BBH Labs » transformational change

Interview With Smithery Founder Mr John V Willshire: Part II

Mel Exon — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:46:58 +0000

After Part I last Friday, which foraged largely outside the parameters of brands and marketing, this post – the final and second part of our interview with John Willshire (@willsh), founder of Smithery – comes back closer to home to discuss the future of advertising, what’s stopping brands universally adopting better marketing practices and ‘Real Marketing’ … along the way taking in cargo cults, starting fires and Doctor Who.

BBH Labs: In the past you’ve used a bonfires and fireworks analogy to describe the difference between advertising and social, and more recently we’ve debated what we at BBH call “Super Bowl, Super Social” on your blog. We can’t help but think (great) advertising will have a role in people’s lives for a good while yet, for the simple reason that good marketing acts as a persuasive shorthand for choice and news in a world increasingly flooded with terabytes of irrelevant information. And we’ve had the likes of Eric Schmidt speaking recently about advertising becoming super-relevant and connected in future. What’s your view on the future of advertising? Is there one?

JW: I think your point about the persuasive shorthand matters, and redefining the story that advertising is going to tell. When I was thinking more about the media planning side of advertising, it was useful to simplify it to two things, activity & phasing; what we should do, when we should do it.

So Bonfires & Fireworks is the what – never really an either/or choice, as companies still need to do social bonfires and advertising fireworks together to make each work.

The when of doing both together, the phasing, is crucial.

What the social bonfire piece allows you to do is, as a company, do noteworthy things that are amazing for your customers, for your employees, with your products, whatever… let the real human stories and triumphs emerge.

Then, after that, you can then tell the story of that. And if you want to tell that story with scale and immediacy, there is no better way to tell that story than in advertising.

The crucial difference is that advertising is no longer the thing you do, it’s the story of the things you’ve done.

BBH Labs: Brands ‘becoming more human’ is a common theme at Smithery, reminding us of The Clue Train Manifesto (we’re fans). Nonetheless, will there come a point in time when we’re sick to death of brands trying to be “just like us”?

I think if we were going to become sick to death of people, we’d have all died in solitude about 5000 years ago.

But perhaps brands should be aspiring to be known as a collective. ‘The people who…’, the folk at…’, ‘the guys that made…’.

It’s increasingly how people talk about brands anyway, and it’s the theme of my favourite thesis from Cluetrain, number 84 -

“We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

On a slight tangent, it’s strange to think that Cluetrain is now, what, 12 years old? 13? Everyone thought it’d change the world in five years. And yet here we still are, slowly plodding along.

It’s Amara’s Law, I suppose: “…overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run…”

*KLAXON SOUNDS… predictable technology quote bingo alert*

BBH Labs: Yet all too often ‘human’ gets interpreted by organisations and their agencies as ‘universally approachable FB-speak’ (I just made that up). What’s your advice for brands here?

That’s what we might tire of, going back to your previous point.

The overfriendly mateyness of social network conversation, where some poor marketing junior is told to be the ‘voice of the brand’ (within strict parameters) which essentially adds to typing thousands of words whilst avoiding saying anything.

That’s not ‘being human’. That’s live, largely unskilled copywriting.

And yes, you can hire agencies to do that for you, and it’ll be better. But it’s not making the most of the connections you could be creating.

If all you want people to bother doing is to come along and give you a little pat on the back for doing what you’ve done as a company for the last fifty years, then Facebook’s perfect for that.

Oh, I like that. It’s fine. OK. Satisfactory.

I do wonder if Facebook got rid of fans because weren’t enough great companies, products and services out there worthy of fandom?

You wouldn’t be a fan of a shitty generic lager, for instance, but you might like something they did. The like lets the whole world damn you with faint praise… you can like a page, leave, and never have to look it again.

Which is what happens on the majority of Facebook pages. The numbers vary, but the last thing I saw suggested that Facebook pages only reach 17% of people who’ve liked those pages.

And yet far too often, likes and friends pop up as things to actively measure success or failure by. Just because the numbers exist, suddenly they’re something to judge entire marketing efforts by. It’s causing way more problems for clients & agencies than it is offering solutions.

Its this climate that might’ve prompted Richard to write this the other day:

“The involvement of most brands and in the social media lives of the public remains clumsy, inept and disrespectful. Driven, it seems, by a profound misunderstanding of our place in this world, our importance in people’s lives and the basic question that we should have learned a long time ago ‘why would anyone give a fuck?’ As my girlfriend incredulously remarked over the Christmas break, ‘how sad do you have to be to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook?’

BBH Labs: Yep. It strikes us that too many brands look at the social web as another “channel” to broadcast in. They adopt cargo cult behaviour: “Let’s have a conversation!” Versus let’s listen and then add value. The worst examples are just creating white noise 24/7, 365 days of the year. How do you reckon this is all going to end?

It’s fascinating how many “Facebook is too polluted” posts and articles seem to be around. And a lot of that pollution is caused by brands, who’re also the main source of revenue for Facebook.

The source of the cash is detrimental to the product; it was claimed last year that 89% of Facebook’s revenue is from advertising.

There’s two pieces worth reading. There’s something in the Uncrunched post “Nobody goes to Facebook anymore. It’s too crowded” that rings true.

Facebook have got a marvellous platform there. But they should let people have a fresh go at starting again. Or make it very easy to defriend lots of people at once, so you can easily refocus it to be as useful to YOU as possible, not as useful to Facebook in how many links you might click on.

The joy of using Path at the moment is in making fresh tracks in the untouched powder of a new social network. Which in that slightly haphazard snowboarding analogy, makes Facebook the bottom of lifts where you can’t move for bloody skiers…

Source: New York Times

The second interesting piece is this one on Colony Collapse, which looks at the parallels of bee colonies to what happens in social networks…

“When a power user departs a social network, the hundreds of thousands of ties, however weak, collapse, and so at scale the whole infrastructure begins to collapse, and the social network begins to die. This is directly what happened with MySpace, which remains a desperate shell, an empty husk of what it once was.”

