Has the Internet Changed Everything?

At Judie Lannon’s invitation (editor of Market Leader) Paul Feldwick and I have kicked off a debate about the impact of the internet on marketing. He is in the ‘nothing’s changed’ corner and I am arguing ‘everything has changed’. You can read his opening salvo (which picks up on comments I made in this blog) and my reply in the latest edition of Market Leader. The debate is continued on their web site.

As usual with these things, in reality, I don’t think Paul and I are that far apart. I don’t think the fundamentals of marketing will change that much, in other words the purpose and objectives of marketing, but the means by which we do marketing will change – already have in fact. More importantly business and marketing will change because people are changing. I argue this has always been the case – since the Stone Age, technology has changed society. The technology revolution we are living through is the biggest ever in terms of speed, scale and (low) cost. I am trying to focus the debate on 3 areas of change:-

1. The way we market goods and services (research, innovation, communications, pricing, distribution)
2. The goods and services (especially the latter) that we can market
3. The market itself – the internet is multi-dimensional exchange. It is BtoB, BtoC, CtoC and CtoB. What gets exchanged ranges from goods and services to ideas and the currency is money, time, information, entertainment and ideas.

Any way  - what do you think? Tune in and join the debate if not. I’ll keep you posted.

The Biggest Creative Department in the World

If you had a problem you needed solving would you give it to one creative team, 3 creative teams or a thousand? It depends. If the creative brief is confidential you will want to restrict the number of people who know about it, that’s obvious. But there’s another huge advantage to working face to face with just one trusted creative team (or agency). The original brief gets modified as the process of solving it gets underway. This starts when the brief is presented and discussed – aspects of the brief are challenged, nuances emerge. The brief the creative team finally works on is rarely the one the client originally wrote. And then as ideas are developed and submitted more insights emerge that cause the brief to be further fine tuned or in extreme cases thrown out.

For these reasons, crowd sourcing creativity does not spell the death of the Ad Agency (or design, innovation, PR agency) any more than cinema or television killed books, although they did have an impact and these days they all work together. Like books/cinema/theatre/TV, there are occasions when crowd sourcing creative ideas is better and other situations when it can work to enhance the client/agency relationship.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with creative crowd sourcing you can check out Crowdspring, 99 designs or Quirk’s Idea Bounty (I have a vested interest in the latter). You post a brief, offer a reward or ‘bounty’ and the creative community built by these platforms goes to work. Crowdspring and 99 designs are more design & execution focused and ask for ‘spec work’ i.e. finished creative work. Idea Bounty asks only for ideas although people can, and often do, take the opportunity to support this with visuals to various degrees of finish. People are not penalized if they only submit a very rough idea – it is the power of the idea that is judged (by the client but with help from the Idea Bounty team).

This difference – spec work versus just ideas – is important in two respects. Firstly it matters to the creative community who see crowd sourcing finished work as exploitative. Secondly, focusing just on ideas makes the kind of problems you can work on much broader and allows a wider range of professionals and amateur creatives to participate. During its Beta Testing Phase, Idea Bounty successfully delivered ideas for a strap line for the a beer brand’s World Cup campaign (“It all comes together with a Castle”), a idea  for how to encourage more people to use on-line banking (FNB bank) and a new campaign idea that could stretch to TV and posters for an FMCG brand (Peperami). The creative Community that Idea Bounty has built up over a year is now close to 15,000. They come from around the world (but with a bias to English speaking countries) and span a wide range of full time professionals, freelancers, students and Joe Public. Professionals and Semi-Professionals form the single biggest group and so far all the winning ideas – every brief has delivered a winning idea that has been implemented by the client – has come from them but it is early days.

The average number of submissions to a brief on Idea Bounty has grown steadily. Peperami got over a thousand submissions of which roughly half were good enough to make the first shorlist! The cost of getting anywhere from a few hundred ideas that solve your brief to over a thousand is between $3000 and $50,000 depending on the size of the Bounty (roughly half the total cost) and the appeal of the brief and the brand. Seems like a no-brainer, why wouldn’t you use Idea Bounty? The cost is relatively very low, the results are excellent so far (every client has had a successful outcome and the idea has been used). Well, with a certain degree of bias I think everyone should use Idea Bounty and that over time everyone will – but not all the time and not for every brief.

