POST-ADVERTISING

FREE, CONDENSED, AND LIQUID VERSION OF THE POST-ADVERTISING BOOK

On

POST-ADVERTISING

DANIEL SOLANA

On Post-Advertising is the liquid and digital version of the book PostAdvertising, written by Daniel Solana, founder of DoubleYou, in May of 2010. This 36-page version in PDF format is a compilation of 150 excerpts from the book which encapsulate the ideas and reflections put forth in the book. The idea behind the liquid version is to present the backbone of the books thesis, to give fluidity to its diffusion via digital media and to spark conversation. The content of this version is protected under Creative Commons. The solid version is a 300-page hardcover book in Spanish, published in May 2010 by ndice Arts Grfiques. Copies may be purchased at www.postpublicidad.com, a space where you can also find complementary information and access to possible new versions and editions of the book.

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1. The Yin and Yang of Advertising. 2. The Cycle Shift. 3. The Yin-Yang Balance. 4. The Yin and Yang of the Media. 5. The Yin and Yang of Products. 6. Tuned-Out Advertising. 7. The Art of the Hunt. 8. The Dandelion Strategy. 9. The Raspberry Strategy. 10. The Yang of the Jingle. 11. The Yin of Celebrity. 12. The One vs. the Many. 13. Consistency 14. The Unique Message 15. The R strategy. 16. The K strategy. 17. The Advertising Junskpace. 18. The Sustainability of Advertisements. 19. The Model Shift. 20. The Breakdown. 21. Unpredictability. 22. Creativity. 23. Edibility. 24. Edible Spots. 25. Advertising as Food. 26. Advertising as Merchandise. 27. Engagement or Enchantment. 28. Interactivity. 29. The Sense of Touch. 30. Experience and Impact. 31. Human Appetites. 32. The Hunger for Amazement. 33. The Hunger for Laughter. 34. The Pantometria. 35. Kansei. 36. Kansei Detectors. 37. The What and the How.

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38. The A Factor. 39. The G Factor. 40. The Tell-a-Friend Syndrome. 41. Marshmallows. 42. The Hunger for Marshmallows. 43. What People Care About. 44. Participatory Advertising. 45. Purchased Participation. 46. Intervened Advertising. 47. Excess Participation. 48. Non-Action. 49. Extraordinary Stories. 50. Opportunistic Marketing. 51. The Hunger for True Stories. 52. The Real Reality. 53. Real Time. 54. Inhabited Advertising. 55. Post-Advertising Inspiration. 56. Advertising and Technology. 57. Intelligent Advertising. 58. Living Advertising. 59. Absence. 60. Engaging Absence. 61. Absence in a Website. 62. Kansei Spots. 63. Marketing and Creativity. 64. What Is and Is Not Digital Advertising. 65. The King of Media. 66. The Global Realm of the Media. 67. The Holos. 68. Holistic Windows. 69. The Ownership of Holistic Content. 70. Content Authorship. 71. The Big Feast. 72. Mobile Phone Advertising. 73. Our Hunting Instinct. 74. The Mystery of the Lost Masses.

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75. Advertising Investment. 76. The Media/Brand. 77. Solid and Liquid Mediums. 78. Liquidity and Fissures. 79. The Liquidity of Google. 80. Dissolution in the Liquid Internet. 81. Liquidity in the Holos. 82. The Chemistry of the Holistic System. 83. Solid Formats in the Liquid Internet. 84. Liquid Creativity. 85. Digital Creatives. 86. The Toxicity of Liquid Advertising. 87. Solid Ideas. 88. Liquid Ideas.

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114. Credibility. 115. Conversational Advertising. 116. Non-Conversational Brands. 117. Conversational Brands. 118. Brands in the Social Realm. 119. The Barbarian Invasion. 120. The Attitude of the Barbarians. 121. Barbarian Salves. 122. The Barbarians Issues. 123. Our People. 124. Cultivating Our Peoples Loyalty. 125. Social Beings. 126. Ideal Types. 127. How to Define the Target Audience. 128. Bad Manners. 129. The Advertiser-cum-Etiquette Coach. 130. The Behavior of the Barbarians. 131. Gifts. 132. The Conversation. 133. Talking and Listening. 134. Relationship Marketing. 135. The Barbarian Assault. 136. Positioning and Personality. 137. Brand Identity. 138. Alpha Dogs. 139. The New Heroes. 140. Being Who One Is. 141. The Inconsistency of the Consistent. 142. Indifference. 143. Generic Brands. 144. Social Marketing. 145. The Difference between Being and Communicating. 146. Brand Self-Awareness. 147. The Fragility of Brands. 148. Respect. 149. Advertising as a Pact. 150. Post-Advertising Culture.

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89. The Role of the Internet in a Hard Campaign. 28 90. Integrated Campaigns. 91. Holistic Creativity. 92. Expansiveness and Evolutivity. 93. Holistic Campaigns. 94. The Old Media Plan. 95. TV-Centrism. 96. 360-Degree Campaigns. 97. The Polyphony of the Holistic Plan. 98. The Idea/Plan. 99. The Narrative Backbone of the Media Plan. 100. Brand Voices. 101. The Advertising Voice. 102. The Distance between Brands and People. 103. How People Talk. 104. The Non-Readers. 105. The Branding of the Slogan. 106. Phantom Campaigns. 107. Attention-Grabbing Advertising. 108. Attention Hogs. 109. Cast-Aside Ads. 110. Compulsive Liars. 111. Hucksters. 112. Tellers of Tales. 113. The Pinocchio Obsession. 28 29 29 29 29 30 30 30 30 30 31 31 31 31 32 32 32 32 33 33 33 33 34 34

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1. On the Yin and Yang of Advertising. Yin and yang could be considered as the two forces that represent the dynamic interaction that makes up the balanced whole of advertising. Yin is attraction, reception, hospitality; it is creating a comfortable home to receive guests, it is listening, cultivating a relationship, intimacy and conversation. Yang is action, it is extroverted; it is speaking, constructing discourse; it is going out for the hunt, pursuing, tracking the herd and firing messages. Yin and yang are inverse qualities, not mutually exclusive, which co-exist and complement each other within a single advertising campaign. 2. On the Cycle Shift. The world of advertising is in transition. But this doesnt necessarily have to be interpreted as a shift from analogue advertising to digital advertising; rather, it can be seen as a cycle shift between two profoundly different communication cultures. On the heels of an era of predominantly yang advertising, based on intrusive campaigns that sought out an audience wherever it could be found, the hour of yin advertising has arrived. Yin marketings aim is the creation of interactive spaces, the cultivation of relationships and the generation of marketing pieces with a real ability to attract.

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DANIEL SOLANA

3. On the Yin-Yang Balance. Advertising yin and yang are opposing yet complementary forces. A brand message will spread if a campaign is composed only of yang pieces, but it wont be able to create relationships. If it contains only yin pieces, it will be able to create connections with consumers, but it will be a deaf campaign with a limited capacity to be heard. It is precisely the coexistence of both yin and yang components that make a campaign balanced. 4. On the Yin and Yang of the Media. Yin and yang are latent qualities not just in publicity pieces but in communication media and formats as well. Film is surely the most yin of the classic media, gathering the public together in a friendly and passive way, offering their product up for contemplation. Television is also yin, though less so. Radio is certainly one of the most yang formats. Radio slots reach us not with the intention to attract, but rather in a kind of assault. The internet, as a meta-medium, is a symbiosis between yin and yang mediums. The web is fundamentally yin, while banners are yang elements. E-mail is perhaps the most yang of all media, digital or analogue. 5. On the Yin and Yang of Products. A campaigns yin and yang are related to the yin and yang of the product it is advertising. If we launch a product whose benefit is so relevant that it attracts on its own, perhaps it isnt necessary to add more attracting yin elements to the campaign; instead the yang must be strengthened in order to try and spread this message to the largest number of people possible. If the product is that attractive, or the message to communicate (the seed) is so relevant (flavourful), then it is not necessary make it more edible; with a yang campaign it is enough to simply launch. 6. On Tuned-Out Advertising. We are living in a moment in which we are bombarded with excessinformation, messages and inducements to buyand as a result we have become experts in unconscious filtering techniques, instant omission and selection. One must have a mind trained to tune out information to survive in todays world and, unfortunately for brands, advertising implicitly bears the label of insubstantial information. The glut of marketing material reinforces something that we learned as children: advertisements are meant to be ignored.

