Guerrilla thinking

Never before have us GT been so convinced that this is the right moment to start up your new agency.

Yes, sometimes we might seem negative and so might do our posts.
But we are happy guys, struggling to do our job in the best way and help you do the same.
To say it all, we are living in a very intense moment, where we think anything could be possible.
We can’t but see this crisis as a rare, unmissable opportunity.
A perfect moment to set up something new in advertising.

No, we are not joking. We are seriously saying that if you ever thought about it, you should do it now. Provided you do it the proper way.
And here’s why this is the moment to do it.

1) CLIENTS NEED IT

zombified advertising agencies, insignificant geeky digital ones…
A few player out there really kick ass. And even those ones are stuck into a specific framework, are unable to redefine themselves as something different depending on the project they are working on. They have roles and skills and to-do-lists and accounts…

The market is demanding more and more someone that’s able to punch marketing managers’ faces and tell them the truth. Is demanding authority and honesty.
The market is crowded with dwarves and needs men.

If you can enter the room and say: here I am, this is the moment for you.

2) CUSTOMERS NEED IT

The distance between customers and brands it’s still way too large.
People and brands (apart for a very few of them) speak 2 different languages and advertising has been so far playing the role of the interpreter.
But you can’t enjoy such a conversation for too long.

Customers need someone not to let them understand what brands are saying, but to teach brands how to talk their language.
For real. Not just as a master class topic that marketing people will forget right after the class.

Cleaning away many of existing interpreters, this crisis is the right moment to get companies and let them understand how to REALLY speak their customers language.

3) THE WORLD NEEDS IT

Yes, we believe in the social value of good communication.
We believe that this means teaching a brand how to communicate and talk people language and letting it understand how the quality of its product is far more important then any lie they could say about them

It’s not just about advertising as much as advertising is not only about selling.
It’s about creating a vision of a product that’s consistent to what it really is and thus it’s about selling better products.
Companies could be proud of what they do and people could be proud of what they buy.

This can lead the entire human identity to a new level of consciousness.


FINAL CONCLUSIONS

IF you have what it takes (that is balls) and are sick and bored of working in advertising the way you do now, it is time to raise you head.
Watch the infinite horizon before you and explore the many possibilities of your future.
Doing this business in a different way is possible.
Going back to the roots of our being human and carrying them on in our creative and advertising job is vital.

If you are thinking we’ve gone nuts, you probably are not one of us.
Most likely you are a dumb monkey. You might be earning a lot of cash but sooner or later you are bound to fail.
But if you know what we are talking about, if you feel there is a leap we can take to get this business to become something more than just business, to have fun and really enjoy what we do, then the moment is now.

Let’s do it. Let’s not miss this opportunity.
Let’s change the rules now.
 

That’s it.
It’s all in the title.

We had the chance to talk to some of our fellow Italy-based GTs a couple of days ago.
Frustration was all over the air. 
The web in Italy is failing. Not used to its all potential. 

Here are the answers to the question: why are Italian companies failing on the web?

1) MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN COMPANIES ARE TOO OLD AND PROUD

Don’t misunderstand us. It’s not a matter of real age. But it is surely a matter of MENTAL age and disposition. People taking decisions in Italy are too often unable to understand the trends and follow the market. They are stuck into their product/brand state of mind and unwilling to think as a consumer.
Even when they pretend to do it, they always universalize their point of view.

You can hear them say: “I would never tweet” , “I don’t use Foursquare”, without understanding that there are many, so many other people that actually would and do.
Rather than getting them to trust their agency, this incapacity plays on their pride and get them up to themselves and ultimately in the position not to understand what is being proposed.

2) NOBODY EVER TAKES THE RISK TO DECIDE ANYTHING

Think about it. How many times have you held a 3 HOURS presentation to a large audience of people in a room and heard right afterwards that they would present that to their “boss” and decide?
In Italian companies (or at least in big ones) only a few people take the risk to decide. The rest of them simply flow from one presentation to the other, unable to even express their own opinion.
You can see that for yourself. Next time you hold a presentation, ask to your interlocutors what they think about it.
If the boss is in the room, you will see that nobody will ever talk before him/her.
And when they do, they will simply go after their boss.
People working in Italian companies are FOLLOWERS by nature.
But how can you expect a brand carried by followers to be a leader? You can’t.

