The Rising Sun

Agency workplaces are a bit like people in that we can classify them as either “Radiators” (that generate energy) or “Sinks” (that drain energy). Those agencies that are Radiators have obvious advantages in markets where skills are generally portable. Being preferred places to work, they will attract, engage and retain the best talent over time, resulting in a polarization of performance and profitability among Agencies.  Radiators will win every time.

But the industry is far from being static. The Radiators of yesterday and today will not necessarily the radiators of tomorrow. That’s because the Advertising Industry is changing rapidly, and the way work is conducted now is determined much more by technology than it has been in the past.  Today’s knowledge workers use smart-phones, email, videoconferencing and social media to solve problems with their colleagues and clients, so modern workplaces need to be able to facilitate these new ways of interaction.

Business is also more global, requiring collaboration beyond regular office hours. As a result of technology and globalization, personal lives and work lives also blend together, more than they had in the past.  This means that preferred workplaces must have technological advantages, and need to be in convenient locations, where workers can commute more readily at different hours and be closer to restaurants, bars, shopping, health clubs, etc. that allow them to strike a better work-life balance.  A good example of this is Google (not quite an agency although it earns most of its revenue from ads) which houses all these facilities – and more – at its Mountain View campus.

In addition, today’s “Generation Y” entered the workforce with completely different ideas of what work should do for them. They have seen layoffs during downtimes, and as a result, do not have the same loyalty as older workers. That’s also why they are more interested in the immediate experience of their current job than a career path that might not happen.

Further, this Generation is not generally motivated to occupy large offices in the “Executive suite”, because many of them don’t plan to stay long. Unlike older Boomers who had one job for a very long time, and Generation X, who generally had one career but perhaps many jobs in that career, Generation Y often expects to have a number of careers in their working lives.

That said, this post discusses how adjustments to Function, Form and Internal Communications, can keep your workplace driving profitability in a changing environment.

1. Function.

The simplest way for a workplace to drive profitability is to facilitate the function needs of today’s “Creative class”. Namely a workplace must satisfy the following needs:

• Location – the workplace must be close to a convenient and “happening” area of town. Namely it needs to have good transportation and/or parking, be near decent restaurants, bars, shopping, health and fitness and in an area where like-minded creative people hang out.

• Collaboration – offices need to provide more places for brainstorming, creating, debating, listening, presenting and sharing ideas as a team.

• Focus – while multitasking is a much discussed subject, recent research and practical experience show that today’s knowledge workers need places that also allows them to concentrate work for significant blocks of time without interruption.

• Learning – the “Creative class” looks at a career much like a Swiss Army knife, because it is multi-faceted and changing quickly. As agencies have cut back on formal training, workers today must take charge of their own career skills and development. They learn from peer-to-peer discussions, on-the-job experience and Web 2.0 tools of blogs, tweets and other forms of digital information and learning. A smart workplace understands and facilitates this type of learning.

• Socializing – the workplace needs to provide space for celebrating, interacting, mentoring, networking, sharing, and working together to build a common culture from diverse thinking.

• Personalization – a healthy office is one where the staff is proud to bring a part of their personal life including photos, mementoes, music etc. This is symbolic of both being at home while at work and in seeing fewer divisions between one’s working and personal lives.

• Sustainability – today’s workers care about working for an organization that caters to their higher needs including their responsibility to fellow man and the planet.  As such a caring and environmentally responsible office has become a must for these workers who expect their employees to pursue a Triple Bottom Line of Profit, People and Planet.

2. Form.

The second way to increase productivity of today’s knowledge workers is through the form of the office. For Advertising agencies to play the part of a creative business, they must look the part of a creative business. That’s why agencies need to balance a cool office with business sense.

Different types of agencies find different ways to look and feel creative, and the answer depends a lot upon the independence and size of the agencies. Here are two examples that demonstrate this:

• TBWA\. Flagship and stand-alone agencies have a distinct advantage over most network agencies because they are more free to decide how to structure their work environment to help get the most out of their people.  A great example of this is TBWA/Chiat/Day’s flagship office in Los Angeles. Designed by architectural legend, Frank Gehry, the cavernous structure has been dubbed “Advertising city”. It features a skull and crossbones flag flying proudly overhead, and houses over 600 agency “pirates” who didn’t sign up to be part of any advertising navy. They signed up to “Change the rules” in order to rule the change facing business today. That’s why they are known as “The Disruption Agency”. TBWA/Chiat/Day’s flagship office has alleys of surf-boards, punching bags with managers’ faces on them, a basketball court, and a dog friendly park visited by many pets the staff bring to the office.  This building is an embodiment of TBWA\’s spirit and an inspiration both to its inhabitants, but to the entire network of over 12,000 people in over 260 other offices.

• Aegis Media Sweden – holding companies have a slightly more difficult time in finding cool workplaces than flagship and stand alone offices, because their business model is based more on gaining economies of scale by pooling “back-end” costs such as office rent than in enhancing single brand image. This often means pulling their agencies together to gain clout over landlords and to help enforce integration. While this makes sense from a financial and business point-of-view, it can work against the need for agencies to differentiate themselves, and for the workplace to reflect the particular brand’s culture. This can be difficult unless the venue accommodates both integration and differences. Aegis Media Sweden is one holding company that has managed to find a good balance between the cost savings of having a portfolio of agencies under one roof, and different environments for each brand. This Holding company houses Carat, Vizeum, Isobar’s Far Far, Suddenly, iProspect, Molecular, Posterscope, JJP, Lentus and domingo within the same complex.  Yet it does so that each brand has its unique space within an interesting building complex that has a large common area to facilitate integration. None of the Aegis Media brands seem to have priority over the others making it more democratic and like a “Communications village”. Yet at the same time, the back-end of Finance and Administration are grouped into a common “Shared service” to improve overall profitability through scale economies.

3. Branding the workplace and using it to communicate Agency culture.

The third way to use the workplace to drive productivity is to use it as a communication vehicle to physically telegraph the agency’s brand message and experience.

This means using the Public, Shared and Private spaces within the agency to communicate the agency’s story, engage the team, motivate the troops and teach them to spread the word throughout the agency’s network. The following spaces must be creatively used to align, educate and motivate the team, and in turn improve its productivity, leading to higher agency profit:

• Public spaces (Exteriors, Lobbies, Vendor Spaces, Recruiting Spaces)  – these should be used to present the Company history, Vision, Mission, Values, Awards, Salute the key clients that have helped build the Agency and Showcase the Agency’s work.
• Shared spaces (Hallways, Training rooms, Kitchen and lunchrooms) – these areas are for Employee spotlights (e.g., Creative team of the month etc.), Employee engagement, Recruiting messages, Special events including welcome notices, anniversaries, greeting clients)
• Private work spaces (Offices, Conference rooms, Call centers)  – Goals, Product offers, Inspirational messages, personal items

It’s particularly important for Flagship offices such as W+K’s Portland office to reflect the overall brand values and experience. Also it’s very important to bring key staff joining the global network of W+K from other parts of the world to experience the brand first hand for a flagship office is the reservoir of the agency’s history, knowledge, key client relationships as well as the staff who know the business best.

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To conclude, spending on Function, Form and Marketing Communications should be considered an investment vs. an expense because these are all great ways to fuel productivity and increase profitability. Smart agencies understand this and will ensure that their workplaces are up to the tasks of delivering the function needs of today’s Creative Class, that the form of their office reflects the cool image they want to portray of their business to employees, recruits, clients and prospects, and finally that the workplace is fully used as a communications tool itself.

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

Change is difficult for most industries. In the case of Advertising, the Industry has resisted change and stretched its business model to the breaking point.  During this process, many critics have claimed that the model is broken, Digital agencies will rule, and PR will become more important than Advertising.

These claims by the critics are proving to be untrue, because under the surface, the Advertising Industry has been hard at work adapting to the changing marketing environment. Recently, the Industry seems to be alive with new types of jobs, that have been created to deal with:

• Digital technology’s continued growth.
• Economic pressure from a global economic slowdown.
• Convergence among the various marcom disciplines – creative, digital, media and PR agencies are competing more closely for the same spend. This has resulted in a struggle for the position of “Prime contractor”.
• Changing consumer behaviour.
• Disintermediation of agencies as clients bring creative in-house and/or deal directly with production houses and media owners.

This post outlines some of the new roles that are appearing at leading Agencies:

A. Jobs within Agencies.

1.  Digital skills within Traditional Creative and Media Agencies.

“Traditional” Creative and Media Agencies continue to absorb Digital talent by hiring both individuals and acquiring “Pure play” Digital shops. In turn, the Pure play digital agencies are being pressured by clients to hire “Traditional”  talent, resulting in a convergence to full service agencies that include both Traditional and Digital solutions, under one roof.

During this evolution, the following positions have been created in a number of progressive Creative and Media Agencies:

• Analytics Specialists – Agencies increasingly need to find ways to secure better insights from the avalanche of data.  The data comes from mobile and location-based sources, purchase data from credit cards and e-Commerce, Search, and Social. Those Agencies that invest in Analytical resources will have advantages in their ability to a.) uncover unique insights to develop better strategies and work and b.) attract new revenue streams for data analytics from research departments within client organizations (in addition to the strategy and work from marketing departments).

• Creative Technologists – as technology opens up the avenues for developing creative, a new type of creative person is emerging – one that is at ease blending creative with technology. This blend is an important development, because until recently, it has been difficult to mix these disciplines. Creatives “speak” a certain language and Geeks “speak” another tongue. Moreover, technology people are more adept at experimenting with different options, running “A/B” tests to determine the best way forward and in working in a continuous beta” mode. Some of this thinking is now pervading traditional agencies, bringing great changes. This includes moving from The Big Idea to many ideas and by launching work and then improving upon it, the way software developers work. Finally Traditional creative agencies tend to outsource more of their work than digital agencies. With creative technologists, more work is generally done back in the Agency, giving rise to faster turn-around and sometimes higher margins because more work is done internally.