Idea Bounty is great if the brief is not confidential (or if the sensitive aspects can be disguised). Note that only the brief is public – the submissions are seen only by the IB team and the client. It works when the brief is absolutely clear and can be expressed succinctly. This may require some pre-work but then all good briefs do. It’s not essential but it helps if the brand or category is familiar so the context for the brief is also clear. So far Idea Bounty has for the most part been used by big well-known brands– Levi’s, BMW, Red Bull, World Wildlife Fund.

You can ask for communications ideas or an idea for some aspect of communications. What I like is the possibility to post briefs on a wider range of marketing problems or opportunities  – ideas for new products or service enhancements, a different approach to internal marketing, a new twist on Corporate Social Responsibility programmes, trade launches, complaint handling…the list is endless if all you want are some good ideas for a clearly expressed need.

Clients have spotted the pure value of this kind of crowd sourcing. If you only have a total marketing budget of $1million you cannot afford to spend a big chunk of it on the creative. Idea Bounty does let clients source ideas cheaply and then work directly and more cost effectively with a production house. This is how Peperami used Idea Bounty.

So far all this sounds very threatening to ‘conventional agencies’, especially the last point which allows clients to by-pass them altogether. But it’s not how I see it developing. There are many more instances and many more constructive ways that clients can use Idea Bounty or other forms of Crowd Sourcing in collaboration with their existing agencies. Here are just a few.

The client and agency can post a brief in order to get some great upfront insight on the brief. A thousand submissions to a brief tells you a vast amount about the brief, the issues and some areas to explore. If the client agency team think they have something absolutely brilliant why not test that by using crowd sourcing. If the idea cannot be beaten (or if it can be slightly enhanced) how much more commitment will this generate – all for the cost of a few focus groups (which we all know are fairly unhelpful in developing or approving creative ideas)?

What if the client is working with an agency whose core creative strength is in one area of marketing – the one most appropriate to the overall task in hand – but there is one aspect of the work that requires different kinds of ideas. Do you bring in another agency or use Idea Bounty? Ad agencies can source a PR idea, PR agencies can source a digital idea, digital agencies can source a new product idea.

I am not saying that platforms like Idea Bounty offer no threat to ‘conventional agencies’. By allowing agencies to compete creatively in non-core areas and by allowing smaller agencies to punch above their weight creatively it does change the rules. Victor & Spoils is a break-away from Crispin Porter + Bogusky and they have made crowd sourcing their business model – expect to see more of this over the next few years.

Cinema did have an impact on books and television had an impact on cinema but they all co-exist and increasingly they work symbiotically.

I don’t command big marketing budgets these days but I know if I did I would be using, and experimenting with, Idea Bounty and other crowd sourcing platforms. Back in the day I was one of the first clients for David Bernstein’s agency, “The Creative Business” (now long since gone). Their offer was “creative ideas where advertising is not necessarily the answer” and for a while they were really successful until someone decided to turn them into an Ad Agency. I see Idea Bounty as a progression of this kind of creative offer – creative ideas where you need more than just one team can offer.

What is Creativity – in Digital?

I want to share this ongoing debate about creativity and what it means in digital aka eMarketing. There is good material on creativity in brand communications in the free downloads section of this site. In ‘Persuasive and Creative Brand Comms’ you can hear the views of the best brains in the business – Hegarty, Wight, Wieden, Shelly Lazerus and many more. There is lots of discussion about how to develop outstanding creative but a fair consensus about what creativity means. It is a fresh idea that will inspire a wide range of great communications to an agreed objective (let’s just say, building the brand). It is art but it is, as John Hegarty says, applied art and not art for art’s sake.

