Yesterday I had the sincere schadenfreude to explain the concept of a ‘brogrammer’ to my boyfriend, a software engineer. He told me he didn’t think he’d ever met a brogrammer.  I’m not sure I have either – I have heard people talk about “slinging code” and read detailed descriptions of the hard-working, hard-partying, hard-assery of Valley start-ups.  I suppose, read one way, it’s supposed to be a recruitment driver: eager young Turks, chomping at the bit to change the world will feel a kinship with this kind of ethos – and nerds will get to feel cool.

Well, whatever.

I find myself increasingly – disillusioned isn’t the word, annoyed is – annoyed with the rising Silicon Valley cool factor.  I’ve written before that the problem with the advertising industry is that it’s full of people who want to be cool, and that cool people can’t, almost by definition, be nerds because nerds are passionate to the point of absurdity about something, and cool kids must be dispassionate at all costs.  So I’ve got good news, everybody! The cool kids are moving to the Valley.

I’ve known lots of cool kids.  They take great pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of others, while almost never noticing it in themselves.  When pointed out to them, they take it in stride as all part of the lifestyle of cool.  They talk a lot about making things, when in point of fact, they rarely make a thing – they ‘brainstorm’ and ‘ideate’ and ‘direct’… But because the thing itself is rarely produced by them, there is a tremulous fault line of doubt rattling under all the coolness.  This is why we argue, in the ad business, about who owns the ‘idea’.

It’s probably also why, in start-up culture, we’re moving from an ethos of “he who slings the code, builds the start-up” to something more personality driven – “he who has failed visibly before and assembles rock star dev teams, builds the start-up”.  We’re shifting away, in start-up culture (or at least as tech-blog press would have it) from a culture of makers to a culture of entitled-by-capital power hoarders.

Some are even threatening that the Valley will turn Republican.

Which is a tidy segue to something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past month or two.  I’ve been ‘building’ the site for my business.  But I choke slightly on the word ‘build’ every time I say it because I do not take myself seriously as a coder, and I’m certainly no developer or software engineer.  It’s not merely a case of (perhaps womanly) self-deprecation – saying I built this site ‘from scratch’ is like saying I make dresses from ‘scratch’.  I don’t weave silk on a loom, I don’t design dresses from my imagination; I buy fabric and notions, and I assemble them using patterns someone else designed.  Coding, as it turns out, is a lot like sewing.

I ‘built’ that

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a post describing my process for building the site for my company, The Difference Engine.  But there were two big obstacles to writing that post:  the first was that the features I think are the best are the features you would either take the most for granted, or would not even be visible to you.

And then there’s the reality of coding in developer frameworks like Ruby on Rails.  I think Noah Brier is where I heard it said that there is nothing more widely available on the internet (except possibly porn) than information about the internet.  And so googling is the most oft-used tool in an aspiring, or even a practicing, coder’s toolkit.  Want to build a blog using Rails? Google it. Want to truncate posts on a front page and link to the full post? Google it.  What’s the ideal column width? Google it.  Someone will know the answer – whether it’s stackoverflow or github or any countless number of google groups and dev discussion boards.

But what Google gives you is access to this amazing treasure trove of ideas, solutions, tutorials, and upgrades that come from thousands of other expert and novice developers, all asking questions and helping each other out.

‘You didn’t build that’

Obama got a lot of guff for reminding business owners who depend on trains, highways, municipal water supplies, mass transit, public education, electricity, or other public infrastructure that while they may have taken the admirable and needed leap to start the business, they didn’t build all the infrastructure that makes starting a business in this country so comparatively easy.  There’s a reason we use the phrase ‘hang out a shingle’: that is all you have to do, a lot of the time, to get started as a business – just say you that you have.

And I should know. I told a room full of people in March at SXSW that I’d started a business;  a month and a half later someone in that room became my business’s first client.  All I had was a URL and a set of business cards.  It’s easy to start believing your own hype when other people seem to.  [It’d be tempting to say that I made all that happen myself, but the truth is, I had access to a bully pulpit because Edward Boches invited me to be on a panel which meant I didn’t have to pay to get in to SXSWi, and Tim Malbon recommended me to Katie Dreke to put on an event with Adidas, so most of my expenses were paid. Free rides and good will can really take you places.]

So it’s now six months later, and I finally ‘finished’ a website for the business.  One I assembled myself.  But.
I didn’t build that.

• Matz invented Ruby, which is the foundational language on which the Ruby on Rails framework was developed.  Apple’s engineers decided to bundle Ruby into the operating system – you don’t even really have to install it on a Mac. dhh invented Ruby on Rails, which is the framework I used to build the site.
• A whole bunch of guys authored the RailsGuides, which hosts the Getting Started guide, which helped me assemble the basic structure of the blogging system on the site.  Ryan Bates produces (prolifically!) RailsCasts, which showed me how to implement sign-in and authentication systems to prevent any old person from blogging on my blahg.
• Alex and Art created Redactor.js, the WYSIWYG editor I use to edit the posts in my blog.The folks at Woo Themes created Flexslider, the jQuery slider plugin that powers the carousel of giant headlines on the homepage.  John Resig released jQuery, and now Dave Methvin leads the dev team that updates and maintains it.
• PostgreSQL is the database system that powers the blogging architecture, and was developed by a bunch of volunteers in the open source community.  Jonas Nicklas forked carrierwave, which enables me to upload files to the blog.  Corey Johnson forked mini-magick which helps Ruby talk to ImageMagick, which will allow me to edit images I upload to the blog.
• Heroku is a cloud platform as a service which gives me the environment for hosting the application, but also for live development without pointing domain servers directly at the URL.  Basically it gave me a bit of cover to fail a lot over the past year or so without anyone noticing.  GitHub is a web-based version control system that allowed me to share my project repos with developers who knew what they were doing, and it’s a treasure trove of other people’s ideas on how to make things work easily in Rails.
• There are some other gems in use in this blog – bcrypt for authentication, json, rspec… Stuart Eccles pointed me at most of these resources, because he’s a Rails developer and an Agilist, and a lovely, lovely boyfriend.
• Plus there’s HTML, and CSS, and countless blog posts on how to style this or that element, and what the difference between a div id and a div style is, and so on.  Oli Mathews helped me trouble-shoot a real stumper in my CSS, and also gave me the recipe for his roast veg masterpiece.
• And just tonight I added some social sharing buttons by AddThis (at the suggestion of Heather James).

So I didn’t build my site, my blog, my authentication system.  Chances are, you didn’t build yours either.  You took the creative leap to conceive of it, you sourced the materials, you assembled it.  But you didn’t write the algorithm, or the gemfile, or the javascript; you didn’t invent and document the framework; you didn’t write the language.  If you’re making websites and web apps these days you are standing on the shoulders of a handful of giants as well as countless footsoldiers who are constantly and incrementally innovating, and trying to make coding easier for everyone else.  And that’s well before you go for your Series A.

Most of the sites you see today are not wholly novel – they are remixes of other ideas, recombinations of pieces to create seemingly new wholes. Some of the best apps out there are actually reductive – they’ve taken away a lot of bells and whistles we got super excited about but didn’t really need.

Mobile is My MVP

In 1999 or 2000, I was working in a start-up and we were developing the website for The Goo Goo Dolls.  It had Flash animation, and it played a riff from “Iris” as the animation loaded with the homepage.  There was lots of useful stuff, too.  But on client calls with the band and their manager, we kept hitting enormous walls of frustration – they couldn’t see any of it.  We’d tested the site on every version of the few browsers then available, and it always worked.  What we hadn’t anticipated was that The Goo Goo Dolls would be on a 28k dial-up while on tour in Germany, and that their ‘browser’ would be AOL.

So when I started to assemble the site for The Difference Engine, I was doing it from the perspective that any choice I made had to look good on my iPhone 4, and load fast enough that I wouldn’t be embarrassed if you loaded it on your mobile browser.  I focused on the Rails app code and the essential HTML, and I stayed out of the stylesheet folder entirely.  For what seemed like the longest time it was just black text on a white background.  I started with the authentication framework – a sign up and log-in screen.  When that worked the way I wanted, I asked Rails to generate the scaffold for the blogging system. I edited those features to display posts the way I wanted.  Then I asked Rails to set up some static pages for me, so I could do the obligatory creds pages all consultancies must have.  It’s amazing how much Rails just anticipates, and how little you have to do to set up the essentials.  Which, by the way, is something Avi Flombaum brought to life in a 2 hour intro to Rails class he let me attend, for free, through Rachel Sklar.

When all that was working, I checked it on my mobile devices – yep, still working.  Then I layered on some fancy – the Redactor WYSIWYG editor in the post form (which you can’t see because you don’t have a log-in! but trust me, it’s beautiful), Flexslider for the slider on the main page. I chose Flexslider on Josh Schelling’s recommendation because it’s responsive to touch interfaces and works well on mobile devices. When those were working properly, I turned to the question of styling.

I got my fonts from TypeKit. I found some great blog posts about combining web fonts, knowing that Bebas Neue was the font I’d chosen for the logo, and so I paired it with Museo Slab, an internet favorite.  Back in the spring, I’d used Adobe’s kuler app to find complementary colors for the site, and used those when I designed business cards I had printed by Moo.com. I designed the cards/logo first in Keynote and then in Pixelmator, on suggestion from web designers I know who tell me they hardly use Photoshop anymore. I used the logos and the fonts and the colors to style the site. I chose a column width (again, on Stuart’s suggestion) that would be both in keeping with what page designers have known for years about the ideal width of a column and with what would be most legible on a mobile device.  I decided to eschew too many containers or grids, because they get wonky on mobile devices.