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7. On the Art of the Hunt. Brands must stop chasing, interrupting, and stalking the consumer on the corners like muggers if they want to achieve their objectives , and start to think about cultivating interactive spaces, creating advertising material with the ability to attract and establishing relationships based on mutual interest. In the postadvertising age, brands whose subsistence depends exclusively on their hunting skills will have a very difficult time surviving. 8. On the Dandelion Strategy. Yang advertising culture is based on the dandelion strategy. The dandelion flower disperses multitudes of light and buoyant florets, whose purpose is to disseminate in the surrounding areas. The florets shape and size make it easy for them to float, while their miniature hooks permit them to get tangled into animal fur and thus travel even further. Not all the seeds are germinated, but it doesnt matter; there are thousands, and some will inevitably succeed. The dandelion bases its strategy in the buoyancy of the message, which should be brief, ephemeral and multiple. The seed travels, it propagates (propaganda) transmits what it needs to transmit and disappears. The dandelion strategy is to push, shoot messages at the audience, the more advertisements the better. It relies on the technique of insistence. 9. On the Raspberry Strategy. Yin advertising culture is based on the raspberry strategy. The raspberry doesnt wildly cast its seeds to the wind; it produces an edible berryred, sweet and perfumedappetizing marketing content for the target population, and then waits patiently to be picked and eaten. The raspberry bases its strategy on its fruits powers of attraction. It wraps its message in this aromatic package that attracts forest animals, which eat the fruit and, with it, the seed. The strategy of the raspberry is to pull. In keeping with the raspberry strategy marketing content (the edible fruit) represents the culture of attraction that sets yin advertising apart. 10. On the Yang of the Jingle. Music is yin, yet jingles are a resource that advertising executives have transformed into yang: pure dandelion. The jingle perfectly exemplifies the type of publicity piece that chases us, barging in, with a clear intention to transmit a message. It is brief, simple, catchy, sometimes unappealing, and it doesnt view repetition or multiplicity as a negativein fact, it is a key part of its strategy.

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DANIEL SOLANA

11. On the Yin of Celebrity. Celebrity experts maintain that famous faces lend credibility to a brand, transmit its values and spread buzz, up to 25%, according to some. But, in the case of Nespresso, George Clooney as its leading man doesnt exactly create buzz or grab our attention at this pointwere already so used to him as part of our cultural landscape that we no longer take notice. What Clooney brings to Nespresso ads is edibilitythat is, pure yin. 12. On the One vs. the Many. In these post-advertising times, if the central element of communication is not an ad placed in purchased media space, but is rather content peppered with edibility, content that attracts and exists in its own space, then there is no reason for the advertisement to be necessarily brief, simple, or persistent. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that the only strategy is to fragment the proposal into a thousand tiny pieces and throw them willy-nilly at the audience in order for the message to be heard over and over again. 13. On Consistency. As advertisers and marketers, it is much more convenient to reduce all that we have to say to all the different people at all the different moments in their lives to one universal message. To speak with one voice is much easier than speaking with a thousand different voices. We are one, but we direct ourselves at millions, so we define the process according to our position as lone transmitter and not according to the plural nature of our audience. This is what we call consistency. We appreciate and are thankful for consistency, because it helps us understand the message that we send as well as our own voice. 14. On the Unique Message. For marketers, unifying an advertising message is useful for managing campaigns. Its much more practical to propose something creative and then clone it to different media, platforms and points in time, than come up with different creative content for each type of media, platforms and point in time. It is much cheaper to produce one campaign for everyone than to have each country produce its own. We like consistency. It is a great help to us, the transmitters of the information, those of us on this side of the conversation. But what is convenient for us doesnt always translate into the best thing for reaching different audiences at different times and in different settings.

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DANIEL SOLANA

15. On the R Strategy. Yang advertising is, by nature, fragmented. In biology this is called the r theory, and it is related to the so-called opportunist or persistent species, those that have multiple offspring, dont provide much care for their young and have a very high mortality rate. Translated to the advertising environment, the r strategy means filling up communication mediums with the largest number of messages, under the premise that sooner or later some message will worm its way into the mind of the consumer if we just put enough out there. Generating ineffective ads in this context doesnt matter. 16. On the K Strategy. Yin advertising, on the other hand, takes a different tack, placing value on the individual. It is what in biology is referred to as the K theory, and it is related to those species that develop slowly, have few offspring and extensive care for their young. Translated to the advertising environment, the K strategy involves launching complex, not necessarily brief pieces, with the idea that an audience will pay attention if the piece is attractive enough. If a yin piece isnt effective, and is ignored, it is a significant failure. All our efforts and resources were invested in this work. Creating and launching another yin piece is a slow, expensive and difficult endeavour. 17. On the Advertising Junkspace. As in the big cities of the world, in the big spaces inhabited by the internet there are also suburbs, although no one seems aware that the phenomenon exists. I have heard architects lament and even take responsibility for the aesthetic decline of cities, but I dont see the marketer very worried about generating such high rates of nuisance-advertising on the internet, nor do I see him unsettled because the junkspace of the internet turns web navigating into as non-enriching an experience as strolling through the dilapidated suburbs of an industrial city. 18. On the Sustainability of Advertisements. Neglecting the advertising ecosystem damages the marketing industry in the long run, because filling the advertising landscape with nuisance-advertising desensitizes people to advertisings impact in such a way that ever-increasing messages and larger budgets will be needed to achieve the same results. Advertisers lament the progressively increasing cost of making a lasting impact, but it is marketing itself that makes creating impact more expensive. The new post-advertising age invites us to believe that advertisinglike so many other things in todays worldshould be sustainable.

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DANIEL SOLANA

19. On the Model Shift. The post-advertising era implies a model shift. This means transitioning from an advertising model based on a hailstorm of short yang messages to a model based on yin content, and this change of model casts doubt on the entire advertising process. It calls into question the role of the agency, because the agency feeds off of the culture of synthesis and immediacy. It also calls into question the role of the media agency, because its no longer just about the wholesale buying of media space. And it even forces us to reconsider the role of the in-house marketing department, starting with the brief, since there is nothing brief about what is going to be undertaken. 20. On the Breakdown. If the evolution of advertising brings us closer and closer to global and integrated campaigns that are centred on one piece of yin content with the power to attract, if the central element of communication ceases to be the synthetic advertising message, and becomes a not-necessarily-brief bit of content that lives in a notnecessarily-purchased space, if advertising ceases to be just the launching of ads, but rather establishes relationships or initiates conversations, then the entire industry must reconsider its foundations from the ground up, because there is the risk of breakdown. In reality, the breakdown is already well underway. If it doesnt seem more threatening to us its only because its happening in slowmotion, and though we havent heard the roar of the crash, the collapse is colossal nonetheless. 21. On Unpredictability. A good learning exercise for someone wanting to create an inviting website is to observe how easily people leave a site they are visiting. This would be especially interesting for an advertiser who is unaccustomed to social communication, because yin campaigns and pieces are becoming an essential part of new postadvertising communication, and not only in digital settings. Sooner or later the unpredictability of the public will reach all the media platforms; advertisers, too accustomed to living off of captive audiences tied to their sofas, should be prepared.

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22. On Creativity. Creativity must be considered as something more than a pretty package in which to launch a message in an attempt to break through peoples general indifference, or an ingenious ruse to lend emotional depth to a piece of advertising, or a touch of unexpected coolness to tell the same old story in a different way. Creativity is much more than this. From the moment in which advertising becomes content that must attract, creativity becomes a strategic component, because its what gives a piece its reach and capacity for diffusion. 23. On Edibility. We can talk about creativity or about edibility. They are two closely related but different concepts. There are advertising pieces that are inedibleor only edible for others within the advertising worldand edible pieces that are so unoriginal, inept and unimaginative that they will never win an award at an advertising festival. 24. On Edible Spots. If we look back at the award-winning advertising spots from recent years we notice that many of them were recognized not for their creativity, but rather for their edibility. These spotsneither original, nor unique, nor innovativestand out for being appetizing and triggering our sweet tooth. Edible spots incite consumptionpeople want to devour them over and over again. Festival juries adore creativity but they are not immune to the attraction of a highly edible ad spot. 25. On Advertising as Food. The advertising of content is oriented towards human consumption; marketers attempt, therefore, to make their ads edible, consumable. We can visualize advertisements as a kind of food, like the libations the ancient Romans used to offer the gods: sacred food, a kind of advertising-offering, intended not just for communication but to establish ties between the offerer and the receiver. This is particularly relevant today, because in these post-advertising, social advertising times, relationships are more important than ever. 26. On Advertising as Merchandise. If we understand advertising as a food we can think about ads as consumable products, consumer goods, merchandise. Works of very different types, stories or audiovisual or narrated scenes, graphic or interactive, spectaculars or individual

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or collective experiences, spaces of encounter, chats or meetings, performances or events, monuments, sculptures or even physical or virtual artefacts, communicational articles or products of different natures that a brand offers to its public for their appropriation or possession. Compared with the messages (reaching ads), consumable products (attracting ads) are designed to become part of the lives of the people who consume them. 27. On Engagement or Enchantment. We can say that an advertising product possesses the capacity to engage if it attracts, captivates the senses, retains or traps, causes some type of satisfaction or pleasure and persists in the consumers memory. These qualities are not always found in the product that we are advertising, so that if we want our advertising communication to cast a spell to enchant - we will have to look for answers outside the advertisers marketing departments and root around in human nature. 28. On Interactivity. Thus far advertising communication could be seen or heard or, at most, seen and heard at the same time. The arrival of the internet has meant employing a third sense: touch. Interactive advertising pieces can be touched, manipulated. We have shifted from two senses to three senses advertising. A revolutionary occurrence, but one that has gone by relatively undetected by the advertising sector because the business remains the same. The incorporation of touch as the third sense which intervenes in the act of advertising profoundly transforms the process of communication, but it does not increase sales, and so agencies ignore the phenomena. The arrival of a third sense on the scene has very little to do with the industrys bottom line. 29. On the Sense of Touch. Sight is a useful sense to gauge distance, to canvass the territory, the clan; it serves for hunting, it is reaching and conquering. Sight is yang. Hearing operates in the milieu of familiar nearness, useful in the individuals periphery; it serves to scan the home, to protect the family, it is belonging. Hearing is more yin. Touch is profoundly intimate, it is found within the individuals environment, giving rise to a sense of possession, of protection; it is no longer ours, but rather mine. It is an infant clinging to his mother, it is contact, it is authentically yin.

