Filed under: digital marketing
Advertising has made some digital leaps forward over the last few years, particularly in the areas of production and technology. Creative Technology is not a new concept anymore (the 4A's even has an event for technologists, CreateTech), and more traditional agencies are building out internal production capabilities. While this has created new job opportunities for technologists, data strategists, UX designers, and many other types you'd find at pure-play digital agencies, the options for creative talent has yet to markedly change. You can be an Art Director, Copywriter, or Designer, essentially meaning you can design or write scripts and ad copy across media. These are still very relevant and mission critical agency functions, but much of the digital talent escaping to start-ups doesn't naturally fit the mold. Many are hybrids. They do a little of everything from creative to product management to strategy to technology. And these are people we need to attract and have a place for. Just as the definition of advertising creativity has evolved to be inclusive of media and technology we think it's time to take it another step. We need to make room for the social media and start-up generation. We need a new creative discipline. We're calling it Invention Strategy. The Invention Strategist sits within the creative department, works on integrated teams with Art Directors, Copywriters, Creative Tech, UX, and Media, and is responsible for digital ideation and strategy as well as creative direction on things like apps and platforms. Brands compete with digital giants for attention today. We all need to act a little more like start-ups. Inventors. Our marketing has to be less about message and more about immediate value. We don’t need to throw away everything we've learned about building brands, but we need to take a few pages from the Web 2.0 and product development communities in how they’re structured, think, and act, in order to create content and experiences that resound with people today and make businesses go. Ultimately, invention should be everybody's job, and we want more t-shaped or hybrid thinkers across the agency, but by introducing Invention Strategy to the creative mix, our hope is that we kickstart things and push the thinking a little further center, and in turn create new job opportunities for creative folks out there who may not have advertising on the radar right now. This past Monday, we welcomed, Bud Caddell, our first Invention Strategist to Deutsch LA. Bud's a great thinker and has worked on some breakthrough digital and social media marketing campaigns and platforms for brands like American Express, Ford Motor Company, GE, CNN, Pepsi, HBO, and TBS/TNT. We're excited to have him and to get the group of the ground.
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
I’ve spent most of my career working as a producer, breaking ideas down to their core, figuring out what they are, and how they should work.
Over the past year, I’ve read and heard a lot of talk about crowdsourcing, and it’s mostly questions about what it means for the soul and future of our industry. What I haven’t heard a lot about is what it actually means. Blame it on a good buzz word, but everyone seems to be caught up in the effect rather than the what. As a producer it’s hard for me to skip the what.
When you break crowdsourcing down to its essence, it takes on a relatively familiar shape. It’s Web 2.0 + freelance, or more specifically, aggregated, online freelance. The only thing that’s new about this idea are the websites and tools that filter and bring the communities together, though a site like TopCoder has been around since 2001.
Crowdsourcing sites make it easier for small businesses, brands, and agencies, to access and activate freelance communities, at lower cost, and that’s a very cool and powerful thing, but even great tools don’t remove the baggage that comes with having to lead and manage a freelance and virtual workforce.
The best things we’ve done since I’ve been at CP+B, particularly in the digital space, have been a result of co-located and cross-disciplinary teams working together. But even the successes have come with challenges, and it can be hard getting people to work together well even when they sit next to each other in the same building. When you add physical distance, different time zones, tight timelines, and a lack of shared work culture and goals, it gets a whole lot more difficult to do effective, press worthy work. It’s not impossible, but it takes more time, and in the marketing world, that’s not something we have a lot of.
Crowdsourcing has a future. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a smart way to open up the ideation and design process, as well as empower consumers to take a more active role in your marketing efforts. But as good as the Web collaboration tools are today, the toughest creative problems, more often than not, get solved faster and more efficiently by teams sitting and working together.
For that reason, we’ll continue to experiment with and incorporate the latest and greatest collaboration and social media tools into our work, but as far as our business model goes, the premium, for the foreseeable future, will be placed on creating an evolving work environment and process that enables better teamwork. Original A-team style.
That’s how we get results. And that’s what our clients are paying for.
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