I added some Slideshare and YouTube assets to the site; both of these platforms provide mobile friendly embed code. I added a tag to the phone numbers and email addresses on the site so that you can tap to contact me from any  mobile device – and if you’ve got the Skype Click to Call plugin installed in your browser, you can Skype me directly from your desktop, too.  Whee!

I decided against hosting comments – the battle against the bots is a losing one, and I find moderating comments to be a bit of a chore, so I took a page from ITV News and opted for social sharing features instead.  If you want to share or talk about the ideas on the site, you can do that where you do that – on Twitter and Facebook.  Heather suggested AddThis and damned if it didn’t just work. Magical.

I didn’t build that.

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” – President Barack Obama

It’s not popular with the Ayn Rand/Rand Paul/Paul Ryan set, and evidently it’s not popular with the VCs and Founders who are riding the wave of an economy whose wealthy are awash in cash and looking for places to stick it.  But the truth is, if you’ve made anything worthwhile in this country, or on this internet, you have a lot of other people and institutions (some of them independent citizens, some of them foreigners, some even governmental) to thank for creating the infrastructure you built it on.

You have a lot of people you depend on that you will never be able to really repay, people who are not on your payroll, who you don’t know, who aren’t even charging for the solution they spent the intellectual capital to create.  Their ‘free’ work allows people like me to build a website I can use to (one hopes) solicit clients, build a business, make some money, hire some people, etc.  And the beat goes on.

I’ll add other features as I need them, and those features will come from a tutorial on RailsCasts, or a RailsGuide, or a google search, or a helpful coder on StackOverflow, or a friendly dev at a MeetUp.  I will profit from the work of these people in many ways: I will continue to learn from them, be inspired by them, be helped by them, use their expertise and effort to wow my clients and my peers.  I will begin to count myself as a member of that community of open source thinkers and makers.

But for now, for my site… let’s not say that I built that.  Let’s say instead that we did.

The truth is, this topic makes me physically exhausted.

And cranky – have I mentioned how cranky I become when this topic comes up?  My boyfriend asked if I’d read something about Marissa Mayer by Dave McClure, and I snapped at him that I didn’t give a shit what Dave McClure thinks about Marissa Mayer, and that I didn’t really care about Marissa Mayer, or the color pink, either (color choices for this blog notwithstanding).

In that moment I thought, maybe he’s a better feminist than I am.

Maybe it’s the Olympics and the Mars Curiosity Rover and all the women who are leading both wins; maybe it is Marissa Mayer; maybe it’s the fact that a few good men are beginning to actively call for women’s participation in tech.  Maybe it’s that I’ve started a digital innovation strategy business and I keep getting asked if I’d like a job when I HAVE STARTED A DIGITAL INNOVATION STRATEGY BUSINESS.  I’m busy.  I have clients and family obligations and a sprained back and I thought we already covered this.

I mean, come on, 4As.  I know it’s the CreateTech conference. And I know that the ad business, already fairly Luddite when it comes to women, believes women in tech are vanishingly few (in the same way they believe women who are funny, or women who deserve a creative director’s title are vanishingly rare).  Still, fifteen percent participation of women on the speaker’s dais is not enough.  Seven percent representation of women on the committee roster is definitely not enough.  Why an organization would think that would be enough, when they’d already been given a hard time, TWICE, about industry events they’d hosted with not enough women, is beyond me.

This is the industry organization that is supposed to represent the advertising industry – to our peers, to government, to our clients.  These events are aimed at inspiring us, uniting us, recognizing our creativity and strategy, creating community and promoting progress.  But the ‘us’ in the equation is decidedly male, usually white, and often over 40.  I like white men over 40, don’t get me wrong. I’m related to some white men over 40. But they’re not inspiring me in this industry anymore, they represent an old guard of a struggling business model, and they’d be wise to be more inclusive of diverse perspectives and people.

[Oh, and some of them, as my female peers can attest, are downright disgusting.]

I considered emailing the conference organizer directly, but then I was stopped by imagining the excuses I’m so used to hearing: there aren’t as many female creative technologists; we asked everyone we could think of; the only woman we’ve ever heard of couldn’t make it.  Last year I fought these responses to get more women on the dais, more women judges, more women participating in the 4As Strategy Festival, and felt we’d made some progress.  The thought of repeating the fight again this year was… annoying*.

I mentioned this to a couple of my men friends.  The response: “I really don’t know any women who are creative technologists.”

But that sentence needs unpacking: “I really don’t know any women who are creative technologists.”  What does that mean?

• Does it mean, “I don’t know any women”?
• Does it mean, “I don’t know any women who are creative technologists in advertising”?
• Does it mean, “I don’t know any women who are creative technologists like me”?
• Does it mean, “I don’t know any women who are this one specific kind of creative technologist that I think they meant when they coined the term, even though lots of people call themselves creative technologists who are not that”?

So I tried something.  I said, somewhat huffily, “Don’t think of your ideal of what a creative tech is – look at the list of men who’ve been invited to be on the committee or the dais, and think of women who do what they do, or are at least as smart as they are about tech and advertising.”

A few seconds later he’d sent me the LinkedIn Profile of Christy King, the VP Digital, Technology R&D for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. So yeah, not only did he know of a woman who is a creative technologist, she does her work in a business that defines ass-kicking, and she’s in a hard-core technology role.  She just doesn’t work in an ad agency.

My initial reaction was, see was that so hard??

Look, there aren’t many creative technologists in the world of advertising; we couldn’t actually do a 2-day conference with the half-dozen pure CTs in the business.  So the conference organizers broadened the scope to look for “tech-makers and tech-thinkers” in that world.  Yet, if the scope is broader than the half dozen serious app developers in senior roles who work in agencies, then it should start to sweep up the many women who are both tech-makers and tech-thinkers.

I personally have a list of women, many of whom would qualify; and I’m sure if I ask more people, there’ll be more suggestions.  But in order to get these recommendations, we have to frame it as I did above – look at THESE men, and suggest a woman who does what they do.  Not your ideal of creative technologists, not the female version of you, and not a VP-level, female codemonkey CT who works in an old school agency.  In other words, suggest women who are like these men.  Suggest women who exist**.

Because the moral of this story is this:  Women are being evaluated against unicorns, not against men.

And that’s why there are so few visible women in tech.

* Almost as annoying as seeing that this year’s 4As Strategy Festival theme is remarkably similar to the theme of the workshop I gave at the Festival last year, though I was not asked to participate as a speaker or organizer by the 4As this year.  Despite that, a lovely man, Faris Yakob, suggested to the chair of the Creative Technology committee that I be asked to be a judge for the Strategy Festival awards this year, for which there is, at least, decent gender parity among the judges.

** When I spoke wth the organizer of the Planningness conference before the 2011 event, the response to my criticisms of a dearth of women speakers was hyper-specificity: “yes, but do you know women who are experts in game design, systems thinking, network theory?”  It seemed like a test – but it was one that was remarkably easy to pass.  That’s because when you get specific about what you’re looking for, it gets EASIER to find a woman like that.  She actually stops being a mythical creature and becomes a person with a resume, a career, an education.  Give me the parameters, and the variable to solve for is now, often, just the name.

This whole campaign from Nike in the UK – their guerilla Olympics effort – is just beautiful.  It’s quiet, it’s compassionate, and it feels like the heart and soul of the Nike brand bubbling back up to the surface.

The concept that anyone can be great, that we all have that capacity, feels true – especially when you see people working hard to achieve whatever greatness means for them.  Here are a few, I’ll lead with one for the girls…

Click here to view the embedded video.

But this is the one that really caught my attention today.  Finally, another ad made me stop and watch it – clearly had the same effect on my friend Asif, who just shared it on Twitter.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let it inspire you.  Even if for just a minute.

On Friday night in London, Danny Boyle showed us what England has to be proud of.  Their contributions to sport, industry, technology, literature, music, were brought to life through music, dance, film and a remarkable stage.  The sometimes-witty, sometimes-silly, often-self-deprecating British humor shone through.  While Beijing’s opening ceremony was a demonstration of the Party’s vision of Chinese history, a perfectly coordinated, monolithic, prideful and proud display of a culture feeling pretty good about itself, London’s managed to pluck at heart strings and play for laughs within the construct of controlled chaos.  Which I suppose is Boyle’s signature style.  That and lots of children singing.

Now, I watched the live BBC stream through a VPN service, which means that I could watch at the same time as my friends in the UK, that I did not have to listen to Bob Costas or Matt Lauer or Meredith Vieira, and that I did not have to sit through commercial breaks.

You might think this is the liberal northeastern elite version of me talking, finding ads and the cast of the Today Show so very middle America, so very pedestrian.  And you might think of me as living in the tech bubble because I used a VPN to watch a British feed, and then tweeted about the experience.  But as I was watching my liberal fantasy on my tech bubble connection, I only had to look at Facebook and Twitter to see the VPN have-nots were very unhappy with the American broadcast television experience.

