Naked 1.0 may be dead, but we need Naked 2.0 more than ever

Just as the original Naked Communications model helped change the ad industry, we need something just as radical to rewrite the rules for today, writes Dominic Mills

The last rites have been said, the corpse is now safely interred. The mourners have gathered to mark the passing.

Yes, the shining light that was once Naked is well and truly gone, marked by a slew of obituaries in the US press, the UK and Australia.

Reading them, you get the sense that Naked – founded in 2000 by a triumvirate of clever media planners to apply real creativity and strategic thinking to media and to bring clients genuine media-neutral advice – was uniquely a creature of its time.

Certainly, it is clear from this excellent Campaign feature, which sees the two surviving founders, Jon Wilkins and Will Collin, and other ex-Naked luminaries reminisce, that they incline to that view. There’s no obvious appetite amongst them to do it again.

Here’s Will Collin: “…[P]eople have commented to me that Naked’s success contained the seeds of its own demise. We challenged and then changed the industry: job done. We re-engineered clients’ approach to communications: job done.”

He’s right. Things have changed so much since 2000 that, today, it is hard to imagine just how Naked had the industry in thrall. The speed and scale of its success left rivals gobsmacked and rushing to imitate. Much of what we see today has its roots in the revolution that Naked ushered in.

Media agencies did get their act together (and there are no doubt many leading strategists working there now who owe much to Naked). Creative agencies suddenly started taking the ‘creative’ bit of media more seriously; after years of looking down on media, they suddenly wanted to play.
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For their part, clients opened their minds to the plethora of communication options open to them. Indeed, one of Naked’s mantras – ‘everything communicates’ – can be said to have accelerated the rush towards brand content.

But job done? In one sense, yes. In another, absolutely not.

Now, more than ever, clients need a Naked 2.0 to steer them objectively through a media world that is much, much, more complex. Yes, the strategists at the big media agencies play a good, sometimes excellent, game. But as even they will privately admit, they play a secondary role to their trading desks or are subject to group-mandated buying diktats.

And compared to even a decade ago when, arguably, Naked’s light was beginning to dim, there is an unparalleled amount of choice. Twitter was in its infancy. Amazon was still building its retail offering. Snapchat and Pinterest…they were just gleams in their founders’ eyes.

At the same time, trust has evaporated. The original Naked model, in which clients paid for thinking, not doing, had trust built into it.

Here’s a perceptive piece by Tim Burrows of Mumbrella in Australia in 2015 about the shift by Naked away from thinking to doing.

As he predicted, Naked was effectively signing its own death warrant. Nobody pays for thinking any more, at least not consciously or willingly. And it’s worth remembering that, when Naked launched in 2000, we were just coming into the second digital boom and era of global economic growth. There was money to spend on thinking.

It’s not there now, so any Naked 2.0 would have to find a different model or, alternatively, a home with the likes of Accenture or McKinsey, whose clients pay handsomely for thinking.

As luck would have it, Will Collin, who this month is reunited at Karmarama with his old mate Jon Wilkins, will be joining us this Wednesday (26th April) at Mediatel’s Planning Debate. Serendipity or what?

It’s the perfect opportunity to ask him – and fellow strategy stars like Marie Oldham (VCCP Media) and Craig Mawdsley (AMV BBDO) – whether we need a Naked 2.0 and, if so, what shape it should take.

Sweden: home to the heroes of failure

I love the idea of the Museum of Failure housed, somewhat bizarrely, in Helsingborg in southern Sweden.

It sounds peculiarly Swedish – no-one can do mournful like the Swedes when they’re in their cups – but is in fact the brainchild of an American psychologist, Samuel West.

In fact West’s purpose is to celebrate failure, and to show that innovation requires failure.

My view is that it’s more about what happens when corporate hubris meets real life.

Either way, to this end West has assembled a long list of failed products. These include a Colgate frozen lasagne – why people who make toothpaste thought they could turn their hand to frozen food beats me – and a Harley Davidson cologne called Hot Road that smelt of exhaust fumes, or possibly biker armpit after a day on the road.

Beefy-fresh breath

I assume West has earmarked a place for one of my favourite product failures, Dasani. If you remember, Dasani was an early attempt by Coca-Cola to get into the bottled water market in the UK. It failed when it was revealed that the product came, not from deep in the Cotswold Hills or some romantic and pure location, but was actually tap water bottled in suburban Kent.

That may have been enough to kill Dasani off in the UK, but I was astonished last month to find it thriving – with near-ubiquitous distribution – in Malaysia and Cambodia. I don’t suppose the locals give a monkey’s about its provenance, but to me it was the heavenly taste of Eau de Sidcup.

We all know the saying that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising, but I feel the Museum should also be a repository for heroic ad failures, where the test is to find an inverse relationship between the amount of money spent on the ad and its quality. You will have your own choices, but the Museum could do no better than start with the recent Pepsi fiasco.