Re: Today’s Creative Director, BBH’s Kevin Roddy gets it 90 percent right
I give Kevin Roddy a lot of credit for coming out and declaring that creative directors might actually be clueless when it comes to creating ideas for the post digital age.
In a guest column in Ad Age, Roddy suggests that traditional CD’s may still know a great idea when they see it, but he questions whether they can inspire or conceive complex digital ideas if their real comfort zone is in the media of TV, print and radio.
BBH New York’s CCO goes on to suggest that advertising creative directors whose experience comes from old media story telling should “admit that they don’t know enough about technology and start asking for help.
“Take down the walls and ask other people for suggestions about how to make the work better,” he smartly suggests.
I’m in total agreement with everything Kevin says. But I might go one step further. Knowing how most traditional CDs, writers and art directors work, I can confirm that there’s still a tendency among many to generate ad “ad idea” first and then go seek out their digital counterparts who might “make the work better,” to use Kevin’s words. In fact plenty of creative technologists will tell you that the question they usually get is, “Can you build this?” When the question they want to be asked is “What should we build?”
Kevin’s right that those of us who grew up on the traditional side of the business need help with the new complexities of technology. But we should make sure we get that help before we have an idea.
In fact we should be aggressively and proactively learning as much as we can about what’s possible with mobile, geo, APIs, social media and the very latest technology before we or anyone on our team closes the door to go and concept. Better yet, the people we concept with should be the techies themselves – creative technologists, UX professionals, social media enthusiasts.
I once had a CD tell me that he didn’t really need to know technology because, “No matter what I think up there’ll be someone who’ll know how to build it.” True, but my question back to him was, “But if you knew what was actually possible, wouldn’t you think up even more interesting ideas?”
Thanks again to Kevin for admitting and reinforcing what we all need to do. Let’s just make sure we get the help he recommends first. Then we can brief teams, look at ideas, and know we’ve picked the best one.
Retail goes social
Perhaps it’s the inspiration of Zappos and its pioneering use of Twitter. Maybe it’s the success of Best Buy, whose Twelpforce has turned employees into an online service and support staff. But retailers everywhere are jumping on the social train. And well they should.
Today shopping happens anywhere: offline, online, on the go. And shoppers can connect and share every step of the way. Mobile utilities make it possible to find a product in a store and quickly order it for less somewhere else. Services like Groupon deliver daily and or regional discounts providing the crowd responds. Platforms such as Placecast offer all of us a chance to opt-in to offers and messages from our favorite retailers entirely on our own terms. And multi-feature apps such as Springpad (note they’re a client and I serve on the board) will soon actually hunt down the best prices for products you’ve saved to your wish list.
In fact it’s only a matter of time before consumers can issue their own RFI for a given product type or even a specific brand.
So what are retailers doing besides the obvious presence on Twitter and Facebook? Lots of stuff. In the last couple of months I’ve come across the following. My guess is it’s just the beginning.
Uniqlo sets the bar
If non-stop experimentation and creativity is your criteria, check out Uniqlo. Their constant fashion innovation extends into social media. For example, UTweet takes all your Twitter content and gives it a cool new look. They’ve got something new every month or so and all of it is designed to engage with customers, connect them to each other and inspire them to pass it around. This is a brand that’s being social rather than doing social.
JC Penny hires haulers
Among the many phenomena brought to us by YouTube are haul videos. Shoppers sharing their most recent purchases. Don’t ask me why, but some of these young women have thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of views. (Amazing what we are interested in.) JC Penny figured, “Why not have them haul home stuff from its stores?” Give some of the popular ones a couple of gift cards and turn those haulers into customers and advocates all in one fell swoop. No doubt we’ll see more retailers trying to leverage the influence of the individual.
Kohl’s crowdsources customer stories
Again, you may ask yourself why, but it appears we want to share everything and even pay attention to what others are sharing. Kohl’s figured this out and created a simple site where customers could hold up receipts, sharing what they bought and more importantly how much they saved. Granted $100 prizes helped generate participation, but shoppers showed up and shared as much because they wanted recognition and inclusion as they did the money. In a matter of weeks Kohl’s got thousands of customers to share their purchases and brag about their savings. Note: Kohl’s worked with This Moment, whose platform lets them create a unified brand experience across all the social networks, from YouTube to Facebook to Kohl’s own site.
Diesel introduces social dressing rooms
This is pretty cool. In Spain, Diesel created the Diesel Cam, essentially connecting mirrors right outside the dressing rooms directly to Facebook. When you try on an outfit you can log in, upload a photo of yourself in your new jeans, and solicit immediate feedback and “likes” from your friends. We all want the opinion of people we trust and who better to watch our backside than our friends? Social shopping, whether it’s via our iPhone and a quick TwitPic or full-blown installations like Diesel’s, is definitely here.
K-Mart post gamers’ online reviews in-store
This one couldn’t be simpler. K-Mart invites its video game customers to review games online and possibly have them appear in-store as POP right on the shelf where the game is sold. You get your review and your name front and center for other shoppers to see. Ups your gamer cred and makes you feel part of the franchise. We all know it’s easy to post comments online, but to have them displayed as a miniature billboard? Much cooler.
Retailers may still be addicted to FSI’s and the offline tactics they’ve always depended on, but if I were in the Sunday circular business, I’d be even more worried than I already am.
If you’ve seen other cool retailer uses of social media, please share. I’m taking up a collection. Thanks for reading.
Does short term thinking miss the potential of social media?
The long term benefit of friends and followers exceeds the short term impact of a campaign
As more and more brands race into social media it appears they’re bringing with them the exact same short-term mindset that they apply to advertising campaigns. I hear it all the time.
“If we do this (fill in the blank: Twitter, Facebook, blog, whatever) how many (fill in the blank: clicks, inquiries, sales, customers) will we get and how soon?
“Because we need it right away. Like tomorrow. Or next week. Otherwise we can’t sell it in.”
Despite all that’s been written, discussed and in many cases proven (thank you Blendtec, Zappos and Gary Vaynerchuk) regarding the long-term value of listening, engaging, building and mobilizing community, and engendering loyalty, lots of marketers still insist on applying the traditional advertising model to social media, demanding an instant correlation between spending and results.
For years, digital agencies have pointed out the shortcomings of advertising campaigns — they have to be repeated over and over to maintain visibility and impact — arguing instead for platforms that integrate into people’s lives.
Well people, social media is, in many ways, like a digital platform.
When it’s done right, if mirrors the tactics pioneered by none other than the Grateful Dead.
And it generates the same kind of lasting results. It produces an ongoing journey, allows the community to influence the experience, introduces like minded people to each other (a reason in and of itself to be part of a community) and rewards them in such a way that they want to invite their friends to come and join.
Consider all the press and pundits who’ve questioned the effectiveness of the recent “Hello Ladies,” campaign. (I wanted to write a post without saying the name of the brand behind it just to see if I could.) A gazillion views and all anyone can ask is, “Yeah, but did it sell more product?” In fact it did. But not because of the videos alone. Promotions and discounts buffeted the campaign, topping off the buzz with real incentives.
Still, half the world had nothing but praise, while the other half felt compelled to point out that video views (social media) don’t translate into revenue. