"This your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." –Morphius in "The Matrix" How very strange it is that on the back-end of the worst Christmas retail season in five years, the words of Morphius ring truer for the ad industry's matrix of lackluster performers than ever before. Madison Avenue has obviously opted for the blue pill this past year, choosing to ignore the effect of rising energy costs and slumping home values that combined to curb consumer spending. For those in search of a red pill to shake off advertising's obvious lethergy, last week's article on Lean Advertising may prove to be just what the doctor ordered . Our circulation tripled over the Holidays. We got a spitload of mail asking us to dig into this Lean business and provide more detail. There seems to be more than a passing interest in this radically new approach to advertising as usual. The Allied Occupational forces in Japan were more concerned with the economic issues governing Japan than the political underpinnings. Emperor Hirohito had been allowed to maintain the Imperial household as the titular head of the government and state and a democratic Parliament had been established under U.S. guidelines. In essence, the great challenge was to put the nation back to work. Historically, Japanese heavy industry had been controlled by a complex system of interlocking financial, manufacturing and distribution networks called Zaibatzu. Occupation powers allowed those networks to remain intact, but re-directed their industrial output to serve a peacetime economy. |
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During this period the company had adapted the philosophy set forth by the U.S. War Department’s Training Within Industry (TWI) Program of Kaizen or “change for the better”. In 1947 W. Edwards Deming was brought to Japan by the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers through TWI to advise the U.S. Army and the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers on statistical quality control methods and the Shewart Cycle in heavy manufacturing. Dr. Deming’s Shewart Cycle formed the basis for Kaizen,, (which sounds a lot cooler in Japanese than Shewart) from 1947 until 1960. Dr. Deming’s work with the Kaizen philosophy formed the basis of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The TPS process is credited with having its inspiration from a visit by Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro Toyoda and their chief engineer Taiichi Ohno to a Piggly-Wiggly Supermarket while, touring the Ford plant in Detroit. From these humble beginnings and the powerful influence of the Kaizen revolution on Japanese industrial practices, TPS evolved into the more expansive Lean Manufacturing Movement. Simply stated, the Lean manufacturing process is the practice of using less of everything (as opposed to mass production). Lean endeavors to use less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment in tools and less engineering time to develop the new products that start the process all over again. Lean also stresses the smooth flow of production, striving to get the right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity to achieve perfect workflow while eliminating waste and maximizing flexibility. Lean has become the buzzword of modern industrialization due to the phenomenal success of Toyota as the second largest automotive manufacturer and by far, the most profitable. Unfortunately many attempts to adapt the “Toyota Way” by other manufacturers have fallen short of their goals. Many have tried to claim this is because of the cultural differences between Japanese and American workers. (as opposed to a trip to Piggly-Wiggly.) Of course, a bigger question is whether or not this philosophy can be migrated from a production-based product environment to a creative-based service environment. This fact alone makes the agency business model fair game for change. Bored yet? Good. There's more. You agency guys can go dust off your resumes. Client folk, read on. If we overlay the principals of Kaizen over the latest developments in modern day advertising practices, we can get an idea of how Lean Advertising might just change the game. Kaizen starts with the standardization of a given task or process. Once the benchmark is set, Kaizen then moves quickly to measuring the standardized operation in terms of cycle-time and amount of in-process inventory. Next Kaizen strives to gauge measurements against requirements. Lean Advertising, to be true to the principals of Kaizen, is not about pre-set goals. Lean Advertising is about making the advertising better. Change for the better is the stated goal, not meeting an arbitrary sales quota or click-through benchmark or conversion rate. This is a big deal. There is no “finish line” with Lean or Kaizen. Continuous improvement is exactly what it says: continuous. This means that the current practice of short-term performance metrics gets tossed in favor of long-term effectiveness. This also means that the Lean Advertising process now has the task of taking the entire value chain into consideration when seeking to improve that banner ad. Improving the product is when Kaizen shifts into high gear. Then there is innovation. What if the innovation is to go with a web buy that doesn’t afford the agency its standard media commission? Whose interest is to be served first? The agency bottom line or the improvement of the banner buy?We all know the answer to that one, right? Finally Kaizen seeks to standardize the newly improved process (or banner ad) and then determine if the innovations and productivity gains are an improvement or a setback. Then the entire process starts all over again ad infinitum. There you have it. The Lean Advertising Process. On the face of it, this methodology could signal a major change in the way advertising is created, produced, evaluated and improved. Obviously, the financial ramifications are enormous; accountability brought back to the marketing department where it belongs; efficacy given a solid set of accountable criteria to adhere to; and the challenge of innovation and creativity applied where it belongs. To making best practices even better and better. All of these efforts focused upon making the practice of advertising more meaningful to the audience. Stay strong.
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In response to Are you saying that botique agencies will be the only ones to survive in the future? Surely companies with less than a million to spend annualy on advertising will still rely on outside sources if only because they cannot afford to staff in-house. I don't understand why more companies haven't done this already as part of their own on-going process re-engineering initiatives. But somehow, everybody seems to think marketing and advertising are "above the law." I think you ought to follow this up at the first of the year with something even more hard-hitting. This is something that needs to be said. And now is the perfect time to say it. -CF. Phila.
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