The Tape Delay

People were angry about the tape delay, starting nearly 4 hours after the actual ceremonies.  You’d think we’d be used to tape delay, but the truth is that when it comes to global sporting events (The Olympics, the World Cup), people will get up or stay up to watch the actual event on whatever satellite link or cable channel that will provide it in real time.  And with the advent of real time, global social media, many people are hearing about what happens before they can see it themselves.  We call this phenomenon the ‘spoiler’ for a reason.  Knowing what happens ahead of time spoils the experience.

The thrill of the Games is still there for many people, watching the tape delay, but while we were watching the women’s gymnastics teams in their qualifying all-around competition Saturday night, the athletes participating in the games, the journalists covering it in North Greenwich, and the good people of London were asleep.  Those events had happened hours before.  Now the broadcast became the backstory – we knew which members of the team had qualified for the finals competition in Women’s Gymnastics, and we knew that the US Men’s Relay team had blown first place.  We were watching to see how that happened, but not as it happened.

The Editing

The second price to be paid by the US television viewing audience was one of completeness.  It’s impossible to watch every second of every competition, and nobody wants to, but the opening ceremony was one scripted performance.  If you tunneled into the UK via a VPN service, you saw the complete performance; if you watched on NBC later that night, you got the edited version.  In fact, you completely missed a dance tribute to the 7/7 attacks, instead seeing Bob Costas interview Michael Phelps.  I don’t think we even have to argue that if another network preempted a tribute to 9/11 to interview the captain of the swim team, Americans would be outraged.  And when the Brits heard what happened on NBC after they’d gone to bed, they rightfully were.

The Stupidity

Related to this is, perhaps, a third price. NBC’s handling of Olympics coverage thus far has come to be known on the web as #nbcfail – but it’s clear that this is about a couple of things.  One is just the disappointment of not getting what you want, but the other is embarrassment.  I think some members of the social media dust-up are embarrassed the American sporting press would be so… bad.  Maybe it is, in its way, another example of Ugly Americanism.  The Yanks think the games are all about them, which is why they wait to watch when it’s convenient for them, which is why they cut away from a moving tribute to the victims of a terrorist attack (that took place the day after London won the Olympic bid, 7 years ago) to interview one of their athletes, which is why the announcers seemed almost proud to have never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), which is why the term ‘money shot’ was used in reference to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, as she opened the ceremonies, as her father did the last time the Games were in London (in another time of austerity).

So, the critique among the twittering classes was that NBC was out of touch, out of date, and out of time – that this woeful misunderstanding of the power of realtime social networks in transmitting information about the ceremony and the ensuing Games would no doubt backfire on NBC one way (in ratings, not yet) or another (in good will, right now).  Even the bartender in the pub on Sunday afternoon complained about NBC’s coverage of the games; the camera had been trained on the faces of the Women’s Gymnastics team, but not on the routines they were watching.

Interestingly, across the pond, viewers there complained about the BBC announcers’ lack of knowledge of cycling, and the quality of their commentary across a variety of sports.  So at least there is some good news for NBC: they’re not alone.

It’s hard for me to say whether this year’s broadcast is substantively worse in quality of commentary or coverage than in previous years, or whether the wealth and availability of real time and in-depth information about the teams, athletes and competitions elevates the audience’s expectations of coverage.  But it’s clear that the audience expected something better, and so far, hasn’t got it.

But here is the essential problem.  The audience wants a better product experience, but what they don’t seem to realize is that *they are* the product.  The customers for the IOC and NBC and Comcast are advertisers – those big brands who paid for exclusivity and fierce enforcement of that exclusivity, but don’t seem to be getting much credit.  NBC and its cable provider parent Comcast paid $1.2 billion to the IOC for broadcast rights.  No wonder they only permitted paid subscribers to MSNBC or CNBC to watch the livestream on nbcolympics.com; no wonder they interrupted the opening ceremonies to show commercials; no wonder the coverage of competition feels sub-par and strained.  They have sponsors and advertisers to serve, and money to recoup.

The way they do that is promising brands aggregated audiences who are likely to see the advertising that occupies 16-18 minutes per hour of prime time American television.   To make good on that promise, they do all they can to ensure we’ll be there when they said we would be – so they circle the wagons of content access.  No truly free livestreams, no commercial-free or -limited broadcasts.  If we could watch it for ‘free’ on the web, without commercials, whenever we felt like it, we wouldn’t need that $100+ cable subscription, and NBC wouldn’t be able to charge hundreds of thousands per half-minute to P&G or Coca-Cola or McDonald’s… and by extension, they wouldn’t be able to afford the IOC’s asking price.

New Media Joins the Fray

This morning, #nbcfail was joined by #twitterfail after the Telegraph revealed that Twitter shut off the account of a journalist critical of NBC’s coverage of the games (who had also tweeted the public, business email address of the president of NBC Olympics), after they reported the journalist’s critique to NBC and told them how to file a complaint against him.  Twitter and Comcast/NBC have a partnership in place where Twitter features highlighted tweets from NBC accounts in return for on-air promotion of the service.  While there was no money that changed hands, apparently, those hands are not clean.

Jeff Jarvis and others make the argument that Twitter should observe the church/state boundaries between news and advertising that newspapers pretend to observe, or risk losing their credibility.  But I’d counter that again, this is a misunderstanding of the business model.  Twitter is following in NBC and the rest of Old Media’s footsteps.  Their users are the product, the third-party developers who made the experience what it is are now friendly adversaries – they’ve chosen a sponsorship and advertising based revenue model, not a subscription one.  For us to use Twitter for free, for this platform that has done so much good and changed so much about the way many people communicate to continue to grow, they need to find a source of revenue.  And featured/highlighted/sponsored tweets are the path they’ve chosen.  When they did that, their product stopped just being the platform, and began to include the audience the platform gathers.

The problem (and it’s hard to say how big a problem it is) for Twitter is that the people who use it the most, and who’ve used it the longest, are pretty sure that they are writers and editors of the content on this platform called Twitter; that they are the customers of this product. It’s much harder to introduce advertising into a fully-vested community than most social media startups understand; it’s not just an intrusion, it’s an invasion.  The members of the community who took some pride of ownership in helping to make Twitter a fun, smart, interesting, dynamic place (or a dull, stupid, bigoted, repetitive place, depending on your feeds) believe they have rights, too.  But those users don’t write checks to Twitter; McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, P&G, NBC do (disclaimer: I have no idea which of those brands pay for promoted tweets, I’m just saying, brands).

Twitter, like NBC, is not a charity.  That’s true.  And besides, more cash into the platform or newspaper theoretically allows them to do more for the audience; and they need to do more for the audience so the audience will turn up.  As long as the audience keeps turning up, they can keep charging brands for space/time on their platform or page or air.  But if the audience begins to think that its interests are not being served, if the content is less credible or less relevant or more cluttered or just not as good, the audience starts to wander off.  And when the audience wanders off, so do the advertising dollars, which are programmed to chase ‘viewers’ and ‘readers’ and ‘users’ all over Creation.  When the ad dollars wander off, the platform is forced to do less, and then even those in the audience who were okay with the brands and dollars and bias start to find their attention turning elsewhere, to something shinier.

Soon we’ll start to see advertisers behaving like Little League parents, confront the Coach T by saying, “I paid good money for my kid to be on this team, I want him off the bench, and on the pitcher’s mound.”  Advertisers don’t just transact media spend for audience eyeballs.  They choose media placement based on the audience that channel attracts, the content they publish, the ‘match’ between the advertiser’s brand, and the channel’s brand.  There are a lot of places to spend money if you’re an advertiser, so advertisers know they have all the power.  And they don’t like it when a platform they’re subsidizing is critical of them in print or on air.  So they’ll threaten to take their spend elsewhere. Twitter wasn’t a natural ad platform; the promise of millions of dollars of revenue turned it into one.  Twitter wants that cash bad enough, they apparently don’t even need to be threatened.

But for now, the Twitter membership are holding on to some measure of power.  The firestorm around the #nbcfail/#twitterfail conversation got the journalist reinstated, the Twitter policy ‘clarified‘ and left NBC looking nervous, saying “Not it!”

The easy thing seems to be to turn your users, your audience, your readers, into the product.  There is a limitless, misguided optimism around the notion that advertisers will always want your aggregated audience, your page views, your user demographics and data.  But the history of Old Media tells us a different story, and the backlash to the NBC Olympics coverage and to Twitter’s handling of a journalist critical of NBC’s Olympics coverage allude to what happens when the audience isn’t happy.  First they get mad, and then they leave.

If either brand, NBC or Twitter, wanted to ensure their continuing relevance and revenue, and free themselves from the shackles of these cumbersome business models, they’d flip the value chain and ask themselves what would benefit users, viewers, readers, us – they’d ask themselves what we would be willing to pay for.

What is a brand?  Some people will tell you that a brand is what people think about a company and its products, or how people feel about it.  Some people will tell you that it’s a ‘story’ that people pick up through cues both ambient and explicit as they interact with this ephemeral thing called a brand.  Some people think it’s just the logo or design, the branding.

None of them are entirely wrong.  But the sad truth is that a brand, for the past 40 years or so, has been about what the marketers of the company and its products want people to think or feel or associate with them, whether this is authentic to the product or service, or not.  They have created a careful mythology in which The Brand trumps the product, trumps the service, even trumps the customer.  In which the cartoon below sounds a familiar refrain.

