iMedia: How do you keep innovating in a down economy?
Bastholm: That's the obvious challenge. But you know what? It actually goes back to the way we think as an agency. When you're looking to achieve the same results on a smaller budget than you had before, you have to innovate. It's actually the only way of achieving your objective. If you try and do everything the same with a smaller budget, you're doomed to fail. If you innovate along the way, you have a better chance of making it happen.
You have to remember innovation doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. Innovation's often about getting a good idea for a different way of doing stuff that you've done in a certain way so far. So innovation can sometimes even be money saving, and you're basically doing a great job with less. In a way, that's more engaging for everybody involved.
iMedia: You've won more than 25 international awards, judged several competitions, and are now president of the Cannes Cyber Lions jury. Have you noticed a lack of creativity recently?
Bastholm: I don't think there's a lack of creativity, per se. I think in recession times you always get people who say "let's play it somewhat safe." I think that's going to happen until, as a marketer, you realize that you're not achieving your goals and that you actually have to be a little more daring to achieve something in this down market. Hopefully, we'll see the creatives able to flex their wings a little bit more [in the near future].
Talking overall about a lack of creativity, I think a lot of it comes from
Randall Rothenberg's column the other week about lack of creativity in online advertising. I would tend to agree with him to a certain extent; banners in particular have not been a preferred medium for creatives to express themselves in, because the rules have become so rigid. Basically, IAB won, and the publishers all won, and they managed to make everything so structured and so stylized in what you could do that the good creatives kind of lost interest because the box was just really, really small.
If we can all sit down and agree on little bit of flexibility from publishers and the IAB, and a little bit more creativity from the creatives working in the space, we can probably reboot that whole relationship and get to a better place.
iMedia: What is that "better place" that you envision?
Bastholm: Often, what you'd see from a creative standpoint is you have a media buy that encompasses a gazillion boring formats where you could effectively not do anything, and I think that is what has caused banner blindness. People don't see them anymore. Ask anybody who doesn't work in our field which banner they recall the best or which banners they can remember, and I guarantee you 99.9 percent of people will say "none." You don't see them anymore, and that's kind of our own fault for plastering them everywhere. So I think it needs to be much more creative.
If you look at the Mac versus PC spots that have been running on NYTimes.com, people love them and they talk about them -- they're creative and they're fun. So it's not that you can't do something fun with banners. It's that we've effectively managed to kill them by plastering them everywhere and making rigid rules for what you can do in order to maximize sales, not actual consumer satisfaction or consumer enjoyment of the marketing we're doing.
What you don't want to do is something you know doesn't work going in. When you have less than 0.2 percent of people exposed to a banner clicking on it, you're talking about a medium that doesn't work. You basically have to come up with a different way of using that space, and that is the only way we're going to get to a point where it's going to start working again.
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