ABOUT US: FORCE FOR GOOD | BETRAYAL | JUST THE FACTS
Behind every betrayal lies fear and greed. The year was 1996. The business of advertising was going through major changes. At the time, we worked at the largest ad agency in the Southwest. Their response to change was to bury their head in the sand. In 1999, we left there to join the largest ad agency network in the world. Their response to the upheaval in the ad industry was to bury an even larger head in the sand.
The Internet was exploding. And changing all the rules in the process. It was making it possible for people to interact with companies and brands at a level that had never even been imagined before.
But for the most part, the ad industry didn’t see it that way. When they looked down their noses at the Internet, they saw web pages that radically limited the number of fonts they could use. They saw animation that was closer to flip books than it was Industrial Light and Magic. And they saw video screens that were the size of postage stamps.
So they tried to marginalize the impact that the Internet was having on their business. Push it in a corner. They either partnered with an Internet marketing boutique or they created a small interactive division within their agency. But the worst of it all was not necessarily their response to the innovation and creativity that the Internet represented. It was their response to their clients. Clients wanted what the Internet could do for their brands — connectivity, interactivity, accessibility, and community. Whenever they would invite ad agencies to pitch their business, they would inevitably request interactive capabilities to be a part of the presentation.
So the agencies would turn to their interactive partners and include them in the pitch. And after the agency would win the client’s business, they would council their client to spend all of their media dollars on traditional media because they didn’t understand interactive at the strategic level. And they weren’t willing to allocate budget line items to some interactive company that was outside of their own P&L.
Simply put, it was just wrong. The advertising industry, not well regarded by most for its impact on our society, at least has a reputation for creativity in our culture. Along comes the most unusual and innovative force for advertising since the television — the industry bars the doors and shutters the windows. To make matters worse, advertising is supposed to be a service industry but due to their fear and greed, the average advertising agency ignored the needs of their clients in the most self-serving way. That’s when we set out to set things right.
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