• Data Visualization – Social Media specialists often use Data Visualization artists to add value to their Data and these types of Designers. Some of these skills are being imported into Creative Agencies.

• Digital presence strategists. These are being hired largely by Media Agencies to ensure that client brands maintain their visibility within the rapidly changing Digital world.

• Information Architects/User Experience specialists – these “Digital imports” are being used to shape Digital communications in Creative Agencies and their expertise also helps strengthen traditional communications, as well as the integration of all forms of communications. Increasingly these specialists are starting to work with Creative teams of Art Directors and Copywriters.

• Social Media experts – while specialist agencies started managing Social Media, many clients are now bringing this function in house, hiring the people form social media specialists, and simultaneously reducing the funds available for outside partners. In turn, the Social Media Agencies are starting to reposition themselves as Research Houses that analyze consumer buzz for Insights and/or Creative Shops that better visualize data and develop creative solutions.

2.  Creative agencies

Creative Agencies are importing both Digital and Media Agency skills by hiring or partnering with specialists from these disciplines. This trend is being accelerated by leading marketers such as P&G, that are returning to a Prime Agency, Prime Contractor, or a “Brand Agency Leader” model.

The reason for this new consolidation of power within a Prime Agency, is that Clients are also facing increased pressure to cut marketing costs.  It takes resources to manage a network of agencies and clients want to reduce this cost. They are doing so by regional consolidations, reducing staff and outsourcing part of their co-ordination costs to Lead Agencies.

In turn, Creative Agencies are also bringing on board specialists for:

• Content Strategy and Production – Clients are asking Agencies to manage more than their Traditional Marketing Communications and with the advances of digital there is a need to keep content “fresh”, making brands more visible to search engines. As a result, agencies are again becoming more influential in overall content strategy and the production thereof. While this role is naturally involved with the Creation of new content, increasingly it is also helping clients with the Curation of content.

• Crowdsourcing – there are a number of agencies that draw upon the “Crowd” to source their creative work. Some of these use Crowdsourcing to supplement their current creative teams drawing on website such as Crowdspring, Genius Rocket and Pop Tent.  Others are agencies build totally on crowdsourcing including Victors & Spoils.  Crowdsourcing will elevate the role of the Creative Director(s) and may reduce the number of in-house creatives.

• Innovation labs – Agencies increasingly need to stay on top of the many changes in digital and media, so leading shops such as BBH, Ogilvy, and TBWA\ are opening up innovation labs to raise the standard of their work.  These labs were first established on a global level in innovation hubs such as Los Angeles or London. But they have since spread to regional hubs around the world, including Singapore and Hong Kong.

• Master Planners – as the strategic planning function in creative agencies reflects more the “Voice of the consumer” and is increasingly responsible for the ROI of the marketing communications, strategic or brand planners are expanding their skill sets to include Communications Planning imported largely from media agencies and Digital Planning. In short they are becoming “Master planners”.

• Platform Producers – more agency briefs require audience participation in the forms of co-creation, entertainment, games, information, inter-active, and ongoing dialogue. These schemes are all designed to encourage consumers and customers to spend more time with the brand. Pioneers in this field are consulting and/or becoming part of the agency’s creative teams.

• Search engine marketing – Copywriters are working more closely with Search specialists to understand the language consumers and customers use when searching products. Their collaboration helps align creative copy with the language the audience themselves use.

• Video producers – Creative Agency producers are increasingly requested to produce Web and Mobile Content in addition to the Television commercials they produce. This is very detailed work because it digital content is often tested to see which version performs best and is changed more frequently. As a result, creative agencies need video producers to help with the increased demands of digital video.

The specific departments within Creative Agencies are also changing, including:

• Account Service The Account Service function is starting to take on more functions of a Production Department, where account people are charged with finding more ways to manage the increasing Marketing Communications needs of clients, including, but well beyond, Advertising. This includes external and internal content, maximizing “Owned media” and integrating the various specialists that Clients had previously managed. Further, as a number of Clients move from retainer-based relationships to more project-based relationship with Agencies, client service people need to take on more Project Management skills to help Agencies remain profitable.

• Strategic Planning. Some of the biggest changes in marketing communications are being felt in the Strategic Planning areas of both Creative and Media agencies because there job plays into what the market requires most today, including the “Voice of the consumer” and being responsible for a positive ROI on marketing communications. That said, some of the difference in planning roles include: a.) Communications Planning within creative agencies  – traditional creative agencies such as San Francisco’s Goodby Silverstein and Partners are bringing comms planners to help shore up the “When” and “Where” parts of planning, in addition to the “What” and “How” parts that creative agencies normally cover. b.) Fringe planning – this is done by Anomaly and BBH where a number of agencies are taking product ideas to market, or essentially beginning to compete with clients.c.) Propagation planning – as marketers are finding that stories told by others are more impactful than those told by brands, a new branch of planning, pioneered by Naked Communications, is emerging.

3. Media agencies

Some leading Media Agencies are looking to hire both Creative Agency people to improve their salesmanship and client management skills, as well as acquiring people from Digital agencies.

The new roles that have been created include:

• Communications Orchestrators  - A number of Media agencies have tried to become Prime Contractors in leading brands. Carat has done this with P&G in the US and Naked positions itself this way around the world.

• Creative Media Specialists – some large media holding companies such as OMG are setting up specialist units to improve the creativity of their media product. A good example of this is OMD Ignition Factory. These creative media specialists are also helping drive a convergence among the media, digital and creative agencies for innovation and are heating up the race to become the Brand Agency Lead.

• Demand side specialists – as mobile becomes more important media buyers learning to deal with automated buying platforms, changing the way they purchase digital media.

• Geotargeting – with the rise on mobile and location based technologies media planners and buyers will increasingly need to factor geography into their media plans and buys. As mobile gains more traction this is giving rise to geotargeting specialists.

• Social and Earned media – media agencies are learning to expand their roles from bought media to better dealing with owned and earned media. To deal with “earned media” they are learning to present “media donuts” meaning media that has an empty centre for consumer or customer presentation.

B. Jobs supporting agencies

Digital training

A number of specialist shops have been set up to train advertising and marketing people in digital skills. These shops include:

• Hyper Island
• Digital Acceleration
• Digital Boot Camp

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As Marketing continues to evolve it’s clear that new roles and positions will be required within Advertising Agencies. Traditional practitioners will have to learn new tricks from technologists and other types of new talent, resulting in “Help wanted” ads for new positions as well.

Given the multiple challenges facing the Advertising Industry, it’s likely we’re only at the beginning of a long process of upgrading and adding to the skills of Advertising Agencies.

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

Last week I interviewed a new University graduate and asked why she wanted to get into advertising. Her answer was both refreshing and important for an old hand (okay no-so-old hand) to hear. She said, “I want to change the world, or at least change what I can in the world”.

The candidate went on: “I want to be part of something that’s important. Not to work for just anyone. But I want to be part of something bigger. Something important. I want to work with something where I can be proud and where my family is proud of me”.

These words were music to my ears, because they were so different from her peers, but also because this is what I believe in – or at least want to believe in.  For I too really need to work with people and companies that have a purpose in life, well beyond money. And I believe that most of you reading this post think the same thing.

Over years of delivering growth, scrounging for every scrap of possible revenue, and in prudently cutting costs (including the unfortunate need to cut people) to hit profit targets, I have been feeling that the singular pursuit of profit has clouded my sense of purpose and the reason why I originally was attracted to the marketing communications industry.

I understand that as you rise through the ranks, your role centers more on managing people, and delivering financial results. But profit delivery should only be part of the business, and not all of the business.  My priorities had started to shift to profit at the expense of purpose.  Something felt very wrong.

Some of the issues resulting from a Profit first perspective.

The continuous search for profit also began to put pressure on my principles of doing great work, believing in your people, and working as a team.  That’s because there are fewer clients buying good work vs. “safe” work (meaning work just like everyone else). The trouble is safe work generally gets ignored, doesn’t drive business and undermines everyone’s time and investment. In turn, compromising on the principle of doing only distinctive work gets agencies in trouble because it reduces their ability to deliver business results.

At the same time, we also rarely support our people and almost never  do so when it means contradicting a client, albeit diplomatically. While few will admit this, many young clients who first taste power,  abuse it, at the expense of their young partners or suppliers. It isn’t fair to leave these young people to face clients alone, especially when they are fighting for our great work. We must work as a team and ensure there is a more equitable relationship for the sake of the work.

Moreover, the continuously increasing profit goals (we grew 20% last year so let’s grow 30% this year, despite a flat market) can tear a team apart as the responsibility for delivery hits harder as the goals get tougher.  Unreasonable growth targets pit managers against staff, foreigners against locals, and parent companies against subsidiaries – often for the sake of one or two individuals trying to become heroes. Again teamwork is critical to success in this increasingly complex world, so senior management needs to continuously take in feedback from the field on profit pressures.

In short, the concept of team has become a one-way street.  Companies happily provide Blackberrys to increase employee productivity on the way to and from work and during their spare time.  Yet many of these same companies outlaw the use of Facebook from the office – even if this office time averages more than a dozen hours a day. We truly need to pursue good for the company and good for the employee at the same time.

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Returning to the words of the young graduate mentioned above, these have haunted me for about one week now. While I had similar sentiments to her when I joined the business, I have started to lose them in the highly pressurized and focused pursuit of profit. So in many ways I think it’s been a blessing that she came along – if only to set me straight.

After taking these seven days to reflect, I think Purpose is more important in the marketing communications business, than ever. In fact, I believe we are moving into an era where we really need to reassess the relationship and rearrange the priorities of Purpose and Profit.

