… digital, and its ongoing impact on what was, and sometimes still is, known as the advertising industry. First up, a Q+A with one of my favourite tweeters, Ryan Wallman, head of copy at Wellmark. I’ve thought of Ryan as something of a kindred spirit for a while now, united in our burgeoning skepticism toward the grandiosity of the digerati. Enjoy!
Can you tell me a bit about yourself and what you do at Wellmark…
Well, I’m a copywriter, first and foremost. But I originally trained in medicine and worked for several years as a doctor before changing career to become a medical writer. Since my medical degree, I’ve also picked up writing qualifications and a Master of Marketing. So it’s fair to say that I’ve done more formal study than I care to remember.
As for what I do at Wellmark, we’re a communications agency that specialises in healthcare. My primary responsibility is to oversee all the copy we develop, which involves supervising a small team of writers.
My day-to-day work is a mix of creative direction, concept development and copywriting, with a bit of new business development in there too. And I write most of the copy in our own communications, such as our website, direct mailers, social media posts and so on.
Sorry if that was a mind-numbingly boring way to start — I’ll try to make the rest of my responses more interesting.
One of the frequent themes in your posts is that marketers today are too easily led astray by shiny new technologies and platforms. Why do you think this is — and what role are agencies playing in it?
There’s no doubt that many marketers have a fascination with technology and ‘innovation’ (ugh), at the expense of marketing fundamentals.
I think there are several reasons for it.
The first is simply the novelty appeal — a radio campaign is always going to seem a bit lame compared to virtual reality or Snapchat or whatever else is new on the scene.
The second is fear. You only have to think back to the hysteria around Pokemon Go last year to appreciate that (some) marketers are desperate not to be ‘left behind’ by these ephemeral obsessions.
And the third is related to marketers’ roles. Mark Ritson has astutely observed that very senior marketers worry about seeming ‘out of touch’, so they willingly swallow their young colleagues’ hype about new technologies — while mid-career marketers, who might otherwise be voices of reason, are caught in the middle.
As for the role that agencies play in it, they’re undoubtedly part of the problem. When you consider that only 6% of people in advertising agencies are over 50, it’s no surprise that agencies tend to favour newer technologies. What’s more, they have little incentive to question the value of online advertising, so they’re definitely not militating against this preoccupation with newer media.
Related question — are marketers forgetting the fundamentals of brand-building?
At an industry level, yes. At an individual level, I suspect many marketers never knew them in the first place!
There is definitely a trend towards ‘tactification’ (as Mark Ritson describes it), to the point that some marketers seem to genuinely believe that promotion alone — or even a single promotional channel — is synonymous with marketing. That’s a profound misunderstanding.
But it’s hardly surprising, perhaps, given the apparently large proportion of marketers who don’t believe in (and in some cases aggressively decry) the value of formal qualifications.
It feels like there’s a bit of a resistance movement emerging with the likes of yourself, Bob Hoffman, Mark Ritson and others among the first to articulate some skepticism towards the grand promises made by the purveyors of social media marketing and content marketing. What’s your take on the state of the debate around ‘digital’ at the moment?
Well, I wouldn’t say I was among the first, but I’m more than happy to be considered in that company!
I think it’s an artificial and unnecessary debate in many respects. To quote Tom Goodwin, ‘there is not a more meaningless divide and obsession than the notion of digital media’.
But if I have to take a side in the current debate between ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ marketers, I’m firmly with the latter. We may be in a post-truth world, supposedly, but I’m more inclined to believe the scientific rigour of people like Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp than the fanciful claims of the digi-gurus.
As it happens, I’ve just seen a Forbes article listing ‘the top 20 influencers of CMOs’, based on the number of mentions and retweets they receive. You couldn’t make it up.
Bob Hoffman — who we both admire — often says ‘show me a brand that digital has built’ as a way of highlighting the shortcomings of digital advertising. How do you see the future of brand-building and what is the role of ‘digital’ in it?
Admire? I love that man, frankly.
As Bob has so adroitly shown, digital advertising is a murky area to say the least. And I don’t think that display ads, in their current form, have much of a future at all.
That said, it’s inevitable that digital channels will eventually become critical in brand building, given their growing ubiquity in our daily lives. But, again, it’s an artificial divide to consider ‘digital’ separately from the rest, and it’s one that will become increasingly nonsensical. I just shake my head when I see titles like ‘digital copywriter’ or ‘digitally led creative director’ — what the hell do those even mean?
If we were to talk again in a decade what technology or platform do you think will have had the biggest impact on marketing?
Honestly, I don’t think any technology will fundamentally change marketing. As John Caples put it: times change, people don’t.
But naturally the tactical mix will change, and in that respect it’s hard to go past the potential impact of the Facebook/Google duopoly. Their dominance will surely influence marketers’ choices.
And of course everyone is talking about the potential of virtual reality, including people whose judgement I respect. I’m still skeptical, but I really don’t know enough about it to give an informed opinion at this stage.
Wellmark works a lot with healthcare and B2B clients… what kinds of conversations are you having with them about emerging marketing channels?
That’s a really interesting question.
Our pharmaceutical and B2B clients work within tight regulatory constraints, which include strict limitations on what can be shown in the public domain, so they’re understandably wary about newer channels. There have been occasions when we have recommended the use of social media, for example, but it has been considered too much of a risk. I don’t think their caution is necessarily a bad thing, mind you — it’s certainly preferable to jumping into every new channel without thinking.
With our newer healthcare clients, who have more direct contact with consumers, the conversations tend to be quite different. Some of them have been using newer channels for quite a while without much tangible benefit, so we’re talking to them about the relative value of these compared to more ‘traditional’ channels (for want of a better word).
The common theme, however, is that we always talk about channels in the context of a communications strategy. That is, we never take the arse-about, ‘channel first’ approach that seems to be so prevalent in marketing now.
What are the chances of jaded copywriters like us being replaced by robots?
Ah, the million-dollar question!
I asked Drayton Bird about this a while ago, and he felt that robots may well replace copywriters for some forms of short copy (and would probably improve it substantially, given the woeful standard of so much copy that’s out there). But he thought that longer, more complex copy would be much more difficult to automate — and I agree. After all, good copywriting depends on empathy, which isn’t easy for robots to emulate. If chatbots are any indication, I’d say we’re pretty safe for now.
And the other point to remember is that we’re not just word monkeys. As Tom Albrighton articulated so well in his recent post about copywriting being undervalued, our trade involves a whole range of skills beyond putting words on a page. As he says, much of what we do is actually copythinking — based on human understanding and intuition — and it will surely be a while before robots can master that.
