The future of advertising according to the IPA

This event had the potential to be so much more. This is what the IPA advertised it as:

“There’s a revolution in the air that’s transforming society. It’s social networking and it’s empowering the consumer. Agencies must get to grips with this changing marketplace over the next decade or they could face growth of only 1.2% per year by 2016. This is according to the second future of advertising report to be published by the IPA and the Future Foundation. To find out more (….)”

What it was, was an extremely confusing, pointless rehash of things that probably 3/4th of the room already knew. Paul Graham live-tweeted this about the event:  ”Scarily, the speaker is talking in a way akin to an alien commenting on bizarre human activity.” Couldn’t have put it better. 

The first thing that the IPA probably forgot was that the people attending were mostly from agencies (indeed, I’d have been surprised if there were more than 10 non-agency people in there). Ergo, they were not catering to the audience. If they wanted to present the report to clients, they should have had a separate event for clients instead.

The second issue I had with the event (and I’m not saying I am any sort of expert) is that the presentation was extremely unappealing visually. I’m sure the IPA could do with reading Presentation Zen, or even just following Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule. It was chock of full of strings of marketing words next to images that looked like they’d been put in just for the heck of it. One of them, a sort of meter gauge with a zero on one end and a ‘+’ sign on the other, with an arrow randomly pointing at some bit in between, really confounded some of us. It had no meaning whatsoever. Another image was a pie chart neatly divided into one thirds, with different colours for each third. Again, it didn’t make any sense. Add to the mix a couple of tables that had way more text than should have been presented at an event like that, and the IPA had a big problem on their hands. My personal favourite WTF comments were ‘at this early stage in social media’ (if this is the early stage, I shudder to think what the later stage is according to them), and ‘listening is more in the realm of brand research than brand communications’. If brands don’t listen as part of their communication, they are going nowhere except down.

For 18 months of research (with 100 IPA members), I don’t know how much the report reveals that was not already known. It can be argued that the report will be useful to clients, which is what the panel declared, but if it is an intelligent client then they are unlikely to see all that much value in it (that too at £75). I know there are clients to whom social media is a strange world (as is a ‘wiki’  - sorry, you had to be there to get the joke!!), but this report is unlikely to make them familiar with it – and that’s what they need, not some theorising based on the opinions of (ahem) the people that are looking for their business. In addition, 18 months is a lifetime as far as social media is concerned today. 18 months ago, there was just a tiny bunch of people who heard about Twitter, today it is the first source of images after an accident. 

The panel discussion later, as Amelia said, could have been so much more than it was. Really. Russell Davies not being present was a big disappointment for most people, but the rest of the panel just didn’t drum up a ‘social’ enough debate, if you know what I mean. The panelists were fine, but the debate could have been way better. 

I had a whole host of questions in my mind after the event, but the predominant one was this: are traditional advertising agencies really closing their eyes to the elephant in the room (read social media, digital, whatever you want to call it), or is it just the IPA?