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June 16, 2005
This is how it's done...
LiveVault is setting the standard for how to market your products via the Web. I was sent this link today by a colleague who was looking for some examples of good viral marketing strategies in preparation for a meeting with a B2B client. The link is to a Web Video they produced for IT Managers... but instead of a boring old "talking head" telling them the value of LiveVault's data back-up service, they produced a high production value "Branded Movie" with John Cleese in it making you laugh while you learn about LiveVault.
It's pure entertainment, well almost... if you're interested, it has a lead-generation tool at the end. It's a seven minute piece of content.... wait, read this again... a SEVEN MINUTE ADVERTISEMENT, that I could not stop watching.
Seriously, I was watching it, thinking about all of the other things I needed to be doing, but couldn't stop the movie... and I'm not even in their target audience.
Posted by Andrew Spencer at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 03, 2005
Incorporating Design... from the Masters
All of these lessons are borrowed from the [FAST] TAKE section at the bottom of several pages within the June 2005 issue of Fast Company.
Claudia Kotcha, VP for design innovation and strategy at P&G
1. Get Buy-in from Senior Management
If the CEO isn't on board, cultural change efforts are doomed to fail.
2. Get Outside Feedback
She has a board of outside advisors who give honest comments about their work.
3. Understand the Design Process
Designers are flexible and intuitive rather than rigid and exacting. So to think like one, you have to adopt the design process.
4. Locate Designers Near the R&D Folks
Design used to be siloed at P&G, viewed by most as peripheral and unimportant. Now most designers work directly with researchers within each unit. This sparks new sorts of innovation and makes it easier for nondesigners to understand what design is.
5. Let Designers Create their own Workspace
In a place like P&G, where workspaces are standardized, this is both symbolically and functionally critical.
Brian Collins, Executive Creative Director, Brand Integration Group, Ogilvy & Mather
1. Cut-and-Paste Culture
Globally, kids are now mixing and matching things to create new forms - sampling music tracks on their laptops, creating images that meld digital photographs and magazine clips.
2. Accomplished Amateurs
Brands are already turning to their consumers for content. This trend will accelerate in advertising as tech-savvy teens, armed with cameras and cheap moviemaking software increasingly challenge the pros - and the old financial model of commercial production.
3. Storytelling Renaissance
What's oldest is new again. Good brands are always good stories. And storytelling is always interesting because it's driven by one question: What happens next? Stories make people turn the page, click on the link, enter the shop, see the show.
Joshua Prince-Ramus, Partner, Office for Metropolitan Architecture
1. Create a Common Language
The three-month research period gives the firm and its client a contextual framework they can share before beginning the design.
2. Simple is Smart
When Prince-Ramus talks about smart design, he often says he likes a dumb solution that comes only from digging into a problem.
3. Question Everything
Prince-Ramus believes in the power of questioning first principles and discarding preconceived notions.
4. Authorship is Leadership
Many designers, architects or business leaders might define a project's author as the person whose name is on it. A leader creates something not by taking credit, but by making spaces in which others can excel.
Chuck Jones, Vice President of Global Consumer Design, Whirlpool Corporation
1. Follow the Leaders
Initially, Jones put together a presentation for senior management showing how a design-focused strategy reaped rewards in stock price, market share and profitability at Apple, Chrysler, Volkswagen, and other design-centric companies.
2. Grab a Seat at the Table
For designers to help solve business problems, they need to understand Whirlpool's overall corporate strategy. Jones' team stays in the loop, participating with sales and manufacturing...in key meetings.
3. Take Smart Shortcuts
Each of Whirlpool's 16 major brands has its own language - a series of colors, textures and descriptions that tie every product together. These cues provide building blocks to accelerate new product design.
4. Use the Numbers
Jones' team takes the fuzziness out of design abstractions through extensive usability studies that quantify effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Making the numbers opens the door for more risk taking.
Bruce Mau, Founder, Bruce Mau Design, Inc.
1. Avoid Analysis Paralysis
Rather than spend an inordinate amount of time on research, Mau will launch a project even when he has just a 10% understanding of what it actually entails. He might have more questions than answers, but he knows the answers will come when he prototypes the idea and gets feedback from the client.