So, if you have less ‘power users’ and more ‘white noise’ from brands as you put it, it’s a less desirable place to be, and the energy disappears.

And with increased pressure post-IPO to make money for Facebook shareholders… well, there’s a chance that Facebook could go exactly the same way as Myspace, Friendster, Friends Reunited… the list goes on.

BBH Labs: So what should brands do about it?

If your social strategy disappears because Facebook disappears, then you probably never had a proper social strategy in the first place.

The temptation with a lot of brand social projects to date has been to write one big, central narrative – let’s crack THE THING that EVERYONE will want to PARTICIPATE in, and throw all energy and resource behind it in our marketing campaign.

When really, it shouldn’t be one thing, it should be LOTS of things (“Light many Fires”, as my good friend Mark Earls says).

And they should be from all around the company, not just concocted by the Marketing Department and their agencies. Think about this:

“Real Marketing cannot be thought of as a department activity. It is a matter of harnessing all of the company’s resources to satisfy customers, and of linking what the customer wants with what the company is (or can become).”

That’s not new thinking. It’s from Stephen King’s 1985 paper “Has Marketing Failed, or was it Never Really Tried” (I found it through Simon Clemmow’s Admap piece).

If you think about the connections it’s possible to make between people internally and customers externally now, well, King would have a field day.

Interestingly, of the four essential aspects of Real Marketing that King proposed, the second one was ‘Working Over Time’. The whole point of proper marketing was to make it “a little easier to be successful in the future than at present”.

I think maybe Stephen King wouldn’t have had any truck with the notion of “social bonfires”. He’d have probably just called it “Real Marketing”.

BBH Labs: Looking into 2012, what are you excited about?

Well, we’re expecting a second child in June. So THAT, for one.

Work wise, it’s continuing to debate and discuss things like this, for one. Where does brand meet community, are they at some level the same thing, and therefore how do we create definitions that help companies get better at marketing. I’m sure that’ll be solved by May…

Then there’s a ferociously bright and talented bunch going through the IPA Excellence Diploma (created by BBH’s Nick Kendall, of course). They’ll be writing their 7,000 word dissertations through the summer, which will no doubt serve up enough inspiration for a lifetime.

Interestingly, a lot of my in-house projects and current client work is about exploring the links between pixels and bits, where things becomes digital services, and digital services become actual things.

And as always, I’m excited about the project that appears over the horizon and completely contradicts everything we’ve talked about…

…but that’s half the fun, isn’t it? To quote Doctor Who – “do what I do; hold tight and pretend it’s a plan…”

John is @willsh on twitter, and blogs at http://smithery.co/blog. You can read Part I of our interview with John here.

Interview with Mr John V Willshire, founder of Smithery

Mel Exon — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:56:00 +0000

Every now and again, we like to interview someone doing something interesting. It’s a pleasure to say that this time we’re featuring a good friend of Labs, John V Willshire, (or @willsh, as he’s known to the Twitterverse). John broke free from agency life last year to set up his own business. In this, the first of a two-part interview, we asked John to tell us a bit about it – along the way sharing his thoughts on a bunch of things from The Smiths, social connectivity, the economic viability of social production today and, er, rocks vs water..

Social Winter, Oslo, 2011

BBH Labs: Tell us a bit about why you founded Smithery.

JW: The idea powering Smithery is Make Things People Want beats Make People Want Things. The former doesn’t replace the latter, as companies still do both, but what’s interesting is the switch in emphasis.

Over time, the advertising industry became very, very good at making people want things. It didn’t matter if those things weren’t all that good, because nobody could tell each other with any meaningful scale at a meaningful volume. Advertising was louder than bombs, to inappropriately hijack The Smiths (hey, if it’s good enough for John Lewis…).

Obviously we don’t need to go into the details here of how the internet has changed how companies can connect with people, but the advertising instinct is to use social connectivity to make people want things. That’s why I think the majority of social activity we see is poor.

As time passes, companies and agencies will work harder and think better about how to use social connectivity to make things people want, whether that’s changing established goods and services, or creating new ones.

So I founded Smithery to help do that; whether it’s working together in better ways, making better things, or helping telling better stories about those things.BBH Labs: We know why you chose the name, but what is it about Smithery that’s valuable and different, do you think?

JW: All the excellent BBH Labs posts on t-shaped people and teams over the last eighteen months kept setting off this little voice in my head… “so what IS my deep rooted skill?”.

Being honest, for years I’ve been forcibly resistant to idea of specialising in anything, and just doing what needed to be done, like the rocks & water idea – fit in all the gaps where nobody’s doing what needs to be done…

I found that the Creative Generalist guidelines (read “what specifically do generalists do”) served as a decent compass.

And I was lucky, really, to be at PHD where it wasn’t just tolerated, but encouraged. My job description was “the creation and cultivation of ideas through the study of technological, social and cultural trends”. Which, when you pick it apart, means absolutely anything is fair game.

I thought of generalism itself as my specialism. Which in hindsight wasn’t true.

Lately I’ve been thinking that if I do have a core, a long leg of the T, it’s economics. I accidentally did economics at university (a long story), but I ran swiftly away from being an economist after going on a two day graduate course at the Bank of England.

But economics has proved really, really useful in and around advertising and marketing. Simplifying it, microeconomics is thinking about how individuals react to changes, macroeconomics is thinking about how groups, companies and organisations react to changes. It teaches you how to quickly model and explain these changes, and design and define a strategy.

What’s caught me attention lately on that economics angle this paper by Gilboa, Postlewaite, Samuelson & Schiedler.

It proposes that economists develop and use economic models not as strict definitions of how the world is (“rule based”), but as analogies to help us understand the relationship between different real-world cases and the models themselves (“case based”).

Which I think plays out in an analogy like Bonfires & Fireworks – it’s not the creation of a rule-based structure, but a helpful way to think about what you’re setting out to do.

BBH Labs: are co-creation and social production viable economic models yet?