Here are the reasons I think this is so:

1. Consumers demand it.

Consumers are increasingly demanding that brands grow up and answer more to a “Triple bottom line” of Profit, People and Planet. As Simon Mainwaring points out in his new book “We First”, consumers are using social media tool to force brands to change from a “Me First” mentality of self-interested behaviour, to a “We First” mentality where brands can both promote their own interests, and make the world a better place, simultaneously.  Purpose and Profit can, and should, be pursued together.

Further, brands need to realize that consumers have the power to boycott and/or strongly influence others not to purchase those products/services that do not rise up this challenge. So it’s very important for agencies, as brand advisors, to understand this new sense of extended purpose, to both change their own business, and to be able to advise their clients accordingly.

2.Clients demand it.

Major brands today also recognize the need to have a higher purpose. This is why we see global leaders moving to address large social issues. For example, GE is promoting “Ecomagination” an initiative for more sustainable, global energy use, while IBM is promoting “Smart planet”  working to make a smarter planet and a better planet. These initiatives are clearly geared to the joint purpose of helping these brands grow, and in making this world a better place.

Further, modern brands often start out with a lofty purpose because they have grown up in this Internet age where consumer interaction is facilitated by technology. Google is a great example of this as it began with the mission to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Clients want to work with thought leaders who both understand consumers and the roles brands need to play in addressing their various, and increasing, needs. Many clients need guidance in this field; but many others are leading and ahead of agencies and will only work with those shops that “get it” as well.

3. Employees demand it.

The best talent in the market has a choice of where they work, and they increasing demand work environments that have purpose beyond just profit. Most graduates today are more interested in a caring, socially conscious company and financial protection than in just money. There is also  research to back this up (albeit research from North America: http://bit.ly/pVSPTJ).

That said, it is not only the young graduates that need a sense of purpose. We experienced people need it as well – perhaps even more so, because we have seen an ongoing shift to companies driven increasingly by profit as the sole measure.

Apart from owners, there are very few people in advertising who work for money alone. Most of us entered the business because in some way we thought we could make a difference with our work. While very few people would not admit profit is important, it is not the cause of success. It is the effect, or measure, of success and not an end in itself.

As consumers, clients and employees are all demanding it, agencies must change to ensure that Purpose comes before Profit. To accomplish this, they will need to:

1.Carefully articulate the their specific purpose.

Great agencies, like our new graduate, want to change the world in some ways, or at least change their world. So define this purpose and outline the Agency’s principles while defining the positioning.

For example, Crispin Porter + Bogusky defined its purpose as “To be a catalyst for changing popular culture”. This is very high purpose, for its lifts its role to be an agent of social change versus a company that produces marketing communications.

2. Continuously find ways to live the purpose and related principles, by demonstrating that there are principles or things, which are more important than money.

It’s clear in this age of transparency that actions speak louder than words. This is even more important for a marketing communications agency that has in the past, thrived on the creative orchestration of words, images, music and the supporting audio-visual effects.

This starts by defining what an agency will do, but also what an agency will not do – within reason. For example, in his recent book “Hegarty on Advertising” John Hagarty describes how BBH, since its inception, never does speculative creative work in a new business presentation. While this might not seem like a radical idea, it really is,  because it puts the Agency at a competitive disadvantage against those agencies willing to give away their ideas,  in the short term. But in the longer term this principle actually places more value on the people in the agency and their work. In almost every industry customers must pay to commission ideas. But with creative advertising agencies most shops will produce ideas for free in exchange for the chance to secure an account.

3.  Ensure that the Agency’s purpose covers a Triple Bottom Line of People, Planet and Profit.

New graduates who are part of “GenY” have different values in life. They work to live and do not live to work. And we all can learn a lot from this. So the Purpose and Principles that the Agency lives by, need to support people and do good for the world.

For example, Ogilvy promotes what it refers to ask “The Big IdeaL” which requires that brands commit themselves to some cause of “enduring importance”. A good example of this is the “Real Women campaign Ogilvy helped develop for Dove.

4. Take leadership roles on principled business.

Agencies must work with clients to change the way they market products and services based on Principles. This means recommending ways for clients to use their expertise to help people while at the same time helping themselves, as in “We First”.

This also means changing the existing “Image manipulation” model to a “Brand as service” model. It means taking on a social cause, having good purpose in what it does and being socially and environmentally considerate in all its practices.

For example, TBWA\ has worked with Pepsi on its Refresh project, to come up with a scheme where Pepsi will fund charitable projects that are voted on by its users as important to them and the greater community.

5. Give back to society.

Agencies need to start giving back to the societies that help sustain them. As people are the most important asset of marketing communications organizations, it’s in both the agencies, and society’s, interest to contribute to the talent pool that sustains them.

At the entry level this means taking a greater interest in the universities and colleges that provide their talent. It is also incumbent on marketing communications to find ways to help with older employees in the industry who are often affected by ageism. Sadly I don’t know any agency that excels at helping older workers.  I’d like to hear from anyone who does this well.

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The recent global economic slowdown has shown the weaknesses of the capitalist system. While capitalism has helped rise millions out of poverty, and transformed Asia Pacific into the most powerful region in the world today, it too has its limits. These limits include a widening gap between rich and poor, insecurity of the middle class, degradation of the environment, and profit over-riding all other principles.

While the ingredients for success remain largely the same, I believe the important of these ingredients that need to change. Profit has started to overshadow Purpose and put pressure to compromise Principles. The order of these priorities needs to be reversed.

It’s time to teach the old dogs of advertising (and myself as I learned this past week) that Purpose and Principles should come first and Profit later. As Peter Drucker famously put it:

“Profit isn’t the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity”.

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

Better creative work requires better briefings.

One major reason why this is a lack of great creative work today is that there is a breakdown in the creative briefing process. This has come about because:

1.) The Art of the Briefing is not taught in Agencies and is in fact disappearing. Many creative agencies have wiped out “The Middle Class” within their ranks to remain profitable, leaving only very senior and junior people. During these lean times, the senior people spending a significant amount of their time chasing new business to fill their “leaky (revenue) buckets”, and defending their existing business from lower cost competitors,  while the junior people are no longer trained in the techniques and importance of briefing. As a result, the job of writing great creative briefs with compelling propositions is not getting done, or at least done well.

The job of sorting out the brief and brand proposition is generally left to the already overworked creative teams. Consequently, the overall creative work suffers, because the brainpower and inspiration needed for the creative work is being used to shore up poorly written briefs.

2.) The Creative Briefing Process was also developed during the age of Traditional Marketing Communications and has not evolved to deal with the new complexities and opportunities of the marketing environment. Consequently the creative briefings do not often reflect the challenges of Integrated Marketing Communications, the advances in technology, the subsequent changes in consumer behaviour, and the explosion of owned, bought and earned media options.

This post suggests a number of ways Agencies can overhaul their creative briefings to get better work and improve their reputations with clients.

A. Overhaul the Creative Briefing Process

Creative agencies need to elevate the Creative Briefing to be the most important internal Agency process, because it is the quality of the briefing input that directly affects the quality of the creative output.  Moreover, we always need to keep in mind that great creative is the primary reason why Clients retain Creative Agencies.

The changes to the Creative Briefing requires:

• Senior management commitment because it will take investment and time from most of the agency.
• Strengthening of the Strategic Planning function to better represent the Consumer in the creative development process, ensure that the briefs deliver business results, and that the overall standard of work is elevated.
• Giving the Account Service Team more responsibility for the quality of the Creative briefs and Creative work. Their job can no longer be one of only ensuring that work gets done on time and on budget.
• The Creative Director to have the authority to reject briefs that are not well crafted. This will help them spend more time on developing excellent creative.
• Ensuring that the briefing process balances the needs of the clients yet reinforces each agency’s unique positions.

B. Resolve the tension in the Creative Briefing process.

An effective Creative Briefing process must resolve the conflicting priorities of Stimulation, Comprehensiveness and Brevity.

1.) Stimulation

The overall process must be viewed as a system designed to stimulate the creative team to do great work. As such, great Creative Briefings should not be focused solely on creative briefing documents; rather, the briefings must inspire the creative team to develop great work. Consequently great briefing need to consider theatre, storytelling, visual stimuli, and other ways that help the creative team understand the client’s vision and/or to walk in the shoes of the consumer.

One of the ways that TBWA teaches its Planning, Account and Creative people about great briefings is by introducing the hypothetical way Pope Julius II inspired Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1508 to paint the Sistine Chapel as: “You are commissioned to paint our ceiling for the greater glory of God and as an inspiration and lesson to his people; frescoes which depict the creation of the world, the fall, mankind’s degradation by sin, the divine wrath of the deluge and the preservation of Noah and his family.”

Clearly this vision is superior to these briefs offered by less senior members of Pope Julius’ clergy:

• Priest – “Please paint the ceiling.” (There’s no need to hire an artist.)
• Monsignor – “Please paint the ceiling with red, green and yellow paint.” (Not any better than the Priest)
• Bishop – “We’ve got terrible problems with dampness and cracks in the ceiling and we just need something to cover it up”. (Is this inspirational?)
• Archbishop – “Please paint biblical scenes on the ceiling incorporating all or some of the following: God, angels, cupids, devils, saints”. (Competent but leaves little room for creativity.)

2.) and 3.) Comprehensiveness and Brevity.

There is an inherent tension in most creative briefs, between comprehensiveness and brevity. On the one hand it’s important to spell out the key problems that the brand faces in detail; but on the other hand, it’s important to focus on an insightful solution for the creatives to base their work.

To relieve the tension both brevity and comprehensiveness in the creative briefing process, one must separate the process into two parts or documents; the first is through a comprehensive Creative Brief that outlines the Marketing and/or Communications Problems which the marketing communications are expected to solve: the second is to through a concise Creative Strategy that defines what must be included in the Creative Solution.

While the Creative Brief and Creative Strategy work hand-in-glove linking problem to solution, most creative teams focus on the Creative Strategy because it is both more concise (time is scarce with good creatives) and that is the document that contains the Brand Proposition. With this backdrop it’s best to concentrate on the Creative Strategy during the physical briefing session and to leave behind the creative brief for the creative team to review.

