As night turns to day, so does AdHack Alpha turn to AdHack Beta.

Yes: AdHack Beta!

It’s still got that new-website smell, so come on in and sniff around.

• Here’s the welcome page.
• Here’s the AdHack Alpha homepage.

Come on in — the water’s fine.

Have some thoughts? Tell us what you think.

I’m tired of traditional advertising that insults my intelligence. Too often, ads are one-way messages from brands telling consumers what to purchase through overt campaigns that depend on boring stereotypes to inspire us to buy.

Yes, yes, I’m listening.

Most consumers listen to (and trust) product opinions from friends and family far more than any traditional ad developed by professionals. Savvy marketers are realizing the potential of a new (un)advertising model that highlights peer-to-peer recommendations and personal perceptions over rosy fantasies.

Houston, we have liftoff!

Communities are developing around consumer generated advertising, or do-it-yourself (DIY) “ad hacking” that look very promising as a way to share a brand story, without the message coming from the brand itself. Designers, photographers and other creative folks are pushing the advertising envelope online by featuring their own opinions, testimonials and reviews in fresh formats that threaten to blow the socks off the traditional advertising paradigm.

*blush* Aww, shucks.

Perhaps the Scots know best. According to the Scotsman, they prefer sex over chocolate.

If Valentine’s is about love, romance and feeling sexy, why are the advertisements so boring?

Love is never boring.

That’s why the AdHack community decided to spice things up this Valentine’s Day.

AdHack is a community of designers, photographers and creators who are pushing the advertising envelope.

Have a look at the ”Chocolate Love” ad created by AdHack member Giant Ant Media.

The Assignment

Create an ad for the best romance item ever received.

From the Chocolate Love Ad Concept, creators Giant Ant Media say:

“Pretty simple. We wanted to make a connection between chocolate and romance, and chocolate as an aphrodisiac but without using people. By using the chocolates, the video is still racy, which we wanted, but not crude and still retains a “cuteness” about it. This video could work as an ad for a chocolate company (Purdy’s / Lindt), or even for a brand that sells “romantic” goods (Oh My/Kama Sutra).”

“Chocolate Love” is a short, stop-motion animation, shot on a light box. 367 Frames.

About AdHack

AdHack is a web-based marketplace for advertising creative. Anyone can create an ad. Anyone can buy an ad. AdHack acts like an eBay for ad creative, connecting ad buyers and ad creators. Learn more on the public site at www.adhack.com

AdHack is currently in a private alpha rollout. For more information contact James Sherrett.

Publicis will contribute ad creators and clients. Google will contribute ad inventory, delivery and analytics. They each have something the other needs. Seems like a good match.

Wearing my AdHack hat, I can tell you this is a small announcement that points to larger trends in the ad industry. So here’s the big-picture in less than a thousand words.

• Everyone is building ad networks. You can’t swing a dead script in hollywood without hitting one. The big ones are getting bigger, the niche ones are growing more niches.
• Everyone else is building ad analytics / optimization / delivery technologies to run on those ad networks. These folks are hoping to insert themselves into the new advertising value chain that’s taking shape.
• Everyone not building an ad network or analytics / optimization / delivery technologies is building something for web video. This is the shift to something that’s previously been called ‘web TV’ but will be something different. Even the TV industry kinda sees it.

So the volume of ads being served is exploding.

And the advertisers placing the ads or the agencies acting on their behalf know more and more about those ads.

And the more then know, the more they realize that they need specific, custom, fitted ads for each place they advertise. Adopting techniques from other media — repeat the hell out of the same ad! — is like dancing to swim.

And since media is fragmenting from mass to micro, more of those places pop up all the time, all of them with different factors to consider. Now advertisers know about all those factors too since they know so much more about their ad performance.

Mix in more contexts, more advertising outlets and more data about ad performance to prove that the one ad needs to be a whole bunch of ads. That those ads need to evolve and get selected based on performance in tight, quick feedback loops. That new ads need to get built all the time.

Except: who’s going to produce all those ads? All the variations to test and use, test and use, test and use.

Ad creators in agencies are organized to build a few big ads in a long, intensive process. What if they need to build tons of tiny ads in fast, lightweight processes? That no work so well.

The cracks are already showing. Two new models are being pursued today to deal with the inelasticity of ad creation:

1. Automating ad production from standard ad creative units. Take an off-the-shelf ad, make a few aspects variables that an algorithm can tweak for contexts and you have a potential solution. If the variables are significant enough to affect performance. If the ads can just generally not be that good, but scalable.
2. Offshoring production of ads. Big agencies have bought creative shops in China and India so they can build the ads cheaper to satisfy demand. Of course, those agencies still have those ad creators locked up and control what work they do. So not many more ads will get produced. And how many Chinese ad creators understand the micromedia considerations of Cargill’s market in Des Moines, Iowa? I’d love to read that brief.

Will either of these approaches work? Dunno.

