9/1/2010
Steve Schildwachter, EVP, Group Management Director, Draftfcb Chicago
Smartphones will eclipse feature phones as a percentage of the U.S. mobile device population by the end of 2011. Clients are discovering smartphone apps that offer an opportunity to engage and continue consumer relationships. Agencies each want to be the one to help their clients leverage these apps. All kinds of agencies: traditional, new breed, media and of course digital.
Which agencies own Mobile?
First we ought to properly frame the question. An AdAge.com article recently took the view that "creative agencies" and "media agencies" are fighting over the right to "own" Mobile. Apparently they put digital agencies into the "creative" category, which is fine as far as it goes.
It doesn't go far enough, however. Missing from the discussion is retail. Some promotion and shopper marketing agencies are starting to create mobile apps for their clients, and retailers themselves are developing programs in which their vendors - uh, partners - can buy into - uh, participate. One example described in an article on NYTimes.com is Shopkick, currently backed by Macy's and four other retailers.
The gigantic Venn diagram
The landscape of agencies, clients and retailers is more complicated than just "creative" and "media" agencies. This shouldn't surprise us in an era where all available marketing channels form a gigantic Venn diagram that shifts and overlaps in new ways every week. We've observed this before (here and here) and in a way it's the point of this blog.
Asking who owns mobile is like asking who owns television: the agency who develops a 30" commercial, the agency who plans or buys, the network or station, the program developer or the cable service provider.
It's the same with mobile. Someone has to decide there's an opportunity to engage consumers via a mobile device. Someone has to develop the app or ad. Someone has to figure out the way to engage the consumer, which in some cases will be a display media buy and other cases something resembling word of mouth marketing.
Mobile survival guide
There are two implications here:
Who knows Mobile? Clients won’t ask which agency owns Mobile, they’ll ask who knows Mobile. If you’re an agency person, worry less about whether you should handle Mobile and more about whether you’re prepared to handle it.
Mobile is not a silo. This actually applies to all disciplines, but you can’t treat Mobile or anything else as its own discipline. It has to be considered as a strategic option from the beginning, and made part of the plan if and only if the business solution demands it. Planned that way, it will work well together with advertising, digital and retail.
8/26/2010Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
As I went back over the video I shot of Patrick Moorhead, director of mobile platforms at Draftfcb Chicago, detailing the agency's mobile manifesto, the 10th point didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, so I asked him to take a few minutes and write down his thoughts on the final part of the 10-point strategy. Here's what he had to say:
Our final point in the mobile manifesto is that if you make your mobile experience work for the consumer, they will notice. In fact, those who get it right have seen dramatic responses from consumers.
A clear example of this is online auction company eBay, who launched a full scale mobile platform in 2009. Incorporating a platform approach means accounting for a wide variety of devices and methods for consumers to use them seamlessly – not just an iPhone app, but an app for each smartphone platform, and options like SMS and WAP for low end phones – integrated with online email and commerce systems fluidly. In its first year, eBay reported a whopping $600MM in revenue resulting from mobile transactions. That’s $600MM worth of consumers saying "yes, that works for me."
The time, and the evidence, are now here to allow us to stop asking the misguided question “is this the year of mobile”. The answer is not yes, or no, it is simply that it doesn’t matter. Mobile is not optional for the consumer, they are relying on it more each day, and companies that embrace these facts and take action against them are seeing explosive results. So instead of asking “does mobile make sense” or “should we test mobile” we need to evolve an understanding that what really matters in mobile is getting it right, and getting started.
In case you missed any other earlier posts to the manifesto, you can easily find them in posts from earlier this week -- part 1, part 2 and part 3. 8/23/2010Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
In the third installment featuring Draftfcb's Mobile Manifesto, Patrick Moorhead, director of mobile platforms at Draftfcb Chicago, covers three of the final four points in the 10-point strategy.
Patrick Moorhead, Parts 7-9
8/20/2010
Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
Picking up where he left off yesterday, Draftfcb Chicago's Patrick Moorhead, director of mobile platforms, discuss the next four points of Draftfcb's Mobile Manifesto.
PMoorhead Mobile 3-6 8/19/2010Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
It's been an exciting few weeks in the mobile space for Draftfcb Chicago.
In the below video, and series of videos to follow over the next few work days, Patrick Moorhead (@chimediaguy), director of mobile of platforms at Draftfcb Chicago, talks about the agency's 10 point mobile strategy that we call the Draftfcb Mobile Manifesto. It provides a framework for unraveling the mobile opportunity and understanding that succeeding with mobile has less to do with technology, and everything to do with understanding people.
This initial video includes the first two points, and additional points in the manifesto will be posted tomorrow.
Patrick Moorhead on Mobile
8/18/2010Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
McGraw-Hill last week released the 7th edition of Advertising Media Planning, the world’s largest selling text on media planning — a subject increasingly more complex as the media landscape continues to evolve. Draftfcb’s Roger Baron, svp and director of media research, based in Chicago, is co-author of this 30-year industry classic, which is viewed by many as the “media bible.” The new book, now available at online sources and in book stores, includes all the basics of traditional media plus updates from Roger to include the latest industry challenges and practices.
