Realtime marketing? What you know about your customers should lead to creating stuff, not ads

Real Time Marketing is here - and advertising needs to adapt says Tribal DDB’s Paul Gunning in an article over at FastCoCreate and the wisdom in it sounds a lot like If you work in advertising but all you're doing is advertising, you're doing it wrong by Tim Geohagen here on adland last year.

Paul bemoans the lack of flexibility at agencies, the rigid system that hinders ideas to appear where they can be useful.

The marketing ecosystem must allow for the dynamic generation of advertising in multiple formats, yet enterprises are paralyzed by a system where every link in the chain provides an opportunity for the process to break down (from on-demand creative, to media buying, to supply chains and legal departments). If the system is not designed to nimbly push through creative, it’s a nearly impossible feat.

Tim has similar beef:

There's value, efficiency - and an entire future - in being nimble.
With access to technology, you can now leverage nimble talent against massive organizations in a way challenger brands never could. A great idea could earn its own media. And great ideas that do exactly that should be what you’re paying for.
Don't outspend - out-think. The only way you'll do that is by allowing the talent in your agencies to respond much quicker than they are able to, or allowed to, right now. Those agencies also need to learn how to be nimble by creating and perfecting the systems that allow their clients to react as fast. Because in today's media, responding to a socially relevant conversation 2-4 weeks after the fact is almost always too late. Sometimes, a day is just too late.

Funnily enough, Dave Trott said the same exact thing to me back in the early nineties. We discussed an ice-cream campaign that covered the entire London underground when launching the brand. "What that says is 'I don't have a good idea, so why don't you give me 30 million quid'" said Dave, who always wants us to out-think never outspend. Being nimble has always been the cause of upstarts getting big all of sudden, the question always is how to we prevent the big animal from turning into a slow dinosaur?