No, I’m not talking about more creativity, bigger ideas, or building expertise in social, local, mobile, or analytics. This is what everyone is doing. Yes, it’s flashy and fun to talk about these as the wave of the future, but it’s just not practical. For a moment think about other industries that have become commoditized over the years – autos, CPGs, airlines. What do you do when your product becomes highly supplied without an increased demand? You create cost efficiencies!

In advertising, we’ve put the cart before the horse. Everyone is trying to create a competitive advantage through the aforementioned ambiguous capabilities. Meanwhile, the people who need to be coming up with these ideas, becoming these experts are preoccupied with mundane tasks like compiling reporting, mining data, building custom timelines, getting client approvals, and building excel cost outs for budgeting. This why things like big ideas can’t become a differentiator – no one has time to make them. And really, I mean, we’re in the digital age and we still can’t manage media buys electronically, aggregate data without customizing our own Excel template, and use multiple systems for various reasons (none of which communicate with one another). I can’t even tell you how many different digital reporting templates I’ve created over the past 5 years. It’s literally the same work over, and over, and over, and over again.

I know it’s not flashy or sexy to announce to the industry, or clients, or employees that you’re investing in the future through efficiency and economies of scale, but it’s what the industry needs. The CEO with the courage to make big investments in this type of technology will be light years ahead of other agencies in the next 5-10 years. Of course it would take a couple years and millions of dollars to improve these processes, but it would be worth it. With downward pressure from clients on staffing arrangements, handing some of this mundane work over to robots will free up time to demonstrate what these ad people can really do for a client’s business. It might come as a surprise, but there are a lot of smart people behind those timelines, flowcharts, and reporting templates.

Anheuser-Busch: Bad News. The only spot worth talking about was for Stella Artois called “Crying Jean.” The tone might have been a bit down trodden for its placement, but did well to project the mystique of the brand. I couldn’t have been more disappointed in the Bud Light spots. They missed the mark on both humor and product messaging.

Audi: WTF. This concept was both peculiar and disturbing. By the time you found out who the ad was for (more than half way through the commercial), you were way too confused to remember which car they were talking about.

Bridgestone: Wasted Effort. While these spots may have garnered some attention for the brand, there was minimal (if any) linkage to the product. If you’re going to pay that much for a Superbowl spot for a brand with low top of mind awareness levels, you’re better off just coming out and saying whatever it is that you have to say.

Brisk: Negative Points. This whole using-celebrities-while-pretending-not-to-use-celebrities just isn’t working for me. Healthy Choice tried this strategy in a spot with Julia Louis-Dreyfus somewhat recently. I would also suggest making sure your celebrity is contractually obligated to inform you if he will appear in other Superbowl spots.

Career Builder: Short of the Goal. Okay, so maybe we’ve seen enough of these monkey spots to remember their point, but isn’t it worthwhile to reinforce that point? I mean, especially if you’re not going to make a new one.

Carmax: Split. I liked the concept for “Kid in a Candy Store,” but felt the execution could have done a better job of linking the message to the product benefit. The Carmax customer just wasn’t believable. They should have stopped while they were – sort of – ahead and not run “Gas Station.”

Chrysler: Clear Winner. This wins the gold for me. Maybe I’m a sap, but I love these spots that ladder up to something truly meaningful for the country. I have a lot of respect for Chrysler that they were willing to take what could have been a bit of a risk in order to tackle a big issue on everyone’s mind – and execute it well. The last spot I can remember like this was the Budweiser “Respect” spot that ran in 2002.

Coca-Cola: Indifferent. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of these spots. It’s my opinion that Coke needs to work on creating a tighter equity campaign. There’s so much lost potential in the happiness campaign. I can see how “Siege” could be a continuation of that, but certainly not “Border.”

Doritos: Bronze. All three spots were funny and entertaining. Better yet, all of them tied back to the product and reinforced the brand’s historical equity. I’m skeptical of the longevity of “Crash the Superbowl,” but despite that they had some strong spots again this year. Luckily for Doritos, there wasn’t a lot of competition from historically top performers like Bud Light.

Chevy: Foul. Of the five spots, only “Discovery” for the Volt was any good. Chevy could have done a lot better job of ensuring these spots really worked together to some singular goal. The only similarity was the end treatment, which didn’t do the job. The commercials almost seemed to work against one another rather than together.

Groupon: Good Effort. I love it when the newbie tech companies make their way to the big show. Last year it was Google, who rose to the occasion and justified its presence with its “Parisian Love” commercial. Unfortunately, Groupon didn’t. In all honesty I’m afraid for them if they continue to run these spots. They got the attention they were meant for, and now they should be stowed away before people start to get offended.