Tempting to think it is no different for eMarketing. Creativity means having a great digital idea that is relevant to a brand or business brief. Well maybe…..

In advertising there is a case to be made that the agencies regarded as the most creative – the hot shops – can often be stronger on the ‘fresh idea’ than they are on being effective in achieving a business or brand objective. Some will argue that’s fine because fresh is what makes it effective – good creative cuts through the clutter and makes the brand being advertised distinctive. Being seen, heard, talked about creates momentum, and that plus distinctiveness are key drivers of brand growth. This is not just faith, it can be proved although not perfectly so and not in real time.

In eMarketing there is a version of the same debate. So called ‘creative digital agencies’ translates as “eye catching web sites with lots of flash”. In fact there is an expression among digital agencies for this – “eye-candy”. I guess ‘candy’ is a reference to the fact that it may taste sweet but it is not so good for you. In eMarketing there is no escaping measurable results. It is not the same debate, as in conventional advertising, that good looking creative may not necessarily be as effective. Eye-candy can actually get in the way of effectiveness if site usability suffers and search engines can’t find you (to use flash as one simple example). In advertising you can believe that an idea that is “too creative” i.e. really strong and original, can get in the way of the brand. An example would be Bud’s “What’s up” campaign – won all the awards but did not do much for the brand, if anything it dumbed it down. But in digital you can show that, for example, a great looking site or innovative brand game download, achieved appallingly low visits, click throughs, usage etc and that the ROI was therefore terrible.

There is no reason not to strive for great design, a distinctive look and feel, fresh eye-candy, but effectiveness in achieving pre-specified and measurable results is the absolute priority.

All agencies want to be seen as effective and creative, the best want to show that they are effective because they are creative. With less by way of hard data but more in terms of years debating this, advertising has achieved some kind of consensus about what is meant by ‘creativity’. Not so digital agencies. By creativity, do we mean:-

A Big On-Line Idea?
Creative use of technology?
Creative use of eMarketing tactics (site, social media, email, gaming, content, apps etc)
Creative design – the eye candy?

The answer is yes, we mean all of that, and it is judged by hard data not a panel of experts in Cannes.

In fact, in digital, strategic, original and effective are all aspects of ‘creativity’.
Let’s pause for a moment and look at different routes to an effective creative idea. By effective I mean an idea that solves a problem or realizes an opportunity – applied creativity.

Based on what I’ve read, there are 4 sources of an idea:-
•    Inverse Logic
•    Connectivity
•    Reduction
•    Peacocks

Inverse Logic is what I think of when I think of Edward De Bono. Problem = my car lock is frozen. I try pouring hot water on the lock to unfreeze it but it just pours ineffectively down the side the car. De Bono pitches up and suggests I heat the key with my lighter.

Inverse logic is about turning the problem on its head, seeing it from a different angle, challenging the assumptions that people make. Rather than use the internet to sell people things more things efficiently, why not allow people to sell things to each other more efficiently (eBay). That kind of an idea.
Connectivity is forming new connections by using a variety of stimulus to create a new idea or solution. Peroni uses the language of luxury style brands to sell beer. Smirnoff Ice uses beer codes to sell pre-mixers.
Reduction is where an idea comes by seeing though all the clutter to some pure essence or insight at the heart. Innocent Smoothies, EasyJet, Magnum Ice Cream. (Was it Michelangelo who just chipped away at a block of stone to reveal the sculpture contained within?)

Peacocks are all about elaborate and exaggerated display – they survive as a species despite being one of the most impractical birds of all time because Peahens look at them and go “Wow, how good must his genes be?”. Gaultier perfume bottles, Honda’s Power of dreams, Cadbury’s Gorilla.

Not only am I mixing brand ideas with creative problem solving and communication ideas but I am implying that ideas come from one of these sources. It is much messier than that. Peroni, the brand and its communications, are inverse logic, new connections, reductive thinking and peacock display all rolled into one.

So creativity comes in to a lot of things and comes from a variety of techniques and inspiration. But it starts with a problem or opportunity.