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30. On Experience and Impact. When digital agencies discovered the engagement capacity of interactive pieces, of enchantment or engagement by interaction, they started to say that they didnt create messages, they created experiences. Experience is an interesting term, especially if we compare it with impact. An experience is something deep, involving, and memorable. It is yin. Impact, on the other hand, is fleeting, ephemeral and noisy. It is yang. We cannot delve deeply into the culture of yin connections by firing advertising impact at consumers. It seems much better to do so by producing appetizing experiences for the public to use or consume. 31. On Human Appetites. If we understand that advertisements can be conceived of as publicity products endowed with edibility, then we can surmise that we should all have some type of hunger that incites us to consume them. We should investigate which phenomena move society and generate this hunger before producing an advertisement piece, and discern if there is some type of appetite in particular that characterizes our target audience. 32. On the Hunger for Amazement. As human beings we hunger to be amazed. Awe nourishes our lives. We voraciously take in the special effects of the movies, the acrobatics of the circus or we go to amusement parks in an attempt to sate this appetite. Since childhood, superheroes and their super-human powers have amazed us, and we are attracted to them in the same way that the ancient Greeks were attracted to (and awed by) their gods, heroes and mythological creatures. They exist precisely because of our insatiable appetite to be amazed. Awe is one of the yin ingredients of advertising campaigns. 33. On the Hunger for Laughter. Humour is an ingredient that pushes us to consume advertising products because it sates one of our most fundamental hungers, one impossible to define: the universal hunger for laughter. Human beings need to laugh. This explains why there are so many successful ad spots and winners of advertising awards that use comedy as their central ingredient. Many advertising professionals talk about humour as a creative resource, but this is not entirely true. Humour in advertising works because it lends edibility to a piece and coverts it into a yin product.

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34. On the Pantometria. Somewhere along the way we became obsessed with pantometria, or the preoccupation with numerically evaluating any and every aspect of the reality that surrounds us. This obsession has become so widespread today that we ignore anything that cannot be measured; in other words, what is unquantifiable becomes invisible. Advertising is full of intangible elements, like beauty, poetry, peculiarity or the element of awe intrinsic in the product that we create, but whose use is difficult to justify for its very intangibility. The marketing industry isnt exactly excited about spending money on that which cannot be seen nor measured. 35. On Kansei. An interactive, or tactile, piece should evince Kansei, a Japanese concept that means sensitivity and subjectivity. Used in industrial engineering, the term encompasses those design elements that arent strictly visual and which confer sensorial attractiveness and enjoyment of use on the product, like the lights on the car dashboard or the solid sound of a car door when it closes. Kansei is important given that it plays a role in a positive evaluation of the product, possibly influencing a decision to purchase. Kensei is thoroughly yin and is implied in the new advertising model from the moment that interactive advertising products are created. 36. On Kansei Detectors. Pieces with Kansei stand out because they invoke pleasure without judgement, without reflection. They are pieces that do not need to be understood, but rather enjoyed; they do not require previous experience or knowledge in order to please. Kansei is noted on the skin, like a caress or a warm shower. Everyone likes pieces that generate Kansei, including children. To know if something arouses Kansei just show it to a child and see if he or she enjoys it. Children are great detectors of Kansei. 37. On the What and the How. Tone is a qualifier in communication. The tone is not the subject, it is not the what, it is a how. The what is the noun, the how is the adjective. The what is one, the hows are multiple. The what is seen and judged, the how is invisible and immeasurable. The what ignores the how, the how affects the what. The what is empirically sought, the how is found. The what can be explained with an outline, the how lacks explanation. The what is a single

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right, the how is made up of multiple rights. Research analyzes the what, the how is never researched. The what is born with the idea and worships the idea, the how is constructed in the production and production underestimates it. 38. On the A Factor. Matias Palm-Jensen, founder of the Swedish firm Farfar, calls it liking (yin), and locates it at the extreme opposite end of branding (yang). The writer and lecturer Tim Sanders calls it the L factor, or likeability, and describes it as a subjects capacity to be liked. Likeability does not correspond exactly to the attraction factor, or A factor, of an advertising piece, although they are closely related concepts. Likeability is a passive quality, it affects others, but it resides within the subject and we observe it in the subject. Attraction seems to be a magnetic force that, despite being innate to the subject, is observed in the reactions of others. Something can attract us, make us take pause and even stick in our minds, even if we didnt like it at all. Almost all that attracts us, we like. But this is not necessarily so. 39. On the G Factor. In the same way that a pedestrian ends up unconsciously following the flow of the crowd on a congested street, if the people around us dont stop talking about a movie, we somehow feel compelled to see it, even if we never had any intention of doing so in the first place. This is the G factor, which can be defined as the tendency of people towards gregariousness, produced as a result of proximity, of friction. The G factor is the spark that sets off trends. If the majority of women carry oversized handbags this summer its going to be difficult for a woman to carry a tiny handbag and swim against the current, in the opposite direction of the crowd. 40. On the Tell-a-Friend Syndrome. Word of mouth, or WOM, which we could also call the tell-a-friend phenomenon, can be defined as the human tendency to gain a sense of ownership of something that they like, and seeking satisfaction in spreading the word to others. The tell-a-friend phenomenon is a strange force because it transforms people to the point that they behave as though they were the actual authors of the work, piece or product that they recommend. They arent authors, but they are distributors. They become dealers of advertising merchandise that they themselves distribute.

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41. On Marshmallows. Expectations should exist in a piece of advertising based on edible content. If we want people to take it in, we need an ultimate end, a motive attracting us towards the end of the path. However, the journey that the piece takes us on must be conveniently strewn with marshmallows to keep us moving. Little capsules of immediate pleasure that people can continually consume, incentives to keep the pace as the experience moves forward. If we dont provide the marshmallows, if there is no instant gratification, our audience will seek them elsewhere. 42. On the Hunger for Marshmallows. Human beings are insatiable consumers of marshmallows. Like wild boars sniffing for truffles in the ground we comb through the media, dredging up these little capsules of instant gratification. We are impatient. If we feel like seeing a movie that just premiered, we find it very difficult to wait for it to open at our local cinema. If something happens in the news, it never occurs to us that we could wait to read about it in tomorrows newspaper. If we want to know the results of a game, it seems absurd to us to wait for it to be announced on the radio. Technology shortens the distances between what we want and what we obtain, and this has made us extremely impatient. Like spoiled and demanding children we want our marshmallows and we want them now. 43. On What People Care About. In advertising we can talk about the interests of the brands or the interests of the people. The interests of the brands tend to result in forced conversations that generally have little to do with what people care about. These brand issues tend to be not particularly attractive, eliciting boring debates and generating almost inedible content, and rarely do they contain any marshmallows. On the other hand, people find their own issues fascinating. Not very surprising, is it? It seems obvious, but marketers and advertisers just dont seem to get it. 44. On Participatory Advertising. These days there you hear a lot of talk about participation, though this is far from a new concept. Whats more, if I had to highlight a participatory project no better example occurs to me than Tupperware Parties, invented by the visionary Brownie Wise. I dont know if this idea received any recognition at any advertising awards in its time, but if it didnt it should now, a Titanium at Cannes, a posthumous honour. What Brownie Wise did was to convert her advertising campaign into experiential interactive content with the capacity to attract; a campaign based