I was thinking recently about revisting the Social Production stuff, in relation to coffee service eightpointnine.com. I wrote some thoughts on it here, but the long on the short of it is that economic models aren’t as fit for purpose as they might be.

For a hundred or so years, there was no point supposing that your product could be infinitely variable by each customer who came along. Production methods might have allowed it, but there was no way to connect to people quickly enough to manage the process.

So, instead, economics focused on things you could change, like price. ‘Price discrimination’, for instance, is where you set different prices discretely to different groups in order to maximise revenue for a constant product.

But with a coffee service that lets you blend their own perfect brew, and share it with whomever, all at a constant price… that’s not something that’s been factored into standard economic or business thinking.

Technology helps you organise precise, personalised orders from your customers, and technology will increasingly be used to help fulfil – the 3D printed chocolate cupcake could be personalised for every order, the drink you create and design on uFlavour can be bought by the crate for a party you’re having.

But is it viable to be looking at this now?

Well, viable and profitable are two very different things. It’s definitely viable. And in the short term, it’ll give you more interesting stories to tell around your people and your business. There’s value created on the journey. You’ll learn new things too. And take turns you never expected to into new territories.

But you’d be kidding yourself if you thought it’s going to be a short three month journey into profit.

I think what we may well see is a lot of interesting startups around personalised food and products, but in the same way interesting tech startups get rolled up and disappear into existing companies, the same will happen in the product space; except, of course, you can replace Nokia or Google with Unilever or Kraft.

BBH Labs: Is there a danger all this audience involvement actually asks too much of people?

JW: Yes, of course. Perhaps the real trick will be making product personalisation passive for the things you don’t care enough about. For instance; I love coffee, so I will spend five minutes a week tweaking the blend.

However, say I don’t care nearly as much about tea. But my supermarket and other shopping habits can be used to create a ‘tasting’ profile (always buys: rich, dark, liquoricey tasting things), which is used to guess what I’d like in a tea, I’d probably pay more for it.

For the things you buy that aren’t important enough to micromanage, that type of customisation becomes important.

Of course, you have to also consider what is it that’s actually interesting for people here? Is it that the product is clever and passive, and you can show off to your friends? Or was it the fact that you actually made a selection and judgement on things the story, so the passive model isn’t important?

It becomes important for clients and agencies to think about the story space created around products, so people can tell their own version. To some extent, the stories of products and services are becoming about the buyers, not the sellers.

John is @willsh on twitter, and blogs at http://smithery.co/blog. Look out for part 2 of this interview on Monday, when we’ll come back closer to home with a perspective on modern marketing: where it’s going wrong and some thoughts on what to do about it.

Majority report: looking through the digital hype

Mel Exon — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:13:31 +0000

This post originally appeared as an article in Viewpoint at the end of 2011. Briefed to one of BBH London’s smartest strategists, Ed Booty, as a deliberate polemic, it’s a provocative argument designed to question our assumptions about the constant pace of change. We like being challenged (we enjoyed Matt Edgar’s post last year along similar lines) – please let us know what you think in the comments.

Author: Ed Booty, Strategy Director, BBH London

Image: Seattle Space Needle, by Patricia Kranenberg (via Flickr under a Creative Commons licence)

It is commonly accepted that a digital revolution is afoot. We have entered a brave new networked world. Individuals are empowered, social movements cannot remain contained and knowledge is free to all. Data is making our world more intuitive, bespoke and rewarding. We are mobile, always on, always entertained and hyper-social.

Things appear to be going swimmingly and never has the future been so clearly mapped out for us. It’s sexy, creative, inclusive and exciting. It’s one big SXSW festival.

Nothing new so far, and it does all sound rather good.

Maybe it’s too good to be true?

Unfortunately it is.

Advance apologies to neophytes, digital evangelists and west coast entrepreneurs. It’s time for a reality check. The speed, scale and depth of the so-called digital revolution has been wildly exaggerated.

What has caused this mirage of revolution?

Behind the hype, what might a more realistic vision of a digital world be?This isn’t a luddite’s defence of an endangered way of life, but instead an attempt to rationalise and reconsider some big digital assumptions. Only by realistically appraising the present can we begin to discern what the future might look like.

Digital media is undoubtedly the defining technology of our age. It has already reshaped entire industries, created empires and billionaires. There is little to debate over its reach and integration. Everything is now digital, from TVs and books to shopping. The important question is therefore not ‘How digital is the world?’, but ‘How different is life in this digital world?’.

For me personally, there has never been a more exciting time to be in the business of creative communication. Digital media offers us massive opportunities; new ways of interacting with content, of bringing to life ideas, and of making brands relevant and useful, far beyond traditional advertising.

It’s so new and exciting that it’s easy to confuse its potential with reality. As we’ve explored and embraced the bewildering possibilities, we’ve increasingly convinced ourselves that a revolution is here. Meanwhile real peoples’ lives and needs simply aren’t changing at the same pace. What is possible is growing at an exponential rate, but how people actually live and use technologies has changed very little. This gap between the myth and reality is ever-widening.

20 years ago the average Brit watched 4 hours of TV a day [1 - see footnotes]. Their favorite show was a soap. The most popular news source was The Sun[2]. The number one brand was Coca Cola[3]. The best selling car was a Ford Fiesta[4]. The two biggest issues in people’s lives were the economy and the NHS[5]. 20% of people enjoyed a night at the pub. 27% were always improving their home. 11% rarely had a family meal. 23% enjoyed clothes shopping. 17% hated housework[6].

This is all also true in 2011. Life is fundamentally much the same.

Of course there have been changes. Mobile phones are ubiquitous, the internet is in 3/4 of homes[7], digital TV in 93%[8]. Facebook has 31m monthly users[9]-numbers regularly cited as irrefutable evidence for the radical shift in how we live. Despite their scale, their actual impact has been overstated.

Purchase is too often confused with adoption. People do often buy and subscribe to new technologies. They then infrequently (if ever) use them. Only 20% of the average smartphone’s capacity is ever used.[10] Of the 20% people willing to pay for TVs with internet connectivity[11], under half of them even connect it[12], let alone find it useful.