As such,  the two Creative briefing documents look like:

a.)  Creative Briefing Document – an outline of the Problem(s) that the Marketing Communications must solve. Typically this document covers the following subjects:

• Background – history of the brand, its performance, the consumers, the competitors, trade etc.
• Communications environment – the conventions and exceptions in this space.
• Relationship between the brand and the consumer/customer
• Key marketing problem
• Key communications problem

b.)  Creative Strategy Document – this outlines what the solution to the marketing communications brief must contain, typically including:

• Role/objective of the advertising
• Key insight (an often optional but important section)
• Target group – demographics and psychographics
• Benefit
• Support
• Tone and manner
• Proposition or “Focus of sale”
• Desired consumer response
• Executional guidelines and/or Mandatories (e.g., logos, selling lines)

C. Secure input from other marketing communications partners.

Creative Agencies need to secure input from the Brand’s Media, Digital, PR, Activation and other marcom partners, if they hope to develop a creative solution that can be both comprehensive and  integrated with other disciplines.

Too often the various marcom disciplines – Creative, Media, Digital, PR etc. – work towards their own interest, ignoring the input from the brand’s marketing service partners. By seeking partner input up front, the creative  agency can develop work that captures unique media opportunities or that connects more closely with consumers because it incorporates the key words consumers use to search for brands in communications’ copy.

Ignoring partner input also increases the risk that the Creative Agency will miss out on important data that is more readily available to Digital and Media agencies. Further, it also increases the chance that the client will reject the work because it competes with other brand initiatives.

D. Update the briefing process to provide for the digital age.

Critically Creative Agencies also need to ensure that their Creative Briefings take into consideration the new ways that leading brands are communication with their communities. The main reason for this is that many agencies have not updated their creative briefing process despite the enormous changes in technology, consumer behaviour, and ways to get consumers to engage with brands, spending more time with them than regular traditional communications.

Some of the key ways Agencies can improve their creative briefing is to accommodate the following changes:

E. Conclusion

Just as a great meal depends on its component ingredients, great creative requires great talent and great briefings that are inspiring, comprehensive, and yet strategic and to the point. Moreover, these briefings need to lead the creative teams to come up with both traditional and digital solutions that are not always obvious using traditional creative briefs.

And if that is not enough, each agency will need to address the creative briefings process in a manner that helps drive the type of solutions that highlight is positioning. For example, TBWA would tend to drive a solution based on Disruption, while Draft FCB would drive one based on “6.5 seconds that matters”.

While this may seem a lot of work, there will be definite payout for those who may the investment in better creative briefings vs. those who do not.  That’s because the secret to great creative lies largely in a great briefing!

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

A. Complexity

High profile digital “verticals” such as Social Media and Mobile, are becoming more complicated as skyrocketing valuations continue to attract on-going investment and innovation. These fast growing verticals have in fact become hyper-specialized, as new players enter the market to uncover unique opportunities.

This is also a multi-market phenomenon, with local innovation developing because of:

• First-mover advantages. The key global, social networks took time build user bases in their home markets, before spreading widely around the world. Over time, the home base markets for these initial players became saturated, and user growth became possible only by expanding to other markets. During the time the initial players spent building their home base domestic network, many  competitors in other countries reverse- engineered and tailored these original social networks for their own markets.  These global competitors then started to enjoy their own “first mover advantages” often associated with networks. (It’s “expensive” to switch to other networks after you’ve joined an existing network. This expense comes from the difficulty in co-ordinating  switching on a large scale – how do you convince your contacts to switch with you? As important, many people are reaching a point where they do not have enough time or interest, to join another social network.)

• Unique market factors e.g., while Japan’s mobile industry has developed many of the world’s business models for mobile marketing, it  remains very much a “Galapagos” in the telecom world, because its unique ecosystem of carriers, handset manufacturers, and developers, co-exist only in Japan. While the Japanese mobile marketing industry is extremely advanced, most of it cannot be exported to gain scale economies, because the unique conditions cannot be replicated abroad .
• Government regulation e.g., China restricts many Western Social Networks due largely to security concerns. This has helped spawn a thriving local industry.
• Cultural sensitivities and understanding by local competitors e.g., the Japanese tend to use more avatars that real identities, which has limited growth of Facebook in favour of the local Mixi.

Keeping up with the global changes in digital is a full time job for any one individual, both because of the continuous changes, and development occurs in multiple local markets.  For example, it is difficult for an English- speaking curator to fully understand what is happening in Social Media or mobile in China, Japan, Korea, or Thailand, because of he/she is not part of the market and local “digital culture”. Further, there are local language barriers to understanding.

B. Curation

Fortunately there is now enough money in “Digital” to support global and multi-local experts, who can keep track of the on-going developments in these verticals in their home markets, and around the world, through the help of their network of collaborators. In turn, these experts can help organize this information in ways we, mere mortals, can better understand it.

Increasingly these individuals and firms are being referred to as “Curators” because they carry out roles similar to museum curators – organizing companies, facts and figures and weaving them together into a story. The ability for these Curators to summarize the state of play, as well as predict where digital business are headed, helps most of us understand and navigate an increasingly complicated landscape.

In turn, this “know-how” provides these individuals and companies with a good living from their books, speaking engagements, and consulting work.

C. Elegance

Keeping on top of the trends is only part of the issue. To be a good Curator, one also needs to present the information in an elegant manner – i.e., a way that’s easy to understand, yet remains comprehensive in detail.

Crafting an elegant visual story generally requires another type of specialist in Information Architecture, and/or Info-graphics. This is often done by a partner organization, because curators may have organizational skills but don’t necessarily  have the design skills to bring elegance to the information.

The extra investment in bringing Elegance to Complicated information, generally pays out, because it multiplies the perceived value of the information, making it both easier to read, and appears to be of greater value – simply because it looks better!

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To see the how Curation and Elegance combine to counterbalance the growing Complexity of the Digital World, consider the following examples:

1. Mobile Marketing Ecosystem

Luma Partners, is an investment bank that provides strategic advice to digital media companies, that are interested in Mergers & Acquisitions in the Digital World.

Luma has laboriously Curated and Elegantly displayed a number of “Lumascapes” covering the digital verticals of Mobile, Display, Search, Video, Social Commerce and Gaming. The following is the Lumascape for Mobile Marketing:

(Please refer to the links above because there are limits to what Campaign Asia’s site will accept in terms of imagery and resolution.)

This Mobile Marketing Ecosystem elegantly simplifies the very complicated world of Mobile Marketing, giving investors and regular marketers a much better understanding of the current complicated market place.  Again, these landscapes help position Luma Partners as a company that clearly understands the mobile space, globally.

Finally, from a metrics perspective, these Lumascapes appear to have delivered a very positive return, because they apparently have been viewed over 100,000 times in more than 60 countries.  (The claim does not indicate whether these are unique users?) This is a significant audience and likely represents a high return on the time invested in pulling this information together, especially if it involves pulling the data through downloading.

2. Twitter Ecosystem – “The Twitterverse”

Brian Solis is now a principal at the Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm, after establishing himself as a thought leader and published author in Social Media. Brian’s current book, “Engage”, is regarded by some as the definitive guide to Social Media.

As a Curator of Social Media, Brian Solis spends a significant amount of time studying the growth of applications of Social Media for the marketing, community management and customer service professionals. He too has trouble keeping up with the ongoing local, “regional” (multi-local) and global changes.

If we take the example of only one Social Network – Twitter – the emergence and disappearance of applications was too much for Brian to keep track of on his own. So he outsourced the tracking as well as the visualization (via Jess3) of Twitter’s apps to two specialist companies to come up with the following Twitterverse Info-graphic:

Again this visual is an elegant compilation of the Curated material for the growing complexity of Twitter alone.

D.  Implications for Brands

The question arises as to why brands like Luma Partners and Brian Solis would publish this proprietary information – that obviously required great effort to compile and  curate,  and even greater effort to present in an elegant format. Will this pay out for these brands and what can others learn from it?

There are both positives and negatives for publishing such proprietary information:

1.Positives

The benefits of making Intellectual Property (IP) public include:

• Publicity – releasing IP helps build awareness and understanding, attracting prospects to one’s brand franchise. This is especially true when these prospects go out of their way to download specific information. When they do this they are clearly “engaged” or involved with the information and will clearly remember the sponsoring brand.
• Thought leadership – if the information is unique and timely, it will help position the brand as a leader in its field, likely being called upon for further thoughts on the industry(ies) in which it competes.
• Endorsements – if the information is unique and timely it will likely be shared through social media, thus being endorsed by users and received by an audience that otherwise would be beyond your grasp.
• Goodwill – as part of the Open Source movement “Free” and valuable information are treated as a valuable investment in goodwill.
• Revenue generation – turns a cost into a potential source of revenue. Left on their own, the Lumascapes remain costs for generating internal expertise; however, when opened up to the public, these charts become new-business magnets, potentially becoming an additional revenue source for the sponsoring brand.

2.Negatives

The main negative issue that arise from sharing Intellectual property (IP) is that this information becomes visible, free of charge,  to competitors.  This is only a problem if leading edge technology is given away for free – which shouldn’t happen because control still remains with the “publisher”.

3.Net result

Curators that give away IP for free, generally find that the returns far outweigh the costs for doing so. Moreover, brands can enhance the positives and diminish the negatives, by issuing “Creative Commons” licenses that provide “some rights reserved”.

4. Lessons for brands.

In general, brands that are leaders in their field, have the type of IP available that Luma Partners and Brian Solis have made available for Mobile and Twitter, respectively. While a brand must first decide whether it is more advantageous for it to live in an Open system or a Closed System, those that move to share IP, albeit “trailing edge” IP, generally reap more benefits than incur costs in doing so. Open systems can help these brands attract prospects, partners, fans and new suppliers and employees, etc..

