Trends in advertising creative and the telco business

A great article on ADOTAS about creative development in advertising agencies.

Based on my experience with Euro RSCG Kiev, I think Mosteller's list of desirable skills for today's creative department are particularly important for agencies in markets in transition like Ukraine, where society and cultural norms are undergoing tumultuous change, and the first generations of Internet users are growing quickly. Consumers' desired relationships with brands heavily impact how the brand should engage them if it wants to connect with them. Analyzing, understanding and explaining these trends are crucial to keeping clients' advertising and brands on the cutting edge. These skills are not only needed for digital media, but for the traditional channels as well.

My experience with web marketing at Sonopia, in comparison with my previous work in traditional media channels with Euro RSCG, highlighted to me the difference creative development approach for each. One difference is the freedom to employ a "test and learn" approach to constantly fine tune creative to improve click-through and conversion rates. This requires the creative team to take a more modular approach to each webpage and have a greater appreciation for performance measurement and analysis (from strategy guys like myself). This may sound trivial, but many agency creative types (usually lower level ones) naturally prefer to consider themselves more artists than salesmen, and resist seeing their ideas modified just to meet some stupid performance metrics. The slower and less precise traditional channels insulated them somewhat from these compromises.

If you're a "creative type" in an agency, what do you think?

Telco 2.0
A couple of thought-provoking articles and polls about the future of the telecom operator business from the guys at Telco 2.0. I like these guys because, whether you agree with them or not, they consistently present new ideas and business models for telecom operators from a money-making and customer-driven perspective.