Avoiding the ‘crap trap’
AT CANNES this year, PepsiCo president Brad Jakeman didn’t lean on euphemisms in a fiery address pointing out exactly what he now expects of his agency partners. “Instead of five pieces of content a year, a brand like Pepsi needs about 5,000 pieces of content a year,” he said. “Instead of having six months to develop it, we have six hours or six days. And instead of it costing $2 million, it needs to cost $20,000.”
Jakeman’s argument was that in a changed world, agencies were too slow to meet these requirements, and that an over-reliance on skills honed in traditional media meant that they didn’t have the infrastructure to produce sufficient content for the never-ending online conveyor belt.
The old axiom used to be: good, fast or cheap. Choose two. But Jakeman certainly isn’t alone in his desire to have all three. We live in an era where more seems to be demanded for less. And across the industry, we’ve seen this belief manifest in a number of narratives, most often proclaiming the death of this or that traditional media channel in the face of competition from
