Introducing Plein Air
En Plein Air or “in the open air” was a 19th century rebellion against an artist culture that favored formulaic methods and composition taught by the schools and studios of the time. A young English painter named John Constable led the revolution to disrupt the conventional, instead relying on his imagination and inspiration from the natural world around him. The movement gained momentum with the invention of tubed paints and box easels that gave artists the mobility to capture beauty anywhere in the world.
Thousands of explorers, inventors and artists have since left the safety of confined spaces for the potential of the unknown.
The time has now come for new explorations. The technologies of our day have a great power to disconnect us from each other, but used properly, they can also give us the freedom to find new truths as well.
Just like the artists in the 1800’s, our tools of work have given us a new ability to reconnect with the world in the service of finding more interesting and useful ideas. That is why Plein Air exists.
Something is amiss in the advertising industry.
Adland took the opportunity that social media provided and turned it into a never-ending stream of valueless content. A decade ago we were discussing the promise of social brands and sustainable communities, but the industry has since delivered little more than noise.
New technology has vastly changed how, when, and where we connect with our clients’ audiences. It’s expanded the data we use to make decisions and deepened our knowledge of how real people behave. Yet, most of our media plans remain designed to reach the same broad demographics we used 20 years ago.
While agencies are busy creating ads that are easily ignored, the industry is losing to technology companies and publishers that understand that everything we do is a user experience challenge.
We barely think about real people anymore
Companies like Google and Facebook are built on the understanding that while the advertisers pay them, it is the audiences they’ve built that give them value. The long-term incentive structure is clearly defined. Give people experiences they love, and the money will follow. This is a lesson that agencies have not learned well.
Many agencies tout the value of customer-centricity, but their behavior often doesn’t align with what they say. They obsess over how to please the client and lose sight of the job the client has hired them to do.
The new expectations of modern campaigns have made matters worse. Before, a campaign was only a series of a few spots and maybe a print ad. Now, they require hundreds or even thousands of unique pieces of content.
With so much more to do, agencies leap to the trendy solutions rather than the best ones. Their people stay at their desks. They rely on their gut. They execute lazy ideas, and a lot more of them.
You could point to mounds of customer research from the booming market research industry as evidence of an insatiable customer focus. In reality, these are big, expensive decks that are sometimes interesting to read, but rarely reach the desks of the people who create the ideas. Even when they do, they are typically boiled to a few platitudes that turn real people into the stereotypes we know so well.
The real challenge is bigger than putting the customer at the center of a diagram, it’s weaving their voices throughout the culture of an organization.
Creatives need organizations designed for them
A creative business is a talent business. The new creative class expects more than most agencies offer. The creatives with the most active imaginations and biggest ambitions — whether they work in creative, technology, strategy or media — want working experiences designed for them.
We are finally able to bring the best creative talent in the world together to work on common missions, guided more by their ability to connect with real customers than the need that they easily fit within the structure of a broken system.
The insanity of the current paradigm is that while collecting experiences is infinitely valuable in the process of creating meaningful ideas, most companies still assume that real work can only happen behind a desk. This is nonsense.
The kind of experiences that help brands grow will change over time. But creating an organization that inspires the best talent to work on challenges that matter to them will prosper in the long-term, whatever the end product looks like.
A modern marketing organization
Like the mid-19th century artists who believed painting in the studio held them to the conventions of their time, the disconnection from the reality customers live in only ties the industry to a way of marketing that is dying.
We are in an age of relevance on a massive scale, of ever-growing customer choice, of unfettered access to information. Those who win will not be those who tell generic advertising stories, but those who are better able to deliver customers what they want, when and how they want it.
An organization that can deliver experiences that work in this always-on world needs to be built with empathy at the core. It needs to be insatiably imaginative. It needs to be well-versed in the language of data. It needs curious leaders with diverse skillsets. Most of all, it needs to use every interaction as an opportunity to create real value for people.
We are launching Plein Air to remove the barriers between brands, creatives and customers because we believe that doing so will provide the fundamental fix to a system that has for too long rewarded intrusiveness over the creation of relevant, valuable and shareable experiences.
The foundational principles of Plein Air
1. Start with real experiences with real people.
Create ideas through experiences with the people we’re designing for. Instead of relying on old tools to unveil truths, gain insight through lived experiences and watching real behavior.
2. Create value, not noise.
Understand what an audience wants, and deliver that. Every interaction with a customer is a chance to give them something of value, and not just cram them full of what we want them to know.
3. Create ideas in the context of the whole customer experience.
The best designers consider both the tangible and intangible problems that stifle growth. Always solve for the most important problem.
4. Drive for relevance, not wastefulness.
Every audience should be described by their behavior and interests, not their demographics. Help brands grow sustainably by delivering relevance moment to moment.
5. Hire only the best creatives, and set them free.
An inventive culture is a byproduct of creative thought shared between curious people from diverse backgrounds. Offer freedom, autonomy, difficult challenges and clear expectations, but only for the minds that will push the organization further.
6. Measure everything that makes sense to measure.
Without actively encouraging a measurement culture for everyone, our decisions will be far less thoughtful, and more often wrong.
7. Create work that matters
Value meaningful challenges even over profits. If an opportunity makes us financially richer but intellectually destitute, we shouldn’t do it.