Even where a new medium is being used, it is primarily facilitating old behaviours. Despite the breadth of user-generated content, 98% of the UK’s viewing is of professionally produced film content[13]. The UK’s most popular news website is the BBC. The vast majority of people remain passive recipients of the same content they have always liked. Only 2% of web users actively create and contribute[14]. Even within Twitter subscribers, 83% have not sent a tweet in the last month[15]. However, the illusion of revolution is so convincing that it affects how people perceive their own behaviour. On average PVR owners believe they watch over 70% of their TV on demand. The real figure is 14%. 86% of their viewing is traditional real-time broadcast. This ratio is not changing.

Despite having it at their fingertips, people are just not making use of the richness of the technology that is available to them. They aren’t living the digital lives they should be. What’s going on? Surely they should be as excited as we are? Are they just laggards who will eventually embrace the glistening and inevitable digital future? Or, perhaps it’s us who’ve missed the point?

We have bought our own hype. So desirable is the digital dream that we have mistaken its potential for reality. This delusion has been driven by an unprecedented bubble of hype, driven by the media, digital advocates and technology brands. They have created, believe and propagate the myth that life has changed irrevocably.

Journalists, whose own industry has been heavily affected by digital media, give it disproportionate coverage and importance; seamlessly suggesting causal relationships between the advent of technologies and real life events. Twitter caused the Arab spring. Blackberrys were the London rioter’s secret weapon. Elections are now won and lost on Facebook. No story is complete without an unquantified reference to the impact of digital media.

Under 8% of Britons have ever used twitter, 1.9% use it regularly[16]. It’s only the UK’s 27^th most popular site[17], but is the most mentioned- with an average of 1,446 times per month in the national press alone.

The cult of technology has also been passionately advocated from within; by a minority with disproportionate influence. The web is an ‘echo-chamber’ where digital enthusiasts have their beliefs reinforced and re-tweeted. This creates a self-referential cycle of self importance. The web’s favourite subject is unsurprisingly ‘computers and the web’. It accounts for over 34% of site visits (versus just 12% for social media and forums)[18]. These self-proclaimed ‘early adopters’’ assumption is that the rest of society is simply yet to catch up[19]. This is rarely the case. Real people more often than not, have better things to do, like watch Eastenders.

The myth of radical change is furthered by technology brands. They are a powerful influence, representing over 10% of all bought advertising[20] (ironically, the majority of it in traditional media[21]). With ambitious sales targets and consumers that have literally got more technology than they know what to do with, communicating marginal innovations will not suffice. Every new technology or product is promoted as revolutionary; a life-changing breakthrough.

Who wouldn’t want to get involved?

In this era of economic uncertainty, in contrast to the zeitgeist, technology has become a beacon of hope. It’s cool, synonymous with success and promises to enhance life. Like alchemy in the Renaissance, technology brands offer a potent combination of wonderment, distraction and optimism. Their CEOs are evangelistic figures; revered and admired. They promise a brighter future on a rainy day and we believe it because we want it to be true. They show us what is possible. Herein however, is the crux of the problem. Technology is tech-centric. There is the assumption that because something can be done, it will be popular, important and useful. However, ‘We are now able to…’ is not the same as ‘People now want to…’. Possibility is mistaken for demand.

The dotcom crash of the late 1990s was driven by the same misunderstanding. Price/earnings ratios were overlooked and belief placed in technological advancements. A decade later mobile networks paid over inflated prices for 3G licenses to facilitate video calling. Not because there was demand, but because it became possible.

Too little attention is given to what will be required and what will actually be useful.

Rather than thinking about the future in terms of what technology that will be available, a better method may be to ask what will people want in the future; what will actually improve how they live?

While a minority excite themselves and propagate the belief that the future is here, it is real ‘consumers’ that will dictate the pace of change and ultimately have the final say in what the future really looks like.

That’s why there is no Digital Revolution. Cultural revolutions are not created in R&D labs.

They represent radical changes in how people live and society operates. The agricultural and industrial revolutions changed the fundamental shape of society. Digital media has barely scratched the surface. As Steve Jobs was visionary enough to acknowledge:

“This stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t… it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything.”

The early impact of digital media has then been wildly overemphasised.

This does then beg the question famously voiced by Roy Amara: What are the long-term impacts we simultaneously under-estimate? That’s a topic for another day. But its an important one, because they’re going to be fundamental, dare I say ‘revolutionary’…

[1] BARB
[2] NRS
[3] Marketing Magazine/Grocer: Britain’s Biggest Brands
[4] SMMT 2011
[5] source: Ipsos Mori)
[6] Source: TGI
[7] ONS
[8] ONS
[9] Facebook
[10] Source WDS Global.
[11] Quarterly TV Design and Features Report, 2011
[12] Gartner/ Wired Magazine, September 2011
[13] BBH research
[14] eg Wikipedia
[15] RJMetrics
[16] Gaining accurate numbers is difficult. These are the assumptions in the calculation:17% of Twitter accounts have sent a single tweet over the past month, 4.9m people have accounts, UK population 61,838,154
[17] Source: Comscore
[18] source: Experian Hitwise, actal web usage data, UK, August 2011
[19] Anyone remember SecondLife?
[20] Nielsen
[21] Nielsen

Google #Firestarters 3: Building A New Agency OS

Mel Exon — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:27:14 +0000

For the third event in the Google #Firestarters series its curator extraordinaire, Neil Perkin, chose to tackle the issues of “legacy structures, processes and thinking” head-on with the question: “what might the operating system for the agency of the future look like?“.

It’s a hairy, humbling monster of a question, not least because talk of new agency structures and ways of working so often teeters precariously on the edge of empty buzzword bingo (check out Tim Malbon’s post last year on Agile as a cargo cult).

On Tuesday night, Martin Bailie, James Caig and I were given 20 minutes to share a response. I attempted to avoid painting a picture of an agency built of silicon, and instead set out to describe something rather more prosaic. These days, perhaps more than ever, agencies are almost ALL about culture; their operating system a set of programs designed to encourage creativity and responsive behaviour, not codify inflexible structures and processes. Get the culture right and the rest follows. So the question becomes: what sort of agency culture do you want to create or be a part of? And what about all the contextual stuff we perhaps need to consider first?