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on social networks and that depended on a kind of participation by people more characteristic of our times. A good example of post-advertising yin cultureits not surprising that it was a womans brainchild- and this was in 1954. 45. On Purchased Participation. Participation is a valued post-advertising ingredient. However, we like it when the public participates in our concerns, in the interests of the brand. We invite them to create our ads, our jingles, to participate in our advertising decisions, for example, how we should end of our spot. In other words, we understand participation as the active collaboration of the consumer in the creation of our hunting material, and for this we are willing to compensate their work with awards and incentives. Participation should grow from the interests of the people, and satisfaction should be gained from personal involvement in the project, not from an added incentive that compensates the effort. 46. On Intervened Advertising. One could argue that up to now there were campaigns that suddenly barged into the lives of people, and now there is a new type of advertising in which it is the people who voluntarily interrupt or intervene in the campaign. It is their intervention that ensures that the advertising process occurs and occurs successfully. Intervene is a better term than participate because it implies less effort. Asking people to make the effort or work for us doesnt seem to be a good idea. 47. On Excesses Participation. Participation or personalization is a wonderful post-advertising discoveryor rediscoveryas long as it is considered from the yin culture of offering and it doesnt exceed certain limits. A piece wont necessarily be better by being participative. Its one thing is to walk into a restaurant and order a dish from the menu, another to serve yourself at a self-service establishment, and quite another to walk into the restaurants kitchen and start preparing the food for ourselves. The fact that the possibility to personalize or participate exists doesnt mean that we all like to cook. 48. On Non-Action. We dont disparage the benefits of non-action. A human is a social creature and therefore likes to take action, talk, have dialogue, intervene, participate and on occasion actively collaborate. But a human is also contemplative: once in a while he likes to just passively sit and anonymously take in an extraordinary story that
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takes him far away from his reality, without the least involvement, without even moving a finger to click. This is also thoroughly post-advertising, a purely yin offering. 49. On Extraordinary Stories. Journalists know the voracious appetite that we human beings have for extraordinary stories, hoarding them as though they were a precious delicacy and then serving them up to us on a tray in their newspapers for our delight. They are polished pearls after the overdose of news on the worlds conflicts and turmoil, informative marshmallows that produce instant gratification in the reader. A newspaper cant live on marshmallows alone, as it would be difficult to subsist on a diet based on candy, but few can resist a delicious truffle if it is offered as the finishing touch to top off a big feast. 50. On Opportunistic Marketing. The post-advertising age invites us to use the social phenomena, news, anecdotes and extraordinary stories that pop up all around us. To do this we have to learn to be agile and be able to kick-start a campaign in a matter of hours. This is not just a suggestion to improve our communicationif we dont take advantage of these resources, our competition will. These phenomena are simple products of communication that carry with them their own mechanisms for diffusion; they are contagious and have their own audience. Small campaigns or pieces based on rented creativity, ready to go. 51. On the Hunger for True Stories. The nature of the internet, so intimately tied up with people and their daily lives, invites us to convert reality into another element of our communication. The hunger to consume true stories is one of our oldest. We have always been fascinated by looking at the sky, closing our eyes and weaving impossible stories in our imaginations, but we also need to look at our neighbours, rummage around in their private realities and consume extraordinary everyday stories. 52. On the Real Reality. Advertisers have been resting in a world of fictions, or recreated realities, for far too long without caring that the advertising we create rings completely untrue to consumers. The internet hands us a new ingredient that we have scarcely made use of: real reality. The real reality is what converts many stories into

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extraordinary stories. And whats more, the good extraordinary stories are contagious and spread based on their own merit: authentically edible advertising exposed to the voracious appetite of the public. 53. On Real Time. Radio occasionally uses real time in its advertising. For example, sometimes it employs announcers that take part in a debate as a way to introduce advertising messages, live. These arent really sophisticated advertising messages because, despite achieving a certain texture of reality, the brand commentscentred on the interests of the brandsare not interesting, nor are they credible, and they relegate the brand to the role of an inopportune guest that only interrupts to talk about himself, disrupting the flow of the conversation. They call to mind brands attempts to penetrate the social networks: when they get there, disoriented, dislocated, as if on tiptoes, they ask us if we want to be their friends. 54. On Inhabited Advertising. If we consider a website as a welcome area where people arrive, come in, find their place, look around, interact, leave and come back, we see that there is a curious similarity with a discipline quite theoretically removed from the world of advertising: architecture. Architecture can show us how to use website transitions or loading screens to move from one space to another, how to help people find their place so they dont get lost, or how to design a homepage, in other words, the foyer. Even today I still have the sensation that online advertising can be lived in, and this is a provocative thought that makes me sit up and pay attention. 55. On Post-Advertising Inspiration. In the early days, advertising looked for inspiration through a sole root that fed from a few related disciplines like literature, photography, graphic art and cinema. Today, in these times of hybridism, advertising strikes multiple rhizome roots that dig into many different disciplines including architecture, journalism, sociology, industrial design, the gaming industry, set design and technology. The roots of advertising bury themselves in these fertilizers searching for the nutrients that will inspire them. 56. On Advertising and Technology. It would seem that technology has very little to do with us as advertisers. It seems a subject more germane to the realm of MIT than Madison Avenue, and if it affects communication it is only in some strange medium that just popped up among

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us. This is why we isolate it and observe it as though it does not have much to do with our work. But we are mistaken. Whether we like it or not, advertising communication is written in programming code. 57. On Intelligent Advertising. If advertising increasingly operates in a technological environment, if a piece of advertising doesnt live necessarily on paper, celluloid or magnetic tape any more, but rather exists in lines of program code, and if by programming we are capable of composing pieces that intelligently respond to interactions, we could start to think about a new model of advertising that understands. That is, advertising pieces that behave according to the place, time, and person with which they are interacting, that learn from their own experiences and that even reproduce, mutate and evolve following their own genetic laws. 58. On Living Advertising. It would seem that rich media banners react to touch as though they were simple organisms. These pieces of advertising can be extremely simple, or ingenious, but they give us the sensation that they are composed of a substance different from that of traditional analogical advertising pieces. It is not an inert material, it is live material. This constitutes an extraordinary leap in the nature of the product that we as advertisers create. 59. On Absence. To play with absence or a lack of information is a classic recourse in advertising that has once again become valuable in these post-advertising times. We will stay engaged in a piece as long as there is something that needs completion, an unknown to resolve, a question without an answer. We simply cannot remain impassive before something that has no explanation. We need to resolve doubts, satiate our curiosity, prove that which we suspect, fill in the blanks of information with an explanation, but not with just any explanation, with the right explanation. Absence, or scarcity, is yin, and the desire is contagious. 60. On Engaging Absence. Absence attracts, because not knowing provokes incertitude and incertitude generates interest in us. It captivates, because the mystery of the unknown captivates. It retains, because until we find answers our desire to keep looking for them persists. It causes us satisfactionor relief, because curiosity is one of the

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most powerful of the human hungers, and satiating it pleases us. And it remains in the memory, because desirethe desire to knowinvolves us and transcends our will, affecting our most primal instincts, our most uncontrollable hungers. 61. On Absence in a Website. It is true that feeling lost and dislocated in a website could be counterproductive, but to visit the site and not feel the least twinge of curiosity is to renounce something inherently human, as intense as the preoccupation of feeling lost: the need to discover, explore, go places weve never been or to resolve the irresolvable. In fact, this is what we continuously do when we navigate, and also when we live life; to resolve unresolved issues is part of human nature. 62. On Kansei Spots. Curiously, Kansei can exist in audiovisual pieces without touchand it has become the creative foundation of many ad spots. The acclaimed Sony Bravia Bouncy Balls spot by Fallon, in which thousands of coloured balls were thrown into the streets of San Francisco, wasnt a beautiful story- it was pure suggested Kansei; an advertising product that captivated our senses. Kansei spots stand out because they are likable without reasoning entering into it. It is difficult to explain this to the creative team because Kansei ideas are unjustifiable, and it is difficult for the advertiser to understand because there is little to understand, one must simply feel, nothing more. Getting approval for a Kansei spot is difficult, because Kansei cannot really be appreciated in a storyboard, animatic or an outline. Kansei appears once the spot has already been shot. 63. On Marketing and Creativity. The term creativity has frivolous connotations that could make the person who must approve a campaign uncomfortable. Creativity conjures up words like intuition, imagination and improvisationthe complete opposite of, for example, research, which is a term that seems to place the debate in the scientific realm. Marketing is no science, but it makes us feel more confident to make decisions based on what numbers tell us than based on what one can intuit, imagine or suppose. Research is too serious a term to leave room for doubt. Creativity, on the other hand, is too superficial to be considered serious. Marketing believes itself to be a science, but it isnt. Creativity believes itself to be art, but it isnt. Curious coincidence when looked at side-by-side.

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64. On What Is and Is Not Digital Advertising. For media agencies and the advertising industry in general, including the IAB, advertising is investing a budget in banner campaigns and is not creating an experience-based micro-site, a brand website, a relationship platform, an application for social networks or a viral campaign. I say that for them these things are not advertising, because they are not taken into account when the internet advertising investment is calculated. To consider only the pieces that live in purchased channels, messages launched, the hunting material, as advertising and not marketing products based in content of attraction, is truly nonsense, but it is in line with the logic of the yang culture from which we come. 65. On the King of Media. Although internet could be in the third or fourth position in the ranking of media, according to the volume of advertising space that is sold, or even first , as has already happened in the UK, this doesnt mean that it hasnt been the most relevant media in peoples lives for quite some time. According to the EIAA, Europeans currently dedicate more time to surfing the internet than they do to watching television. This runs counter to the interests of the traditional agencies, whose survival depends exclusively on advertising investment in the classic media, and for this reason it is a fact that isnt really broadcasted. Regardless, the internet can be considered the king of media. The agencies dont say it, and they wont say it, but the people have spoken. 66. On the Global Realm of the Media. It is possible to say that today advertising no longer lives in six or seven isolated mediums, but rather in a unique space or stage that rejects compartmentalization, an open environment, global, versatile, interconnected, technological and ubiquitous. Open, because it brings us entry access. Global, because it spans everything, including those mediums that we didnt even think were mediums. Versatile, because it grows and transforms organically. Interconnected and interdependent because if television shows are watched on YouTube, they wont be watched on television. Technological, since the setting isis being, will bedigital. And ubiquitous, in terms of its accessibility from so many different methods and devices that we could say that it is always there, ever-present. 67. On the Holos. Rather than in isolated mediums, we can think about advertising as living in a unique space, open, global, versatile, interconnected, technological and ubiquitous. This space we could name the holos, because it constitutes the