But the lesson that Luma and Solis teach us in not only that the information must be valuable, but it must be presented in an attractive manner. Or in other words, Curation and Elegance are important ways to manage Complexity.

Last but not least, as the digital world is becoming increasingly complex, Curation can be augmented by Crowd-sourcing. In other words, Brands should keep an open dialogue with a global audience to continuously improve its Curated work. In a rapidly changing environment it’s important to have more “eyes” on the lookout for change –an engaged “Crowd” can help with this.

5. Where and How to post Curated IP.

If a brand decides to get into the Curation game then there are many venues for it to consider posting content including:

• The Brand’s own Website and Blog (as Luma Partners did).
• Curation or document sharing sites such as Slideshare.net or Scribd.com/.

It’s also important that a brand uses Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to make this more visible to the various local search engines.

Moreover, if this information is uploaded onto Slideshare, a screen can be added to collect data on the user before the information is released. As such, this information could be the introduction to an on-going CRM campaign.

So here’s to all those Curators who make our life that much easier by helping make the complicated, elegant.

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

“The Big Idea” is a term that has power. It implies certainty, scale, superiority, impact, imagination, and creativity. It’s clearly better than “The Small idea”, which seems almost to be contradiction in terms, and much more eloquent than a “The Bigger idea” or “The Biggest idea”, neither of which sound quite right.

“The Big Idea” is also the basis for a great business model, that bonds a client and agency together to a single large thought, followed by a commitment to execute this thought through different media channels. As such, it’s the foundation for many Client-Agency relationships.

1. Advantages of “The Big Idea”

From the Client’s perspective, The Big Idea can help unify its Vision, Image, Culture and Community – the four key pillars of branding.  For example, “Think different” (which is not even proper English) was The Big Idea that helped Apple bring all of these branding items together in 1997, when Steve Jobs returned as the savior of the then declining business.

From the Agency’s perspective, the Big Idea has also helps lock-in a client for an extended period of time, to come up with a platform that requires heavy lifting up front, but less stress and a relatively longer-term payout  and relationship, once The Big Idea has been cracked.

2. Disadvantages of “The Big Idea”.

a.) Advertising Agency Convention

The main trouble with The Big Idea is its great success, which has been copied by countless creative agencies, and has sadly become Conventional.  Almost every creative agency and most digital and media agencies,  now work to find The Big Idea, so it is not differentiated.

(i.) The Origin(?)

“The Big Idea” is a term that was apparently coined by George Lois, the larger-the-life American art director, designer and advertising giant. Lois’ term “The Big Idea” arose in the 1960’s, and spawned a way of thinking in agencies.  It spread from agency to agency to the point where almost every shop claimed it was in the business of discovering “The Big idea”.

(ii.) Dilution of impact.

When almost every creative agency talks about “The Big Idea”, and there is a large range of quality among and within these agencies and their products, clearly the term has lost much of its punch. Clearly not all Big Ideas are Big Ideas.

b.) Risk

Another problem with The Big Idea is the downside risk it creates for a client and agency, because its singularity forces both parties to place all their eggs in one basket. If The Big Idea succeeds, great; but if it is not extremely successful, then both Client and Agency can have a real problem on their hands. A Big Idea that fails can destroy a relationship.

One way to reduce the downside risk, improve the quality of work, and not blow the budget all in one go, is for a brand to test a number of relatively big ideas in a number of markets, learn, and then refine the overall communications – whether it be one or a number of ideas.

This type of testing more than one Big Idea, will become an increasingly important practice in a continuously changing world. It will help re-balance the risk-return trade-off in business.

c.) Quality, Speed, Price: Pick three.

A different problem with The Big Idea is the time and cost it takes to develop. Increased global competition and the increasing pace of change, have broken the old maxim that one must trade-off Quality, Speed and Price. In days gone by, one had to pick two of these variables (“Quality, speed, price: Pick two”).  Business today is different in that it generally requires better, faster and cheaper solutions – all at the same time.

d.) One-to-one advertising.

Further, The Big Idea becomes less important with the advent of digital marketing, and particularly, mobile technology, that make one-to-one communications possible. That’s because The Big Idea and Mass Marketing are not completely in synch with today’s technology, which allows personalized Marketing.

Technology is helping Marketing move from a mass market  age to a mass customized age with many, albeit related ideas, appealing to different segments and individuals. In fact, people now want and expect more targeted, if not personalized, messaging, especially on their mobile devices. They have been conditioned to this by leading marketers. And those marketers who do not customize messaging stand out – not often in good way.

3. The Way Forward.

“The Big Idea”  which is usually brand centric (vs. consumer centric),  will continue to play a role in Advertising, despite being employed for over 40 years; however, the changes facing business will mean that it must start to share the stage with other ideas.

The following outlines how “The Big Idea Market” will likely shake out:

a.) Role for “The Big Idea”

The Big Idea will continue to have be most relevant in markets where mass marketing still dominates. This typically includes developing markets, with an emerging middle class of consumers.

In developed markets, The Big Idea will also be relevant as one large anchor for many brands that have simple brand architectures and messaging,  such as a number of packaged goods products.

But in developed markets, where digital campaigns are also prevalent, and one-to-one marketing is possible, The Big Idea will need to start yielding ground to other ideas.

b.) The Bigger Idea

Successful brands must also look for “The Bigger Idea” that is concerned more with the lives and interests of the Community of Brand Users, than the specific product or service. This means finding what the brand’s community is interested in, and then engaging (co-creating, crowd-sourcing, entertaining, forming a dialogue, involving)  it in a discussion where the community is comfortable conversing with brands.

This “Bigger idea” thinking is consistent with the notion that consumers today expect more from brands to address their higher needs such  “Saving the planet” taking on a Social Cause as Dove did with the “Real beauty” campaign.

c.) Role for Many Smaller Ideas

Brands today are more sophisticated than they were in the 1960’s when “The Big Idea” was originally developed. To understand this, consider the complexity of an Apple or Google, which play many roles in society all at the same time. Apple and Google are giants of industry, huge employers and trend setters. Moreover, as brands, they provide products, services, experiences, communities and technologies.  Further, they are not static but evolving day after day.

With this increasingly complicated backdrop, it’s difficult for a single big idea to guide a modern brand in an increasingly complicated and global market, alone. It’s better to have a range of coherent or hierarchical ideas that paint an evolving story for complex brands.

d.) Molecule idea and Many Smaller Ideas.

A proponent of the “Coherent Brand Theory” (author’s quotes)  is John Grant, co-founder of St. Luke’s, a famous British Advertising Agency.  John is also the author of “The Brand Innovation Manifesto” and he sees the need for many smaller ideas (vs. one Big Idea) because modern brands are a “Cluster of cultural ideas”.  He describes today’s brands as “molecules” that are held together by coherency and not consistency.

The following is an example of  John Grant’s depiction of a brand molecule for Starbucks:

These brand molecules have a distributed identity that can evolve over time, and adopt different “cultural ideas” or input as required. This later point is critical for global businesses, because there will be different needs in different countries, limiting the effectiveness of a single big idea for all markets.

e.) Continuous “Beta” Ideas.

The influx of technology companies into the Marketing and Media world (including Google, Microsoft, Razorfish, Sapient Nitro) has brought with it new thoughts on Ideas and building brands. Part of this new thinking has come from Software Development where it is common to launch “Continuous beta”, having the following qualities:

• More releases. Less polish.
• More small. Less big.
• More fast. Less slow.
• More rifled. Less shot-gun.
• More consumers. Less agency.

The reason why it is called a “Beta” is that it is usually developed using an “80:20” principle where 80% of the project is done in 20% of the time. Beta projects involve continuous improvement to become “Alpha” projects.

The advantages of a Continuous beta are continuous news (upgrades), continually improving quality, speed, and a lower cost of development, as well as reduced risk.

4. Summary and conclusion

After 40 years of success, The Big Idea still has power; but a growing market sophistication, and an influx of different thinking, are causing The Big Idea to yield ground to other ideas.  And as branding further evolves, and learns more from technology and other fields such as entertainment, we can expect to see The Big Idea yield even more ground.

The Big Idea still has legs, but it will not be the only thing that works for Clients and Agencies in the days, weeks, months and years, ahead.

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy borrowed this phrase – “A rising tide lifts all boats” –  from his regional Chamber of Commerce – the New England Council – to help address criticisms he was facing for a local dam project.

The phrase has an inherent wisdom, and is applicable to Advertising, because if we raise the Industry’s profile, all of us will benefit. This post suggests ways we can do this.

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A. HISTORY RELATED TO ADVERTISING’S FORTUNES

One of the reasons why Advertising has struggled globally is that its fortune is tied almost exclusively to Marketing, which is under increasing scrutiny from senior client management and shareholders, especially since since the global slowdown in 2008.

In recent years, Marketing has been a declining function in many countries, because multinationals are consolidating the Marketing function from local offices into Regional hubs, such as Singapore or Hong Kong.  Examples of this include P&G and Unilever, the top two advertising spenders in Asia Pacific.

This consolidation has reduced the number of marketers employed in most markets and turned many local offices into Sales offices. In turn, this consolidation has reduced the need for marketing service people in the local markets, but slightly increasingly the need for a few more regional Marketers in the market hubs.  The net results is that there has been a decline in Marketing and marketing service people, worldwide.

Further, Marketing as a Department is becoming diffused throughout many organizations, and is becoming more of a shared competency throughout the entire culture.  So the pressure to downsize Marketing continues.

Given this backdrop, Advertising cannot grow if it maintains only links to a declining Marketing function in this global economy. Consequently, Advertising will need to find new sources of revenue and profit to grow, while its key partner, Marketing, is depressed.