Motorola: Missed the Spread. Before the spot ran during the game, this commercial was being compared to the legendary “Apple 1984” ad. Sorry Motorola, not even close.

Pepsi Max: Poor Performance. I can’t help but wonder what type of image Pepsi is trying to create with this new product. The brand is so well known for its pop culture influence and today it was like it was trying to be Bud Light. Waaaawaaaa…

Snickers: No Follow Through. I understand why Snickers would want to carry through the concept from last year since the “Betty White” spot caused such a stir. This execution fell flat though. When I heard Roseanne would be making an appearance, I was anticipating something equally as clever – not the case.

Volkswagen: Well Played. First was “The Force.” VW clearly did the best job executing the pre-game buzz strategy with millions of view of the full :60 second spot. I sat there the whole first half just waiting for that spot to show up next. And each time it didn’t I said to myself, “‘The Force’ spot is way better than that one” – before it even aired. The spot was adorable and tied directly to a product feature. I liked “Black Beetle” too.

There are three core principles I think are most relevant to how Gen Y or Millennials  function at work (and in life, since it would be a Y sin to lack congruity between the two):

1) Everyone can win. Gen Yers have been taught that they have the power to do anything they put their minds to. And if that’s the case, why would they ever accept a solution where they lose? This doesn’t mean they want others to lose, mind you. They truly believe there is a win-win solution for every problem. So work with them to find it.

2) Credit where credit is due. This principle is frequently misinterpreted as a desire to move up the ladder quickly. But think about it from their perspective. They are trophy children and they’ve been encouraged through positive reinforcement all their life. While they may need to get used to constructive criticism in the workplace, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give them props for their ideas. Whose idea was it anyway to give the bosses all the credit? That’s just plagiarism.

3) Things change quickly. This is clearly the result of the Gen Y’s digital upbringing. The belief is – everything moves quickly, and if it doesn’t, it should. They’re used to getting things right away when they want them. This isn’t a bad thing. If something cannot be accomplished right away for good reason, explain why. You never know, they might surprise you with a good way to make it faster. And that’s exactly what very firms need in every category to keep pace.

Regardless of whether you agree with these principles, it  isn’t complicated to manage these youngsters. Quite the opposite – their beliefs themselves make it easy. Like any employee, all you have to do is understand their motivations. Unlike other employees, however, they will be more than willing to be blunt about what they’re after. The only challenge is those motivations can be fickle (remember, things change!). You have to keep up-to-date on what is driving (or not driving) their behaviors. I suggest sitting down with your employees at a minimum bi-monthly. Ask them questions about what they like about their job, what they don’t like, what they’d like to be doing more of. And set their expectations with specific goals that must be achieved before they will be granted those desires – a promotion, more responsibility, recognition for their work, etc. I promise, if you truly listen, what they want will be made clear. It’s up to you to translate those motivations into action.

Although ad avoidance continues to grow more and more prevalent, advertising is too much a part of consumers’ every day lives for it not to be ingrained in the decisions they make. In many cases, the first thing that comes to mind when a person thinks about a brand is its advertising. When I think of Nike, I think of Michael Jordan. When I think of Apple, I see ‘think different.’ For Dove, it’s women of real beauty. Who could have thought a simple bar of soap had the ability to boost confidence? That’s the power of advertising. This doesn’t only apply to creative either. Marketers need to think of media selection as if it were the distribution of the actual product. Would you sell your product on the street next to a newspaper stand? If the answer is no, then maybe you should reconsider running ads on news sites.

For direct marketers, it’s generally easy to attribute sales revenue to advertising allocations.  For branding marketers, the value of advertising is a bit more nebulous. But maybe that’s just because we aren’t thinking about it right. Sure, advertising can increase awareness and consideration, but it can do more than that. The advertising itself can increase the value of the product – and the best way to measure that is through willingness to pay. Several studies have shown advertising often allows marketers to charge more for their product. If more marketers would investigate the validity of this phenomenon for their business they might find that advertising can impact both volume and margin.

We all knew regulation (internal or external) was on its way. I had just hoped that consumers would come to their senses by the time it arrived. You see, the privacy battle is much too one sided. The privacy activists and legislators are speaking out for privacy and marketers are in a no-win position. This leaves no one to communicate the benefits of sharing their personal information. But I for one will happily divulge personal data in order to reap the rewards.