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global, an everything, made up of the content of all the mediums. The holos was born from the internal implosion of all the mediums, an implosion that broke down the walls that separated the mediums to fuse their content in one complete system. The holos is one, a unique entity, but there are multiple ways to access it. 68. On Holistic Windows. We didnt think that the mediums and formats were content containers. This is why they are called platforms, because they support our advertising content. However they are not containers, they are rather access to the holos. The mediums are windows, peepholes in some cases, doors in others and, in some cases, wide passageways that give the crowds access to a common and universal spectacle. 69. On the Ownership of Holistic Content. The mediums logically continue trying to protect their content. But we will soon see if it will be possible to maintain the pay -per -view model in these postadvertising times we are entering. We shall see if it will be possible to maintain authorship or ownership if the content that they sell us forms part of a global holistic conglomerate, if it is accessible to everyone through other free means of access, if it transforms, interconnects and associates organically with other content and authorship diffuses and blurs, if it continually mutates, modified by people, if it is pervasive and exists everywhere, if the people have it and hide it and share it. 70. On Content Authorship. Advertising professionals say that brands belong to the consumers and not to the companies that launch them. Thats all well and good, but it would be much more accurate to assume that todays content belongs to the people and not to its authors, creators, producers, distributors or exhibitors. People no longer just passively contemplate content, they use it. They look for this content and combine it, remix it or create their own based on this manipulation. Content therefore belongs to them, since it is people who have collaborated with varying degrees of effort in its diffusion and overall success. 71. On the Big Feast. Up to now advertising, that is yang advertising, lived in the holos as a nuisance. If we understand content as intellectual food, we could say the public ended up finding an unpleasant dandelion seed stuck in their teeth after they took a bite. Today, however, advertising attempts to construct itself into a form of food that
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satiates some type of appetite and to form part of the holos as a value and not as an inopportune consideration. Holistic post-advertising pieces do not pit themselves against the pleasure of tasting, they do not want to be the inedible seed you spit outthey want to be part of the big feast. 72. On Mobile Phone Advertising. Mobile phones are a portal or window to the holos, a means of access so that our public can enter and consume the advertising product that we have created. It is the people that hold the key to this door. We simply need to place something really attractive behind it, ring the bell and wait. If its of interest to them, people will open this door and consume our advertising product. However, the opposite tends to be generally understood as true. We believe that we have the keys, that communicating is as easy as suddenly throwing open these doors and tossing our annoying nuisance-spot through it, which the consumer will then receive with open arms. 73. On Our Hunting Instinct. The dizzying evolution of communication technology that has occurred in the last 15 years has not been accompanied by a parallel evolution in advertising. With the changing of technology, new media and formats have appeared, but our way of producing advertising has neither changed nor evolved, nor has our mentality as advertisers. Lets go hunting. We are still going hunting. What will advertisers do with the e-book when it becomes the universal window to literary works? Fill it up with banner-ads? Judging by what we have done with mobile phones, it does not appear that our strategy will go much further. 74. On the Mystery of the Lost Masses. If what Jim Stengel said is truethat there are no longer masses behind the classic mediums of mass communicationwe should do something to find them. It is clear that people have not disappeared, nor have they stopped consuming content through the media. What has happened is that large audiences have been redistributed and the mediumswindowshave multiplied. Chris Andersons Long Tail Theory could apply here as well. Where are Jim Stengels lost masses? Stengels lost masses can be found in Andersons long line. 75. On Advertising Investment. There are not just six, seven or eight mediumsthere are many, many more. Yet oddly enough, when you look at advertising investment, the media agencies rarely show us data beyond the seventh. They do not account for the new forms
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of non-purchased advertising based on content, the advertising in their own communication channels, applications on social platforms or digital media, experiential or viral advertising, and other alternative advertising methods that go beyond the purchasing of media space. In other words, the total volume of advertising investment that media agencies show us is not the total of the investment that the advertisers dedicate to advertising, but is rather the total of the advertising investment that the media agencies manage, their business. And, quite frankly, who cares about that? 76. On the Media/Brand. Up to now the brands have employed their product formats or spaces to do advertising legwork for them. Kelloggs, for example, uses its packaging as an advertising platform and uses it to place content, like nutritional advice. It is a space available for advertising, a format. We thought that Zara didnt advertise until we discovered that they actually do, since they advertise via their display windows, strategically located all over the world. We said that Google didnt advertise, but they do, they advertise through their own platform, the most visited on the internet. Brands are mediums in and of themselves. Right now they only use themselves for self-promotion, but it is easy to imagine such brands making agreements among themselves and sharing audiences. This is something the G7 will surely dislike. 77. On Solid and Liquid Mediums. Traditional media have their content perfectly located in set spaces or at concrete times. To determine the location of content of a newspaper or magazine, for example, it is enough to find the number of the edition and the page. We could say that its structure is solid. On the internet, on the other hand, content flows and moves from one corner of the internet to the other. One day a piece of news appears in an online newspaper and at some point later reappears on a blog at some other far end of the internet. Content moves, crashes into itself, flows, is displaced or relocated. The internet is a liquid medium, which is why we say we navigate or surf it. 78. On Liquidity and Fissures. The internet is liquid. And this means it is capable of seeping into any crack, however small it may be, its liquid content penetrating our lives. It comes to us at work through personal computers, gets into our pockets via the mobile phone, and at home it reaches us through the video game console. Moreover, as it lives

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in liquidity, as time passes it will find new ways to reach us, oozing through any type of gadget, taking advantage of any circumstance, through any fissure and at any time of day or night. 79. On the Liquidity of Google. Google, as a search engine, has been successful because it has adapted to the liquidity of its environment, becoming an instrument that efficiently oriented us in this moving sea. Directories, on the other hand, lost the battle because they were solid in nature. 80. On Dissolution in the Liquid Internet. The commonly liquid state of the internet causes the sub-mediums, as well as the platforms and formats that live in them, to become distorted, ultimately transmuting into something else. This explains how on the internet an originally graphic support, for example, such as a digital newspaper, can later end up as something audio-visual in nature. 81. On Liquidity in the Holos The real world, which seems so real to us, has been internetified, and the holos, which seemed to us so solid, is becoming liquid. With the rise of the internet and the digitalization of the media, liquidity also starts to form part of the nature of the holos, as content flows inside it and the trans-media currents transport trends from one place to another. A song, for example, becomes popular, and living in the liquid whole, it diffuses like a drop of dye to end up becoming a YouTube video, a television commercial jingle, a film sound track, and a mobile phone ring tone, running into all the media channels it finds in its path. 82. On the Chemistry of the Holistic System. The holos can be interpreted as a system. The mediums are not isolated, but as as chemical components of one single substance. Given its liquid nature, in this system the internet acts as a dissolvent, while other mediums, given their solidity, are solute, with varying degrees of solubility. The holos can be understood as the result of a chemical reaction with the tendency, as in any chemical reaction, to reach the maximum level of entropy. If this was true, and the laws of chemistry apply to this type of substance, sooner or later the holos will end up being completely liquid, completely fluid.

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83. On Solid Formats in the Liquid Internet. The banner ad has always been a cursed format, because, existing in a liquid environment such as the internet, it treated it like a solid. Digital creatives start to wonderwhy restrict advertising to a non-interactive, merely static format? Why compress creativity to a fixed 468 x 60 pixel module that weighs no more than 15 Kb? If we can make anything happen via programming in this 468 x 60 pixel space, why limit ourselves? 84. On Liquid Creativity. The internet is liquid. Standard advertising formats can be used if we think that they could be useful, but we have no reason to limit ourselves to them. If the desired format does not exist, it can be created- no big deal. Similarly, a medium can be redefined, re-drawn, or reinvented if it doesnt existif a platform is lacking, it can be established. The medium is liquid for a reason. Based on this vision, the format is no longer a space that holds the idea, but is rather the starting point for an experience that more or less begins there, and where it ends up is anyones guess. The molecules of creativity on the internet are not firmly attached to each other, they flow. Creativity, on the internet, is liquid.