Here are some thoughts of how Advertising can turn this challenge into an opportunity for change and renewed growth:

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B. WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

1. Aiming higher within society.

Advertising should tackle large social causes, to supplement its main business of commercially supporting Marketing departments and brands. To do so, Advertising will need to use its talented people to develop and solve such problems as:

• Electing Disruptive Politicians to change the status quo e.g., Barack Obama
• Bringing “People power” to bear on repressive regimes e.g., North Africa.
• Turning the tide in favour of the environment in key regions such as Coral reefs and Rain forests.
• Forcing governments to legislate Greener policies and technologies.
• Globally tackling and solving a major health issue e.g., AIDS, Malaria, TB

By working Pro Bono or at Cost, with like-minded NGO’s, politicians, and wealthy individuals, who want to change their world or the world at large, Advertising will raise its profile as a worthy social change agent. These acts will also give Advertising attention and support from powerful players who will become its advocates.

Investment in these social causes will not generate significant growth alone; rather, it will help raise the overall respect for the Advertising Industry, and place it on a better footing for more profitable growth with new customers in the future. As such, tackling social causes should be considered an Investment for renewed growth and prosperity.

2. Aiming higher with our work.

Advertising needs to also improve the overall Quality, Speed, and Price of its work. To do so, it needs to find ways to transform as many steps in its problem-solution process into Profit centres vs. a Cost centres alone. Advertising also needs to practice more of what it preaches, demonstrating faith in its own craft:

a.) Quality – Advertising must build it strength at every step of the creative development and problem solving processes. That’s because the processes are only as strong as their weakest links. As such, Advertising must improve the quality of the following steps:

• Input
  • Data gathering i.e., “Big data”
  • Analytics
  • Insights
  • Strategic planning and integration
    • Brand planning
    • Communications planning
    • Digital planning
    • Partner selection and Execution Stage
      • Partner selection
        • World-sourcing
        • Crowd-sourcing
• Project management
• Performance evaluation

Within these steps, the biggest returns will likely come from investments in the “Input” part of Advertising.  Improving Input or “Big data” will help Advertising gain better insights into consumers – who they are, what they want, what they value, how we can engage them etc. – and develop better strategies and work.

By learning how to manage Big data, Advertising will also find new and better customers and sources of revenue and profit. Again Advertising will need to invest to realize these new revenue streams.

b.) Speed – as speed-to-market becomes a more important driver for business success, Advertising must change its perspective from only developing “Big ideas” – that take a significant amount of time to produce (albeit superbly crafted) – to adopt more of a Software Development Model that is based on a “Continuous beta” with the following qualities:

• More releases. Less polish.
• More small. Less big.
• More fast. Less slow.
• More rifled. Less shot-gun.
• More consumers. Less agency.

Big ideas will remain important but will have to share the stage with many more, Smaller-scale ideas.

c.) Price – Advertising must be more responsive in terms of pricing, being able to charge for high value added services such as Consulting, but also pricing more basic services more aggressively. To do so, it must find ways to deliver lower cost, project-based work through:

• World-sourcing – getting work done in lower labour cost markets.
• Crowd-sourcing – opening up projects to a broader talent pool.
• Co-creation – empowering users to help with the development of its work.
• Reducing waste/More efficient use of resources

d.) Practicing what it preaches. – In addition to improving Quality, Speed and Price, Advertising must also demonstrate skill used the “Craft” to promote itself. Advertising has generally not been proficient promoting itself, falling back on the argument that the “cobbler’s kids have no shoes because the cobbler is too busy making shoes for customers”. This argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

To see this, consider what would happen if IBM presented itself as an e-Business consultant with being an e-Business first. It would be out of business pretty quickly because we expect IBM to be an e-Business before it can advise us on how to conduct e-Commerce.

3. Aim higher and deeper within client organizations.

Advertising must target higher and deeper levels within client organizations, in addition to maintaining its strong links to Marketing. This diversification will require skill and careful negotiation to navigate the client landscape because of history, expectations of what Advertising can and cannot deliver, and internal power struggles within Client organizations.

One key way Advertising can move deeper in client organizations is by leveraging its expertise with “Big data”, i.e., Analytics, Insights and Strategy. In an age where consumers have more influence over brands, Consultants who know what consumers want, can be as important as Business Process Consultants, that advise firms on how to make products and services, better, faster and cheaper.

Through careful analysis of data from Search, Social, Mobile and Location-based source, Advertising can better understand consumers. This is critically important to the clients’ C-Suite executives as well as its Research & Development departments, who are logical new targets for Advertising, moving forward.

4. Aim higher with people.

Advertising must learn to treat its people better, because we live in an age where consumers respect brands that deliver a “Triple bottom line” of Profit, People and Planet. As Advertising is tightly linked with building modern brands it must show some leadership with how it manages its own brands.

Although Advertising is a “People business” the Industry is generally not very good to its people. It offers minimal training, an undefined career path, few benefits, limited retirement programs if any (few people retire from Advertising) and job security that is less than acceptable.

Sadly, Advertising is one of those rare businesses that dis-cards most its experienced people in favour of the new and fresh, reinforcing its reputation as a young person’s game, which has its strengths and weaknesses. This may start to change as Clients and Advertising sees more purchasing power with older consumers.

While some countries such as Japan have introduced unions to help protect workers’ rights, and a few countries have charitable associations to help those who have fallen on difficult times, it is very Darwinian business in that only those adaptable to change will survive. This must change if it is to raise its overall profile in society.

Recessions have a habit of shifting the preferences of new graduates to more recession-resistant industries. This past recession will mean that fewer very talented people will seek out careers in Advertising, with its higher risks and lower relative returns. Coincidentally this may leave room for older workers who have great life experiences and can adopt new thinking and technologies.

C. WHO SHOULD AIM HIGHER AND FOR WHAT?

The question then arises as to who exactly should Aim higher? Should it be Advertising Industry Associations, Advertising Agencies or Individuals? The answer – unsurprisingly – is all three, because they are all interrelated.

While there are Advertising Associations can help the Industry address larger social issues through competitions (such as WARC’s recent Strategy competition in Asia) and it can help set guideline for the better treatment of people, it will take individual Agencies to forge relationships with new types of Clients. But to support all this, key individuals will have important roles to play in the business.

To understand this, let’s turn back to President Kennedy, this time at his Inaugural Address in 1961. This year was a time of great change in the United States. The country faced a number of challenges related to the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, a growing population of Baby Boomers who were anxious to find roles in the work force, and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in America. The Country, just like Advertising today, was facing tremendous challenges.

During his Address, President Kennedy said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” If we exchange the words “Your country” for “Advertising”, this quote is very appropriate: “Ask not what Advertising can do for you, but what you can do for Advertising”.

President Kennedy’s quote was not a call for every American to become a socialist. Nor does this post suggest that Advertising should follow such a path of Socialism. It is really meant to say that it’s the people in Advertising, who are daring enough to change the world of Advertising, are the ones who will actually change it.

So here’s to daring individuals. And here’s to bringing in a new tide into Advertising – one that will raise all boats!

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The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little brighter.

The television series Mad Men is as much a story about Advertising, as it’s a walk down “Memory lane” for the Baby Boomers and some of Generation X, who watched their parents grow through this era. Mad Men also seems to be a source of fascination for Generation Y, who find that the themes portrayed in this show resemble what they face today, proving that times change but human nature remains relatively constant. (After all Facebook didn’t make people Social. People were Social to begin with. Social networks such as Facebook, just gave people a way to be More Social.)

While we can never go back to those Golden Years (and not just because smoking is slowly being outlawed around the world) it’s certainly possible to have a Renaissance, or “re-birth” in Advertising. Some think this might be happening now as we’ve passed from the “Industrial Age” to the “Communications Age”.  Disruption and Creativity are becoming more important business drivers today. Surely this is fertile ground for the resurgence of Advertising?

With that in mind, what can be done to ensure a Reset in the Great Game of Advertising? What’s currently going on to Re-set it? And what else can we do to Re-start it?

A. Solution focus.

Arguably the best way forward is to focus on the Solutions for Advertising, and work backwards from there. A key reason for this is that it would take a really thick book to outline the issues Advertising currently faces, analyze the options available, and to develop a plan of attack. We have only limited time in a blog post.  Moreover, a Solution Focus can help us cut through the muddle and get to the issues more quickly.

So let’s start by imagining that a miracle has just happened, and that Advertising has been Re-set. We are entering a Platinum Age of Advertising – better than the Golden age – and a time when future writers would capture it in a new series – Television or otherwise – called Mad Men (and likely Mad Women) Return.  What would this look like and what we the things had to occur for us to realize this miracle?

B. The New Age of Mad Men and Women.

Specifically, let’s consider that it’s the Year is 2030, and the 55th People’s Choice Awards are on tonight. Every major Event in 2030 is now judged by Crowd, who have been proven to be “Wiser” than Expert Panels such as The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for the judging contests like the Academy Awards. “Mad People”, a retro visual series based on Advertising’s Renaissance in the 2010’s, is expected to clean up in this evening’s show – which will be seen by 3 billion people.

The reason why Mad People is so popular is that Advertising changed dramatically around 2010 and became the world’s most interesting business. Great entertainment brands such as Pixar returned to their roots in the Advertising and for some time developing retro commercials for Tropicana, Volkswagen, Trident, Pillsbury and Lifesaver, just like it did in the old days.

There are many other examples to demonstrate the Renaissance of Advertising in 2030, including:

1.) Global perspective.

• In terms of Brand Power and Market capitalization Advertising Consultancies (no longer called “Agencies”) rank among the top service brands in the world i.e., along with McKinsey and Accenture, if not higher.
• The most successful Advertising Consultancies had moved to a “Hub and Spoke” model and reduced the need for full service agencies in each market. These hubs were center for the “Creative class” including Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Bangkok, Seoul, Rio de Janiero, Buenos Aires, Miami, San Francisco, New York City, Montreal, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Milan, Paris, Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, Istanbul, and Cape Town.
• Advertising budgets would be increased during a recession as innovation is seen to be the best way to power out of recession.