3) MARKETING PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THE DIGITAL MARKET

This sounds funny, doesn’t it? 
When you hear the word “marketing” you might expect that these people actually study, know and deepen their market. But when you face them in a meeting you soon realize they don’t.
Sure, iF they sell, let’s say, coffee they might know many things about coffee but they don’t really never know how the coffee is discussed, loved, hated and connected to their target online.
Never have our Italian GTs found during their presentations to clients someone sitting on the other end of the table able to give them a vision of their digital awareness and reputation and a clear brief of their goals.
“Digital” is a word that means a lot and nothing to them.
Most of them still think that it actually means having or creating a website.
Too many times you can hear them saying silly things like “Facebook is for kids” or “Youtube can’t make money, it will close sooner or later”. 
Truth is that they rarely even have a Facebook account. 
There’s no passion, no real interest.
They read an article in a newspaper and they think they know it all. The problem is that the article is written by another Italian average market thinker who pretends to be a guru but it’s just, most of the times, a jackass.

4) PEOPLE IN ITALIAN COMPANIES LACK IN PASSION FOR THEIR JOB (AND LIFE)

Communicating a brand/product is one of the best jobs you might happen to have.
But you can’t live it as a day by day career.

In order to really succeed and make a difference you must live it as a passion.
You must be curious about people. You must ask yourself questions like: what do they do? where do they do it? And most importantly: WHY do they do it?

This is even more true when you are talking of the digital landscape.
After all, the web is all about passion and love.

But people working in the marketing areas of most Italian companies just don’t get it.
And they really don’t do this anymore. They pay zillions euros to idiot research agencies that will pop out a million slides powerpoint to say nothing that you can easily understand going out in the streets for yourself.

Please Italian guys, stop sitting on the throne of your brand growing a fat ass.
Go out, breathe, listen to the people, get them to talk, use a bus, get on a train, LIVE and watch.
And learn.

That will do a lot more for your work than any research can do.
And you will stop failing.

Some of us guerrilla thinkers were having dinner a couple of nights ago with some top-of-market agency guys and we were debating whether mobile Apps will sooner or later replace websites at all or not.

In other words the question was the usual one: is the web dead? Will mobile apps and content definitely kill any effort to build up our own multiple and various little world in the web galaxy? Are we doomed to a future when in order to check, watch, buy anything we will have to download or worse BUY an app?

This latter question is pretty important because what many journalists, critics and guru never point out while discussing the possible scenarios is that the difference between apps and what we call “free web” is that while a website is open, free and search engine friendly, apps are not.  Yes most apps are free but they are downloadable from a market you access from specific devices.

And you gotta pay for them. You can’t just enter a public place (hotel, school, bar, restaurant…) and use their pc to check things on your apps, because in order to do that, you gotta have them right there in your little, cool, smart, fashion phone.

Think about it. That’s mainly why very popular apps like instagram are now trying to reverse the same experience and content you have in you device on a pc-level experience.

To be device-bound has been the main force of the apps, but this is also the most important threat to the growth of their business.

If all the content is in the cloud, application should be in the cloud as well, not JUST to be downloaded but to be used for free And that’s basically the web.

A popular device apps will more and more require a fully functional and device-indipendent version of itself or in the medium distance its run will be over.

Of course the opposite is also true. And Facebook is a good example.
Out of a web platform they have created a mobile app to grant users a seamless FB experience while on the go.
Why shouldn’t the opposite be as much necessary for any appstore or android market popular app?

Why can’t I take advantage of let’s say cool hipstamatic filters or photo collage cool effects on my mac as much as I daily do on my iPhone?

Unless we believe that in the nearer future people will be using a single smart mobile and appstore-bound device throughout their daily experience of work and leisure, it is really important to find a good answer to this question. Are we absolutely sure that in the nearer future tablets and smartphones will kill desk/laptop navigation?

But there’s one more thing (oops, that sounds creepy, doesn’t it?): the content of the apps is vertical, whereas the web is horizontal.
When I browse an app (on a device I bought and that’s the only thing that lets me access that, as said above) I browse a barb wired little world. Any connection to other sources of information, other content requires my smartphone to pause, switch to another application (most of the time a WEB browser) and in the end break a stream of thoughts, emotions and interests that brought me to that place.

While clicking on a link in a browser to another website doesn’t change my experience of using my device, switching from an application to another one seriously gets people dizzy and can have serious repercussions on your business.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

In order to maximize APPS, market leaders should improve the way apps dialogue one with the other and make the browsing and hypertexting among them easier and seamless. On the other hand they should be also consider to release the same apps experience on the web, to make it accessible from any device I want.

Until that moment (that could be actually closer than we think) websites will keep on being competitive and demand their right to exist and apps will be mostly dedicated to geotagged services and infos.