2. Question Every Decision
Learn-as-you-go projects require you to continually evaluate your assumptions. Because you lack knowledge to guide your decisions, you must be brave enough to ask stupid questions. Says Mau: "I'm completely comfortable admitting that I don't understand something."
3. Bring in the Outliers
To build the project that became "Massive Change," Mau tapped outside talent - 14 students with wildly different backgrounds. Their unfamiliarity with Mau's design process freed them to challenge his thinking.
I hope Fast Company doesn't mind me pimping so much of their content. They really do seem to have their finger on the pulse of what's changing in business and I really identify with a lot of their thoughts. I don't claim these ideas for my own (though sometimes the synchronicity of where I'm at with my own career and the topic of the next issue that arrives in my mailbox is uncanny) but I do string together the thoughts that resonate with me to help you learn, about me, about what I think is important... and how it's being echoed throughout the world.
I saw an excellent article in the San Francisco Chronicle recently about how the Burning Man people are creating a global creative movement and considering how Burning Man could live on without the playa.... expect a future entry on that one too...
Posted by Andrew Spencer at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
The tenets of a good strategy...
"In order to do a better job of developing, communication and pursuing a strategy, you need to learn to think like a designer."
Have you ever sat in a meeting with one of your clients and knew to the bone that you had the very idea that would solve their business problem. You did all of your homework, pulled all of the stats, put together the most informative PowerPoint presentation, stood in front of the mirror the night before for hours making sure you hit all of the salient points and when it was all said and done found yourself staring across the conference room table at a pool of blank stares? Or worse, have them start throwing out the very objections you had strategized against and already dispelled in your presentation? Then watch your idea die on the vine in favor of something safer, simpler and easier for your client to quantify?
If that frustrates you as much as me then you'll find some of the tips I've learned in this month's Fast Company to be a very helpful tool. They are featuring "Masters of Design" some of the business world's leading design people, some in positions of power at Fortune 100 corporations that you would be surprised to read about... and the best part is that the sidebars throughout the issue are small lists of tips from them about how to bring design into your business process.
I've been experimenting lately with doing more "spec work." I know that in the agency world, even the thought of doing spec is blasphemous... but as marketing has become more of a challenge with new media, new methods of measurement and a less receptive society, I've seen a reduction in my clients' willingness to take risks.
What's funny is that at the same time, I've seen the power of the ideas that the people I work with get even more exciting, more powerful... and in some cases "scarier."
Side note: I had a client tell me in a meeting the other day that he liked an idea that we'd presented him. Not exactly front page news, but what was cool was that he said he liked it because it made him a little bit uncomfortable. This was so rewarding to me personally. It was like a validation of my entire position on how to do business, especially good marketing. I try to challenge my clients and the people I work with to move beyond what they are comfortable with to that place where those really great ideas come from.
Part of what's helped us engage our clients in some of these new ideas was infusing the designers (art directors) in the process sooner than we usually would. I've seen projects recently that sold because rather than asking the client to "imagine" a concept, we showed it to them, before we had a "scope of work document" or a "signed estimate." We put ideas in front of the client that showed us at our best, without having to fit it into this box or that box or make sure that we took out the part that we knew would make one person in the room uncomfortable. We just did it, and in most cases, we also sold it.
The effect of us taking this risk... this initial step to put our ideas and creativity on the line has meant that we score an emotional victory internally, knowing that our creativity has been respected and valued by our client and we are learning to rely more on our instincts. This advice is good for anyone looking to do good marketing. I hear a lot of people talking about developing marketing plans based on business plans. I've even been examining creative briefs from several of my colleagues at different agencies. And in most cases, they look like business planning documents. These documents are exchanged between client directors, strategists and clients/marketers. They focus heavily on the business goals, what do we need to do, who do we need to talk to, how will we measure if what we are doing is working?
All of this is important. Due diligence for strong marketing work... but it spends too much time in the hands of the proposal writers, powerpointeers and "decision-makers" before it goes to the designers. The best projects I have ever worked on had designers right there at the table with everyone else.
