...building relationships, profile and learning through blogging.


Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid writes a serious and insightful bit on why he thinks blogging is an early signal about what advertising could be, absent the bumpf and bluster ... and cost.

Extracted from the gapingvoid blog


Having spent a good portion of my early career in has-been, stuffy, conservative agencies, I've done my fair share of fantasising about what I'd do if the has-been, stuffy conservative client ever got around to letting the team and I come up with anarchic, crazy, cutting-edge stunts, the kind Steve writes about so well.

Of course, it never happened.

But maybe that's a good thing. The older I get, the less these crazy stunts seem like career-building exercises, and the more they just seem like "re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic".

I think the game has moved on.

Here's an example. Ask me to name what I think is the most brilliant piece of new advertising I've come across in the last 5 years.

My answer would not be some big, funky-dunky campaign from a company like Apple or Volkswagon.

My answer would not be something from some edgy, hipster, in-your-face creative hot-shop in downtown Manhattan or London.

My answer would be Robert Scoble, a regular guy with a regular job who blogs regularly about the company he works for. That company happens to be Microsoft.

I seriously believe Robert, on Microsoft's behalf, is making more advertising history at this very moment than all the creative hot-shops combined. He is changing the game beyond all recognition. The hot-shops are not.

And he's probably doing it at less than 1% of the price the conventional agencies are used to charging.

So if you find yourself working in advertising, you now have two choices:

1. Try to prove folks like me wrong or

2. Get with the program.

A lot of people will opt for Choice Number 1. A lot of them will lose everything.


I think he's right.


* cross-posted to the Wirearchy blog