There are reasons why this notion developed – some good, some bad.  Concepts of ‘brand positioning’ became very important in the middle of the last century when we were all mucking about in the ‘swamp of sameness’ that parity products created.  Mature mass market capitalism called for some other way to sell products than actual product differentiation or customer benefit, because often, the products were the same, with the same benefits.  It was less about whether our detergent gets your whites whiter, than whether you believe that this is truer of our detergent than others.  Also, company and product names were familiar to us – we all grew up around Tide and Coca-Cola and Chevrolet. We didn’t need to be told about their products anymore, we just needed a reminder, a quick nudge.

Meanwhile, the creative revolution was coming up at about the same time that agency commissions were going down, which was actually good news for the industry – it meant really expensive, beautiful, celebrity-laden, location-shot TV spots, that simply deserved to be only in prime time television – and that meant you could still make a living in this business.

I can literally go on at length about why we created the Brand Bubble.  But like other bubbles, where the value of the underlying assets is wildly overestimated, and under-capitalized, the Brand Bubble is bursting before our eyes.

The constant discussion and debate about the following factors are where you can see the fissures forming in the Brand Bubble:

• media fragmentation, of not having a captive audience making appointments to watch our ads
• social media, of actually hearing what customers have to say
• digital marketing, of not having complete control of a contained, static message in a system where measurement has been long established
• co-creation or user-generated content, of having to share the brand with customers
• mobile, of not being able to serve up epic production values
• big data, of not knowing where the data is, how to get it out, and what it means if you could find it and use it
• ROI, of having to be accountable to something other than your own work (think: setting KPIs after the creative is locked, or establishing successful media metrics based on ratings points/impressions)

The fear that underlines these new threats/challenges is present in every digital master class I teach or attend, in every debate about whether there is such a thing as a ‘digital planner’ or if digital is just a channel tactic, in every deck we write for a client in lieu of work we produce.

I submit that there are no longer 4Ps. There’s only one, and that’s Product.  Your product (or service) is inextricable from where you sell it, how you sell it, and for how much. But it’s more than that – today I can probably get your product from multiple places, for multiple prices, with or without a coupon or Groupon or discount code or customer loyalty program.  Maybe I can even get a similar product directly from one of your competitors, without the middle man.  Some of these companies’ customer service, marketing and product accessories/features are all rolled up into one product experience.  Their marketing can make it easier for a customer to own a product, not just easier for a company to sell a product.

In some regards, it’s a return to this:

Sunkist knew you’d heard of oranges. It wanted you to add a new behavior – to drink oranges. They’d send you a juicer if you sent them $.05, or you could get one with Sunkist oranges at the grocer. That juicer made it easier to buy more oranges, and to put them to good use.

So a ‘brand’ – if such a thing exists – is now not about what people think about you, or feel about you.  A Brand is that inflection point between your product or service and my experience of it, and the brand’s ‘positioning’ emanates from how I talk about that inflection point with others.

Today I was reminded of how true this has become. Virgin Atlantic, the airline founded by that Master of Brands, Sir Richard Branson, has been my preferred international carrier for several years.  When I was flying a lot to Europe and Asia for work, I had the luxury of company reimbursed business class, and Virgin’s Upper Class experience was difficult to rival.  It was luxurious without being stuffy, fun in spite of being paid for mainly by business travelers. And the service, from being picked up and dropped off by Virgin car service drivers, to the personal service you received when you arrived at Heathrow, to the truly excellent airport lounges, to the in-flight massages, was impeccably effortless, and always ‘on brand.’

I found this to be true, if to a lesser degree, in their Economy cabin as well. Flight attendants were always friendly but professional, phone representatives were cheerful and helpful and always resolved any issues without attitude or delay.  The food was better than on most airlines, the inflight entertainment system reliably good (from both a content and an usability perspective), and the planes flew on time.

The ‘Brand Halo’ of my Upper Class experiences had cast a warm glow on my Economy experience, but the experience itself was good.  Booking online was generally easy, and fares were always competitively priced; airport kiosks worked well and never caused issues; checking a bag was always handled efficiently. I could justify my decision to occasionally spend a little extra.

But I had a bad experience last month. First, the checkin kiosk at Heathrow misspelled my name, causing a delay as they figured out that the booking and my passport were right, but the kiosk was wrong.  Then we boarded the plane on time only to sit at the gate for almost 4 hours, without air conditioning or refrigeration.  We sweltered, the food spoiled. And when they’d finally fixed the problem, they locked the doors, announced there’d be no meal service, and took off, casually mentioning that they had considered canceling the flight but decided against.

While we waited, and when we landed, there were a few hundred people angrily tweeting and posting status updates on Facebook about the botched service.  Whoever manages @VirginAtlantic tweeted in response first, the same explanation the crew gave us, and then specifically to me:

@VirginAtlantic

@farrahbostic It would be a shame to judge us on this 1 experience if you’ve always enjoyed before. I hope you give us a 2nd chance soon ^G

Maybe I was jetlagged, exhausted, hot, and looking down the barrel of an hour long drive home, only to get up 3 hours later to go to JFK for another flight, one I was supposed to be able to get 7 hours sleep before taking, had our flight from Heathrow arrived on time.  But when I saw that tweet I was pretty furious – it was absolutely not an apology. Read one way, it seemed to suggest that the real shame would be if I was the kind of hard-ass to hold a grudge. And also, let’s be clear – these replies came at the start of the British business day – not in real time when people were complaining.  You could watch the complaining escalate in the face of silence.

Today I’ll head to the airport for another flight, and yes, it’s with Virgin.  But it’s already gone wrong.  The online check in system isn’t allowing me to check in, but there’s no explanation why.  When I called customer service I was told ‘others are able to check in’ and that I should just check back again later (something I’ve been doing since 10pm last night).  Finally I was told that if that wasn’t working there was nothing customer service could do to override the message and so I must arrive an hour earlier than everyone else so that I can try to get a seat that is neither in the middle, nor in the very back row.

I feel mistreated, inconvenienced, and neglected. I’m complaining on Twitter, and now I’m giving 1500 words to it, which I’ll share everywhere.  We’re at the inflection point: whatever the flight itself will be like, the service wrapper around that flight is broken, and all the hard work will be done by me, not the airline. The degree to which Virgin credibly stands for ‘a different kind of airline’ is now close to nil – never mind the red and purple suits, the music, the cheeky safety messages, or the decent curry.  That’s all window dressing.  The product itself – a nearly $1000 flight, delivered via a broken online experience, a bad previous flight experience, and a sub-par customer service experience – isn’t “playing back the Brand Architecture”.

The Bubble, in other words, has burst.

It’s 3am on a Sunday morning, and I just wrote a 20 question survey that I want to share with you to better understand the agony and the ecstasy of one piece of the insight value chain – qualitative research.

I believe in the value of talking to real people about the products and services I help my clients develop and sell. I believe in being a member of a reality-based community. And I believe that evidence and empiricism often lead not only to incremental improvement, but also to great leaps of imagination and invention.

I believe in it so strongly that I’m building a business around it, and working only with clients who are willing to give evidence a shot.

Still, I feel saddled with a tradition of “research” for gathering this evidence.  As a former partner in a research-based brand consultancy, I can tell you that the standard operating procedures of most researchers are built on tradition, on a desire to be taken seriously as something professional and almost science-y, balanced with a need to be flexible and creative and responsive.

But tradition is not the only reason that the standard operating procedure has become standard.  The biggest reason we cling to the 8 person focus group, conducted in a grey room in front of a grey mirror with grey people, is that we are dependent on a research supply chain that is broken.  And there are four reasons, all mutually dependent and a bit circular, why this chain is broken.

How Sample is Collected is Broken.

Random sampling of people walking past you on the street corner, mall intercepts, fliers on the bulletin board at the community center or grocery store, direct mail solicitation, robo-calling, or registering online – these are all legitimate, time-tested means of collecting sample.

Most recruiters focus on the most general of general population folks when they are standing in malls, or calling people at dinner time.  There’s never any trouble finding stay-at-home moms, retirees, students or the marginally employed (which are, admittedly, a plentiful piece of the economy these days).  But start getting specific – not just Walmart Moms, but Walmart moms who own an iPhone and a Prius – and things get tricky.

Or start looking for people who aren’t at the mall at 3pm on a Wednesday: office managers, shipping managers, IT directors, CEOs, lawyers or accountants or doctors.  Or for people who aren’t at home in front of the TV at 10am or 10pm – college students, retail workers, bartenders, people with social lives. It starts getting tougher, and then you have only two choices – pray for a list, or staff up to start dialing the phone book in search of the people you need to talk to.

Maybe you’re lucky, maybe there is a customer or prospect database. Many clients aren’t direct to consumer sellers, so they often don’t have this data.  Yet even when they do, you begin to rethink the definition of luck.  Dummy phone numbers, misspelled email addresses, out of date addresses, incorrectly entered data.  I’ve had to quote clients a 1000:1 ratio on some lists for number of calls we’ll have to make to find a single respondent. Because even if the data is good, you don’t know when is best to reach them, if they’ll be interested in participating, if they’ll be available on your schedule, or if they’ll even qualify once they’re put through the screener.

In other words, sample is tough to get, and even tougher to ensure is of quality.

Screeners and Profiles are Broken.

If you’ve ever drafted a screener you’ll know that they seem to go in one of two directions: too specific or too simplistic.

