henry chilcott

The new IP

The Ad industry is bursting with brilliant creative and commercially strategic minds. But this brilliance is most often only applied to, or just under, the glossy veneer of businesses when it should be at the centre.

Our industry also suffers from being in relationship, rather than partnership, with our clients. The word 'relationship' covers a multitude of sins whereas partnerships are necessarily built on mutual respect – at their heart are shared agenda and belief underpinned by shared risk and reward. Sadly, the reality of our industry is that partnerships are killed by fees and award ceremonies.

As a result of this partnership scarcity, the creation of brilliant new products and services with brilliant simple ideas at their core will only ever exist at the periphery of today's Ad Agencies. A rare and recent example is McCann Erickson's Widget for UPS, but this is an exception. The bottom line is that IP simply can’t prosper at the periphery; it has to be at the centre. And that's because it's not a new discipline, it's a new mindset. A mindset that must challenge a Client’s expectation of unlimited ideas for monthly fees regardless of whether they are for posters, business changing widgets or the next killer format for ITV.

There are only a few companies that have fully embraced this notion – Anomaly and Erasmus are two that come to mind. But the industry is skeptical, everyone asks the same question - "how can they survive without fees when equity is a long game?" The answer probably lies within a hybrid of the two, but regardless of the exact answer, it is clear that the existing fee based model is in trouble and the only way out is by becoming cleverer with Intellectual Property.

Cleverer doesn’t have to mean building walls – on the contrary, I believe that today’s spirit of collaboration, twinned with increasingly pressured client budgets could lead to the emergence of The New IP – Intellectual Partnerships - joint ventures between Agencies and Clients with absolute shared risk and reward. It's the only way everyone can win, and it might just trigger some of the best new products and services we've seen in years.

Real world virtual, virtual world real

In the real world we're not very tolerant of mediocre ads. In the virtual world of gaming, we love all ads because they make a virtual experience feel more real. In fact, the more mediocre they are, the more real it feels. Weird paradox, we're trying to shift our real world to become more virtual and the virtual world to become more real.

Presumably we'll meet in the middle somewhere.

The entertainment business

If you boil it down, the single most important thing a communication must do is entertain. The word entertain comes from entretenir (entre = between, tenir = to hold) So, to entertain is to hold attention between you and your audience.

If your piece of communication isn't entertaining then it follows that it is a waste of money.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to entertain people:

give them stuff they enjoy

give them stuff that's helpful

This is a simple and let's face it not exactly breakthrough point - but it does render the majority of communications we are hit with every day largely useless. We are in the business of entertainment - something that's all too often forgotten.