85. On Digital Creatives. Although they dont yet know it, the creative professionals emerging from the digital agencies have experience in liquid advertising, and have a valuable background from which to approach the new holistic advertising. In reality its about applying what theyve already been doing for all these years in digital media to a global environment, which means: reconsidering formats, redefining supports, reinventing the mediums in an undrawn, fuzzily-bordered landscape in which all or almost all is yet to be created, and looking for a creativity that flows behind the scenes. 86. On the Toxicity of Liquid Advertising. Advertising doesnt just have a bad reputation among the public, it has also made enemies among the other mediums, especially among those responsible for the content of these mediums. They view advertising as a necessary evil that dumbs down the publication, the edition or the broadcast, something that should be conveniently isolated and tagged with the label advertising, so as not to be confused with the supposedly unbiased content that they publish, edit or broadcast. Despite the commercial pressure, they resist and try to keep advertising in its solid state. Given that the advertisements that the agencies put

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forth tend to be toxic material, they understand that if advertising is liquid, it will insinuate itself freely and without sanction into the format and contaminate its content. 87. On Solid Ideas. In solid ideas creativity is endogenous, in other words, its intrinsic to the advertising format for which it was intended. It can be adapted to other formats, reduced, cut, broadened or partially used, perhaps just the sound or an image, but a solid idea is rigid, not very mouldable. It can serve its task extraordinarily well in the medium for which it was developed, but in others it perhaps loses its meaning or just doesnt work. Its virtue is that, given this lack of malleability, it always maintains its image whatever the format, and this gives it consistency. 88. On Liquid Ideas. In advertising a liquid idea is expressed independently of where it will eventually reside. Liquid creativity is endogenous, and easily exceeds limits or lives outside of its format or medium. Liquid ideas are liquid because they adapt to the container that holds them, whatever it may be, and they flow to expand easily in the holos.

89. On the Role of the Internet in a Hard Campaign. We sometimes get the feeling with certain campaigns that the agency and advertiser have tacitly decided to use the internet to sell the spot that cost them so much to produce instead of selling the product the spot is advertising. The problem is that its difficult to accept that television ads, which we have always considered to be the basic creative elements of our campaigns, are no longer appropriate in the role of the creative core of a holistic campaign. TV spots are normally based on a hard idea, rigid creativity, not always adaptable to other mediums. 90. On Integrated Campaigns. We can think of all the advertising communication disciplines as related, and that any resource can be useful to achieve our objective of advertising, whatever the discipline may be. There are specializations, more than ever, but not stagnant compartments. The great implosion also tore down these walls. Integrated advertising cross cuts the different disciplines: advertising, public relations, promotion, events, direct marketing, digital marketing. Integrated campaigns

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require holistic ideas, because they dont reside in a medium, but rather in a vast environment: they live in the holos, and are so liquid that they are capable of penetrating any realm of communication. 91. On Holistic Creativity. Holistic creativity requires great liquid ideas that have to do with people and what they care about: ideas that are generous with the people, that sate one of their multiple appetites; ideas that have the power to bring together, that celebrate meetings, generate contacts, bewitch with their charm; ideas that invite people to get involved; that flow and expand in the holistic ocean. It is yet to be seen through what windows, peepholes, hatches, or doors they will be perceived, contemplated, visited, used or experienced. 92. On Expansiveness and Evolutivity. Liquid ideas acquire relevance based on two characteristics: expansiveness and evolutivity. Expansiveness makes it possible for an idea to be born or explode at any point or moment, growing, dilating and propagating through other formats, platforms, mediums and disciplines, invading and flooding the other territories with its liquidity, like an ink stain. Evolutivity contributes to passage through time. The idea, on inception, initiates a narrative thread that will unfold at different moments, in different formats and mediums and will conclude days, weeks or even months later in the same or another place or medium. 93. On Holistic Campaigns. Holistic campaigns are constructed by a group of related pieces, duly organized in time through a narrative thread, an experience or a conversation with the public, and coherently related in liquid space and interconnected by the holos. We can think about a script, but there is no reason this script has to start and end within the confines of a 30 second space; it can be played out over the span of several days or months in newspapers. We can think about a visual idea, but theres no reason this has to be printed on the page of magazines or newspapers. 94. On the Old Media Plan. In the old model, the media plan is a centralized system. A mass communication medium assumes the largest share of the budget, prioritized over the others. Creativity is solid, and even when adapted it is the same for all the mediums. There is just one idea, just one message- the creative of the whole campaign hinges on one theme.

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95. On TV-centrism. In the old model, the media plan is tv-centric. The television spot establishes creativity, and the other mediums complement it. The radio slot, then, doesnt aspire to be a good radio ad, it conforms itself to being a television spot without images, a mutilated spot. The press, or the magazines, are mere frozen frames of our audiovisual piece. And the internet tends to end up being a blind complement to a minuscule 30 second story thats already been told. 96. On 360-Degree Campaigns. 360-Degree campaigns use the yang strategy of the machine gun. They set the weapon in the midst of the great masses of consumers, and then shoot rounds of harmfully solid projectiles in all directions. In the era in which the great herds of consumers gathered at the mass media trough, this technique proved devastating for the ecosystem, but it bore fruit. Today its effectiveness is less than a given. We must not confuse 360-degree campaigns with integrated or holistic campaigns. 97. On the Polyphony of the Holistic Plan. The new holistic media plan should be understood as a dynamic system in which each medium is part of the inner workings of the same machinery. The plan is polyphonic. An assembly of different instruments interpret the same melody, but not all play exactly the same notes at the same time. Each medium is assigned and complies with a function and together they construct a harmonious campaign. A holistic plan is polyphonic, as is a Mahler symphony or a Dostoevsky novel. 98. On the Idea/Plan. Another confusing point in these confusing post-advertising times, something that makes us profoundly reconsider out current work model, even our role, is that in a holistic campaign the media plan is, or can be, a creative idea. The creative idea is, or can be, a media plan. They are inseparable because both are part of the same whole. 99. On the Narrative Backbone of the Media Plan. In holistic ideas the media plan is crucial to the construction of the story, given that the media and the formats construct the backbone of the narration or conversation. A manager in charge of media planning who ignores the message to be transmitted is as absurd as an editor editing a film without knowing the story it tells.

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100. On Brand Voices. Brands speak with two types of voices. On the one hand there is the corporate voice, which appears in a companys corporate communications. It seems that the colder, more aseptic and impersonal this is, the better, as though a company showing signs of humanity were a defect or weakness. The second voice is the advertising voice: supposedly ingenious utterances that attempt to persuade us of something or transmit a key idea through resources like metaphors, analogies, plays on words, exaggeration, comedic winks, dialogues that simulate everyday life or various lexical feats. They are two voices. And oddly, neither of them is the voice of everyday, real people. 101. On the Advertising Voice. Today the voice of advertising is already a tremendously overused language, but advertisers continue using it, we imitate ourselves, just as we have been for decades. And when we in the agency make the effort and avoid it in our proposed text, our clients are unable to recognize the traces or signposts of advertising language in use and this makes them uneasy. They dont believe that a text that doesnt seem to be written in advertising-ese could be a good marketing text. Or we get serious and we send a press release in cold and impersonal corporate language, or we unfurl the feathers of pseudo-literary seduction and we speak the superlative advertising language of the modern-day huckster. There doesnt seem to be any other option. 102. On the Distance Between Brands and People. Advertisers are fully aware that their brands need to get closer to the people. Some react by launching corporate campaigns that show more human features of peoples lives. But this does not humanize advertisers, because the voice continues to be off-camera, narrating the scene from a distance, not intruding into the normal and everyday lives of people. There are no normal and everyday brands; brands are superior, thats why they speak off camera. There is an enormous, seemingly unbridgeable divide between the language of the brands and the language of the street. 103. On How People Talk. We are (almost) all in agreement about the need to humanize our brand and bring it closer to the people. But if this is true, wouldnt it be better if our ads, instead of just showing people, spoke like people? It would be a good idea for us to learn