2.) Clients

• Clients would not call Advertising Consultancies only for advice, but for jobs and to poach Top talent.
• Clients for the Major Advertising Consultancies now include Heads of State, Celebrities, Rock Stars, and CEO’s, CFO’s and some sharp CMO’s. They come for unique data analytics, insights, strategy, world-sourced execution and results.
• Advertising Consultancies turn away difficult clients & there is a universal “Black list”.

3.) Employees

• Advertising has taken over Investment Banking as the preferred destination for Top University Graduates.
• Advertising would hold Chairs in top universities around the world.

C. What’s the first thing that changed to make this new age happen?

The first thing to make this happen was that a number of Advertising Consultancies figured out that the game was not about how Advertising works; rather, it was about how people worked. They started with what people wanted and did, and worked from there.

With this realization that Advertising was not the center of the universe, revolutionary Advertising Companies stopped trying to take a Direct Approach of drawing attention to Brands in “One step” (also known as “The Peacock Strategy”). They changed to an Indirect Path by creating something of value or interest for a community of people and at the same time creating an opportunity or reason to have a chat with them. This “Two step” strategy succeeded more often than not and it was given many names including Brand Utility, Cause Marketing, Crowd-sourcing, Engagement,  Infotainment, Gamification of Marketing – among others.

D. What other things were done to make this happen?

There were many other things that were done but here are six key strategies:

1.) Get other consumers to tell your story.

Other smart Advertising Consultancies analyzed the “Two step” approach and then applied that to people. They didn’t sell directly to people; rather, they found clever ways for people to sell things on their behalf to their friends. This proved to be a better approach because Brands had lost trust while friends did not.

As a result, Advertising stopped focusing on Target Audiences and started discussing Communities based around consumer interests. It then found ways to be part of those Communities. This heralded a shift in overall spending from Bought Media to Owned Media and Earned Media.

2. ) Take on Social Causes

Some other Smart Advertising Consultancies reacted to the growing consumer pressure for Brands to address higher needs e.g., helping society, saving the Planet.

Advertising Consultancies helped link their clients’ brands to important Social Causes. This generated publicity, increased profitability and made the “Triple Bottom Line” of Profit, People and Planet, a standard practice in Marketing.

Moreover this progressive thinking raised Advertising’s influence from being a business that supported commerce to one that helped change the world, giving it much more profile.

3.) Multiple small ideas vs. one big idea

Still other smart Advertising Consultancies realized that generating the “Big Idea” had become a market convention – everyone claimed it. Besides thinking about big ideas alone proved risky, for if you fail with one big idea, then you have little to fall back on because big ideas require significant resources to execute and sustain.

Big idea thinking gave way to multiple, smaller ideas within a Broadly-defined Brand Territory”. It also gave rise to more personalized one-on-one communications.

Finally “Small ideas” proved to be more successful as clients moved from a Campaign or Continuous marketing approach, to a Project based approach to Marketing and Marketing communications.

4.) World-sourcing and the Rise of Super Integrator – Producers within Leading Agencies.

Since Client organizations began consolidating their global marketing organizations in hub and spoke arrangements (e.g., with a core office in Singapore or Hong Kong and more sales-oriented offices in neighbouring countries) Advertising followed suit.

Moreover, as the Internet pervades business, Advertising has had to “World-source” talent giving rise to a different Hub and Spoke arrangement based on strong project management and global outsourcing skills for the best-in-breed partners and suppliers. Sometimes this talent resided within Advertising’s global network, sometimes it involved professional partners and other times projects were crowd-sourced and open to any and all comers.

Further, as speed to market become a core competency Advertising had to run 24×7 using 3-shifts in a single office and/or a global network to work around the clock.

5.) Different types of Talent within Advertising.

Advertising Consultancies found they needed to import specialized talent to manage the changing landscape. The new positions required included:

• Professional Project Managers – brought in from logistics companies to help Advertising work better, faster, cheaper and increase profitability – all at the same time.
• Creative Technology Officers – adept at both creative and technology, these rare individuals are bilingual i.e., able to talk the languages of Art and Technology.
• Information Architects/User Experience Designers – digital imports to creative and media agencies.
• Innovation Lab Directors – a number of agencies are experimenting with this but this position will be essential to keep “ahead of the curve”.

6.) Outcome vs. output determined remuneration.

The Advertising Business Model evolved to be based on outcomes and results vs. output only. This was done by leading edge Advertising consultancies putting their skin in the game and variable payment that paid big bonuses for performance.

E. Who is already starting to define the Future of Advertising?

William Gibson, the famous science fiction writer, has often been quoted as saying “The Future is here, it is just not evenly distributed”. A number of large and upstart Advertising Consultancies are proving Gibson’s theory correct,  by pioneering some of the paths to this miracle picture we portrayed above.

These transformational Advertising companies and upstarts/challengers* include:

1. Multinationals

a.)  Digital  – Razorfish, Sapient Nitro,

b.)  Media  – Aegis Media, GroupM, OMD,

c.)   Creative  – BBDO, Ogilvy, TBWA\

2. Challengers

Other agencies that are transforming the future are typically outside the main global giants who often think they have too much to lose to transform completely. The upstarts include Anomaly, BBH, Co:Collective, Droga5, Far Far, Made by many, Naked Communications, Sid Lee, Taxi, Wieden + Kennedy.

It is not a coincidence that many of these upstarts are from the West. This is where Advertising has suffered most from recession and where change has become a necessity for survival.

In Asia Pacific, most markets apart from Japan continue to grow, so the current Advertising business model works. That said, Asia Pacific can benefit by tracking how the Western Advertising Companies test new business models. It can then adapt the best of these model as it finds appropriate, or to leapfrog this process altogether.

F. Conclusion

Almost every Advertising Consultancy (Agency) today, and quite a few near Agency competitors e.g., Technology – Google and Microsoft, and Management Consulting, – McKinsey and Bain, and even Investment Bankers, are talking about “The Agency of the Future”.  So if the Advertising Agencies don’t define the future, other businesses will.

In this Age, technology has enabled Disruption and Creativity on a scale never been seen before. Moreover, Consumer Behaviour is being liberated by the same technology. We’ve always known the Brand resides in the Consumers’ hearts and minds. Now they are able to use technology tools such as Consumer reviews, Tweeting, Blogging etc., to have greater influence over these brands.

The combination of technology and changing consumer behaviour makes it the perfect time to Re-set our Business. So in 20 years time, the TV producers (or the equivalent of TV in 2030) will have lots of great material when they write about The Great Reset of Advertising in the 2010’s.

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So, will we ever reach this New Age of Mad Men and Mad Women? Perhaps the best way to answer this is to turn to a great man from the First Age of Mad Men - Leo Burnett - who said:

“If you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud, either.”

-

The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little bit brighter.

* Subjective list

While the major social network sites have started to generate revenue, some of their valuations are huge with price-earnings multiples that are extremely difficult to justify, given the current financial logic. This is particularly true with the recent Linkedin and Yandex IPO’s.

To help justify these valuations, legions of investors and managers in Social Media, as well as Application (App) developers, are testing different ways to monetize and share revenue part of that revenue with the Social networks that host the App. The most successful ways to do so include:

• Subscriptions
• Freemiums
• Virtual goods
• Advertising funding
• Research funding

One of the most recent developments involves the monetization, selling, or some would say, “pimping” of friends within the Social networks.

This post talks about early ventures in this area, and speculates where this practice might be headed.

1. Monetizing friends.

Monetizing friends means receiving incentives – cash or otherwise – for promoting, or successfully selling, a product or service to friends in your social network. At this point the incentives include cash, coupons, points, virtual goods and donations to charities.

But in time this could involve products, services, access to high profile events/people, recognition, or perhaps even jobs – any asset the brand has to offer.

The topic of “selling friends” is interesting because it has the potential to generate funds, but it can also be controversial, as we will see in the examples below.

2. “Friends” for Commercial Brands vs. Individuals.

Selling one’s friends may not be too large a leap for commercial Brands (e.g., adidas, Coca-Cola), because their relationships with consumers are generally grounded in commerce. There is a general recognition and underlying acceptance from both parties and outsiders of this.

But selling one’s friends in personal relationships raises different issues related to trust, privacy and the bases of the friendship. Changing the relationship from personal to business, and without permission, will generally be seen to be “off limits” and will likely tarnish the perpetrator’s own reputation.

3. “Friends” of Celebrities.

Many celebrities use Social Media to connect with their followers and fan base, using both global platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and also local Asian platforms, such as Sina Weibo, in China. Entertainment celebrities also use global check-in services like Glue and Miso and voice- blogging services such as Bubbly in India and Japan.

For “Commercial Celebrities” such as SMAP in Japan, or the famous Indian actors such as Shuhrukh Khan, it’s generally possible, and somewhat expected, to monetize their fan bases.  Social Media might even be part of the contract these celebrities hold with their promoters.

But for the “Non commercial” celebrities, such as the Dalai Lama, it would be nearly impossible to monetize his network unless perhaps it involved requesting donations for a worthy cause.

4. Ad.ly

A number of marketers have also started to leverage the Social Networks to generate revenue for themselves, and to share these with the Social Networks. Ad.ly is an American advertising agency that pays actors, athletes and musicians to promote brands through Facebook and Twitter.

Ad.ly has a roster of over 1000 celebrities including Kim Kardashian with 7.8 million followers and Snoop Dog with 3.5 million followers, and 150 clients such as Best Buy, Microsoft, Toyota and Universal Pictures. Moreover they have celebrities to target Moms, Sports fans, Teen Girls, Teen Boys Women 18-34 and Men 18-34.  Here is an example of an celebrity sponsored Tweet done through Ad.ly:

5. Backplane

Lady Gaga and Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt are also setting up a “Celebrity Social Network” called Backplane. The project was just discussed on June 7, 2011, so press releases are the only form of evidence available. But given the profile of its two founders, we should expect to see great things from this venture including better ways to monetize celebrity friends.

