"Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula."
- Bill Bernbach

Advertising's creative revolution, sparked by Bill Bernbach in the sixties, was a paradigm shift in the industry. Ad agencies' creatives, the "big-idea-people", seized power from polished MBA's, turning advertising inside out. But once again, accountability has been introduced as the leading star all for major brands all over the world. It's a cost-per-click world and the MBA's and statisticians has taken over once more. It's no good, and we won't take it.

Most efforts made by advertisers and technology providers are focused on leveraging what wasn't available in other media - high-quality data, to improve what wasn't good enough in those channels - deciding where, when and to whom an ad is placed - so called targeting.

And sure enough, the Internet has us swimming in data, flooding marketers with opportunities for better targeting, media planning and measurement. However, these improvements overshoots what most marketers are able to utilize.

Instead, what now needs to be improved and optimized is the ability to get consumers' attention and create impact based on that attention. But what particular ad characteristics that are effective differs greatly from person to person, from media to media and from situation to situation. In fact, different circumstances can trigger complete opposite effects, on the same target group using the exact same ads.

Reactive ads

Enter "reactive advertising" - expressed simply as the concept of ads reacting to the conditions of each unique exposure and adjust the contents, images, colors, sound etc. to optimize performance.

Reactive ads use the very same pool of data that is often negligible or too large to be of practical use for targeting, and allows for advertisers to engage in new forms of storytelling, that are more dynamic and persuasive than ever before. With so much advertising these days cluttering our lives and dumb us down, reactive advertising finally presents a real opportunity to make ads that are not only extremely relevant, but also more intelligent and funny.

But if reactive ads are so great, why aren't we seeing them all over the place?

Creatives != Developers

There are actually a number of contributing reasons as for why reactive advertising is currently held back, the most important one being that agency creatives, the ones responsible for what kind of ads are created, have no clue about what's technologically possible.

And even if they did have theoretical knowledge on what type ads could be created, agencies still wouldn't reactive ad campaigns by themselves since there's a huge unpredictability in production time and cost. Also, they lack skills to provision and manage the required infrastructure, and where to find and how to package the data that they could use as base.

Meme Machine and Copybox by Burt

We provide agencies with a suite of products that brings simplicity, convenience and predictability to all stages in the development of a reactive ad campaign, effectively removing restraints for agencies to pursue reactive advertising campaigns.

We've already launched a prototype of the Meme Machine, that's being used in major ad campaigns right now for some of Scandinavia's largest advertisers, and it solves many of the issues related to uncertain production estimates, scalability and high investment costs. We're ironing out some bugs, and 1.0 will be release in october 2008. No, there ain't no public beta, because this baby has to fly from day one.

However, Meme Machine in itself still doesn't solve the problem of reactive ad campaigns being difficult to conceive and describe for creatives. This is where the second member of our product suite, comes into play.

Copybox provides an easy way to conceive and describe sophisticated ideas built on interactivity and data dynamics. Our vision is for Copybox to become a "copywriter's Photoshop", inspiring them to create ads that they otherwise wouldn't have thought of. It'll give rise to new types of communications concepts, not only based on reactive advertising, but for all types of ideas that are driven by opportunities created by digital technology.

Bill Bernbach has passed, but his spirit remains. He once said: "Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling."

Hopefully, we'll make him proud, starting with advertising and not long from now we'll extend his ideals to the rest of the world. It needs them.