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to talk like every day, real people, because if we dont, it will be very difficult for us to successfully penetrate into the new intimately personal territories, intrinsically post-advertising, of the social networks. 104. On the Non-Readers. One of the most frustrating lessons for a fledgling agency copywriter to learn is that no matter how hard he or she works, these days a very small quantity of people will actually read their ad copy. People are less and less inclined to read. Moreover, people are truly not very interested in what brands have to say, their boring brand-centric discourses. It doesnt matter how much we fine tune our claim or taglinewe can go on revising all we want but to find a consumer today that is willing to read the text of an advertisement seems like an impossible undertaking. 105. On The Branding of the Slogan. Slogans are losing their power to transmit; they are emptying out of substance and, once empty, become recipients of the values that our campaigns transmit. We think they communicate, but what they do is take over that which transmits the graphic, audio-visual or experiential stories of the advertisements that they underscore. We obsess over getting our slogans just right, without realizing that they dont transmit, they only put a title to the stories they accompany, like the title of a movie or novel names the story it represents. Today slogans brand; they become sub-brands of our brand. 106. On Phantom Campaigns. If we look very closely at the advertising that inundates our lives, we may well find that we are surrounded by phantom campaigns. These campaigns are impossible to see, but theyre out there among us. They launch their message at the people, but, like ghosts, they seem to be in another dimension, and none of these messages end up making any kind of contact. Phantom campaigns are made up of dead ads, perhaps one of the most disturbing symptoms of the sickness currently wracking the advertising sector. 107. On Attention-Grabbing Advertising. Many advertisers and agencies today are fully conscious that the main risk their ads run is to go unnoticed, that their brand be ignored, and that the most immediate battle they face is for recognition. This is why many brands are even willing to renounce their values if doing so means they become visible. Better an inappropriate ad that winds up in wrong place in the mind of the consumer
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than an ad that doesnt exist in anyones mind. Better to be accused of being a nuisance than to be ignored. Advertising exists only to the extent that it is able to grab attention. 108. On Attention Hogs. Michael Goldhaber once said, We live in an economy where the ultimate scarce resource is the publics attention. Goldhaber was right. In the face of so many advertising messages, there is simply not enough attention to go around. The barrage of ads that surround us is so intense that it would be physically impossible to hear them all. In this context, amid the globalized, holistic scenario of jumbled content in which attention is so meagre, advertisers become attention hogs. 109. On Cast-Aside Ads. It is very difficult for many agencies and advertisers to accept that advertising, their advertising, is considered spam, and that people have developed keen psychological anti-spam mechanisms to send anything that smacks of advertising to the mental recycling bin. In other words, many agencies and advertisers find it difficult to accept that the best thing we can do for our ads is avoid making them look like ads; if marketers really want to reach the people, they must realize that the problem with their advertisements is that they look like marketing. 110. On Compulsive Liars. Many brands are fantastic psuedologoi, or compulsive liars. They have been inventing fictitious positioning for themselves for so long, appearing to be that which they are not, exaggerating the virtues of their products, relating impossible stories, telling half-truths and constructing improbable fictions, that now they are unable to distinguish reality from fantasy. This is why when they log into Facebook, they proclaim: Hey, guys, its me, the ultimate car, or Here I am, the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they dont notice that what they are saying is nothing more than an invention, a story, another advertising lie, and that people are onto them. 111. On Hucksters. In theory, the intention of advertising language should be to establish an intimate and sincere relationship between brand and public; this is very far from being a reality. Personally, as a consumer, I do not believe anything that advertising tells me, and as an advertising writer, I no longer know what in Gods name to write that hasnt been written before by someone else at some point during the last 50
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years. Advertisers are hucksters selling modern-day hair tonics in the universal market of the mass media and, when we enter into the specific environment of the new media, we continue using this same stiff language. 112. On Tellers of Tales. Our society considers advertising to be a synonym for fiction and marketing a technique of manipulation. People in the streets say: This is just marketing, when what they mean is: This is nothing more than a trick to sell. We dont notice, or we are not conscious of it, but the name of the sector for which we work is a synonym for falsity. What we say has very little chance of being believed, and our voice, the voice of advertising, so removed from the voice of the people, gives us away as tellers of tales. 113. On the Pinocchio Obsession. Brands have done nothing but lie, and, like Pinocchio, their noses have grown so long that they are impossible to cover up. Remember the movie? The scene where Jiminy Cricket tells Pinocchio, Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday you will be a real boy,? Jiminy Cricket was right. Through the power of truth, even a wooden doll or a plastic brand can end up being human. At the end of the movie Pinocchio looks at himself and exclaims, I am a real boy! Really, to be human is wonderful, and the brands should pursue this dream, because in the very near future only those voices that sound human will be heard. To achieve this, the best thing brands can do is follow Jiminy Crickets advice and be brave, unselfish, and above all always tell the truth. 114. On Credibility. Without question, brands most important battle is for attention. The discourse we use is irrelevant if people arent listening to us. If they dont listen to us the process of communication never even starts, period. But getting them to listen to us is just the first step. Once the battle for attention has been won we find ourselves facing another battle just as big or bigger, which is the battle for credibility. If we are not believed in no way can we persuade and convince, in other words, advertise. To be heard and to be believed: these are the two big challenges for the brands at the beginning of the century.

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115. On Conversational Advertising. This idea of the market as conversations sounds all well and good, but its an illusion. We are very far from conversing about or exchanging anything with anyone because, in the first place, brands are not even capable of listening. Brands are deaf; the marketing that we employ is marketing without hearing. Conversational advertising has yet to be invented. 116. On Non-Conversational Brands. We are entering into the age of post-advertising, a new era based on interaction, conversation, and shared dialogue; however, brands are still determined to launch their one-way speeches (that are only of interest to themselves) from the mass media megaphone. Then they take their pompous and predictable lectures online, talking about trivial subjects that dont interest anyone, like the whiteness of a detergent or the soft sponginess of a slice of bread, and they hope that these will interest the people and become topics of conversation. 117. On Conversational Brands. There is a type of brand that is much more prepared to establish a dialogue with the people: the dot coms. They live in the realm of relationships and manage their own communication on the internet. They are more or less brilliant with the language, but they have developed a new way to express themselves, a voice that is not advertising, nor is it corporate; it is a much less encumbered voice, less superior and more direct. They are among the people, living with them and talking with them every day, and thus they sound like people. They are conversational brands. 118. On Brands in the Social Realm. They dont notice it, but brands are not just present and communicating in the new social mediums, they also coexist, share, converse, relate with people and, consciously or unconsciously, construct something more than positioning through a speech, they build their public persona through their behaviour. 119. On the Barbarian Invasion. Today, people inhabit a new and vast territory of social coexistence, and strangers have arrived on its coasts. We have visitors. They are brands. They dont speak our language, they dont even seem to belong to our culture, nor to our species; they are not like us. They are Barbarians and we are being invaded.

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120. On the Attitude of the Barbarians. In the past, we only heard the Barbarians on television, or on the radio, or we received their telemarketing phone calls. Now they are among us. They have their own websites and insist that we visit them. If we do, they suggest that we collaborate with them to craft their hunting tools, their jingles or spots, and they incentivize us with raffles and gifts. They also try to introduce themselves in the social networks and try to be our friends or get us to become their fans. When the Barbarians look at us they dont see people, they see consumers. And we certainly are consumers, because we are consuming what they produce. 121. On the Barbarian Slaves. The Barbarians are very interested in people- they make their living off of us. They design their strategies and draw pyramids which they call loyalty. At the highest point of this pyramid are the loyal/captive clients. At the base, its potential public, free people. Their obsession is to make the maximum number of people climb up from the base of the pyramid to the apex. In other words, they want us to be theirs, to turn us into slaves. 122. On the Barbarians Issues. The Barbarians get us together and compete among themselves to see who has the best herd, and when they achieve this they launch campaigns to announce it. We are the leaders in the market! they scream, or Number One in Sales! or one of these resounding brand-centric affirmations that dont allow for any kind of social debate or conversation because they are issues that only interest themselves. 123. On Our People. Our target audience, our people, visit brands websites and chat, sometimes among themselves, sometimes with the agency, other times directly with the advertisers. They complain, they poke fun, they have a laugh, they seem to be unconditionally seduced by what they are offered, or they bitterly toss out insults. Then they go, if they dont like what they have seen or what has happened, or they return with friends if they liked it. Compared with the Barbarians, our people are terribly emotional and capricious, but at the same time hugely practical. 124. On Cultivating Our Peoples Loyalty. Our people will have no qualms about getting close to the Barbarians if offered something that interests them, be it an incentive, useful information, a passionate adventure, something intriguing or a simple smile. They will go, because our

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people are not interested at all in establishing loyalty ties with a brand, nor do they want brands to follow them around like puppy dogs seeking their loyalty. Our people love freedom, they want to feel free to buy what they want, to switch brands when it suits them, and they wont accept anything else. Its true. They belong to a consumer society, full of hindrances and servitude, but the hindrances have to do with their consumer needs, not with brands or products that fulfil them. 125. On Social Beings. Humans are highly social; however, when advertisers think about our target audience we treat it like an individual element. We pull it out of its natural habitat, without caring that it was emotionally attached to its family, partner or friends, and we put it on display in our laboratory to observe it as though it were an asocial being, as if a human being without ties could still be human. 126. On Ideal Types. Marketing and advertising professionals group human beings together in little piles and we label them: alpha consumers, early adopters, trendsetters, prosumers. We invent our own classifications and we talk about cruisers, nesters, super-breeders. We believe they really exist, and sometimes we confuse them with our target audience. But no, they are not people and they dont exist they are only a conceptualization. They are Max Webers ideal types, useful archetypes for analysis and study, to investigate and search for relationships, rules, norms and laws within these groups. But they arent real. People are something else entirely. 127. On How to Define the Target Audience. Advertisers, like good proportional compasses, analyze and evaluate the target audience through numbers. We define its age, salary, or if they live in larger or smaller towns and cities. This data seems useful to us, because it is made up of figures, which can be compared and extrapolated from; we can draw charts and tables to reflect their significance. We arent interested in knowing if, for example, these people move through life with the curiosity of an explorer or with the attitude of a guided search. While this characteristic surely defines the target demographic much more accurately than the number of residents in their town, we dont see it as useful because we cannot multiply or divide it in any way.