6. Burger King “Whopper sacrifice”

One of the first and most interesting examples of a brand trying to monetize friends, was Burger King in the United States, which enticed users sell out (i.e., De-Friend) 10 of their friends in exchange for a Whooper (hamburger). The campaign ran in late 2008 on Facebook and was entitled the “Whopper sacrifice”,

It was judged to be successful mainly because of the PR it generated, especially after Facebook shut it down for running contrary to the Social Network’s goals of attracting the largest possible audience.  A total of 233,906 people were de-friended over the shortened campaign.

7. Likely Social graph and Bell Curve

The answer to when you might sell your friend likely relies on where that friend sits in your social graph. For example, at the extreme right of your “Bell Curve of friends” you might never want to make money by selling a product or service because this is home to “Dear close friends”. Mixing friends, family and commerce can be a difficult mix.

But perhaps you feel less strongly with your “Contacts”, “Contacted once” and “On the way out” friends? It’s quite a personal decision.

The following presents a possible shape of a typical Bell Curve of Friends:

8. “Disposable” friends

It turns out that Burger King’s “Whopper sacrifice” was based on an insight that has global relevance – that users tend to have “disposable friends” in their networks. A recent global “Truth about youth” study released by McCann Erickson indicated that most countries have “On the way out” friends with different names in different markets including:

• Australia – “Obligation friends”
• Chile – “Recyclable friends”
• India – “Stranger friends”
• Singapore – “Disposable friends”

McCann documented that these friends are kept within a person’s Social Network to:

• Make you look popular
• Spy on them and compare what they are doing to others
• Show off
• Save for a “rainy day”. You might need them in the future.

Clearly if an individual were to sell out his or her friends then they would start with these “Disposable friends” on the left side of the Social Bell Curve.

9. “Pay with a Tweet”

“Pay with a Tweet” is a service leverages the value of one’s social network to pay for a digital product or service. Basically this App will provide access to content in exchange for a recommendation or promoting a product or service.

10. Charities and doing good deeds.

Another model that is being tested is to leverage your relationship with friends for a good cause. For example if someone recommends a product to their Social Network via a “Like” or “Share” button, then the marketer will send a donation to a worthy third party such as a charity or NGO.

This model seems to show promise because many individuals want brands to do more and will tolerate messages in exchange for doing good.

11. Strength of ties with “friends” in your network.

Not all friends in the network are the same. So as the market finds ways to monetize friends, it will also need to measure both the strength and direction (one way, two way, symmetrical, asymmetrical etc.) of the relationship of each friendship. This is not possible in most Social Networks. However, work is being done on this as well.

That said, Empire Avenue is a game helps you assess the strength of the connections within your social network. It operates as a stock exchange where you use virtual money to assess the strengths of the links within your network. In time this virtual exchange may act as a real surrogate for the value of your connections.

The is an important development, because the typical links in a Social Media Network give little indication of the strength of the ties within the network, nor the direction or symmetry of the relationship. Without this understanding of the friendship dynamic it is difficult to consider monetizing the relationship.

12. Summary

In summary, there is a great need to monetize the huge audiences of the Social Networks and the current business models only starting to generate revenue. To justify the huge valuations and on-going investment, the Social Networks need to generate more money.

One key way is to monetize or sell friends. And we’ve seen that this can be easier for Brands and Celebrities than for individuals.

That said, “selling friends” is really only part of the larger picture of how to unlock the value of your social network, that includes:

a.) Converting Social Capital into Financial Capital

As we’ve seen, there are a number of experiments underway in converting Social Capital into Financial Capital but acceptance of these will take time. We might even find that the Social Capital Market is more fragile than the Financial Capital market and that there will be push-back by the overall system to monetize personal friends.

b.) Converting Social Capital into other forms of Capital.

Alternatively the conversion of Social Capital to Financial Capital may be only the start of attempts to covert Social Capital into other forms of Capital including:

• Consumer Capital – time, expertise, labour, collective wisdom, physical assets (new and used), points, virtual goods.

• Brand Capital – money, coupons and other discounting tools, products and services, third party products and services, Intellectual Property and digital goods, virtual goods, recognition, projects and jobs.

In time these early attempts to convert Social Capital into Financial Capital might evolve into a huge Inter-Capital exchange where Social Capital can be converted into any forms of Capital.

This new “Stock of Exchange of Social Capital” would be much more interesting and valuable, than in simply selling your “disposable friends” – although personally I would find it difficult to do even that.

The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little bit brighter.

Yes, advertising truly is for the birds – or more precisely – for certain birds. That’s because the study of specific types of birds presents us with a number of models for successful advertising.

Please consider these four, interesting models, that can help inspire both the digital and traditional worlds of advertising:

A. DIGITAL ADVERTISING.

1. Starlings

Starlings present a great natural example of Influencer Marketing, and the “Wisdom of crowds”. These strengths are best seen in the amazing murmurations, or gatherings, of hundreds of thousands of starlings in the UK, that is also one of nature’s most spectacular, and under-rated phenomena.

The huge gatherings of starlings occur when millions of these birds migrate to the UK’s milder Atlantic climate, from the harsh cold of northern Europe during winter months. These starlings gather together – much the way people do – for safety in numbers, information exchange (if some come back from a good feeding area, others learn of it) and to generate warmth for the upcoming night – through the energy they generate in the murmuration and in roosting together.

Each bird flies as close a possible to its neighbour, immediately copying any changes in direction and speed. As such, a tiny deviation by one bird is copied and distorted by those surrounding it, creating a rippling pattern within the entire flock. When amplified by upwards of a million birds, this amplification makes the flock seem to be one vast, living and well-connected entity. In turn this murmuration makes it a good metaphor for influencers, as well as the combined wisdom in human crowds.

While the visual below is interesting, the real phenomenon can only be appreciated by seeing it live or through a video: http://bit.ly/hao8xp

There is a wisdom and an indeed a beauty that a flock of starlings produce –much more than the sum of the parts of what individual starlings could ever produce. By studying this behaviour in birds, a smart advertiser can start to understand the power of Influencer Marketing and to unleash the overall Wisdom that resides within crowds.

2. Bowerbirds*

Bowerbirds represent advertisers who are mastering this age of Interaction and Social Media. Bowerbirds follow a “two-step” process to engage their mates, just the way many smart advertisers are employing a combination of traditional and digital media to engage their consumers.

The Bowerbirds start by thinking of what might be of interest to a potential mate -in this case it’s a nest and a collection of “shiny objects” – and work from there.  When the female bird is drawn into the bait, the male Bowerbird moves in to seduce her.

While this is a unique strategy among birds, it also provides a model for very different approach to traditional advertising. Rather than drawing attention to the bird or product itself, it draws attention to something else before trying to engage the target.

This is an important metaphor for today’s advertisers because consumers are more in control and less interested in interruptive messages – unless they are simply excellent; rather, an increasing number of consumers tend to appreciate brands that understand their needs, provide brand utility, games and a reason to participate, before they will consider a dialogue with the brand.

B. TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING

3. The Peacock*

The male Peacock is a great model for today’s advertisers, because it shows just how far one must go to stand out from the crowd in this increasingly cluttered media environment. While there are many beautiful birds in the world, few can attract as much visual attention as the Peacock.

The Peacock teaches us the degree that a Brand must take its advertising today to be really noticed. Drawing attention to your-self is one of the oldest games in advertising, but it can be effective if done well – correction, if it is done, extremely well.

It should also be noted here that attraction is just one part of advertising. In addition to attraction, this beautiful bird will also needs information – a good line or two – if he hopes to retain the attention of his target.

Great advertising is similar in that a great visual must be accompanied by an equally compelling message in a “set-spike” relationship.

4. Swans

Finally, the Swan can be a very good “model” for advertising luxury brands, because it can help us better understand Brand Imagery, User Imagery and the Relationship between the Brand and the Consumer. To see this, please consider the following:

• Brand imagery: Swans are strong metaphors for luxury because they epitomize beauty, confidence, control, uniqueness, and standing out from the crowd. So if you are thinking of a brand image for a luxury product, a Swan can help define this thinking.

• User imagery: Consumers of luxury goods are a bit like Swans in that they don’t seem to like crowds. When pictured they are generally seen alone or in pairs at best, as with users of luxury goods. That’s because they want to feel unique, be the focus of attention and be seen to express their “high rank” within society by means of their purchase. (“As you can see by my US$10k Hermes Birkin hand-bag, I have arrived. Pay attention to me.”) As such, Swans can also provide great imagery for luxury users.

• Relationship between the Brand and the Consumer. Generally speaking luxury goods are badges that consumers wear to express their status, with the Brand Imagery matching or helping define the User imagery. Swans are good at expressing status because they reflect both the brand and the consumers – calm and in control – with legs working furiously below to power them forward. (Luxury is almost never associated with work.)

It’s no coincidence that a number of luxury brands have selected Swans as their symbol – including high-end hotels in China and the UK, as well as the Nautor Swan sailboats. They don’t need to be symbols but the Swan can help provide good models for advertisers of luxury products and services.

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So is advertising for the birds? Unfortunately much of it is because it poorly crafted, interruptive, and doesn’t really understand today’s changing consumer.

But there is lots of hope. Leading advertisers are changing the landscape, and as odd as it may first seem, the unusual behaviour of some highly evolved birds, can provide us with the some inspiration for doing great ads.

Here’s to those unusual birds, including those advertisers who seek inspiration in every facet of life – like the study of our feathered friends.

Blair Currie

The Rising Sun

Helping make your day just a little bit brighter.

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* I’d like to acknowledge Gareth Kay of Goodby Silverstein and Partners for his thoughts on Peacocks and Bowerbirds. I first learned of these powerful metaphors in one of his presentations.