Time for a change
I could go on to list additional marketing innovation blockers. I could rail against focus groups and group think, which result in ads that offend no one. (And if your ad does not offend anyone, guess what? It impacts no one.) Rather, we wind up with watered down versions of brilliance that crash and disappear without even a whimper.
But regardless, in the end, overcoming all of these innovation blockers requires a focus on mitigated risk. Not no risk. The key to innovation is setting up a system in your company that encourages small teams to go off and ideate by themselves -- without layers upon layers of corporate mediocrity screaming, "We can't do that!"
Over the past decade, we have witnessed a fundamental shift in which agencies have started to be run by CFOs and account teams. If we want to start innovating in this industry again, we have to restore the creatives as the heads of agencies. Sure, many more agencies' financial structures will become completely screwed up -- they will not be as profitable, and in fact, many will fail as a result. But we will innovate.
Seriously, if I have to see another droll banner ad, click-here piece of creative crap, or homepage takeover that has no relevance to the product it's advertising, I'm going back to traditional.
Sean X Cummings runs his own marketing consultancy, sxc marketing.
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