From a trends perspective I see the continual embracement of better design experiences. In the early 2000s we were seeing technology trump design. Brands were happy enough with giving customers functionality and customers were happy enough to stay loyal to the brands that gave it to them. Consumers don’t choose a bank because it has online banking anymore. They choose a bank that can do online banking better. Look around at all the lack luster sites out there maintained by big brands. There is a global effort going on to clean up these sites. As designers we were hearing a lot of people say “good enough”. Not anymore. Now technology is the price of entry, and the experiences are driving the functionality rather than the other way around. It was like we were building epic movies with state of the art special effects. They were cool, but the plots were lost. Brands are now looking to build better sites that listen to their customers, deliver on their expectations and give them what they are looking for more intuitively. Brands are attempting to know what their customers want before they themselves know what they want. The evolution has mashed technological enablement with creative design experiences built on a foundation of customer insight and brand.

Ok so WPP did not say that, but rather their actions proved it. WPP had a great week by winning a $4.5 billion dollar deal with Dell. A deal of that magnitude is not easy to come by, and certainly not easy to win so I want to congratulate them.

One would assume that the very best minds and top talent at WPP spent countless hours in a conference room somewhere lined with whiteboards, Starbucks paraphernalia, pizza boxes, etc. working their asses off to win this. The product of which was a plan for how to best service the Dell account. No doubt the answer is to put together a multidisciplinary team made up of creative (both traditional and digital), media experts, strategist, analyst. Planners, industry experts, and this is only a partial list – effectively a new agency.

This “think tank” and the horsepower and tools to make their ideas and plans a reality for the Dell client would have to share focus, incentives, and account responsibilities. This makes all kinds of sense to me, and obviously so did Dell.

Why create a “new agency”? The irony here (if you have not picked up on it yet), is that this whole thing flies in the face of the promise of what the holding company model was supposed to deliver. These guys have been pushing the “benefits of the network”  - how many times did they tell a client the tale that their collection of agencies would work together in concert to support your brand, yet all they got was bickering about who got the revenue, the credit, or the earn out. Funny that now after the dust has settled, and all the double dipping has been exposed the client’s have learned their lesson. The smart winner in all of this was Michael Dell.

I had my first ever glass of Johnny Walker Blue Scotch not long ago. Scotch is my drink of choice and I was excited at the prospect of trying what many have told me was going to be the best scotch I have ever had. And sure enough it was. The whole experience, from the feel of the weight of the glass in my hand to the warm flow of the scotch down my throat to the satisfying burn I felt as it passed into my system were all exactly what I had imagined. It was a great experience. And, it got me thinking. Mind you I only had one so it was definitely not alcohol induced thinking. I wondered whether it actually tasted that good because in fact it is that good or because I expected, and in fact my mind believed it was going to be that good. Of course, the answer is both. I was pre-conditioned toward a positive experience and the product delivered. So yes, the distillers, the packagers, and the distributors all did their job to create a positive experience for me. But of course so did the advertiser who pre-conditioned me for the experience. Advertising heightened my expectations and the product delivered. Exactly as it should be.

Of course this mental rambling got me thinking about brands in general. I thought about chocolate and then instantly of Hershey, I thought about high performance cars and then of BMW. Of family entertainment and then Disney. Of soft drink and then Coke. You get my drift. Think of the power of this. In the famous book “Positioning The Battle for the Mind of the Consumer” Al Reis and Jack Trout talked about the power of occupying space in the consumers mind. Owning a word, a concept, basically a brand. And as my stream of consciousness reminded me, once that brand sits in that space in ones mind it is very difficult to replace. Clearly a combination of factors contribute to my positive association with the brands I mention above, but advertising has to be top of the list. Multiple impressions served over a long period of time with great impact and I was hooked. In fact, I started thinking, all driven by that glass of scotch, that this was exactly why I got into advertising in the first place. To build brands and help clients own the hearts and minds of their consumers.

But then I was struck by the sobering thought (to carry the drinking analogy further) that at present I was not really in the advertising business. I am in the interactive advertising business and today there is a clear difference. Interactive agencies don’t own the brands, or more specifically are not chiefly tasked by brand managers to be the primary voice of the brand in the marketplace. Sure we get to express the brand in a given channel. But its kind of like the difference between leasing and buying. Traditional agencies own the car outright, it sits in the driveway fully paid for. Interactive shops may get to play with the car ,but it’s a short term lease and eventually you need to give it back. Interactive shops are experts. Need a web site built you go to an interactive shop. A banner campaign, we’re your guys. Need analytics work to better understand consumer behavior and our phones ring. Don’t get me wrong it’s great. As technology has advanced our industry has quite literally boomed. The things you can do now to target and then acquire and retain customers is absolutely staggering. In fact our industry is booming for good reason, our brand of advertising is highly effective and highly measureable. We can clearly tell clients that for every dollar paid this is what was returned. It is very satisfying, and I am proud of the work we do. But is it memorable?