The most commonly cited advantage of sharing information is receiving relevant ads. This is certainly a large benefit. I know I would be much less annoyed by advertising if the ads were relevant to me. I wouldn’t feel as if my TV shows were being interrupted and I might start paying attention again to the 728×90 pixel area at the top of web pages. In fact, this more acute targeting would actually be helpful. Instead of doing Google search after Google search looking for places I can look at bookshelves, after a single search I would automatically be fed options. But this isn’t even the greatest benefit of allowing marketers to collect data on you. The biggest benefit goes even further.

Let’s go back to my bookshelf example. I’m in the market for a bookshelf so I’ve been surfing the web for options. The first place I think to go is IKEA. I see a couple I like, but I want to look at some other options before I buy. Like many consumers, I do some searches to find other places to make a comparison. I look at style and price and normally it would be time for me to make a decision. However, in the data-driven world, the story does not end. IKEA and say Overstock are both able to identify me as someone who is in the market for a bookshelf, but has not yet purchased. Normally they wouldn’t have this information and they could not target me, but now that they do, they’re in a battle to win my business. IKEA finds me on a Yahoo page and serves an ad that offers me free shipping. Overstock finds me on a friend’s blog and they offer me 10% off my purchase. In this way, allowing IKEA and Overstock to have some information about myself has undoubtedly paid off. By allowing them to know who I am (not personally by name, but in aggregate with others who are in the market for a bookshelf), I have taken control of the situation and raised the stakes.

To me, this is the great benefit of data sharing. Marketers are forced into head-to-head competition that they aren’t able to engage in otherwise. Additional competition is always better for consumers. More often than not it means lower pricing – and if not lower prices, better service or higher quality products. Either way consumers win. If only the conversation in the press could be more two-sided, more people might be on my side of the fence.

The inability to answer the question can be any one of a number of things. The agency can push for them pre-launch, but they’re not going to hold up the show if the client is plowing forward.

1) The objective was loosely defined and a corresponding KPI was never agreed upon.
2) The proper measurement was never put in place to measure against the stated KPI.
3) The campaign is over and there is debate over whether the KPI was the right one to begin with.

What it always boils down to is – the goal is sales… and there is little agreement around what drives sales. Even within an organization that has an established ROI measurement system this question comes up. Clients are always looking for a more real time assessment of success.

So what’s the solution? Well, there are ways to statistically determine links between sales and other metrics, so that’s one solution. You have to be prepared to fork over the dough to do the analysis though. Another solution, that is much more affordable, is just to agree! Agree in advance what the specific objective is for each piece of the marketing budget. Then, assign a KPI or two against each objective that seems to make the most sense and can be measured more frequently than ROI. Finally, get approval all the way to the top. People must agree up front what success looks like. Otherwise, no matter what the performance is, the campaign will not be successful. I understand that guessing at the link between sales and other metrics takes a leap of faith. But consider the alternative – flying completely blind. Even a trial and error strategy is better than that.

Building competition within the space has to be a conscious market creation process. That begins with creating barriers to entry. Just because the online marketplace itself doesn’t have barriers, doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some to make it into the consideration set of a national or international advertiser. Setting these barriers and communicating them broadly enough can be a tough task, but they should purposeful and in line with the campaign strategy, not hap hazard or arbitrary.

Digital properties must know who they are in competition with. Sure, creating  competition across the portals is easy, creating competition between the networks is easy. But what about the hundreds of other properties? The digital marketplace’s infancy offers the opportunity to create competition between nearly any property – after all, they are competing for the same dollars. To create these markets, negotiators need to strategically craft RFPs to let partners know who they’re up against. The more transparent the more immediate competition it creates and the fewer rounds of negotiations that have to happen. Too many digital properties think they don’t have competition – show them who’s boss media buyers!

There are a lot of reasons the digital space isn’t ready for barter. And any advertiser considering this path should carefully consider the challenges. First, there’s still a lot of ambiguity due to the lack of standardization in digital. In print where there is a lot of standardization it is easy to ensure the quality of your buys. With digital there are a number of ways to diminish quality including caliber of content, targeting, frequency, placement, time of delivery, etc. Unfortunately monitoring quality becomes almost impossible because each impression has the potential to have a different level of quality.

