Being creative is about generating new opportunities for yourself, and for others.

Every day should be a new, empty slate allowing you to make use of your own creativity: Whether it is as about finding a new or better way to do your work, daring to go someplace you never would have in other times, inventing something you think could generally change your status quo.

It can be big, it can be small, but you never know how far an idea could go in creating some "new" in your life, generating new goals for yourself, and making you feel in charge.

Creation is change. And in the words of Winston Churchill: "Change is the essence of life. Be ready to surrender what you are, for what you could become."

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I have been thinking about this for a few days past, with no clear answer: How good is a GRP anymore, as a marketing measuring unit? Considering that traditional advertising is losing its grasp on the modern consumer in favor of experiential marketing, peer-2-peer networks and other emergent media, can we truly hope to meaningfully measure advertising effectiveness through reach and frequency anymore?

When Procter & Gamble's Chief Marketing Officer Jim Stengel says "show-and-tell advertising is over", I agree. When the industry says that modern advertising should be a dialogue rather than a one-way conversation, I agree. When trendwatchers consider that online communities are the new influencers, I agree. When my own agency thinks that the best mass communications are done through the mass itself, man are we right.

Word-of-mouth marketing. Guerilla marketing. Communities. Content creation. UGC. We seem to have found or identified new tools to permeate the consumer, and we are liking them because the consumer is liking them. But how do we know that what we're doing loops the marketing loop? How can we be sure that our "new and improved" marketing moves product?


We need to find new ways to track a campaign's success, and they need to be based on the value of interaction. Presenting a message to the consumer should generate another action, and not only an emotion. Non-traditional media should dictate how traditional media is used, because we don't just want people to see, we want people to act. "Come to my website", says the billboard. "Go see my web video", says the TV ad. Offline, to online. Encourage the consumer to go and get more. And to follow that chain until it leads him/her to the product or service.

That's why my little finger tells me that proper measurement of traditional media will now require that traditional media be used as gathering tools, rather than informative tools. If we can find a unit or ratio that measures the reactive power of "static" communication using the web ("dynamic" communication), we will have a better basis for effectiveness measurement.

Any thoughts?

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Most people who know me, know that I am a huge fan of the general video game scene.

I recently purchased the excellent Trackmania United (which is all about creating wacky tracks and racing them), and apart from being highly satisfied of my overall experience, I was quite surprised to find local billboard ads for Bell on the racetracks. My reaction was threefold:

a) My gamer brain thought: "Mini ads for Bell. Looky that."

b) My ad industry brain thought: "Bell. The damn beavers again. What an idiotic campaign. I didn't even have time to read the ad, I was racing a high-speed car for pete's sake. Now, what was that billboard showing?? (I had to stop my car in front of the billboard, ruining my lap time) -- It was showing one of the 3D woodchucks saying "Too late. I've won". Too late, you've won what against whom? I don't get it."

c) My analytic brain said "What's the point of placing ads inside a video game, if they're not going to tell me something pertinent or informative, contribute to my gaming experience or give me special advantages inside the game?"

By extending their media placement within games, does Bell really believe that they're effectively engaging dialog with the gamer population? Placing billboard ads inside a video game, with no pertinent message, or anything that actually would call to action towards something that pursues the experience, is to me just another iteration of misemployed traditional media.

There are hundreds of ways to incorporate a brand experience inside a game, adding to the experience. But that's a notion marketers continue to struggle with...

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