That problem/opportunity needs to be interrogated, challenged, discussed, so it can be redefined in such a way that a successful idea can be recognized and successful implementation can be related to milestones and results.
This process – which can take a year or an hour  – sets up the possibility of having an idea by challenging assumptions or by seeing through all the issues to a pure solution. The process of defining the problem allows you to apply new stimulus, new combinations of elements to create something fresh and original.

In digital there is always some new stimulus in the form of new technology or the application of existing technology in a new way.

The process of reducing the problem to clear outcomes promotes reductive thinking as a source of ideas.
Understanding the components of the idea, and new components you can add, may offer the chance to elaborate and exaggerate.
The thinking up front is the foundation for creative thinking – or is it strategic thinking – or is all great strategy creative in the sense of being bold, unexpected, selective, forming new connections?

Strategy relies on developing options  – no choices means no strategy. The process of generating options from which to choose a strategy, especially bold, selective, fresh options, is essentially creative.
This may sound overly complex but surely in order to be more creative we need to explore what we mean by creativity. It leads me to the conclusion that creative strategy is strategic creative. The kind of thinking and processes (essentially questioning) that one associates with strategic thinking seems to me to be the basis of creative thinking.

In digital, the introduction of technology and numerical goals at the outset of the process, ensures fresh thinking that is applied to a problem – applied creativity.
What about the creative design – the execution, what it actually looks and feels like? Design creativity in marketing normally falls into two disciplines:-
Product design – the Dyson Vacuum Cleaner, the iPod
Graphic Design – the logo, the pack, the web site, the identity (and as soon as you introduce the notion of identity you link product and graphics).
In digital it is always product and identity – how it looks and how it works. Because of the strongly empirical aspect of digital – we can test things and we can measure a lot relatively easily – usability always trumps look and feel. Is amazon a great looking site or a really effective site (ditto Twitter, Google, Facebook etc)?

Designers have two great skills – one that is art and one that is craft. They can introduce new semiotic codes to create fresh design. Semiotic is a fancy word that means cultural or ‘what we have come to expect’. We expect a car to look a certain way, financial services to use certain colours and graphic conventions, beer to have certain traditions. The skillful, artful designer respects some of the rules and breaks others by introducing some new design element borrowed, consciously or not, from another category or walk of life. They then craft this into a form that is aesthetically pleasing in an extremely detailed way. Every element of a typeface, every shade of colour, every line and shape is carefully considered and tinkered with until it just looks just right in the context of an overall design that is effective and creative.

Digital designers do the same but like all early adopters of technology they emphasize function over form. Look at cars, computers, phones, watches several years ago and look at them now.

First it has to work, then we can make it aesthetically pleasing. If form does not compromise function but rather it enhances it we have the Holy Grail – we have Apple, Dyson, Porsche

Well this is as far as I have got in this debate but I am still asking questions. In digital, creativity is:-

•    An idea that solves a problem
•    Strategic and creative and effective
•    Form and function
•    New combinations of tactics, applications, content and other digital assets
•    Peacock, aesthetic and functional design
•    It embraces technology and data as stimulus right upfront
•    It is an attitude of mind, an orientation, not a step in the process

It is worth debating all this if it helps us understand a) how to make effectiveness the result of creativity not the trade off and b) organize our teams and our processes to increase the chance of this happening.

Was Agency Commission Such a Bad Thing?

I promised to share some more of my conversations with Mark Earls when he was over recently. Inevitably we got to chatting about Ad Agencies, especially the ‘Big Ones’. Are they evolving fast enough, can they? How come some of the best ideas come out of independent agencies?