The quote at the top of this post is from the head of Ideo... in the article, it further references the value of design thinking in the development of the strategy. He talks about the importance of "prototyping" as part of the strategic development process, which really rings true. Have you ever nailed the strategy, got the client to sign off on the proposal, then sat down with the design team and had one of those moments where a designer looks at your whole thing and has a simple observation that destroys your entire strategy? I have. What do you do? You turn to them and say that their challenge is to make it work anyway....
What if they had been sitting at the table sooner? They might have pointed that out to you, or better yet to the client at a point when you could still make changes because the direction was not set and the budget not yet determined... In fact, they might even help that nervous client learn to trust you more because they begin to see just how talented your whole team is, not just the face person.
My favorite points from "Strategy by Design" by Tim Brown, June 2005 Fast Company Magazine, p 52.
"Here is Ideo's five-point model for strategizing by design.
1. Hit the Streets
Any real-world strategy starts with having fresh, original insights about your market and your customers... Very often you can build an entire strategy based on the experiences your customers go through in their interactions with your organization.
2. Recruit T-Shaped People
Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can't just stand in your own shoes; you've got to be able to stand in the shoes of others.... We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do... They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers... but... they can branch out into other skills such as anthropology.
3. Build to Think
Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. The prototype is typically a drawing, model or film that describes a product system or service.... The goal isnt' to create a close approximation of the finished product... [it] is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we're trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.
4. The Prototype Tells a Story
Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process - it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections - and a storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy.
5. Design is Never Done
Even after you've rolled out... you're just getting started. In almost every case you move on to the next version, which is going to be better because you've had more time to think about it."
Are you integrating design thinking into your business? I'm certainly trying to... I want to tell stories, inspire people, innovate... and integrate my own creativity into everything I do.
Posted by Andrew Spencer at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
"What Comes Next" - Interactive Advertising... (swiped from AdWeek)
What Comes Next?
Swiped from AdWeek
May 30, 2005
By Catharine P. Taylor
What Comes Next?
If you were to describe the last year in interactive advertising, it would be easy-and not entirely off the mark-to call it the "Year of the Chicken." When asking online creatives to assess the past year, Burger King's garter-wearing Subservient Chicken comes up over and over, even among those who are sick and tired of talking about him. He looms so large that by the time the Clio Awards got around to giving subservientchicken.com a Grand Clio last week and the One Show Interactive gave it Best of Show last month, the crowd response was been-there, already-asked-chicken-to-do-that.
"It's like the BMW Films of 2005," says Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB, referring to the series of shorts that won Fallon Best of Show at the One Show Interactive in 2002 and 2003.
Now that the Crispin, Porter + Bogusky-created Web site is more than a year old, the discussion has turned from gushing praise to talk about how its level of consumer engagement can be applied elsewhere. The takeaways are this: the best interactive work should engage its audience without demanding too much from it, be viral, tie back to the brand promise and be something consumers actually seek out. And now that many technological barriers have been breached, it should be about how technology serves the idea rather than the other way around. "I think [the subservient chicken] gave ... a sense of hope," says CP+B interactive creative director Jeff Benjamin. "BMW Films was cool, but I think even when it came out people were saying it was TV on the Web."
Now, the best work is being created with the idea that, well, the Web is the Web, with technology, like broadband for example, as simply the underpinning that makes the ideas possible. "What you see is that people are creating communication with the assumption of broadband," says Jerry Shereshevsky, Yahoo!'s ambassador plenipotentiary of Madison Avenue.
If that thought seems as old as BMW Films, keep in mind the carmaker was one of the few who could produce such work several years ago with confidence that most of its affluent audience could see it. It's only now that advertisers are signing off on broadband work en masse. "They're buying it at a much higher rate this year," says Tribal's Freeman.
"Technology has been sort of like the matchstick," says John Butler, co-creative director of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, Sausalito, Calif., which produced, along with Seattle-based Web shop Zaaz, one of the most award-winning efforts of the year: the Converse Gallery (www.conversegallery.com) for the iconic shoe brand.
On the surface, the campaign, which won silver and bronze awards at both the Andys and the One Show, looks like another example of streaming video for streaming video's sake, as the site features more than 50 24-second films about the sneakers.