Another challenge barterers will encounter is the size of digital partners. Everyone knows the online space is fragmented and there is a lot of competition due to the large supply of available impressions. This means digital vendors are smaller (even the networks) in terms of their balance sheets. Therefore, their need for trade assets is limited. Although they may agree to a barter deal if they feel that’s what they must do to win business, it will compromise the relationship. Let me explain what I mean. In digital, because of the lack of standardization previously mentioned, it is important to end negotiations in a win-win situation so the property has an incentive to provide you with quality inventory. Barter misaligns incentives because the traded assets don’t offset other costs on their P&L and they are encouraged to counteract these additional costs with a higher margin on the inventory. And all they have to do to increase this margin is tweak the quality of your inventory.

In the end, it’s just not worth sacrificing your digital campaign’s effectiveness and your vendor relationships – all for a minimal cost savings. Maybe some day when digital becomes standardized, barter will make sense. But that day isn’t today.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the movie. I did. Especially because, in the last week, I had just finished writing a POV on the site. As a part of that assessment, I did a SWOT analysis from the advertiser’s perspective. Before I go into my analysis, here’s some background. Recently Facebook hired consultants to help them “value” their advertising inventory. I don’t know who these consultants were, but they certainly didn’t know a thing about the advertising market. These people actually told Faceobok to increase their pricing while decreasing the quality of their inventory. No advertiser in their right mind is going to increase their investment under this scenario. Hence the need for a more elaborate evaluation and POV on the property.

It’s no doubt that Facebook has a long list of strengths. It has achieved massive scale among a broad array of audiences in minimal time. As aptly noted in the movie, the site is a part of popular culture. It’s common to say “Facebook me,” and if you’re not on Faceobok your friends are sure to give you hell.  And because so many people share so much information there, a wealth of information exists via keywords within profiles alone. A lot of people have actually gotten upset about all that information and said it infringes on their privacy, but hardly any of them leave the site. I read a post once by a guy who wrote that he was so upset that he wanted to delete his page, but couldn’t bear to loose all the photos he was tagged in.

The interesting thing about this long list of strengths, in my opinion, is that so many of them are assets and so few of them are capabilities. When you look at it closely, there are really only about 3 things that Facebook does well. Everything else is just stuff they have going for it. Still, the list of strengths is considerably longer than the list of weaknesses. The problem is that the short list of weaknesses reveal massive business model challenges. All of the items relate directly to the site’s ability to bring in revenue. The list of threats isn’t much longer. A few other considerations surface including recent privacy law suits and up and coming platforms like Foursquare. However, Facebook’s list of capabilities seem to negate the majority of these items. For example, one true capability owned by Facebook is it’s diligence in updating the platform to evolve with technology. Just recently it released Facebook Places that negates the threat posed by Foursquare. And so it remains, monetization is the pressing opportunity.

I find it hard to believe that Facebook hasn’t solved for this problem already. There are so many avenues open to it. And despite what Zuckerberg claims in the movie, there are ways to do advertising that wouldn’t threaten the site’s cultural status. Facebook has access to so much information and many resources advertisers would love to get their hands on. Advertisers want to understand the interests of their target audiences, how to segment them, how their brands are being portrayed in social settings, and how their advertising is affecting those conversations. They want to build big, customized programs that are exclusive to Facebook. And many of them are already using their profile on the site as a 360 campaign landing page. Advertisers would certainly pay to better attribute traffic to those pages and the actions taken within them. Few, if any, of these products would affect Facebook users negatively. While I understand there are lines that cannot be crossed due to privacy issues, there are still many alternative revenue streams that should be considered. Putting even a few of these in place might take the property a little closer to that billion dollar valuation.

Scope & Rationale. This paper was written for the purposes of identifying long-term solutions to the breakdown within the South African educational system. Our primary goal was to identify the source of problems within the educational system and attack those head on. By applying business theories we were able to filter through the massive operational hurdles to find the dynamics most impacting the overall efficacy of the system and recommend qualified solutions.

Education is the basis for creating a competent workforce, which in turn impacts the whole of a country’s economy. Yet, today, South Africa ranks last in education amid other countries, much lower than countries with a comparable socioeconomic profile. Our initial hypothesis was that due to the affects of apartheid, previously disadvantaged primary age children (in particular) were continuing to be locked out of the system due to lack infrastructure and general exposure to poverty. Several news articles written on the topic supported this hypothesis. However, as we explored the issues further, we found research and conducted several individual interviews that pointed to another source of problems. In fact, we learned that South Africa has achieved nearly universal access to education in the 14 short years since apartheid ended. (Social Surveys, 2009) This led us to further explore the core sources of imbalances and ultimately make recommendations that were rooted in addressing those issues.