A simple take on the impact of technology

We’ve known for years that the opportunities to buy mass attention are shrinking by the day, just as the opportunities to earn and measure attention become ever more enticingly available. If today Google’s Panda algorithm places ever more pressure on businesses to boost the signal not increase the noise and Facebook’s EdgeRank reduces the visibility of brands that send users to sleep, imagine what this will be like in future. At its simplest, it adds up to the same thing: ALL marketing – not just the rare handful of brands that regularly win awards – needs to be *genuinely* useful or entertaining. If not, marketing will become that thing that marketers and agencies fear the most: unseen and unheard.

If we can just wake up to this fact, this is a show-stoppingly great moment in time for our industry. There simply isn’t room for me-too, clutter-up-your-life, half-baked ideas, or one way messages dumped on the web dressed up to look “interactive”. However, there is lots of room for marketing done with skill and purpose, that people want to share, remix and make their own.

I’m calling this Marketing Singularity – an absurd title, which I’ll explain it in a second. For now, I just want to restate how it feels that we’re at a tipping point in our industry’s life cycle. If we can just set ourselves straight, it’s going to be epic. Let me explain why and how…

Is the pace of change exponential or logarithmic?

Let’s start with a question that’s at the root of why we’re having this conversation in the first place: the oft-discussed pace of change. Jeremy pointed me to a speech made earlier this month by Ben Hammersley, who spoke with provocative eloquence about an incumbent generation of leaders losing ground on a ‘Internet era’ revolution racing away from them. Around the same time, Matt Edgar wrote a spirited rebuttal to the common assumption that the pace of change is accelerating.. It feels important to decide where you sit on this debate, because if the pace of change is exponential, then it follows we need to have systems in place that encourage us to plan a lot further ahead – or react more nimbly – than we have currently. Or perhaps that isn’t the point. The pace of change may or may not be accelerating, but the pace of life is de facto faster than it was, say, five years ago. And whilst Matt questions whether technology’s exponential rate of change actually impacts on our lives to the same degree, I find that a peculiar assumption. Technology doesn’t sit on the sidelines of our lives these days: it’s embedded, root and branch. What’s more, the technology companies themselves regard speed as a competitive advantage (“Better products, faster” – Larry Page, Google shareholders’ meeting, 2011). Last week’s avalanche of tech news (again) is a case in point.

Marketing Singularity?

In fact you could argue we’re approaching Marketing Singularity: the point at which marketing is forced to become exponentially better, until it is so useful or entertaining it ceases to be a separate, stand-alone, one-way message and instead becomes indistinguishable from the product or service it promotes.

It might be content, it might be a framework or a game that invites participation; or even participation that gets displayed as a game. Platforms are brand operating systems, campaigns are applications. As Ben pointed out earlier this year, these are not binary.

Marketing as a profit centre, not a cost

Taking this to its logical conclusion, shouldn’t we aim to create marketing products and services that are so good, people are prepared to pay for them? Even if this approach isn’t what’s required (perhaps a Freemium model is the way to begin), I like the responsibility it places upon our shoulders: make marketing valuable to people. Looking further out, we may look back on the days we spent millions of dollars just paying for the privilege to reach people as a little odd. Brands like Audi and Red Bull are early experimenters in the guise of brands as committed media owners / publishers.

The kind of agency OS this demands

A few programs for starters:

Reductive thinking everywhere

At Labs, we admire the ruthless economy, flex and energy of a great start up as much as the next person. Kickstarter and Instagram are two of the better known examples of Minimum Viable Product thinking. For any agency worth their salt, the fundamental principles of MVP should not feel new. Great brand strategy and creative have *always* been about the art of sacrifice. The task now is to apply that mindset throughout agency departments: reduce to MVP, then listen (data) and pivot as required. This becomes all the more important when we look at shifts in business stability: from long periods of stability and short periods of disruption, to the reverse. This is a model for marketing too – let’s get comfortable with an environment that needs to flex and morph.

Silicon vs carbon

As Rishad Tobaccowala said a few days ago, ‘the world may be digital, but people are analog.” Any agency OS needs to be built around people, not technology.

‘Big is a collection of smalls’

People habitually join agencies like BBH from colleges and smaller agencies because they want to do something at SCALE. Accordingly, the very last thing we need to do is shy away from growth. Instead, the best agencies are increasingly breaking into nimbler, cross-functional teams, often with hybrid skills and collaborative in mindset. As Nigel Bogle puts it, ‘big is a collection of smalls’. Teams with autonomy, but access to shared services.

Whilst we should cast for the client or task in question (don’t take the team structure I sketched too literally), it’s worth drawing attention to the ‘broker’ role. If you’re interested in non-traditional media partnerships and thinking, you need a deal maker in your team.

Networked, versus in a network

We cannot do everything ourselves. With every layer of complexity, comes a deeper requirement to nurture and build strong external partnerships. Labs is a product of its network, plain and simple.

Foster Renaissance (wo)men

We’ve said this before, but we’re living through a Renaissance period. To be successful, we need fearless people who want to collaborate and learn from other industries. Deal makers, entrepreneurs, makers.. The people who never hold back from making the thing they dream of, just because the tools don’t exist today. Because they know they’ll exist tomorrow.

Make real things

You don’t need a 3D printer to make stuff or experience the benefits of making a proto-type of your idea. Making an early version of something – even if it’s rubbish (many years ago, I remember taking a mockup of a Boddingtons Tetra pak to a client meeting, to sell the idea of ‘Fresh Cream’. They hated it) – teaches you stuff you don’t find out if you stay in theory mode. So go buy a soldering iron and make something… There’s also a non-too-subtle shift going on between experiences that live entirely online (potentially interesting) and those that straddle the real world too (potentially fascinating). Check out Russell Davies’ piece for Campaign and the brilliant Marc Owens’ Avatar Machine if you want to read more.