The too specific screener may actually get you exactly the person you think you want to speak to (short of having an accurate, up to date, well tended customer or prospect list).  But it will strike fear and panic into the hearts of any researcher or planner to have to sit patiently as the days go by without a single recruit – because of the sample problems I outlined above.

The too specific screener also begins to set up every good-enough respondent as a scapegoat, branded with the “Not the Target” mark of the client or agency who is looking more for validation than for a learning experience.

But on the other hand, the simplistic screener is a blunt instrument: “do you buy this product and are you available on Monday” may not give you enough information about the potential respondent to know whether they’ll be right for the kind of research you want to do.

Regardless of whether the screener is good or bad, the biggest problem with it is that it is a script from which we do not allow or trust our research partners to deviate. There’s no improvisation in recruiting – we quite literally say “TERMINATE” on screener questions where the wrong answer leads to disqualification. Not only is that a sudden stop to a phone call from a stranger, one that ends in what is unmistakably a rejection, but it’s also a phone call the recruiter doesn’t get paid for.  Recruiters get paid by respondent recruited, not by time spent calling people or by effort. Therefore, recruiters want the most relaxed criteria they can get – ensuring they have to make the fewest number of calls to “fill the groups” – and therefore to get paid.

Project Management is Broken.

Because of all the difficulty in getting a large enough sample to recruit from, and in defining a subset of that sample that you want to include in your research in a way that is specific enough to get you who you want, but not so specific that you can’t get anyone, researchers, strategists, and people like me are constrained in multiple ways.

• It’s batch-and-queue, baby. Screeners must be drafted and approved by clients. Then they have to be handed off to the recruiter, who will inevitably spend a day asking more questions to clarify the screener so they can preemptively reduce errors when the phone bank gets to work.  Recruiters will almost uniformly tell you that all recruits take 2 weeks, some longer.  This isn’t strictly speaking true, because they will almost always be able to “fill the group” – whether you give them a shitty list of 2000 names and 4 days, or no list at all and 2 weeks.  They will generally recruit up to the last minute – and often don’t put the screener in field right away if they feel they have enough time to spare.
• It’s a black box. Once the screener has been “programmed” and the call center activated, there’s no transparency into progress.  Once a day, beginning on whatever day they get the first confirmed respondent, most recruiters  will begin to share an excel spreadsheet with respondent names and their answers to the screener’s questions.  If there are people being ‘terminated’, you don’t see them.  Only if lots of people start to disqualify on one particular question will the recruiter call their client to talk about those disqualifications and ask to “relax the recruit” in order to make numbers.  As a buyer of field services, I can’t see how those criteria are affecting the recruit, and so I can’t take action to help my recruiter course correct. In the meantime, I’ll have nervous clients or colleagues wanting updates on the recruit, and I simply have to wait until the recruiter calls me back or emails me an update that is, almost by definition, an incomplete picture of the situation. But it’s no wonder that recruiters only give you daily updates – they’re working the phones too hard to get in touch on progress or check in with ideas about how to improve the situation.

Qualitative Research Design is Broken.

This is a topic I can go on and on about. But for the purposes of this post – study design is broken because it is created with the realities of the research supply chain in mind, and this can trump quality of the learning experience.  Rather than thinking through the right kinds of people to meet and learn from, we start thinking about cities: Which town will have early tech adopters aplenty?  Where do people tend to shop at big box stores?  Which cities over-index on soap opera viewership?  The question of location is dictated by two considerations: the need to do face to face research that lots of people can observe, and the need to find a recruiting partner who has a sample database with our kinds of people in it.  At the same time, we’re thinking about segments that are distinct enough from one another, but still all within the reach of our clients, from whom we’ll learn something useful.  They’ve also got to be distinctive enough that they look like different groups when you’re sitting on the other side of the glass, but not so unique that they’re a needle in a haystack.

In other words, we’re trying to guess what our recruiting partners can get us that is also relevant to our clients.  And we default to using the recruiter’s crappy facilities because you want to keep them on side by paying them a rental fee plus the head count fee, and besides, in for a penny, in for a pound.  Plus it’s easier to corral our clients into a dark room with bowls of Chex Mix and a mini-fridge full of sodas than it is to have them tag along for every site visit, ride along, and in-home interview.

How We Treat “Respondents” is Broken.

Even the way we treat respondents is batch and queue. It begins with a phone survey, followed by an email with instructions for getting to and preparing for a group; showing up 15 minutes before a group begins, filling out more forms, sitting in a waiting room; names are called and 1 or 2 people are left behind; they’re directed into a room where they’re told to turn off cell phones and sit in a chair and put on a name tag.  A moderator comes into the room and asks questions – depending on how good she is, it’ll either seem like an interrogation or a conversation.  Sometimes it’ll be fun.  We’ll provide sodas and food, but not schedule a break in the 2 hours for a trip to the bathroom.  The moderator will cut people off if they talk too much, and then when the time is up, that’ll be it.

Respondents have the vague sense of being watched, but mostly forget about what sits behind the giant mirror behind the moderator, unless of course there’s a tap at the glass, or a note is passed in, or she asks someone to speak up because the microphones aren’t picking up soft or low voices.  Then they’re ushered back into the waiting room, asked to sign for their ‘incentive’, and head home, not sure whether this was helpful to anyone, or what will come of it.  And this is how to “get paid for your opinions.”

We spend about $100 a head just to find these people.  And then we haggle with them about how much it’s worth to them to spend 90 minutes or 2 hours with us discussing topics ranging from nearly irrelevant to them to deeply personal and private.  We assess their value – the 22 year old part-time employed mom is worth $75 for 2 hours, the 35 year old IT director is worth $150. This isn’t about their value to our clients, but about their value in the world.  We reason, that mom would be lucky to make $35 an hour; whereas that IT director might actually need to be paid a bit more to show up if his title is senior enough.  We don’t stop to think that the mom spends thousands of dollars every year at her local grocery store, while that IT director may not actually be the one who signs off on the purchase of a new CRM system.  Her value to a consumer packaged good brand is definite; his is tenuous.  But we don’t think about them as valued customers or prospects, we think about them as short term employees.  We should be engaging them as collaborators that our clients don’t otherwise have (or think they have, or want to have) direct access to.

Trust is Broken.

Why are we doing things this way? It’s a problem of trust. Clients don’t trust agencies to do ‘unbiased’ research on their own ideas. Agencies don’t trust researchers not to kill a good idea. Researchers don’t trust recruiters to get them the ‘right’ respondents. And we don’t trust respondents to be smart, creative, collaborative, or frankly, even experts in their own lives. So we over process the process, we constantly question and negotiate the investment of money and time, and rather than a true best effort, we do what we think is possible, rather than what is best.

So why do we do keep doing it??

Look, we – planners, strategists, designers, makers, brands – still commission qualitative research, we still write screeners, use recruiters, hire moderators, sit in back rooms and listen as questions on discussion guides are asked.

After all, we still need evidence. We need that gut check, that reality check. We need to learn *something* or risk making unfounded decisions, decisions purely on personal taste or ego.  While we all seem to have come to consensus on the notion that you can’t ask consumers what they will want in the future, we all seem to also agree that the person who comes up with an idea is inherently biased in its favor, even when it’s shit.  So we hope for the wisdom of the crowd in adjudicating the value of an idea.

Our path to this adjudication strips crowd wisdom of most of its value. It’s too stressful, too opaque, too costly, too time consuming and inefficient.  So by the time everyone is huddled around laptops and gobbling down fistfuls of M&Ms on some Tuesday evening in Cleveland, it’s no wonder they’re not really listening.  They’ve spent all their energy worrying about the recruit, fretting about the screeners and the guides, trying to keep costs down, and herding people onto planes to come watch dull people in dull rooms talk about dull things.  The people we’ve recruited to participate are kept in the dark about our intentions, treated as ‘respondents’ rather than as partners or collaborators.  And the people who recruited them are hidebound by their own business model, with little incentive or opportunity to collaborate, and a strong incentive to appear regimented when they’re really just tapdancing as fast as they can.

I – and my team – want to change that. We want to find out where the value chain is broken for you, and where there is still value in gathering evidence for insight and inspiration.  We want to understand it from the perspective of time, money, satisfaction and utility. So that’s why I wrote a survey. I’d love it if you could fill it out or share it with others. When we get the results, we’ll share them with this community of people who do and buy qualitative research.

And we’ll keep thinking about the insight value chain, especially as it regards innovation and product/service design, and I’ll keep writing about stuff that pisses me off. You can be sure of that.

Two weekends ago, when I was working on client things and trying to unravel the mystery of addiction vis-a-vis Civilization V, there were some ladies getting righteous in my twitter feed.  Responses to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s post to TechCrunch, “Who Will Be the Next Talisman of the Tech World?” had lit up my feed and set my alerts to pinging – mostly because people were DMing or cc’ing me in outrage.

Perhaps because it came on the heels of two other lists that conspicuously omitted female names, this one seemed at first glance like ‘yet another list where great women in tech are ignored.’  I’ll confess that my first response was to feel exhausted, and my second was to invade Edinburgh.

But I did eventually get around to reading Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s post.  I thought it was an interesting list, this guess at who could be the ‘next Steve Jobs’.