But we proposed AdHack as a better way to address the problem. AdHack fits in as the place where ad production can get scaled up with content. Where a product’s users, a micromedia outlet’s audience, or anyone with desire, time and skills can make the ads. Where ads can be found and customized to fit advertisers’ needs. Or ads can be commissioned, tested, selected and delivered from a creative community.

Final thought: in announcing the Publicis / Google deal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made two pretty interesting quotes.

First: “It is possible that what emerges could drive the development of ‘open source advertising.”

Second: “Google is many things, but one thing we are not is creative. We’re a bunch of programmers, basically.”

Both indicate to me that Google sees the problem, sees how it can affect their business, but doesn’t know how (or want) to solve it themselves. My hope is that AdHack solves it for them. That’s what we’re here for.

I presented AdHack at the first Launch Party Vancouver, and the video below was shot at that event. It’s a great time and a cool bunch of people to meet up with. If you’re in the area, come on our and say ‘hi!’

The white paper is essential reading for anyone who wants to think about how advertising, marketing and communications are shifting from mass to micro — audiences, markets, media, etc. And what that shift means for everyone involved.

The Atticus Awards “honour original thinking in communications services and are open exclusively to professionals working in WPP companies.” WPP is an enormous “communications services” company with over 100,000 employees in 106 countries around the world. They’re one of the global, big daddy agencies.

Congratulations to Blaiq on the win!

Update: The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication is now available as a beautiful PDF for download from from ChangeThis. Go git it.

IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It. With a headline like that, who needs to read the full article.

Okay, I did. And I liked what I read. In a more formal way, it sounded familiar to this AdHack ear. Like-ah: what we’ve been saying, but more.

The report observes four change drivers tipping the advertising industry balance of power: control of attention, creativity, measurement, and advertising inventories…

...consumers’ attention has shifted, with personal Internet time rivaling TV time. Consumers have tired of interruption advertising, and are increasingly in control of how they interact, filter, distribute, and consume their content, and associated advertising messages…

...Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies…

...Self-service advertising exchanges are attracting revenues that were once exclusively sold through proprietary channels or transactions.

Overlooking the subtle pitch for IBM’s services (’IBM believes all players will need to invest heavily in consumer analytics and automation to gain more insights about the consumer and how to reach them.’ ) the report reads to me like a great validator from on high.

Sometimes it can get a little lonely out here. Not tilting-at-windmills lonely, just the sole sound of a lone voice. To hear the shifts we’ve based AdHack on reflected back to us from a blue chipper, warms the heart and gives us a happy addition to market context slide of our powerpoint presentation All About AdHack.

So Blue, we hear you.

And those ads can be more than just decent. They can rock as hard as any ad. Then they can catch the attention of the company they’re about and the agency that handles the account. They can be the entry for their creators into advertising glory.

The ads may run on their own. They may get reshot or edited. Standard creative process of iteration applies.

Even for one of the tightest global brands — Apple — DIY advertising is happening. They recently did exactly what AdHack proposes as the new ad creative production model. A DIY ad became their new ad.

The original ad for your consideration, created by Leeds University student Nick Haley on a Macbook with Final Cut Pro, some images off the apple site, and catchy music:

That caught the attention of Apple marketeers. They lit up Nick, flew him to their agency and asked him to help with a High Definition version of the ad. He obliged, they reshot and the following ad resulted:

By opening the creative process Apple wins, TBWA / Chiat wins and Nick wins. So how does this scale up to create a new advertising production process? Psst: AdHack. We’re playing but we’re not just playing.

Now who wants to be second to be first? Auditioning starts with the AdHack private alpha. Want to play with it? Tell me and you’ll get invited.

Update: Make sure to read the comments on the Digg listing for the story. They read like market research responses to the premise of AdHack.

Thanks to Joel for the pointers and Danny for the reportage.

A new McKinsey & Co. report called How Companies Are Marketing Online draws the astonishing conclusion that many advertisers are reluctant to shift dollars online — despite the massive shift of consumer attention online — because of the “absence of meaningful metrics and adequate capabilities.”

I know. This is sequel number what to this movie? So I made the following comments.

Point 1: people, alone and in groups, make decisions based on faith, not reason. No surprise that they stick with what they know, what has succeeded for them in the past, what presents no risk to them losing their job for advocating something new. The person who stands up and wants to do things differently gets the target on their back.

Point 2: marketers want mass audiences but mass audiences are fast becoming as rare as hens teeth. Why mass audiences? Because then marketing is a system. Design the system and then adjust it as needed. We already have the mass system—get a bunch of people and pound them as hard as you can with the same message.

But the web doesn’t conform. Given choices, people gather in smaller groups. They form social bonds or reinforce existing ones. They recommend things to each other, reflecting and tailoring to that individuality they always had. Mass media has lost its ability to focus those individuals into mass audiences at the same time as people have discovered they can do media for themselves.

So a new advertising system is needed to fit a web architecture, and that new system is emeging slowly in small pieces, loosely joined (Weinberger). Which makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even afraid.

So who’s afraid of online advertising? Everyone already in advertising, and all the companies making their living off those people.

I may have had AdHack on my mind just a little as I made the comments.