I’ve been listening to Joseph Jaffe’s podcast Across The Sound, episode 80 (live from Costa Smeralda, Italy!) in bits and pieces over the course of the past few days. Once again, some wonderful, insightful, inciting dialogues. I love Jaffe’s brutal honesty.

Besides the fact that all the Italians on the program had beautiful skill with the English language (I feel guilty for being uni-lingual), it was intriguing to hear the same refrain, but from the other side of the world: How the hell do we evolve marketing and advertising, agencies and clients into the new era? “What’s the silver bullet?”

That, to me, is Jaffe’s Lament.

It’s interesting to note that these issues are universal. I think the lament, and its cure, boil down to two key issues:

1. Participation

One of my co-workers, Sean, and I were talking this afternoon. We’ve more or less given up on trying to justify our conviction that Twitter can and will be a significant marketing tool; at least, we’ve given up on justifying it to anyone who hasn’t tried using Twitter. In other words, if you haven’t participated, you likely won’t get it. Of course, we won’t stop evangelizing. But we’ve stopped trying to explain it. I’ll paraphrase what Jaffe says in ATS #80: The problem with slow adoption of social media is that, “The so called leaders aren’t leading—aren’t participating.” If agency creative directors, media planners and account directors aren’t personally active and engaged in social media, then it’s no wonder they can’t concept it, they can’t integrate it and they can’t sell it to their clients.

“We have to know what we’re selling. We have to participate—(and) get our clients to participate,” said Jaffe.

And it’s not just the agency leaders and marketing leaders who are failing, it’s the students as well, notes Jaffe. “The people who you think would be all over this—aren’t. They’re not thinking, they’re not involved.”

I’ve seen it myself. We partner with the Miami Ad School to bring in a group of student interns each quarter. It’s been a rarity to discover even one student with their own website, blog, or active social media experience. They want to do ads. And that's the problem. The audience doesn't want that any more.

The cure is simple. I’ve said it before: Stop asking questions and start doing it. Start trying. Start failing. Start learning. Start participating.

Jaffe says, “You have to force yourself to get out of the day-to-day, the ‘putting out fires’…and you have to almost retrain yourself and spend X amount of minutes or hours a day learning, or reading blogs or experimenting. We’ve got to feel it for ourselves.”

2. Redefinition

It’s been said a million times already. But the second key to solving the social media puzzle, to answering, “is it the future of advertising?” is in accepting a redefinition of advertising itself.

“Communication is a foot in the door. That’s all it is,” says Jaffe. His point being that traditional communication (one-way) is inherently less powerful today than conversation. We need to redefine advertising to be The Business of Conversation. Yesterday’s formula didn’t welcome or empower or even tolerate the consumer’s point of view on whatever it is we’re advertising. But today, “Consumers aren’t waiting for us to join the conversation,” says Jaffe.

Benjamin Palmer of The Barbarian Group has frequently said that the future of advertising is in enabling people. We need to give them tools, not sermons. Help them do the preaching. I agree. The challenge, the risk, is that this kind of major redefinition typically doesn’t align well with Schedule As and decades of regimented process. 

But we need the risk. We need agency leaders to shake out antiquated financial and process methodologies. We need marketers to insist their agencies redefine advertising. And it’s not as if taking these risks is somehow new to our industry. As my old mentor, Bill Miller, put it, “The business of creativity is learning to survive rejection.” The stakes today are simply much higher, because now the audience can talk back. They can kill your idea just as swiftly any ECD.

The solution goes back to participation. By redefining advertising as conversation and the role of marketers and agencies as facilitators, versus speechmakers, we will succeed. Jaffe’s advice: “Don’t try and control it, don’t try and manipulate it, don’t try and force it. Join it. Find out what they’re doing, then join it and see how you can make it better.”