After all, it makes for excellent link bait to write about Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs.  It supports the folklore of Silicon Valley to speculate on his heirs, intellectual, aesthetic and otherwise. Search for “who will be the next steve jobs” on google and you get 846 million results. Everybody’s doing it. I’m thinking of going as that question for Halloween, in fact.

So, who’s on the list?  Scott Forstall, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Evan Williams, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Janus Friis and Nicklas Zennstrom, Mark Andreesen, and Jack Dorsey.  The list is very journo- and reader-friendly – we’ve heard of these guys.

It’s my opinion that Mr. Karbasfrooshan didn’t even consider the matter of gender when he typed up this availability-heuristic-based, link-baiting listicle of guys in tech.  But it’s the ‘guys’ part that pissed people off. Where were the women? Did Karbasfrooshan mean to suggest there were no worthy women in tech?  Or worse, that there was no place for women in tech?

How did Karbasfrooshan respond?  In the immortal words of my best friend’s ex-husband, he found himself in a hole and kept digging.  Mr. Karbasfrooshan defended his post by saying, “That’s because the media remains biased against woman (fairly or unfairly). This list is largely about whom the media will turn to, most women are IMHO both put on a pedestal when it’s convenient and then viciously and unfairly attacked otherwise.”  In the comments on the post, the twitter exchanges that followed, and in a follow-up post , he suggests that if Charlie Rose wouldn’t book the talent they weren’t worth putting on the list (in what I shall now and forever call the Charlie Rose Booking rule).

Because data is helpful as evidence in an argument, I did a quick search of charlierose.com. Only half of the list have ever been on the show.  Jeff Bezos has been on 6 times, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell 3 times each, while Evan Williams, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and yes, Steve Jobs were on only once.

The others on the list don’t seem to have passed the Charlie Rose Booking rule; Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, practically has his own chair.  So the rule seems to hold.  In fact, in his follow-up blog post, Mr. Karbasfrooshan mentions a few women – “Catherine [sic] Fake, Sheryl Sandberg and Marisa Mayer.”  First of all, Ms. Fake’s first name is Caterina. Second, Ms. Mayer’s first name is spelled Marissa. Third, Ms. Mayer is the only one to have been on Charlie Rose – and she’s been on three times. (So why not include her in the  list if it’s really all about ‘the media’?)

It isn’t worth it to engage the kitchen sink arguments that Mr. Karbasfrooshan employs to defend his position: there aren’t enough women with enough experience, men in the media will overlook them, women in the media will overcompensate for potential perceived favoritism by excluding them, if they made it into the media we’d probably ogle their breasts, what successes they’ve had will either be criticized or minimized, oh, and tokens & Uncle Toms are bad.  Seriously, he covers all that in one post. It’d be impressive if it weren’t so bizarre.

In short, the lady (here, played by Mr. Karbasfrooshan) protests too much.  But he quotes Gloria Steinem several times, perhaps as some sort of innoculation from outraged women.

I leave it to any intrepid reader to find his self-defense plea tiresome, outrageous or both.  Because despite the author’s apparent lack of a criteria for assembling his list (other than the Charlie Rose Booking rule), there was a common thread among those who made the list – and it wasn’t just that they are all men.

What struck me as the true criteria was that the men on this list (with a few exceptions) are inventors.  Take a look at the list this way:

OS & SOFTWARE INVENTORS

• Bill Gates is a software developer who invented MS DOS and Windows.
• Larry Ellison is a database developer who invented Oracle.
• Scott Forstall is a software engineer at Apple who helped develop OSX and iOS.

INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE INVENTORS

• Marc Andreesen invented the first web browser, Mozilla.
• Sergey Brin is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
• Larry Page is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
• Elon Musk is an inventor with an interest in physics & engineering who co-invented PayPal.
• Max Levchin is a computer scientist who co-invented PayPal.
• Niklas Zennstrom is a business development guy with a tech background who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.
• Janus Friis is a network developer who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.

SOCIAL WEB INVENTORS

• Mark Zuckerberg is a coder who invented Facebook.
• Sean Parker is a hacker who invented Napster.
• Evan Williams is a programmer who invented Blogger.
• Jack Dorsey is a programmer and software designer who invented Twitter.

E-BUSINESS MODEL INVENTORS

• Michael Dell turned a side business upgrading computers into a vendor license into a business model – the no-overhead PC manufacturer, selling direct to their customers.
• Jeff Bezos is a network engineer who invented Amazon.com, transforming the way you buy books, music and video content.
• Marc Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in sales, marketing and product development before creating his own SaaS, cloud-based business, salesforce.com.

VISIONARY ENABLERS

• Peter Thiel was a hedge fund manager and venture capitalist who saw the potential of PayPal and other start-ups.
• Jonathan Ive is an industrial designer who redesigned Apple.
• Tim Cook is an operations expert who reinvented the way Apple makes and sells its products.

All but 3 are inventors of the products their businesses sell.

And this is the real problem for women in tech.  It’s not (just) that the media don’t like us or sex sells or that bias and sexism exist.  It’s that we don’t have enough women who are true inventors in our midst who take their inventions and turn them into multi-billion dollar businesses… And either stay on to be CEOs or sell the business to a bigger fish.

The sad truth is we don’t have enough inventors right now, especially in the US, where enrollment in STEM degree college programs (which would at least give you the basic skills and knowledge for inventing physical things – or say, getting a job even in this economy) is down across the board.

Even those with an interest in engineering don’t get degrees – 1/3 of the list Karbasfrooshan assembles didn’t finish college, much less get a computer science degree.  So it’s not required to have a STEM degree to invent something, but in terms of skills acquisition, women are poorly represented in the shrinking population of those who do study science, technology, engineering or math.

Perhaps more telling however is how few engineers rise through the ranks of existing companies to be CEOs.  In most of the biggest companies in the world, STEM degrees are not tickets to the boardroom.

If you look at the Fortune 500 for 2011, 18 companies are helmed by women: a media company (Gannett), food and food production companies (Campbell Soup, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Archer Daniels Midland), a cosmetics company (Avon), a pharmaceutical company (Mylan), retail & wholesale companies (TJX Companies, BJ’s Wholesale Club  finance and insurance companies (Guardian Life Insurance, KeyCorp, WellPoint), energy and fuel companies (Sempra Energy, Sunoco), and yes, tech companies (Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, IBM).

These CEOs are distinguished women, many graduating with honors.  Most of these women went to prestigious schools. 10 have at least one post-graduate degree.  The vast majority have been with their current company at least 5 years, some as many as 30.  They have worked hard, risen through the ranks, worked for increasingly prestigious brands, working their way up their industry food chain.  But while 6 do in fact have STEM degrees, of those, only one seems to have held a related post, the newly named CEO of IBM, Ginny Rometty. Others, despite their mechanical, civil or electrical engineering degrees, came up through operations, finance and marketing roles.  Even Ms. Rometty went from systems engineer to the consulting arm of IBM, and from there worked her way up. Meg Whitman says she abandoned a math & science degree in favor of the more lucrative and employable economics degree.

While these women have much to be proud of, not one invented the product their company sells or have revolutionized the businesses they helm.  They have made them profitable, made interesting acquisitions, improved productivity or efficiency or morale.  But they haven’t utterly transformed the way people think about packaged food or cosmetics or pumping gas.

But here’s the thing.  Most Fortune 500 CEOs are not the inventors of their products, not the visionaries, not the game-changers.  So this is not a female problem.  It’s a CEO problem.

Some of the tech brands on Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s list are on the Fortune 500: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Google. And you’ll find companies from tech booms past: H-P, Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Yahoo, alongside those old stalwarts Xerox and IBM.  But those companies are now starting to look more like their colleagues in consumer packaged goods, finance/insurance/real estate, media & marketing, and so on.  They hire CEOs, they acquire new technology, they maximize for productivity and cut for efficiency.  They answer to shareholders and the Street.

If his logic holds true, we won’t count the women OR THE MEN of the start-up scene until they have invented and grown their businesses to the size that makes lists like these – household names even Charlie Rose would book.

The companies not on the Fortune 500 created by his tech talismen are an interesting mix: Meg Whitman acquired both PayPal and Skype (Skype is now owned by Microsoft). Google bought Blogger. Best Buy bought Napster. Comcast bought Plaxo. Netscape belongs to AOL. Facebook could IPO any day, they keep saying, while Twitter continues to seek a business model. So perhaps the other future for a product inventor is to exit well and become an investor or serial-entrepreneur.

In other words, it’s about that vision thing.  Karbasfrooshan didn’t omit women because of sexism and bias and discrimination – at least not directly.  He omitted women because there just aren’t any playing at the level these very few guys play at who are visionaries about new products and services built out of technology.  There aren’t enough women who are inventors and cultural visionaries or industry game-changers… because there aren’t enough of those kinds of people, full stop.  They are, almost by definition, rare.

As ever, I come back to the wise words oft-repeated by Cindy Gallop: you can’t be what you don’t see.
Clearly there were women in the 70s and 80s who had engineering degrees but who either could not, or would not, or didn’t know how to put those degrees to use in a way that would serve their considerable talents and ambition.  But it wasn’t just the women who struggled.  If we’re seeing enrollment in STEM programs decline it’s because the business culture makes the case that a strategist at McKinsey, or a trader at Goldman, or a lawyer at White & Case will make the big bucks; the media culture makes the case that a pro-ball player, or a rock star, or an actress, or a reality show contestant will be famous; and both still seem to believe that nerds who invent stuff lack the necessary skills to be either rich or famous, all evidence provided by the dudes on Karbasfrooshan’s list to the contrary.