Stay curious

Adopting and encouraging a culture of constant learning sounds exhausting, but it may well be the only way to stay sane. Learn to code, get comfortable in the wild, stay open, stay curious – I’m enjoying playing with my Weavr thanks to @zeroinfluencer – create your own here. A phrase used often at BBH and which turned up on our login screens this summer is perhaps an apt way to close: “Do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you.”

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We’d love to hear what you think – what are the other programs you’d want to include in an agency OS?

Check out Martin’s presentation here and James’s here.

Thank you to Neil, James, Martin and everyone who came and contributed… as always, the discussion got most interesting when the formal presentations stopped and everyone piled in. Aside from following the conversation here #Firestarters or nicely storified here, there have also been several thought provoking response posts (check out this one here from Simon Kendrick or this one here from Shea Warnes for starters). As always, Neil’s follow-up post will be one to look out for too.

BDW Making Digital Work 4

Griffin Farley — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:14:00 +0000

Whenever Boulder Digital Works puts on an event they attract some of the best talent in the industry. The event is in Boulder, Colorado April 28-29 and you can click here to register.

Below are some notes from the last BDW Event in New York which should give you a taste of what you might see in Colorado.

The Education of Staff and Clients
Edward Boches, Chief Innovation Officer at Mullen described how he got his agency and clients migrating over to social media platforms like Twitter. Before the “Trash Talk from Section Twitter” Mullen had around ten people on Twitter and a handful of clients using the platform. After inviting all their staff and clients to participate, Mullen surged to 350+ people on Twitter and half their clients using the platform. These clients now see Mullen as an expert in the space because they showed them how to use the platform.

The Importance of Partnerships
The trend in agency innovation is to increase dependence on partnerships. Agencies like Victors and Spoils and Co: depend on this model to survive but they also describe how one agency cannot be geographically everywhere to take advantage of all the available talent. This philosophy describes a completely different agency landscape where cooperation creates greatness.

Creative Technologists are the new Rock Stars
A number of speakers talked about Creative Technologists but Scott Pringle and Chloe Glottlieb really nailed the role in their presentations. Chloe talked about a book called ‘Program or be Programmed’ which seems to be the story of the day. Scott shared the importance of playing with technology, sharing that with creative teams and then combining that thinking to meet a client objective.

Speed of Thought
Tim Malbon of Made by Many shared the importance of agility and speed to get things to market and work with your users to refine. We love Tim’s approach to ideation through “sketch sessions” where people sit for an hour and sketch out ideas and then talk about the ideas with the team.

What do you think?

What’s the best way to educate clients on Social Media?

How important are partnerships in your agency?

Should Creative Technologists be the only people that know how to code?

Why Our Misuse Of Metrics May Be A Cultural Issue

Saneel Radia — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:47:13 +0000

We’ve discussed “wind tunnel marketing” quite a bit recently. As a result, we’ve been thinking more and more about one particular facet of the issue: the misuse of metrics and data. Few industries more regularly confuse their objectives and metrics than marketing. I’m referring to when marketers take digital proxy indicators of progress, and make them the destination, even when they’re multiple degrees removed from the objective. This is distinct from our use of data to adapt our efforts. Maybe it’s karma for collectively turning to display advertising in the late 90’s to save our business, unknowingly opening the Pandora’s box of click-thru-rates that’s held us back for over a decade since.

We reject the notion that is due to some psychological need for validation. If it’s about validation, there can only be an empty feeling elicited from the knowledge that the metric isn’t the objective. Thus began our Inception-esque voyage into the psyche of marketers.

Operating under the assumption we’re rational at some level, it was easy to see the correlation between this seemingly irrational behavior and a code of conduct prevalent throughout our industry: self-preservation. Maybe most professions exhibit this behavior to some degree, but the level of self-preservation in marketing is extreme. Scientifically speaking, Cover Your Ass Syndrome is an epidemic amongst us. It couldn’t simply be that opportunistic, self-preservation obsessed humans just naturally tend to find their way to marketing, right? We couldn’t possibly be like baby geese following the first thing that moves, in our case another human that shows as much self-centered focus as ourselves— suddenly and inexplicably asking “what do you do for a living and how can I start?”

Perhaps we’re victims (wait, is that the self-preservation talking? We’re in too deep to tell). Maybe this misuse of metrics isn’t, in fact, innate survival behavior to ensure we’re not left holding the bag when things go wrong. Perhaps this is a learned behavior we’ve created as a result of our environment. Our environmental analysis turned up three factors that seem to be directly responsible for our rampant metrics abuse. The first is the obvious reality of impatience, prevalent throughout shareholder demands and modern human nature. Let’s put that one aside as it’s been discussed ad naseum via analysis of CMO tenures and the fault of modern capitalist markets. It’s the next two factors that are more interesting- and more productive- to analyze. At the surface, they don’t appear linked to our misuse of metrics, but in fact they are due to their impact on behavior and culture within marketing organizations, from clients to agencies. Both are addressable, but would require an organization’s senior leadership to operate in very non-standard ways.

1. Pre-defined Bonuses

When companies define bonuses of marketing executives based on specific metrics like site visits or total audience engagement or- gasp- product sales, it’s human nature to pursue that bonus at any cost. In fact, the existence of black and white bonuses regularly takes a metric for success and makes it someone’s personal objective. What’s best for the company, calculated risk taking and long-term innovation planning go out the window when considered against school tuitions or new drapes.

Although controversial in many business cultures, why not solve this environmental issue by creating subjective bonuses– ones where employees are judged on rational, subjective contribution to the company? Did the risks they take make sense? Did their approach add some broader value? If the objective is what’s best for your initiative, rather than a metric that is only one of many proxies for that success, shouldn’t a bonus be tied to that?

Compensation subjectivity makes people uncomfortable, but with good leadership in place at a company, it’s likely a more intelligent option. Those that truly want what’s best for the organization will trust their leaders.