To find out more about how the media planner’s world has changed and how this new edition will help students and practitioners alike navigate the exploding media world, check out Roger’s comments in the video below.
Roger Baron on Media 8/17/2010Posted by Leo Ryan, Influence Planning Director, Draftfcb London
We received a brief at Draftfcb recently that asked for advice on using all three areas of search; SEO, SEM and “stimulated”. I think this is a really useful distinction and an obvious corollary to the oft quoted “three types of media”; paid, owned and earned which is neatly summarised by Forrester here.
What does it mean? If SEM is paid search and SEO is what you can do to optimise your own web site in search then to my mind stimulated is what you can do to activate both of those. In this interpretation, stimulating SEM would be driving users to a search engine with a specific search in mind, against which you have bought specific terms; Compare the Meerkat comes to mind as an example.
But it is the stimulation of SEO that is really emerging as an area of interest; how to harness the growing tendency of users to link to sites they like (which builds you-in bound links) and to write descriptions of them, which contributes to the meta data that search engines use to understand what your site is about.
I first noticed the impact of inbound links working on the Sony BRAVIA Balls campaign (in 2005 at another agency) when one of the unintended consequences of creating the BRAVIA blog and the associated distribution of blog assets was that lots of high ranking blogs linked to the campaign site bravia-advert.com. The net result of this was that the site was the number one result in Google for the search term “advert”. For two years. Genius. If what Sony sold was adverts…so be careful what you optimse for.
As often seems to be the case whenever you get into the murky world of search there are myriad issues to consider including the follow / nofollow; the practice of marking links as ‘nofollow’ to exclude them from various search engine processes. This varies on different bookmarking sites and so can impact on their contribution to your SEO. With the rise of twitter and other mocroblogging platforms there has also been a huge increase in the use of URL shortening servcies like Bit.ly and TinyURL. Again these vary in the way that hey attributte links, although it seems most of them do fact act as stimulus to your SEO.
Putting these areas of pernickety technical detail aside it seems that overall social media links help browsers find your content and they contribute to your SEO to help serchers find your content. Both good things. So to get a handle on what kinds of social links you’ve got going on go and play with some of the tools that Lee Odden profiles on Social Media Today here. Or simply put your latest blog post into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
And happy stimulation.
Posted by Rich Gagnon, Chief Media Officer, Draftfcb New York
It’s usually better to lead a trend than to follow one.
Case in point: In the Aug. 9 issue of Advertising Age, there’s a big story on how a major global agency is rumored to be considering a move to re-bundle media in order to offer a more holistic approach to clients. We can’t argue with that -- we have always believed that media and creative should work in tandem, with both being equally important.
As a fully integrated agency, Draftfcb was one of the only global players to resist the unbundling trend – and we have stuck to our guns. In fact, we seamlessly combined digital (which drives content and creative expression), media (with search capabilities), and CRM to create our thriving Real-Time practice in New York. While other agency models have adopted a more siloed approach, with each discipline functioning separately, our offering has benefited integrated accounts such as Census and ONDCP. At the same time, adopting a collaborative culture in which we work closely with our creative and wheel teams has helped us better manage media-specific accounts like Merck – and our ability to partner with their agencies.
Why does this model work so well for us? Everything starts with the Wheel: strategic planning, media, creative, digital, CRM, and account management all aligning to form a rich, strategic, cohesive offering for our clients. We believe in the idea of a simultaneous vs. sequential approach -- working together with common goals and rallying around a common purpose. We understand the importance of co-creation: Everyone must be responsible for the creation of ideas – creative, strategy, media, account management, data, and channel experts. We apply context planning to impact the consumer decision journey. It’s not just about how you engage, but when and where you engage consumers. And we have established marketing based on real-time, data-driven feedback.
Let others follow the trend – we’re happy to take the lead. 8/13/2010Posted by Josh Dysart, Manager, Corporate Communications
As the World Cup ended, our colleagues in South Africa launched the Keep Flying campaign, an initiative designed to encourage South Africans to continuing flying the nation's flag 30 days after the World Cup's final match.
While those 30 days have come and gone, the below video features John Dixon, CEO of Draftfcb South Africa, and goes in to great detail about the initiative and its orgins.
Keep Flying - John Dixon
8/10/2010
Posted by Michael Leis, VP, Digital Management Director, Draftfcb Chicago
In the last post, I tried my best to describe the challenge of Overlap10: solving for Wicked Problems. Now, I can tell you the story of scalable solutions (or, How To Solve For Wicked Problems): the basis for the work we did over the weekend.
Everyone who attended was asked to post a short video describing either what they thought a scalable action was, or what his or her idea was for a scalable social action.