There aren’t enough of them to really break the mold – so far, these 20 guys just have cracked it slightly, proffering the exception that proves the rule (think of all the nasty comments and characterizations of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg as unattractive or socially awkward, or of Steve Jobs as a cruel egomaniac). It’s upsetting, yes, that we don’t have more female role models in tech.  But what’s more upsetting is that we have so few role models in tech altogether.

Still, Mr. Karbasfrooshan should have accepted responsibility for his words instead of playing the ‘blame the media’ card.  He should have simply said, “I was talking about inventors and visionaries who are inventing what’s next, and can helm businesses and stay relevant.  I was talking about Steve Jobs, not Steve Wozniak.” That criteria makes it hard to think of anyone you’d add to the list, male or female. He could have simply played it as it lay.  But he took the bait he no doubt unwittingly set, and now looks like a fool or a jerk or both.

So, who are the women (or the men we haven’t heard of, for that matter) who are inventing new OSes, software that changes the way you interact with the world, social platforms that alter the infrastructure of the internet, technologies that enable new kinds of transactions and business models, boxes of wires and silicon that transmit and calculate data in new ways?

If you know who they are, please say so in the comments here, and I’ll follow up with that list.

There are tons of great panels on SXSW 2012′s Panel Picker right now.  And there is one day left to vote.  If you’d like to support the women in our business, here are some panels and talks that look really interesting and are helmed by some of the best women in the business. There definitely not all of the great panels submitted by women – for some other awesome panels, check out Emily Gannett’s list.  In any event – get voting!

And if you want to see an amazing analysis of the gender breakdown in proposed topics and participation, check out Emma Persky’s look at the data.

Angel Anderson, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
The Battlefield Art of Design Triage

Kimberly Bartkowski, Arnold Worldwide
Advertising + Mobile = Bigger Creative Opportunity

Kathryn Bauer, JWT
Level-Up Your UX Game Design IQ

Caitlin Boyd, Boulder Digital Works
Where Does the Next New Come From?

Julie Capron, SapientNitro
More than Scissors: Extreme Couponers Get Savvy

Crista Crum, The VIA Agency
Shock But Don’t Offend – Daring Brands Walk the Line

Dayna Dion, Ogilvy
Digital Divas: How Girls Rule the Digital Universe

Mel Exon, BBH Labs
Skynet vs Mad Max: Battle for the Future

Chloe Gottlieb, R/GA
I May “Like” You, But I’m Not In Like With You

Adele Hazan, GSD&M
Purveyors of Cool: Art, Culture and Brands

Sarah Hofstetter, 360i
BRAVO’s Mobile-Social Living Room

Marcy Ikeler, Grey
Shock the System – Infusing Innovation Into Agencies

Ellen Kolsto, GSD&M
Deprogramming Dull: Digitally Reinventing Research

Barbara Lippert, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Engineers Are the New Creatives

Allison Kent-Smith, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Engendered Species: Leveraging Female Superpowers

Ann Mack, JWT
FOMO: How Can Brands Tap Into Fears of Missing Out?

Gail Marie, McKinney
Language of Mutilation: Grammar for Ads & Life

Sara Meaney, Hanson Dodge Creative
Leif to Beiber: The Web Has Changed Nothing

Rebecca Morehiser, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
My Beautiful Mobile

Jenny Nicholson, McKinney
What’s My Job? How Ad Creatives Can Stay Relevant?

Stephanie Park, Organic, Inc.
Shopper Marketing and the Retail Transformation

Meagan Phillips, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
The World of Sex: Digital Campaigns Never Told

Kelli Robertson, AKQA
People First: Strategy & UX Tools

Brooke Rothman, Ogilvy
Happiness IRL: Technology for Better or Worse

Tracey Scheppach, VivaKi’s “The Pool”
Stop Screwing Your Consumer

Lori Schwartz, McCann Worldgroup
The Truths About Mom and Tech

Adrienne Scordato, Momentum Worldwide
The Madison Avenue of the Future

Kim Sheehan, University of Oregon
Where Goes the Neighborhood: Local Meets Global

Lindsay Stillman, GSD&M
The Controversial Union of Music and Advertising

Angeline Vuong, HUGE
Your Social Media Job is Dead: Now What?

Becky Wang from Saatchi & Saatchi NY proposed:
How Your Data Can Predict the Future

Niki Weber, TBWA\Chiat\Day
7 Reasons You Should Stop Investing in Facebook

Rita Wheat, G2 USA
Shopper Technologies: Sexy or Substantive?

Stephanie Yang, AKQA
The Shift – Traditional vs. Digital Advertising?

Here’s the problem:

There is a massive drought in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. People are starving. The crisis is so bad, people are fleeing their home countries to seek refuge in neighboring nations where conditions are not much better. Corruption prevents some aid from reaching the people who need it most. Bottom line: they need water, and they need food.

Put more simply, here’s the problem:

It’s easy to feel defeated by this. After all, we’re talking about the weather, and governments in lands far from our own, and people we’ve never met – tens of thousands of them. The level of abstraction for those of us in the West is almost insurmountable.

But there are people who have decided to set the abstraction aside and do something concrete. London digital service design agency Made by Many have partnered with social innovation lab Good for Nothing to develop a platform for raising money and aid for those affected by the crisis in East Africa. But they went much farther than just marketing for a fundraising initiative.

The result is the 50/50 Project: a platform to develop and deploy 50 fundraising projects in 50 days, starting August 27 with 5-10 projects and culminating on World Food Day, October 16, with 50 working fundraising projects, and be well on the way to reaching the goal of raising at least £1 million. Ideas for projects are being anonymously submitted to http://good.byideas.co.uk, and a public beta of the 50/50 platform should go live sometime this week with all the basic pages up for creating, selecting or starting a project.

Digital agencies and startups in London are giving their free time to this. Members of the NYC start-up and Lean Startup movement have offered support. The BBC have given it modest coverage. And while the project is heating up in support from many quarters, more help is needed.

The UK donations will go to the Disasters Emergency Committee. The US donations will go to the International Rescue Committee.

Here’s what you can do:

• If you would like to participate in the Hackathon, please vote for your preferred days (these will be Friday night to Sunday evening hackathons, just like a Startup Weekend or others you may have heard about). The poll for selecting a day is here: http://doodle.com/ikpm6dqdi4s6bgkg.
• Sign up for the role you’d like to participate in here: http://www.doodle.com/3zcrtsvu2fez6biq This will help us to figure out how to staff to have enough devs – because there are never enough devs. If none of these roles fit you, but you’d still like to participate, email me and we’ll make it happen.
• Want to sponsor the hackathon? We’d rather have stuff than money for the Hackathon. Offer us space, or pay for our sandwiches and sodas. Donate post-its or sharpies. Email me
• Want to write about The 50/50 Project, email me and I’ll put you in touch with the people at Made by Many.

So please – tweet about this! Facebook it! Post it to your circles on Google+. Email everyone you know.

And thanks.

In the process of thinking through what kind of business I might like to start for myself, I chose to start with a survey conducted by RSW/US, a ‘matchmaking’ company that brings clients and advertising agencies together.

As usual, satisfaction with current agency ratings are quite low, at about 41 percent, and nearly half wouldn’t ask their current agency back in a review.  Clients don’t believe traditional full service agencies have the expertise to deliver great digital ideas; but they’d rather give their business to a full-service shop.

It’s the following two charts in the report that are the most illuminating:

Right time-right place, recommendations, and just ‘fitting the bill’ – being the right kind of agency – are the most influential factors for clients selecting agencies.  Awards, search, trade associations, matchmakers – these are minor considerations for clients.  They want to have heard good things about you, and see you on their doorstep when they need you.

So why do they change agencies?

The biggest issues that lead a client to put the account in review are about their perception of the quality of the work: either the strategy isn’t there, or the creative isn’t.  In my mind, I’d combine “Lack of proactivity” and “Worsening relationships with agency team” because they both seem to be essentially about perceptions of service – together these would come in to tie at second place.  Costs are in a distant fourth place.

If clients put their business into review because the work wasn’t up to expectations, this puts the offending agency at risk for future business, since so much hinges on word of mouth.  So I spent a great deal of time this morning and afternoon thinking through the main categories of dissatisfaction, and matching those against the chief complaints I’ve heard working with or for advertising agencies about clients.  There’s a rather shocking alignment of concerns that express themselves as a kind of he says-she says account of the apparently worsening relationship between agencies and their clients.

This is step one in a process – my intention is to spend some time over the next few months examining what a Lean advertising agency would be like, perhaps even for a book (!).  I’m curious about where clients see the value coming from in what agencies are, or should be, offering.  I’m equally curious about testing the belief that while you might be able to build cars in a lean way, you can’t make a TV commercial using lean principles.  But today we’re going to just start by looking at the problems.

Product-Market Fit

Talk to any venture capitalist or start-up founder – they’ll spend a fair amount of time describing the importance of product-market fit.  This isn’t about changing the product to fit the market, or even changing the market to fit the product – though it could ultimately lead to either outcome – but rather about positioning the product in a way that demonstrates value to the potential market.  There are a lot of start-ups that fail not because they’ve made a bad product or because there is no natural market for their product – but because they haven’t clearly and compellingly articulated why that market might want or need the product.