2. Crediting Systems

In today’s marketing landscape, the way ideas manifest is complicated. All the various executions of an idea involve more moving pieces, multiple partners and blurrier lines between disciplines. Yet, somehow we employ the same crediting system- from awards to inter-company recognition- as we did 30 years ago.

Our credit list may be extensive, but it’s still partitioned by execution: creative, strategy, production, media (assuming media people even get credit). This is true external to the organization (award shows, press releases), but also true internally at most organizations (departments, recognition).

Why? If lines are blurry, why must we categorize contribution? If this sounds ridiculous, please interview young talent in our industry. They have a tough time defining their role by agency verticals and almost always pride themselves on their organic contributions to an agency output. We love that, and in fact look for T-shaped individuals when hiring.

It’s when marketers credit by specific discipline that metrics become disproportionately emphasized. We may call it a team effort, but we take a Hollywood approach to “team,” defining it as a collection of individuals. So, digital-era metrics like sharability, clicks and participation must be measured because they reflect individual contribution (“my part of the project”). As a result, we make decisions that emphasize metrics instead of simply contributing to the broader objective. Credit is needed for survival in this marketing habitat. As a result, metrics are exaggerated and the overall objective goes by the wayside, the remaining vestige of community achievement in a market that deals in only individual currency.

At the end of this pseudo-scientific examination, it’s clear the environment is polluted. The result is a cyclical reality that few companies and brands transcend; even fewer do so consistently. The environment impacts the inhabitants and the resulting means of survival requires substituting metrics for objectives. That said, we remain optimistic that in the near future, leadership of marketing organizations will nurture a culture that shifts our archaic approach to incentives and crediting. This will cleanse the environment itself, breaking the cycle of rational argument for or against the use and application of metrics. The work will no doubt benefit as a result. Ironically, the beneficial impact of the change toward correcting our use of metrics may at first go unnoticed.

Hey, maybe we should put a measurement in place for it….

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Making Digital Work: Voices from Boulder

Ben Malbon — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:01:11 +0000

Boulder Digital Works recently put on a two-day Executive Workshop around the theme of ‘Making Digital Work’. Industry leaders – who on paper are ‘rivals’ – came together for an intensive, collaborative and interactive program around evolving agencies and agency talent in readiness for the emerging landscape (there’s a bunch more detail about the Executive Workshops right here).

In this short film, put together by the tirelessly enthusiastic & ever-disruptive Edward Boches from Mullen, Gareth Kay (GS&P), Matt Howell (Modernista), Kim Laama (AKQA), Brian Morrissey (AdWeek), Kat Egan (Exopolis) & David Slayden (Executive Director of BDW) share their thoughts after a two-day executive session at Boulder Digital Works. This gives you a sense of the energy and enthusiasm of those who come to teach and learn and share at BDW.

Making Digital Work: Voices from Boulder from edward boches on Vimeo.

Follow Boulder Digital Works on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bdwcu

To learn more about Boulder Digital Works go to their site, here.

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TEDGlobal: And now, the good news

Mel Exon — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:52:51 +0000

This post is adapted from a piece written for Campaign magazine (22.07.10), also available online at campaignlive.co.uk later this week.

Image by @LenKendall

Founded in 1984 as a one-off event in California, TED (Technology Entertainment Design) has come a hell of a long way. The numbers tell their own story. Since the launch of TEDTalks online in 2006, over 700 talks have been viewed 300m times and the non-profit has, in keeping with its tagline “ideas worth spreading”, expanded into a family of conferences and content available on an ever-growing number of platforms. The latter now include the TED Open TV Project (allowing broadcasters to incorporate TEDTalks into their programming without license fees) launched in May this year and an iPad app out in a couple of weeks. As they put it, TED is becoming “an organising principle for ideas.”

The theme of this year’s TEDGlobal in Oxford took a defiantly positive stance, drawing on recent data showing declines in infant mortality rates and extreme poverty, flattening population growth and increases in primary education enrolment, together with an “amazing array of new tech, new science, new social and political thinking, new art and new understanding of who we are.”

Whilst TED’s focus may be philanthropic, their approach to curation is unapologetically ruthless. The well-rehearsed speakers are world-class, with each talk adding a dimension to a central theme that builds over the course of a conference. It’s a highly structured, intelligent mash-up of very different perspectives on a series of themes, all serving a central thought.

We were lucky enough to be invited to an ‘Executive Briefing Day’ last week, where the experience was designed to give us a good flavour of the event. Sure enough, by 9am we were listening to Thomas Dolby play a blues set, having heard from Adrian Dolby (no relation), an organic farmer about his eco-centric vs tech-centric approach and Christien Meindertsma, an artist who with her PIG 05049 investigated the final destination of a pig (I gave up recording exactly where after I’d listed soap, bread, cellular concrete, train brake, cheesecake, fine bone china, paint, sandpaper, paint brushes, beer, wine, fruit juice, cigarette, injectable collagen and bullets). Shortly afterwards we were hearing from the ecological entomologist Marcel Dicke on why insects are a sustainable, viable food source for humans.

"Of all animal species, 80% walk on 6 legs" Marcel Dicke (photo: blog.ted.com)

And by lunchtime a further series of talks had examined the concept of fairness, from the likes of Tim Jackson, economist and author of Prosperity without Growth and Jessica Jackley, the entrepreneur who set up Kiva.org, the micro-lending site for the developing world.

Jessica Jackley, founder Kiva.org, announces launch of profounder.com (photo: blog.ted.com)

The afternoon continued with speakers exploring different “Unknown Brains” – including the neural maps defining our identity; the sentience displayed by the human stomach; and the edge of a leaf showing consumption of oxygen and a mesh of electric signals suggestive of a plant brain. The day concluded with a further four talks each of which challenged the state of global education, with a particularly powerful speech from the educational researcher Sugata Mitra sharing what he’d learned about self-organised, group-based education amongst children, having built computers into the walls of slums.