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128. On Bad Manners. Brands today need to learn some manners. Someone needs to explain to them the rules of coexistence, starting with the most basic, like how one doesnt chase people in social spaces, but rather must try to relate to them, and this relating should not be based on one-directional interests- its much better to create links of mutual interest. First one has to seduce, and seducing is not just showing muscleits something more sophisticated, it requires time, its something in which an investment must be made. Someone should take charge of this teaching duty and this someone, whether we like it or not, is us. 129. On the Advertiser-cum-Etiquette Coach. Today we in advertisingwhether from the agency or from the advertising companies marketing departmentswork for the Barbarians. We no longer just have to write their text for them, transform their rough corporate voice into a suggestive voice capable of seduction, or dress them up in the image of an attractive brand. Today our work is to civilize the Barbarians, give them culture, teach them the rules of conduct, train them in the ways and modes of social behaviour that people use, and then present them to society and mediate the relation between both cultures. 130. On the Behaviour of the Barbarians. The Barbarians have truly bad manners. Rather than start with a friendly, hello, hows it going? greeting when brands enter a shared space, they get directly to the point and drily state: Buy it now! They speak in fragments: New. Free. Come. Participate. They spend so much time subject to the dictatorship of the false message that they keep using artifice even when its not necessary. 131. On Gifts. In our personal lives it would never occur to us to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party and then ask the host for something in return. However, this is how brands act in their social interactions. Sometimes they have something for us they call it a gift, though it isnt. A gift is something given to somebody without the expectation of receiving anything in exchange; it is something profoundly human, common to all cultures. But a gift is not a promotion or a drawing; a gift is an act of generosity, a promotion is commercial blackmail.

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132. On the Conversation. We are entering into the age of conversational advertising and we should consider what we are going to say. Not what our message, utterance, slogan, claim, headline or tag line is, but rather what our conversation is going to be about, what the nature of the conversation is, what we are going to talk about. In these circumstances we should avoid the unattractive habit of always talking about ourselves and our concerns, and consider the conversation from the point of view of the concerns and interests of the people. Its one thing to employ our own methods to explain ourselves, our personality, and quite another to make it the only topic of conversation. 133. On Talking and Listening. Oddly, the Barbarians think we thinkthat we are entering into a new conversational moment in which we can talk more and bombard the public that has fallen into our network of databases with messages, when the real opportunity now lies in listening to the public, and listening much more closely. 134. On Relationship Marketing. We talk a lot about relationship marketing, but what type of relationships are we creating with our marketing? A CRM revolution is imminent. With the potential to become a good tool for strengthening ties and adding value to a relationship, it is wielded instead like a crude club of submission. The Barbarians call this cultivating loyalty, which is akin to tying its herd on a short rope to prevent it from grazing in other pastures. CRM is a powerful instrument, dangerous when managed with a hunting mentality, because while it could result in sales, it could just as easily erode peoples trust and ruin the companys brand values. 135. On the Barbarian Assault. Todays brands, the Barbarians, gather at our doors, stuff themselves into our mailboxes, they call us on our land lines, our mobiles, they send us e-mails and they request our friendship on Facebook. Like protagonists in a horror movie, we have to block all entryways to our privacy, nailing planks across the doors to try and keep the Barbarians out of our private spaces. We suspect that they will use any crack or crevice to get in. Meanwhile, our lives are interrupted lives and our social coexistence with brands is reduced to a cold relationship based on suspicion, rejection and distrust.

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136. On Positioning and Personality. There are brands that have personality but lack positioning, because they have communicated poorly or have just not communicated at all. They can be perfectly defined and have a solid identity, but they dont exist in the mind of their public, and although they dont know it, if they dont exist in the mind of their public, they dont really exist. They are like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Then there are brands that are well-positioned, but they are purely faadelacking in all personality. These brands need to continually launch campaigns to redefine their images because if they dont they become blurred and disappear. They are like Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man. They are only visible if you throw paint over them, but when the paint is gone they become invisible again. 137. On Brand Identity. Some brands, from playing the positioning game so much, from worrying so much about delimiting their territory of fictitious affinity and then jumping from one territory to another without justification, from changing their tone or personality so frequently, end up losing any idea of who they really are. 138. On Alpha Dogs. At this point in the evolution of advertising thinking, I think we could start to consider shaking off, once and for all, this utterly masculine yang feeling that our brand must be the alpha dog of the market. 139. On the New Heroes. A brand that shows its weaknesses is not a problem in and of itselfquite to the contrary, it could serve to humanize. Todays heroes are not just the strong types, intrepid and sure of themselves. Cinema, literature and the theatre discovered quite some time ago that not-so-perfect people can also be heroes: characters like Chaplin, Bukowski, or Woody Allen, people with whom we can identify more closely. The advertising industry is surely the last to figure out that heroes have changed. 140. On Being Who One Is. In their social coexistence with human beings, brands are invited to free themselves from the burden of having to be unequivocally admirable, and to stop obsessing about constructing spotless speeches free of any detail that could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. In these post-advertising times, in which

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brands communicate not just with words but also through behaviour, and in which their credibility is under suspicion, it seems crucial to present oneself to society as oneself, without hiding what makes them human. 141. On the Inconsistency of the Consistent. Marketing and advertising people unwaveringly respect the measurable or visible aspects of a brands corporate manual, like the position of the logo, its size, typography and colour. Its as though we feel that the brands will always be themselves if they just comply with these norms and the will stop being themselves if they dont. We dont care all that much If the brands neglect their manners, lie, appear egocentric or rude in their social behaviour. But a brands pantone colourthats absolutely sacred. 142. On Indifference. Perhaps we dont see our bad behaviour as such a big deal because brands arewe areBarbarians and its not surprising to anyone that we act the part. We are brands, which is to say that sometimes we produce great television ads, but in general, we are frivolous and egocentric, we fill up peoples mail boxes with trash, we fight amongst ourselves, we make heavy-handed claims, we try to acquire clients at all costs; if there are any dissatisfied clients, we shove their complaints and insults under the rug because this is the one thing that actually could damage our image. We think that acting this way is no big deal, but it actually is. What happens is something invisible, immeasurable, but it wears away at the relationship between the brand and its public, and its called indifference. Indifference is a symptomless illness that only manifests itself when the brand enters into a crisis. 143. On Generic Brands. Giles Lipovetsky explains it this way: The hyper-consumer has become distrustful and disloyal. He no longer sticks to just one brand, now he goes online and compares, analyzes, reflects and orients his desires towards that which most gratifies him. It seems that this consumer attitude Lipovetsky describes isnt exclusive to the internet we can also see evidence of it in the rise of generic brands. Generic brands are like any other brand, but they take it for granted that links with consumers will be fragile and they act accordingly, refusing to cultivate customer loyalty via long-term relationships. What they try to do is simply satisfy a one-off need, propose a promiscuous relationship, beneficial for both parties, without commitment or hindrance.

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144. On Social Marketing. Social marketing can end up damaging a brand if it is not deeply rooted in the ideological foundations of the company. It seems suspicious that marketing, which is socially understood as a sales technique based on the false, would promote something that is not oriented towards increasing sales. Today perhaps we dont attribute excessive importance to this; we now know that brands are uncivilized Barbarians. But future generations might not be so understanding. Like radioactive residue, our actions wont disappear without a trace, but rather will remain, indelible, on the internet for years and years. What brands do today will one day be evaluated. 145. On the Difference between Being and Communicating. In other eras brands simply talked. Now, in these post-advertising times, brands are invited to listen, to enter into conversations, to act, to relate with people in social spaces, to define modes of contact and ethical norms. Today brands are no longer what they say they are, but rather what they transmit based on their behaviour. They no longer just communicate- they are. 146. On Brand Self-Awareness. For a brand to be conscious of itself requires the sincere exercise of identity definition. This doesnt meant tricking ourselves by claiming what we would like to be, what we arent, or how we would like the target demographic to see us. It entails considering our essence, that which we truly are and which will endure year after year and that remains conditioned by the annual marketing plan. It wont even be destroyed by the tactical needs that the brands suffers over the course of its life. 147. On the Fragility of Brands. If we dont start to reconsider what we are doing from top to bottom and to ground our values in a more solid base, one day we will notice that the brands that surround us are much more powerful than ours, that they maintain better relationships with the people than we do, and that ours, despite being famous or even beautiful, is fragile. Perhaps it will be too late. Because times change, but what doesnt seem to change is the competitiveness of the market. In the market, as in any ecosystem, there is no mercy for the weak, nor will there ever be.

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148. On Respect. Post-advertising culture is based on respect respect for the sustainability of the advertising ecosystem. Respect for brands, to make them grow from what they are, and not dress them up like something they arent. Respect for people, for their intelligence, for their sensitivity and for their time. Respect for the singularity and diversity of the human being. Respect for the media and its nature. Respect for the mediums and formats, offering them a type of advertising that adds value and doesnt distort their content. Respect for creativity, and all that in communication is visible, immeasurable. Respect for ourselves, the advertisers, and our role as catalysts in the relationship between brands and people. And respect for advertising, to treat it like a consumer good and not an unnecessary nuisance. 149. On Advertising as a Pact. Today advertising, more than just a message, is a pact- a pact between a brand and its public. If there is no pact, there is no advertising. 150. On Post-Advertising Culture. Post-advertising culture makes up part of the new zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, which has changed not only societys way of thinking but also its ways of acting. In these new times the rules dont seem to be transmitted from top down, from the seat of power to individuals, but arise from people, and extend via social pressure to reach the different realms of power. The seed of this silent revolution is based on the newly acquired visibility of peoples individual value and, by extension, the strength of their accumulated social value. We must reinterpret our notion of advertising as a removed phenomenon.

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