AKQA’s Rei Inamoto & Johan Vakidis Discuss Adland’s Identity Crisis

“I think the problem at the moment is that advertising is facing a bit of an identity crisis. It’s trying to be everything to everybody. And when you do that you end up being nobody,” says AKQA CCO and Vice President Rei Inamoto.

We’re nestled among the highly polished wood and marble of the Conrad Centennial Hotel bar in Singapore, chatting with AKQA Shanghai ECD Johan Vakidis. Earlier in the day, Rei spoke to the Spikes 2014 audience about the importance of and secrets to creating work that endures, that leaves a lasting impact – and here we are now talking about whether or not the advertising industry itself will endure in the shape it is now.

As far as Rei is concerned, this identity crisis isn’t just about the industry as a whole, it’s also causing problems for individual agencies.

“The ones that are doing well are the agencies that have a focus,” he muses. “There’s nothing wrong with doing traditional advertising if you’re really good at it. There are agencies that focus on doing great traditional advertising – print campaigns, TV and what not – and they’re doing really well. I think in our case our focus is helping our clients create the future. It depends on marketing, it depends on advertising. How do we help our clients create the future so they don’t become irrelevant in five years’ time.”

However, Rei is not among the naysayers who predict the complete demise of the advertising agency – though increasing demands and higher standards are likely to ensure that the weak, unfocussed agencies might fall prey to natural selection. “My take is that I think there will be further consolidation of agencies out there. I don’t think in the next five to ten years I have a hard time thinking agencies will disappear. I think there will be fewer. There will be a few really, really good ones and a lot of mediocre ones. The bottom of the group will disappear.”

The theme of endurance has been bouncing around Rei’s mind for some time now – he’s spent the last few months interviewing architects, chefs, curators and designers like Milton Glaser to try and figure out the underpinnings of work that lasts. Whether it’s an imposing building that weathers the decades and centuries or the memory of a beautiful meal that lingers for a lifetime, Rei is convinced that there is much that the industry can learn from these fields.

And Rei isn’t the only one who has turned their mind to lasting experiences. For his Shanghai-based colleague Johan, long-term thinking is the new reality of digital advertising. The days of launching a hundred new campaigns on every new platform has subsided in favour of lasting strategies that grow organically as each platform develops.

“I think the type of work we’ve been doing over the past year or so has definitely shifted, partly because of the consumer, partly because of the maturity of the market. The best example of that has been the fact that China has always been seen as a great testing ground. There was a time when they were launching a new platform a day to counteract the Great Firewall. They built their own YouTube, their own Twitter and there was a bit of media chaos. Now there’s stability. It’s become clear which platforms are the best to communicate with. If you’re familiar with WeChat, it’s become the internet in China. Let’s take Nike for example. Nike has beautiful products to track your activity. What WeChat did through their API was connect to Nike Plus. The reality in China is that everyone has WeChat. We’re encouraging running, for example. We’re creating long term experiences to help people crew up, find fellow runners through WeChat. This is not a one off thing, it’s not a campaign. WeChat is something that grows. It’s people’s lives. It’s a case of moving from campaigns to long term services for the consumer.”

 This kind of ongoing, constantly evolving creativity requires a completely different set up. “

“For that project, we’re extremely integrated in the way we work, from a tech perspective, a creative perspective, and a user experience perspective,” explains Johan. “We have a little task force that not only does the day-to-day but also looks further. We’re launching feature sets now but we’re also talking to the client about what it will be like in two years’ time. One thing that we do want to make sure is that simplicity is key. We want to watch the simplest feature first and reiterate, reiterate, reiterate.”

Another key to creating meaningful, lasting projects is of course talent. In Shanghai Johan has seen a growing pool of hungry, young Chinese people fight their way into the industry. While the country’s advertising industry has flourished in the eyes of its peers elsewhere in the world, back at home advertising is not always seen as an obvious career path by many Chinese families. However, says Johan, that only means that those who do find their way to an agency are all the more driven and ambitious.

Elsewhere, though, the talent pool isn’t looking quite as dynamic. Rei relates the story of Hakuhodo and Dentsu – in the 90s they were the most popular graduate employers in Japan, with college leavers clamouring for jobs across their networks – these days they see less of a stampede. In the States too, marketing and advertising are having to compete with the allure of Silicon Valley. Perhaps this talent drought is one of the reasons that Rei has been so intent on ideas about permanence. By facilitating meaningful work that creates lasting impact on the lives of consumers, perhaps the industry can start to prove its worth to the next generation of bright young things. 

In some respects, Rei’s current fixation on the concept of ‘endurance’ may seem counter-intuitive. After all, isn’t AKQA one of the ad industry front-runners in the world of technology and innovation? Not so, says Rei. Technologies and platforms may evolve but the principles underpinning the work remain constant. “I think day-to-day, because of the nature of the agency that we are, it’s true that we look at the next big thing, the next shiny thing and we try to find meaningful ways of incorporating them into the work that we do for our clients. We do look at these new things that are cropping up all the time but I think that the way we approach the problems that we try to solve for our clients, we try to – in a good way, I hope – look at it a little bit philosophically,” he muses. “Yeah we need to help with our clients’ business and we need to sell more stuff for them, but we try to be very clear about the mission and purpose of what we do and that forces us to have a long term view on the work that we create. So it’s not just the next shiny thing.”