Friends:

In our continuing quest to offer an alternative view of
the media landscape, we are offering this gem from Jeff
Einstein. Jeff is a media pioneer who helmed the first
digital agency back in 1984. He is just as progressive
today as he was 25 years ago.

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Walking the Talk: When Wonders Cease – by Jeff Einstein

The only panel comment that remains with me from last
fall’s MediaPost Future of Media Forum at The Times Center
in Manhattan was offered up by Jeff Goodby of Goodby,
Silverstein & Partners. The fact that I can only remember
one comment from two hours of panel discussions by media
industry illuminati like Cathie Black, Joe Uva, Ken
Auletta, Michael Wolff, Mark Cuban, Randy Falco and
others is commentary enough on the effete and tepid state
of current media industry leadership – although I suppose
it could just as easily pass as commentary on the
increasingly shabby state of my memory nowadays.

Either way, during the event Q&A a member of the audience
asked the panel to comment on what – if any – downsides
they envision in a digital media future. Quite predictably,
a couple of panelists responded as senior managers, citing
the enormous difficulties presented by the transition of
analog, brick-and-mortar franchises to digital. Others,
including Isobar CEO Nigel Morris and publisher Bob
Guccione Jr., were all smiles and quick to dismiss any
potential downsides, predicting instead nothing but blue
skies ahead. The aforementioned Mr. Goodby, however,
betrayed his creative pedigree with an altogether different
concern: He wondered aloud whether or not we might someday
rue the loss of wonderment to digital rendition.

With apologies to Mr. Goodby – I’d like to expand on
his statement a little. When we sacrifice our sense of
wonderment to our digital prowess, we forsake the very
intangibles that make advertising and marketing work in
the first place. When we lose our sense of wonderment, we
lose our ability to attract an audience likewise motivated
and attracted by wonderment, and are compelled by default
to deploy our technologies to hunt them down like animals
instead. We now know for instance that digital targeting
technologies – like all media technologies – generate
diminished returns on investment (DROI). Massive failure
to perform in the digital media channels is the crazy aunt
in the attic who no one in the digital marketing industry
wants to mention. The truth is quite the opposite of our
claims about digital accountability and ROI: the more
targeting technology we deploy, the less performance we
see in return.

In the chain reaction that ensues (the irony of unintended
consequences), the more targeting technology we deploy in
our marketing efforts, the less of our own wonderment we
feel compelled to impart, the less attractive and more
predatory our work product becomes, and the more inclined
our audiences are to avoid us at all costs. The less
wonderment we engender in our audiences, the less inclined
they are to stand still long enough for us to engage them,
and the harder and more expensive it becomes to reach them.
Isn’t it therefore better and doesn’t it make more sense –
in an on-demand universe where no one demands more
advertising – to pique a sense of wonderment and provide
our audiences with better reasons to engage us instead?
Isn’t it better to let our audiences target us? Isn’t our
ability to engender and convey wonderment the primary
reason advertising ever works in the first place? Consider
the words of Albert Einstein, who said…

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

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Einstein would likely suggest that our failures to engage
our audiences are largely failures of imagination. We have
methodically and digitally stripped the wonderment of
imagination from our work product, not because it makes
sense to do so, but because we suddenly have the
technologies to do something else: target and hunt them
down relentlessly. The digital marketing industry –
immersed in its obsession with and addictions to technology
– has become all but mindless in its pursuit of things that
don’t matter and things that don’t work. Unfortunately, no
one drinks more spiked Kool Aid nowadays than digital
marketing professionals.

But there is an alternative, and it becomes increasingly
apparent the very moment we ask why instead of how. The
question how typically directs the spotlight outward. By
contrast, the question why just as typically turns it
inward. Perhaps the keys to the kingdom reside less in the
exploration of outward things we can measure and more in
the inward things that resist measurement, less in the
quantifiable and reproducible comforts of digital
expediency and more in the discomforting anomalies and
one-offs of the heart and soul.

Eleanor Roosevelt once suggested that we must do the things
that we think we cannot. Best efforts notwithstanding, our
digital technologies offer no hedge against failure; they
only expedite it. We can’t avoid failure; it’s guaranteed
(even Willie Mays failed seven out of ten times at the
plate). But we lose our sense of wonderment when our fear
of failure exceeds our willingness to assume risk – exactly
what happens when we increasingly consign our dreams to the
vapid ether of electronic spreadsheets, especially in tough
times. We fail to engage others when we hide behind our
own technologies. Successful marketing and advertising
campaigns owe their success far more to emotion than to
reason, far more to intuition than to intellect, far more
to simple expressions of the heart and soul than to the
glorious misconceptions of the mind.

The next set of viable metrics to emerge in the digital
marketing industry will express and describe the quality
and emotive impact of engagement rather than the mere
quantity of encounters. The science of reach and frequency
will lose ground to the art of engagement. We will begin
to describe the quality of engagements per the emotions
they elicit in us, and it all begins with the impartial
question, “Why?” The answer then becomes obvious: to elicit
and induce wonderment. And if there’s one thing we know
about our human predisposition for media, it’s that we
will seek out those things that elicit and induce in us
a sense of wonderment. Simply stated, the audience will
target us if we offer our own sense of wonderment as bait.

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About Jeff Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with select rapid-growth clients to help
define and execute healthy brand strategies in a toxic
media environment.

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