And so it is that we at MadisonAveNew.com continue our all-out attack on stupid and wasteful advertising practices around the world. We look at it somewhat like a the spreading of a viral dose of common sense. We believe Lean Advertising to be capable of constantly changing advertising for the better. And we do believe if enough of advertisers embrace Lean Advertising Practices, we can get there from here. But where exactly is...there? What do you have in your bowl when you start your day off with a bit of Lean Advertising? What does Lean Advertising look, smell and taste like, when you compare it with big, old bloated Fat Advertising? For the past two weeks our offices have been buzzing with conversations on Lean Advertising initiatives that are leaping from time zone to time zone. There seems to be a growing global interest in determining whether Lean Advertising is the silver bullet that leading edge marketers have been seeking for the past two years. Ever since MadisonAveNew.com first declared this to be the Post-Advertising Era and Advertising Age followed suite thirteen months later, cutting-edge marketers have been scanning the horizon for the new next thing. Now, a handful of these cutting-edge marketers are investigating Lean Advertising Initiatives and pilot projects so that they can judge for themselves, in their own offices, with their own people if Lean Advertising is in fact, the next new thing. Packaged goods companies call us to say they are already doing a great deal of their marketing communications in-house. They seem to be more interested in taking full advantage of not having an agency to jettison, then to fully incorporate Lean Advertising Practices. We tell them to start anywhere but at least get started. Manufacturing companies that are following the parallel traits of cost savings and productivity enhancing through the practices of Lean Manufacturing, call us. They want to know if Lean Advertising can finally draw a solid line between the cost of marketing and sales results. We tell them that if their idea of "better" is to draw that line, then that's where they need to start with their Lean Advertising Pilot Project. Of the five companies that have sought our consulting help in setting up Lean Advertising Initiatives and pilot programs during the last quarter of 2007, only two are using Lean practices in their manufacturing and administration areas currently. The other three are considering implementing Lean but seem to be far more motivated by getting a firm handle on their marketing investment. They know that Lean cuts the waste, by showing where the waste is. They want that info and they want it now. But the identification of wasted effort and materials is just a by-product of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Advertising. The true end product of any Lean initiative is the transformation of rigid-lock step companies into agile, innovative, organizations, Lean Advertising re-orients the way that both management and the rank and file must begin to think about their companies. Everything in the company must become subject to change if customer value is to be constantly maximized. The value chain created by the use of Lean Advertising is built upon companies and their people dedicating themselves to the personal goal of finding and implementing newer and better ways to constantly change the company to be more responsive to the needs of their customers. _________________________________________ For your own Lean Advertising White Paper Click Here.
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For a company to constantly change for the better, it needs to function pretty much the way the human brain functions. The company ( the brain) has to see to the well-being of its customers (the body) to insure growth ( the essentials: air+food+shelter). This company brain is made up of hundreds, thousands, millions, tens of millions of individual brain cells. Each of these company brain cells is making decisions and initiating actions. Some in offense. (The launch of a new product). Some in defense. (The closing of three factories in Michigan). The thing that allows the company brain to grow the company body is its ability to take what it learns from its mistakes and make itself better and better. This, in turn allows the company body to become lean and strong enough to continuously improve what it does to capture value. In our last episode we projected how Lean Manufacturing processes at Toyota might be migrated to Lean Advertising Practices at Toyota. All of it was hypothetical. But what about the underlying premise of advertising making the leap from a service business to the extension of a product-driven enterprise? How far-fetched is that, given our industry's headlong plunge into accountability and quantifiable performance metrics? And what about the creative process under the Lean Advertising scenario. First let us ponder the fate of the lowly network television commercial. I'm calling, "Toast!" There is no way that the networks, with their antiquated ratings dependency, will be able to survive the migration to Lean Advertising. Networks and agencies will have to give up their dependency on anything to do with the name Nielsen. Can somebody say "house of cards" out there? The big brains I talk to believe the most likely course of events will be that the five or ten companies that embrace Lean Advertising will pool their resources to develop some more reliable form of Lean Advertising-based constantly crunching media metric-generating software platform. A bold new way to evaluate what America is watching. And more importantly, not watching. As television migrates to a web-based Lean Audience, rating samples in the millions will become the norm. Millions of media reporters will poll their respective networks in real-time and report their findings hour by hour. If each reporter polls just 10 viewers an hour that will provide as much as a 20 million sample. The Audience will be incentivised with huge computer-generated lotteries. The billions of dollars saved by Lean Advertising practices will be plowed into the viewer lotteries to fund the much more accurate indicators of advertising effectiveness delivered in one year's time. Lean Organizations will begin to quickly implement the Theory of Adaptive Branding that constantly tailors and adapts audience messaging to topics that are meaningful to each of their audiences. Lean organizations will be able to measure their Lean Advertising campaigns so that they might begin to understand how to make them more and more effective. Lean Organizations will begin to see the emergence of 1:1 communication between their audience and their brands. The uniform advertising campaigns of the past will give way to thousands of individualized branded Lean Advertising messages that resonate to the meaningful and engaging interests of each of their intended audience of prospects. The Lean Creative Process will weave this informative and compelling content into the brand dialogue that exists between enterprise and audience. In many cases both employees and customers will deliver these messages. Everything will be tested for efficacy. Casting, locations, length, subject matter, color palette, music, lighting, camera techniques, editing, everything, will be quantified so as to be improved upon. Everything will be changed for the better or repurposed. There will be no wasted effort. Lean Creative teams will begin to look more like creative teams on feature films rather than those who create traditional 30 second TV commercials. Specialists will emerge. Lean Brand Architects will replace Creative Directors as the guiding hands of each message. Brands will strive to be liked and ultimately loved for what they stand for, not what they make. The brand personality will emerge as a company's principal asset, as it has with Apple, Harley-Davidson, Corvette, Nike and Virgin Air. Lean Advertising will carefully craft these personalities in real-time, minute by minute, day by day, week by week. Every world event will be monitored for potential brand benefit. Every entertainment property will become sponsor driven, in expansive campaigns to spread brand personalities into brand communities and ultimately brand cults. If you have ever talked to a Mac User about the PC then you already understand how powerful a cult brand can be. This is only the beginning.
Stay strong.
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In response to It has taken me almost four articles to actually begin to grasp what it is you are trying to say. If I get it correctly, it seems that you are trying to shoehorn a creative endeavor like advertising into the same robotic mind meld the Japanese are using to build their automobiles. Good luck with that. And if you wind up with anything more than boring, mundane, piece of crap after you "lean " all of the heart out of it, you can mail it to yourself so that you can personally have the opportunity ti ignore it. -N. Smyth. Atlanta.
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