A surprising conclusion – at least to me – was the idea that Ad Agencies lost something when they moved away from the old commission system. Ad Agencies began life as agents for media owners (hence the epithet ‘agency’). They were paid a commission on media sales and used to throw in the creative for free. This method of remuneration persisted long after they evolved to be, first and foremost, creative ad agencies, well into the 90’s in fact. Why, the argument went, should an agency get paid according to the whims of the client regarding their media budget, a budget that was notoriously vulnerable if the clients were under profit pressure? So after a brief flirtation with market success related payments (P&G tried this) Ad Agencies moved to the now familiar agency fee structure– essentially a retainer based on the predicted workload and the level of resource the agency puts on the account. (True, some clients operate a hybrid system with fees plus a kicker if the media spend is increased significantly but remuneration is still effectively fee based not commission based.)

Fees sound fairer and more professional but do they deliver creativity that works? Jeremy Bullmore tells the story of Archimedes to illustrate, among other things, the benefit of a tight timeline and a very strong incentive (tell me if the crown is made of gold, you have one week and you’ll be executed if you don’t come up with an answer). Knowing that with a really well executed, great idea that drives brand sales the client will spend heavily and remuneration will rise accordingly is a very clear incentive.

Yes, we can all see the flaws in this. It steers agencies towards big budget media ideas where the job could perhaps have been accomplished better with cheaper forms of promotion like events or social media. Are short term sales the right measure – many of the effects of advertising are longer term? Agencies cannot predict their income if it depends on a budget set by someone else. If they can’t predict their income it makes it harder to run the business, attract and retain talent etc.

My favourite quote at the moment comes from Gareth Kay (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) – “not advertising ideas but ideas worth advertising”. This nails it. The job of the Ad Agency – any creative agency – is to come up with ideas so good clients want to invest behind them. Perhaps media spend is a crude indicator of this but if you want “ideas worth advertising” there has to be an incentive based on how enthusiastic the client is to get behind the idea. Market place success as an incentive is too complex with too many stakeholders and variables.

Media spend is very crude, total execution budget would be better but is still flawed as noted above. Perhaps, however, it is like democracy – a crap system but better than the alternatives?

Because, as Mark pointed out, if an agency team knows they are getting pretty well paid and that this remuneration is linked more to inputs (size of the team, time invested) rather than outputs (how good the ideas and execution are) you drive the kind of ‘big agency’ behaviour that people complain about. And when I say people I include those in the big agencies not just the clients. I spoke recently to a former head of a big agency who is about to launch his own independent shop. He was very cynical about the ability of big Ad Agencies to do anything effective or creative these days.

It’s not black or white. Big agencies do some brilliant work and fee systems can be made to work. But losing the link to ‘ideas worth advertising’ that the old commission system, with all its faults, gave must be a bad thing for creativity. Why do independents have a stronger reputation? Because they are brave and hungry in equal measure, they have to be to survive.

What a load of B********

Just read Sherrington’s post on technology making us behave badly, internet etiquette etc (I do wish he’d run this stuff past me first). What a load of Billy Bollocks. The whole point of the internet is to be extreme, to drop the normal niceties and tell it like it is. That’s my philosophy. Someone can’t take a joke then f*** them (if I find someone has edited this and put in asterisks I’ll be really p**** off).

By the way, if any of you have been wondering where I’ve been I’d like to point out that I have been posting like a demon but most of them get spiked by Sherrington. If you are reading this then it means the bunch of flowers I sent Amanda has done the trick and she has slipped it past Shezza while he’s been busy with his ‘other ventures’.

Amanda is the one who converts all his ramblings and mine into stuff that can actually be posted since neither of us know one end of a computer from the other.

Up yours, Stame

The Effect of Technology on Behaviour

Mark Earls, ‘The Herdmeister’, is in town this week and we were having a catch up over a beer or three. Mark was described, by The Spectator no less, as ‘the essential guide to the new business landscape’ He has also been called “Malcolm Gladwell on speed’ (by the Guardian I think). He is quite simply one of the most interesting people to talk to about social behaviour, marketing and the impact of the internet. Anyone who reads my stuff will know he is a big influence.

