Filed under: crispin porter + bogusky
When we took on the Domino’s advertising and digital business in 2007, one of our first assignments was to redesign dominos.com. They were last in the category to get into online ordering. Both Pizza Hut and Papa John’s were there first, but no one had nailed it. It was all radio buttons and check boxes. A total chore. We saw it as an opportunity to reinvent the category and create outrageous business results. Our vision was simple. Steal from the best. Be the Amazon of food ordering. One thing we loved about Amazon was that their initial ambition was to be the best way to buy books anywhere not just online. Gigantic but straightforward thinking. Hulu was another that borrowed from their mission, successfully (be the best way to watch premium content online). We believed that if we could become ‘the best way to order food’ anywhere, on or offline, that we could do big things as well. Amazon owned “1 click ordering.” Who owned “1/2 click ordering?” But it wasn’t just a matter of making a super personalized, easy-to-use, and fast ecommerce site. We wanted it to be fun and surprising and uniquely Domino’s. It needed to be inherently shareable, differentiated in the category, and something that people wanted to return to time and time again. So we invented the visual pizza builder, a dynamic tool that allowed users to customize their pizza, and then struck real gold with the creation of the Pizza Tracker, a tracking tool that hooked into the Domino’s POS and enabled consumers to track the progress of their online orders in real time. Fast forward a few years and dominos.com is now the 4th biggest ecommerce platform on the internet behind Amazon, Office Depot, and Staples, in terms of total transaction volume, 25% of all sales come through online ordering, we’ve moved from 3rd to 1st in terms of online order share, and profits through the first half of the year hit $47.1MM, up 23 percent from a year ago. Generating business results for our clients is what it’s all about, and it’s a great thrill, but it’s also exciting to be sharing company with one of our acknowledged heroes, Amazon. Additionally, our mobile site for the brand was recently recognized by Mashable as one of their five favorite UIs of 2010. Others on the list included Google and Twitter. Another big honor for us and the brand. But also something that makes sense. By and large advertisers get written off by the Web 2.0 community as capable of creating groundbreaking applications. I think that’s going to change. From 2000-2004, marketers were doing many of the most interesting things on the Web. It was the heyday of the micro-site, and Nike and Burger King were two brands that especially stood out to me. But marketers lost their way, fell in love with making heavy Flash animations, and banners that no one clicks on. Web 2.0 snuck in and introduced concepts such as UGC, digital utility, APIs, location-based services, and social networks. They changed things over night, and online user behavior and expectations changed with it. People wanted more than what online advertising was offering (essentially interactive versions of TV ideas). They wanted fast, personalized experiences that made life more convenient, helped them be a little more famous, entertained them in two minute doses, and connected them to their favorite people and content. Web 2.0 was about service not brand message. And many in the marketing community fell behind. The only people really seeing and using the work were agency award show judges. But things have changed. The best marketers now understand how to use utility and service to influence consideration, create lasting relationships with customers, and drive real business change. They understand that marketing works best when it’s built into the product. From Nike Plus to Fiat Ecodrive to Pizza Tracker, the Old Spice campaign, American Express’ OPEN Forum, and Vail’s EpicMix, the work is making news, has become more service oriented, and more intelligently designed to fit into people’s digital lives today. The reasons? We now have world-class standards developers, a much more evolved understanding of how to integrate creative technologists into our organizations, a better grasp on the transformative power of social media and transparency, and more APIs at our disposal. Most importantly, great marketers know how to change the cultural conversation around products, build brands, and make them famous. They know how to do more than just make things functional. They know how to make them impossible to ignore. It’s an exciting time to be working in advertising. We’re inventing products not just messages, competing with our digital heroes, getting great results, and changing the perception of what an advertising agency is allowed to do. There’s always going to be a huge need for great storytellers in this business. Video is just such an undeniably, powerful medium, and one that’s still growing online. But the agencies that can figure out how to create cultures of inventing and making stuff will be much better positioned to create real business change for brands. Invention is the new interactive.
Here’s another piece on the "tech divide," and how the knowledge and capability gap between traditional and digital agencies appears to be closing, as evidenced in work like W+K’s Old Spice social media campaign. There’s some really great insights in here about what’s driving the change, but I think it could go a little further.
As I explained in my AdAge article on a similar topic a few months back, some agencies have already closed the gap, completely. It’s not a question. And in my mind, the conversation should be over. The talk should turn to the work and away from what type of agency is making it.
CP+B has been an integrated and digitally-centered organization for almost a decade. From Subservient Chicken to multi-million dollar e-commerce sites to social media to new platforms to mobile and enterprise systems, we’ve done it and driven business results in the process. And even more significantly, we’ve also built brands with our clients in the process. Something no digital agency can claim.
It’s always been my belief that there are fewer great idea people than there are talented and well-trained technologists and that it would only be a matter of time before the best traditional agencies would become ‘technology-enabled’ and capable of doing exceptional interactive.
As the industry moves forward, you’ll very likely see more and more press worthy and innovative thinking come from the so called ‘traditional’ set. Pure utility without story is soulless, and consumers still need to connect emotionally with brands in order to build affinity and preference. To find success in the post-digital world, you’ve got to be able to create something that people want to talk about. It may be a platform, yes. But it also needs a culturally sticky idea.
The agencies that have a history of building brands, changing pop-culture, and that have also successfully integrated technologists into their creative process and departments will have a decisive advantage in creating and developing the next set of ground-breaking digital marketing case studies.
It’s going to be an exciting year as far as digital marketing innovation goes. There are indeed more people at the table. And as I mentioned in my previous piece, clients can stop thinking about which traditional, social, mobile, and digital shops to call and start thinking about which ‘marketing agency’ may be right for their business.
You can read the two articles here: -Adweek, “Closing the Tech Divide” - http://bit.ly/aCCs21
-AdAge, “Give Shops More Credit for Work that Bridges Digital Divide” - http://bit.ly/bS6zgU
Though I’ve never been much of an MS Project geek and don’t see all that much practical value in a PMI certificate (producing is really a people not a process profession), I‘ve always been a big believer in the power of smart project documentation. The fact is that without detailed creative and technical requirements and production schedules it’s difficult to make world-class and large-scale interactive experiences, particularly when you do most of the technical development in-house and work on short timelines. At CP+B, our Integrated Producers do a lot of writing, including RFPs, project statements, production schedules, daily status emails, and project evaluations, and use a variety of project management and collaboration tools such as Basecamp, Bugzilla, Jira, and our own job and allocation tracking system. All of these documents and tools are invaluable to the production process, but I’d have to say one of my current favorites is our CP+B Interactive Production Checklist. When you’re working on a bunch of fast and nearly impossible projects, it can be hard to keep it all together. This is a simple tool designed to help you stay a few steps ahead . And as much as we rely more and more on cloud-based software to run our projects, there’s still a need and place for the simple checklist to help get the job done. Some of the checklist tasks and language are relatively specific to producing interactive at CP+B, but if you do what I do, you may also find it useful. Or maybe you have ideas about how we can make it even better? Either way, I thought I’d pass it along. Thanks to the CP+B developers for inspiring us to make this.
ShockingBarack.com is one of my favorite things we’ve done this year. It recalls tactics and philosophies that we’ve had previous success with (move at the speed of light from concept to production, do more with less, be relentless, and surround the idea with the integrated production equivalent of the Navy Seals), hints at where more of our creative and strategic thinking is headed (transparent, collaborative, more API driven, and real-time interactive), and supports a socially and economically responsible agenda and vision (electric vehicle infrastructure and tax incentive legislation). Social media marketing has been the talk of the town for a few years now, yet there are still more great capabilities presentations and self-appointed experts than actual great and culture-changing ideas and case studies. On October 13, 2009, the Shocking Barack team set out on a mission to retrace the route of the automotive CEOs who went to DC to ask for government loans and deliver a viable and really smart transportation solution to President Obama. Armed only with two Brammo Powercycles, a small camera crew, some Flip cams, and social media tools such as WordPress, Twitter, and Couchsurfing.com, this team succeeded in getting a meeting at the White House with the DOE and generating both a cultural and political conversation. That’s real-time social at work not in theory. It’s been an inspiration to watch, follow, and interact with. Congrats to the team.
If you missed it, you can check-out the adventure here: ShockingBarack.com
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