There's a simple theory for why the majority of ads / communications in the world aren't very good. It's because we insulate them from the market's essential editor, the public, by taking shelter beneath the cashmere blanket of paid-for 3rd party media. As long as we rely on paying a third party to force our ideas upon the public, we'll exist in a bubble that accepts and perpetuates mediocrity. It's only when you take this blanket away, expose our ideas to the harsh elements of the real world that we truly feel the pressure to produce something brilliant. Because, in the real world, if things aren't brilliant, they tend to wither and die.
This is frightening but it's the same world in which the products and services we promote have to exist.
Paying a 3rd party to host your piece of communication can have many benefits (amplification, reach, targeting etc) but it can also make us lazy. Perhaps we need to spend more time thinking like we don't have a media budget to force us to build things that have true value in the real world. As technology makes editing the stuff we don't like out of our lives easier and easier this could quickly shift from an ideology to a necessity.
The Viral Factory is a communications company that has this thinking in its blood. They create a product that lives in the real world (well technically speaking the virtual-real-world of the internet), a product that, if it doesn't cut it, disappears without trace. Its effectiveness (or otherwise) is there for everyone to see. It has to earn every single eyeball. Imagine exposing TV ads to the same scrutiny. The Viral Factory faces this reality every day which can only make their product better (backed up by the fact that their collective works have recently generated their billionth view). 1 billion actively chosen views. A world of difference to 1 billion forced views.
My Agency has recently built a 'pop-up' experience for Rapha - a premium cycle clothing brand. We built 'Rapha Cycle Clubs' in London and New York - part cafe, part screening room, part retail, part gallery space. If people didn't like them then no one would have visited. If no one had visited they would have shut down as a failure. When you can't buy your audience, there's nowhere to hide, and so you are far more likely to create something relevant, motivating, exciting and magnetic. (They were such a success we're taking them to 5 new locations next year)
Wieden+Kennedy's Write The Future campaign is a great example of a concept with a high profile paid 3rd party (TV) component but which didn't depend on that component for survical. TV served to amplify a brilliant idea that was already taking hold in the pop culture of the real world. Any campaign with a robust social media ambition has to be conceived in this way if it's going to succeed. Because if an idea's to become social it needs to be wanted.
So next brief you get, cast away that cashmere blanket and challenge yourself to create something that could survive in the real world; you might just create something that people will be prepared to queue around the block for.
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