Looking back, while a lot of really incredible scalable social concepts were generated, what I’d like to share are the innovative exercises and presentations that helped me understand that we need new ways of generating platforms within which people can create solutions. Here are the highlights:
Bodystorming
The first exercise was to assemble in groups of 7-9 people to grasp the complexity of a Wicked Problem by taking on childhood obesity. To start, everyone in the group took a few minutes to write a series of ideas about the factors they thought were involved in the problem. Each idea has its own sticky note, and we came together as a group for five minutes to arrange all of our ideas into groups that made the web of influences on the problem apparent.
At that point, Dennis Schleicher’s Bodystorming came into play, literally, where we had another 10 minutes to create a short play showing the problem space and varied interests involved in the childhood obesity issue. Then each group had to perform their conclusions in front of the rest of the group. It was an excellent process to iterate through a number of ideas, and because we went through it all together (after the initial five minutes), in two hours the fifty or so people were able to present a depth of understanding this complex problem space that any other method would have failed at producing.
Yes, it felt silly at first. But going through it, and then improvising through the performance only underlined the importance of using this method to create understanding of issues that groups in very typical corporate or government settings would have trouble to produce in conventional meetings.
Kinesthetic Ideation
Did you know that the nerve endings in your hands connect to 80% of your brain’s synapses? The premise of the kinesthetic exercise was to show more specifically how much more effective it is to generate and iterate on really valuable concepts by using your body than it is to be confined to a chair in a meeting room, office or cubicle.
To do this, we were broken into groups of about 10 people at standing tables with a huge box of Legos. In the first five minutes, we were each tasked to build a freestanding Lego tower. The only condition being that it had to stand on its own.
Next, we were given five minutes to work with the person sitting next to us and create a bridge between the two towers. The only conditions here were that you had to be able to pass your hand underneath the bridge, and the bridge had to be able to hold the weight of a post-it note pad.
At that point, we were asked to write down our favorite city and one or two attributes that make that city great. We then got together as we did at the beginning of the bodystorming to assemble these city attributes into like groups.
Here’s the twist: we then had to create opposite groups. So if a city was centrally located and friendly, it became a note of remote and nasty. Then, we had ten minutes to work together to create that awful city.
In contrast to our earlier group strategy of working together through final output, this group decided that we would split apart and work in 2-3 person groups to create our own part of the city we would then integrate to create the larger city. It didn’t work out as well.
Our city reflected the organizational structure: we had a group of neighborhoods instead of one cohesive creation. And when it came time to relate the different awful attributes of our city, we had a much harder time improvising our way through it. We didn’t have that clarity in the roles we were playing, and we couldn’t support each other as fluidly in the presentation.
Everything is a Performance
We also had a few fantastic speakers, one of which was Michael Dila, an Overlap founding member, who talked about performances: that in every scenario, you play a part on a performance.
To start, he described a situation in which he tried to hand an empty milk pitcher to a Starbucks Barista. Instead of saying something like, “Thanks, let me take care of that for you,” the reaction was one where the Barista seemed taken off guard and accosted by the request.
Why would that reaction happen? In a customer service system like Starbucks, there’s a point of scale in training (ostensibly getting people to learn a script for interacting on behalf of the system/brand), that what gets hammered home are the specific scenes in which Baristas interact with Customers. Somewhere along the way, the fact that both of these players are people gets lost and forgotten.
In contrast, Dila then described a newly designed check-in process at a hotel he stayed at. Instead of a long, high check-in desk separating the employees from the customers, the hotel remodeled the area into a few podiums: not unlike what you might find at an airport counter.
As he approached the check-in area, the hotel employee came out from behind the podium and met him about 6 feet in front of the desk. They took his ID / credit card, went behind the podium to check him in, and then came back out to hand him his cards and keys.
Think about what that means. This may be the only interaction with a human that you have during your stay, and they make it special by giving you actual human contact. It’s at least as efficient to the systematic elements, if not more savings across the board in terms of customer service because now you’ve been in direct contact with a person.
So how do we start embarking on solving Wicked Problems in a scalable and effective way?
Two concepts: Frameworks and Questions
Frameworks instead of scripts and single goals
In designing for scale, we have a habit of creating cattle chutes we want people to follow to contribute to a single-goal “replace the light bulb,” kind of solution. But wicked Problems are often too nuanced and dynamic for that.
So what we need to strive for is the creation of frameworks, creating a “place,” whether real or virtual, where the agenda is set, and the participants allowed to break down their own smaller pieces of the problem, and solve for them using their own methods.
This is where the notion of maturing co-creation platforms like Jovoto (who’s president, Bastian Unterberg was in attendance at Overlap) start to become very interesting.
Platforms and questions
All too often, as global brands, corporations, even governments try to create solutions at scale, the discourse is filled with declarative statements about what people need to do.
What’s really needed is to build on the frameworks idea to create platforms where questions can be asked, and discussed. Maybe with no declarative statements or answers. What does a platform like that look like? What kind of potential for solutions exists in a place where you’re only building and iterating on questions?
Thanks for reading all the way down here! Hopefully, this stirred some thoughts and questions of your own. Please, let’s continue the conversation in the comment section, or on Twitter @mleis.
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