It seems that agencies are facing a challenge in this regard as well.  Over the hundred or so years that advertising agencies have existed, the mission has become rather fuzzy.  At the outset the role of an advertising agent was to purchase advertising space on billboards or in newspapers or magazines on behalf of businesses.

After awhile, customers started asking for more: ideas about how to produce advertising that stood out and increased sales.  The agent, not wanting to lose a good customer, hired a typesetter and an illustrator, maybe wrote the ad copy himself or hired someone to write it for him.  He called up his contact in the publisher’s office of the newspaper and this time sent over an ad along with the money for the placement.

The agent became an agency.  The customer became a client – he’d be back, because the agency knew how to get this kind of work done.

And this is how advertising has evolved, as an industry of agents designing, producing and placing advertising on behalf of the client.

What the client used to want? An advertisement that drove sales.  Send us five cents and we’ll send you a Sunkist juicer so you can make juice out of Sunkist oranges.  Write to this address for a complete Sears catalog of all our tools and parts.  Visit this Ford Motor showroom to test drive a new car.

But the market changed. It became more complicated – more brands, more media, more channels. It seemed you had to spend more and more to see that sales curve lift. It became a kind of arms race between brands to see who could reach the most people.

Clients still want to see the sales curve go up.  Read the feedback at the end of the report and you’ll see a lot of concern with ROI, effectiveness, sales and volume increasing, business results, and so on.  But unlike those early days when the guy with a few dollars in his pocket to place an ad in the Gazette sold more widgets than the other guy who hadn’t thought to, the ability to track results against communications activities has become diffuse.  A campaign lives in simply too many channels; the drive for differentiation now means that there might be no direct, trackable call to action; other economic factors (pricing, distribution, competition, etc.) cause signal interference for brands that advertise widely, sell multiple product lines, distribute through multiple sales channels, and face many competitors.

It’s complicated.

But clients don’t feel sympathetic towards advertising agencies for having to muddle alongside them through all this complexity.  Increasingly, this survey suggests, clients feel a great deal of disappointment and bitterness about the failure of their agencies to clarify and simplify the complexity, while still bringing home those obvious, measurable results.

“What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?” — Rosser Reeves

Looking through the complaints I jotted on post-its as I read through this report and the complaints I heard working with and for agencies, I noticed that a lot of the problem seemed to rest under a few overarching concepts.

Strategic Expertise

Clients complain that agencies don’t think or act strategically enough, that they don’t come to clients with a case about how the proposed approach will help them gain market share, increase volume, or otherwise steal sales from their competitors.  They complain that agencies don’t know their consumers, their market, their competitors, their sales and distribution channels.

Agencies complain that sales numbers and ROI are all that clients think about – they don’t ‘get’ marketing, they don’t appreciate the concept of building a brand.  They complain that the client’s goal or definition of ROI is unrealistic.  They complain that clients are not transparent about their business objectives, that they don’t engage agencies as partners, or include them in future plans.  They believe that clients sometimes perceive themselves as competing against the wrong people, or that they want to target the wrong consumers.

Transparency & Accountability

Clients complain that agencies are bad at strategy and analytics.  They believe that agencies lack the competence to effectively measure the results of what they produce, or worse, conceal those results from the clients. They want more accountability from agencies – for agencies to follow-up on the results of a campaign, and to report these results to the client.  And they want these results to be tangible – sales, volume, measurable ROI.  I’ve had some clients who’ve wished that the agency could offer a theory about what success would look like if it isn’t going to be sales or volume or share price.

Agencies on the other hand, feel that there is more to advertising than analytics, or feel that campaign measurement is more complicated and nuanced than mere sales figures.  Agencies often feel that the work of planning and account management – where this strategy and analytics would likely be managed – are under-valued by clients, who care (they believe) only about the creative and the costs.  Often, agencies feel they are provided with instructions from a brand manager or CMO that are unrelated to the company’s business goals.  They worry that clients test ideas to destruction, that they make their goals moving targets, that they aren’t transparent about their actual business goals, and that they don’t give credit to agencies when they do have a successful campaign.

Creativity

Clients say they want – but do not get – enough new, fresh, innovative ideas from their agencies.  They say that they are often not happy with the creative output.  They say traditional agencies lack digital skills.

Agencies say clients lack taste and sophistication, are scared of new ideas, are overwhelmed by fresh or innovative technologies, don’t ‘get’ digital/social/mobile, and prefer the safe, me-too route. Those who do ‘care’ about creativity are just in it for the awards or the chance to rub shoulders with celebrities.

Trust & Service

Clients complain they don’t feel agencies listen to them, they don’t get enough attention, they get pawned off on junior team members.  They complain agencies do not bring them unsolicited ideas; they don’t bring enough ideas; they don’t bring fully realized ideas - overarching strategies with executions for each of the channels.  They complain that agencies set themselves apart and above the internal client marketing team; that they do not recognize the capabilities, talent and expertise that clients have about their own business and market.  They complain about being condescended to.

Agencies complain that clients are not loyal – that they lost business to other agencies or competitors without getting a shot at it first.  They complain that clients don’t trust them – that they don’t share information, or set up ‘gotcha’ scenarios where the agency is being tested rather than engaged in a collaborative way. They complain that when multiple agencies are used on a single campaign, the client plays favorites, undermines some players, elevates others.  They complain that clients are not responsive to requests for feedback or approval, that they unnecessarily delay signing off on scope of work agreements. And they complain that clients can be abusive to some members of the team.

Costs & Capabilities

Clients complain that agencies nickel & dime them for basic service that should just be ‘included’ in the project – for advice, revisions, or projections.  They complain that agencies are bad at projecting costs and managing them throughout the lifetime of the project.  They complain that agencies can’t tell them what the results based on spend will be.  And they complain that agencies can not do everything well, or respond nimbly to their changing needs.  They want a more innovative full service model.  Clients don’t actually want multiple agencies – they want one agency to handle all of this on their behalf, to coordinate the production and placement and management of an integrated campaign for them.

Agencies say that clients want more and more work for free – work that is outside of the agreed-to scope of work.  They say that clients don’t pay enough (in that commission on placement and production structure that most agencies still use), or negotiate them down on the agency fee for coordinating and managing the campaign, thereby making every additional request from the client an opportunity to lose money on the project.  They say that clients lack the internal structure to implement or manage the approval process for integrated campaigns.  They say that clients start with one budget, set goals and KPIs off that budget, and then cut once the project is approved – but still expect the same ROI as the higher spend.  They say that they are the last to know when the client’s needs change. And they say that the era of the big account or project seems to be waning – that it’s tough to find a true ‘full service’ piece of business these days.

What’s it all mean?

It’s pretty simple, when you look at the complaints all lined up on a wall, as I did today.  Clients have business needs, challenges, and goals.  They try to solve for these through advertising.  They believe, however, that agencies are poorly equipped to help them achieve any of these goals or surmount any of these challenges. So the two have become antagonists. – people who do not trust each other.

I think the real culprit is procedural.  Sales and marketing may not be sharing goals with one another.  Marketing may not be incentivized by sales goals.  Marketing commissions advertising based on what some in the Lean Startup movement call ‘vanity metrics’ – likability or brand perceptions or awards.

Advertising agencies aren’t paid to become experts on the client’s business, so they become experts on advertising.  They don’t have the time or the relationships to go deep on the structure of the market; they aren’t rewarded for challenging the client’s assumptions.  They don’t have access to the right people in the client teams for the information they need to make the best recommendations and the best work.  They don’t have the budgets to get that information on their own.

“Good” advertising doesn’t have a clear call to action, isn’t direct marketing – it’s lifestyle based, taps into hidden desires or unspoken needs, creates cultural icons or foments generational movements.  They fear research as a sure-fire path to killing their creative darlings. They limit their financial exposure by bringing fewer ideas to the table.  They defend them fiercely, even at the risk of seeming condescending, because it is the only asset they feel they have.

And because they fear research, and lack the client’s willingness to invest in it, they do not gather data on the efficacy of a campaign, or do not gather the best data, and therefore, do not learn from one campaign how to make the next one better. But then, often, neither does the client.

In the end, relationships falter because of hurt feelings, unmet needs, disappointment, and an erosion of trust.  These come from a misalignment of expectations with capabilities.

It’s hard to say for certain who is in the wrong here – are clients asking ad agencies to solve problems they can’t solve?  Or have agencies intertwined themselves too tightly with the services they provided as agents, and not the outcomes those services were used to create?  In other words were clients buying something agencies didn’t fully realize they were selling?  Is what clients want from ad agencies not really advertising, per se, but increased revenue, sales volume, or market share?  And in today’s complicated world, is advertising always part of the solution set?

It seems to me the fundamental problem is that advertising agencies have thought, this whole time, that they were in the business of selling access to the development and placement of advertising, while their clients were trying to buy increased sales.

Perhaps clients don’t really need advertising agencies anymore (though they will still need creative production and media placement/negotiation).  Maybe they need business-model-seeking agencies that create roadmaps to carry out consumer, product, channel and marketing strategies.  Maybe those agencies facilitate the creation of assets that are placed into those channels or campaigns on behalf of their clients.  Maybe they are paid to be trusted experts who guide clients through the ever-evolving landscape of their market.

Maybe.