But the films aren't created by famous directors; instead they are created by consumers, who have sent in works that include the sneakers playing the piano and starring in action-adventure films. "Why not just go right to the source?" asks Butler of the campaign's premise. The difference isn't just who is shooting the commercials, it's that consumers can create their own media easily enough that they can be a part of the process. "The magic of that kind of work is you can get your consumers involved in the campaign the way you can't in other media," says Freeman.
Of course, every creative wants what Converse go?x2014;true engagement with the brand-but some award show jurors said they saw examples of clients misjudging how much time consumers wanted to spend with their brands. One such example cited by several jury chairs: "Meet the Lucky Ones," a series of short films, featuring 10 characters in an idiosyncratic family, for the Mercury Mariner SUV.
Created as a series of eight-minute films created by the Wunderman unit of Young & Rubicam in Detroit, along with Mother, New York, and interactive production house Kirt Gunn & Associates in New York, the campaign was designed to reach 25-to-45 year old women who think of Lincoln-Mercury as being stodgy. The brand was only a supporting character to the plots. But even though it was a showcase of streaming video just as Converse was, some thought it required too much effort on the part of the audience.
"It was too complicated. It had nothing to do with the product," says Doug Jaeger, president of thehappycorp global, who chaired the One Show Interactive jury and also judged the ADC Awards and ANDY Awards.
Still, Jaeger and others seem willing to cut advertisers and creatives a little slack if they're occasionally pushing the envelope a bit too far in trying to exploit interactive's potential. "Everyone was interested in commercials when they were new too," says Organic executive creative director Colleen DeCourcy, who served as Internet Jury Chair of the Clio Awards.
Maybe it's a signpost of how far interactive creative has come that when talk turns to the industry's next big thing, people don't talk about work that is necessarily digital, but campaigns that toggle almost seamlessly from online to offline, or bounce from electronic billboards to mobile phones to wild postings to e-commerce.
While it might be easy to call such campaigns integrated, Benjamin Palmer, president and co-founder of Boston's The Barbarian Group, which helped CP+B develop the Subservient Chicken Web site and judged the traditional work at the ADC Awards, uses the word "thorough." He defines a campaign as thorough not because it appears in multiple media but because its central idea is completely implemented, with the idea dictating what media it will appear in. If there's no reason to employ text-messaging to support a given idea, and plenty of reason to shoot a TV commercial, so be it.
One of his favorite campaigns of the year was the "Remember Rainier" effort for Rainier beer by Cole & Weber/Red Cell, Seattle, which centered on an effort by two fictitious Rainier fanatics, Tim and Chuck, to bring back the brand's classic commercials and won gold at both the ADC and the Clios.
Yes, it includes a Web site, www.rainier-vision.com, which serves as a crossroads where all of the different media meet; but it has also featured a Wayne's World-style late night show on the local UPN affiliate, an old neon Rainier sign driven around the Seattle area in the back of a pickup truck by Tim and Chuck, visits to bars where they distributed petitions to bring the commercials back, and of course, the commercials themselves.
Yahoo's Shereshevsky puts Tribal's "Lincoln Fry" campaign for McDonald's in the same category. Centered around a French fry that was purported to have the silhouette of Abraham Lincoln, it launched in February, including not only a Super Bowl ad but also a fake blog, a Web site and eventually a Yahoo! auction of the "fry" to benefit Ronald McDonald House charities. The campaign ended on a bizarre note, with the fry selling for more than $75,000 to the notorious online casino GoldenPalace.com, which has also made headlines during the past year for buying an advertising avail on a pregnant women's belly and a grilled cheese sandwich said to contain the image of theVirgin Mary. But from a marketing perspective, what may have made it notable, is that no one element-even the Super Bowl buy-dominated the campaign.
And let's not forget that the Subservient Chicken itself was an exercise in thoroughness. Not only could the chicken react to 25,000 keywords, by Palmer's estimate, but he also was featured in commercials, countless PR ops and the DirecTV chicken fight.
If campaigns such as these are what online executives see as the future, then there's a lot to ponder in what they are leaving behind. When clients say they are looking for out of the box thinking these days, they are usually looking for something beyond television. For online creatives, it's the box containing the computer monitor that might be getting a bit cramped.
Posted by Andrew Spencer at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)