Remnants of Apartheid. The struggles faced by blacks during apartheid and lack of education through the Bantu Educational Act crippled the economy. The after effects have resulted in higher poverty rates, lack of development in a skilled workforce, increased AIDS population, and lingering discrimination. This is in large part due to the fact that students of the Bantu educational system never gained any skills due to the lack of funding and resources from the government. They call this the Lost Generation – the generation that now embodies the workforce and drives the high level of unemployment, which currently stands at over 25%. (Stats SA, 2010)

Despite the country’s best efforts, inequities in education continue to exist today. From the period of 2003-2009, the matriculation pass rate among South African learners has continually decreased. (South Africa Web, 2010) In 2003, the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) ranked South Africa last in a list of 48 countries. South Africa fell below countries like Botswana, Ghana, and Armenia that have a high percentage of the population living under the poverty line. It also fell below countries with lower income per capita including Macedonia, Philippines, Tunisia, Indonesia, and Jordan. Even more telling, the average math score among South African students actually decreased from the 1999 TIMSS. (NCES, 2005; CIA Factbook, 2010) The data points to especially poor education quality among the previously disadvantaged and superior quality among the former Model C / white schools. In 2005, tests were conducted that showed only 5% of township grade 6 learners were able to read at the appropriate level. Those living in townships are primarily black students. Comparatively, the test showed that approximately 85% of learners at former Model C schools were able to read at the appropriate level. (Stats SA, 2005) Several other available statistics on matriculation exam pass rates lead us to similar conclusions.

To illustrate the disparity, among schools in South Africa, the below photos showing the façade of two schools we saw during our visit. The first is St. John’s Prep School, a private school in Johannesburg, whose sprawling campus is quite impressive. Second is Eikendal Primary School located in the Western Cape, a public school in one of the country’s better off primarily black neighborhoods.

Summary of Findings. First, we explored the funding aspect of the educational system. During our research we found several underlying issues with the framework for funding delivery to the schools. This leads to underfinanced schools and cripples their ability to provide a quality education to students and a suitable work environment for teachers. Later, we address this issue with recommendations on how best to overcome these challenges.

Next, we used Porter’s Five Forces model to help us filter through the various aspects of the education market. Rather than issues related to high barriers to entry, we saw a greater prevalence of a weakness in the supply of education – the teachers. Even within the past year, a major national teachers’ strike has greatly affected students’ ability to learn. Further, we saw extreme problems in relation to moving children through the school system with pervasive failure rates. The inability to get these children through the system creates a complex learning environment where students are rarely of a homogenous age.

With the root cause of issues narrowed down to the teaching arena, we did further research on what it takes to be a teacher and the types of issues they face as they seek to become one. We did this by creating a basic supply chain and attempting to quantify the relative challenges faced within each step of the process. Here we learned that the lack of teachers is primarily due to the daily pressure, which acts both as a barrier to entry as well as a cause of attrition.

Recommendations. In the closing section of our paper, we provide our full set of three focused recommendations that could have the greatest impact on the overall system. First though, we recognize the infancy of democracy in the country and the time it will take to mend a country in rehabilitation after an all too recent history of racism and inequality.

1. Restructure School Revenue. The educational funding model in South Africa is broken. Because schools depend on both government funding as well as fees paid by learners’ parents, many of them are running at a deficit. In reality so few of the students can actually pay their fees that revenue the school depends upon lingers in accounts receivable. In order to cover this loss, teachers are asked to facilitate fundraisers, which takes away from their time spent teaching. Our recommendation is to remove the fee system and fund 100% of education through taxes.
2. Feed Teacher Supply. Because class sizes can be extremely large, there is violence, and many distractions for teachers (eg. fundraising), the teaching environment becomes an unhealthy workplace. To control these situations we recommend buffering teacher supply in the short term so that classroom conditions can improve rapidly. This is imperative since repairing the in class environment is the key to teacher challenges, student set backs, and higher quality education. This buffer could be created through additional bursaries (our scholarships) for education students or through international teaching programs like Teach for All. The hope would be that after 2-3 years this additional push could be diminished.
3. Technology as a Catalyst. Some organizations we spoke with are using technology to offset limited teacher qualifications and increase the quality of the curriculum. One of the most promising was a new program using satellite courses where the much higher qualified private school teachers broadcast instruction live to other schools in the country. This type of program, if deployed en masse, could scale quickly and provide additional support for struggling township teachers. We recommend looking into this solution further to identify the cost of resources necessary.

Written by: Erynn Herman, Tiffany Gholston, Emily Kern, Amelia Presley, and Varun Goyal