As all this should suggest, whilst there are ‘conversational breaks’ built into the day, attending TED is a non-stop, ‘live’ onslaught of information; a deluge of stimulating facts and ideas. Many of the themes that emerged in just one day of TEDGlobal’s four day program provide several weeks’ worth of food for thought. Last Thursday, the themes seemed to shed light on the tension between opposing forces:

The ubiquity of corruption (according to Peter Eigen of Transparency International, bribery is still tax deductable in some countries) and the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ facing many organisations, versus a moral and economic need for corporate transparency;
The power of micro-lending (specifically, the catalyst for growth a few dollars can provide for an individual in a developing country) particularly when an entrepreneur by-passes institutions and instead connects a ‘crowd’ of lenders to the people who need the investment most;
The paradox of thrift – at the very point we should be saving, our governments need us to spend to kickstart our growth-based economies;
The need for multinationals in the private sector to drive change in protecting human rights in the global supply chain, versus the need to “trust but verify” (arms control maxim shared with us by Auret Van Heerden) that involvement;
The human desire for novelty vs the human desire for altruism.

We were asked: what’s stopping us doing the blindingly obvious things to encourage sustainable production? To write tangible ecological and social goals into every business plan? To put the relationship between present and future at the forefront of our thinking?

As Tim Jackson summed up in his talk, we need to re-think how we perceive prosperity: “prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet.”

"We're spending money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that don't last on people we don't care about." Tim Jackson (photo: blog.ted.com)

Over lunch came a briefing on TED’s performance, its aspirations for business partnerships and, with that, a parallel with one of the themes of the day: the future role of the private sector, this time in relation to TED itself. Any organisation dedicated to the spreading of good ideas needs to find like-minded platforms and partners to help it do so with maximum efficacy. With many of the annual TED prize winning projects requiring ongoing support, it struck us that perhaps it’s time we as marketers thought more imaginatively. A logo on a ‘sponsors’ page or a bespoke TEDTalks banner is one thing. Shouldn’t brands help make the ‘ideas worth spreading’ a reality? Through funding them, yes, but also through utilising the other resources they as organisations have at their disposal? Along the way, TED might employ the brand’s own network to further propagate ideas worth spreading and become a broker for making more of those ideas happen.

TED has all the hallmarks of an intellectually elite, yet super benign culture: the passion, commitment and zeal of its ‘super spreaders’, TEDsters, TED fellows, TEDx organisers and TED translators (as its curator Chris Anderson drily points out, 4.5 billion people on this planet do not speak English) can be a little unnerving to the uninitiated. However, by the end of just one day any residual British cynicism had given way, overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of individual and collective insight, conviction and challenge to conventional thinking.

A prolonged power outage half way through the day – temporarily reducing TED to ED, as several commentators couldn’t resist pointing out – was also revealing. Instead of ruining the day, it allowed for some particularly TED-flavoured spontaneity, with an opera singer (who also happened to be an entrepreneur running her own nanny network, naturally) pulled out from the audience to give a fantastic, impromptu performance on the spot, swiftly followed by a comedian. Such is the diversity of talent at TED.

Genevieve Thiers, opera singer and founder of Sittercity.com (photo: blog.ted.com)

Chris Anderson ended the day describing his vision of “crowd-accelerated innovation”, which echoed an earlier comment from Kiva.org founder Jessica Jackley: “The way we participate in each other’s stories is of deep importance.” As if to prove the point, the very next day Anderson was conducting a surprise interview with Wikileaks activist and spokesperson Julian Assange.

TED exists as a platform dedicated to ensuring an ever-increasing number of worthwhile stories are told, disseminated and acted upon. And that too, we’d add, has to be the good news.

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Are You Ready to Form Voltron? On The Value of ‘T-shaped’ People

Ben Malbon — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:48:25 +0000

This week is Internet Week in New York.

On Tuesday, Boulder Digital Works (I’m lucky enough to be on the Advisory Board there) hosted an evening at the Art Director’s Club called ‘Evolve!’ at which they launched their neat new website (created by Modernista!) – take a look at: http://bdw.colorado.edu/, it’s very cool. There were a number of short presentations from some BDW board members, including Scott Witt (just recently moved to a new role as Creative Director at Apple), Shane Steele (just recently moved to be be VP Global B2B Marketing at Yahoo!) & Scott Prindle, Technical Director at CPB in Boulder. I tagged along and got my ten minute slot.

I thought I’d use it to highlight why we need places like Boulder Digital Works in the first place. In short, to produce a new breed of hybrid creative; what we call ‘T-shaped people’ – awesome in (at least) one area, plus highly collaborative and at least literate in many other things. So blending both the right skills and the right attitude. Far too often the latter – an appetite for all things open and collaborative, a readiness to leave ego at the door - is sacrificed at the expense (frequently, the *great* expense) of simply importing people with new skills.

In addition to sketching out why these hybrid people are so important in creating new forms of creative product, I briefly touch upon the importance of the agency implementing the right kind of ’operating system’ (the processes, values and culture within a company) if the fancy new ’software’ is going to run smoothly. If the operating system is outdated, even the most impressive software is redundant. I show, in one slide, an overview of how BBH in New York is approaching the re-engineering of it’s OS.

Would love to know what you think, and what your experiences are of finding, working with, managing and retaining T-shaped people. The future surely belongs to them.

For best viewing view on slideshare (this link takes you right there), where you can see embedded film & speaker notes; I have added the latter into the first comment there.

Are You Ready to Form Voltron? (June 2010)

View more presentations from Ben Malbon.

Footnote: Coincidentally, Mattel announced this week that Voltron is going to be relaunched, with a new TV series and toy line planned. Here’s the opening of Voltron, which gives newbies a little background.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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On The Art of Persuasion – BBH’s Sir John Hegarty at Google Zeitgeist Europe 2010

Ben Malbon — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:19:21 +0000

Three undisputed masters in their field discuss how the art of ‘selling’ is evolving.

Sir John Hegarty (Worldwide Creative Director, Bartle Bogle Hegarty)
Alan Edwards (CEO, The Outside Organisation)
Lord Philip Gould (Vice-Chairman, Freud Communications)