We talked about a lot of things. I needed to pick his brains as I am going head to head with Paul Feldwick in a running debate “Market Leader” in the UK has organized – the first volley launches in their June edition. Paul is arguing (somewhat disingenuously) that the internet is a big fuss over nothing – plus ca change etc. I have, what should be, the easy task of pointing out that it is changing just about everything. The problem is that Paul Feldwick is very smart and was in fact Mark’s mentor when he joined BMP many years ago. I will need to get my thinking straight, so Mark’s visit was very timely.

I’ll share more of our discussion in other posts as part of a rehearsal for the Market Leader piece. One thing we did discuss was the effect the internet has, positive and negative, on peoples’ behaviour. Mark’s business thinking is always underpinned by his knowledge of psychology, social anthropology and social sciences generally. We quickly agreed that since opposable thumbs, stone ages and iron ages, technology shapes society and the behaviour of people within it. On the positive side the internet has created a seismic shift in communication and collaboration. The technology has heightened our desire to share ideas and build on the ideas of others.

One insight Mark had was that when people of like minds cluster together they become more extreme in their views. He cited America as an example of this – creationists become radical, clusters of democrats in Texas become myopic. The reason is simple – we don’t hear opposing views so we become even more set in our own ways of thinking. Pluralism is vital to social progress – thesis then anti-thesis creates a new synthesis as Hegel explained.

The internet offers the opportunity for both cluster extremism and dialectic progress. We can violently agree with each other or take the opportunity to surf other points of view that move our thinking forward.

We also discussed the effect of the internet on social etiquette. People behave badly towards others on the internet, it encourages extreme behaviour for which one would normally be embarrassed or even ashamed. We’ve all experienced the ‘email arguments’ – a small, often unintentional, offence can escalate into a full blown, daggers drawn, row. Emails encourage short sharp communication (gotta clear that inbox) with no subtlety or finesse. We can’t see the person we’re responding to, so we do not have the advantage of facial expression or non-verbal communication upon which we rely as super social apes.

But there is also the perceived disconnectedness and safety of the internet. We sit there late at night in front of our keyboard, possibly with a few glasses of wine on board, and fire off crass tweets and blog comments. I’ve done it myself. It’s not really ‘us’, it’s a darker more extreme version of ‘us’. We would never behave like that face to face, we aspire to higher standards of social behaviour. It’s like road rage. We call the guy who cut us up in traffic “a stupid ****”  from the cocoon of our car – something we never do if we just bump into people on the pavement while walking. In fact often, if someone bumps into you, by sheer reflex, you apologize to them.

We feel disconnected to the person who cuts us up in traffic. We can’t see them properly, we’re robbed of the non-verbal communication that tells us whether it was unintentional or deliberately rude. The person who bumps into us on the pavement reveals more about themselves. They are in a hurry, they look worried about something, they were distracted – that’s fine, we’ll let it go. Up close, we can judge people by their intentions, not just their actions.

The other feature of the internet is that you cannot target or conceal your comments and behaviour. You put it out there with some vague idea of who it is aimed at but  almost anyone can get access to it (or see it – remember those Facebook pictures?). Mark was telling me a story about some innocent joke he made about dead sheep in a review he posted. For months he was Cyber Stalked by some woman – one presumes an Animal Activist. She left comments on his blog and sent him tweets that became more and more bizarre and threatening. It turns out she held a very responsible management job somewhere in the States, by all accounts a perfectly nice woman. She had behaved badly but when Mark contacted her directly – personally – to explain he had meant no offence by the joke so could she kindly leave him alone, she behaved like the person on the pavement, “Yes, of course, sorry, my mistake”.

Because, of course, the safety, disconnectedness and anonymity of the internet are only perceived. The cocoon of your car is not a real cocoon. If you behave badly or inappropriately you can be confronted with the consequences of your actions.

Mark and I agreed that we are still, as a society, developing the internet etiquette that goes with its undoubted freedom of expression and access. The technology has changed our behaviour and not always for the better. In time, the intelligent and sensible among us will learn to behave better. We are social apes, and that means that over generations of genetic honing we have learned that it benefits us to get along with others and, if asked nicely, to leave them alone.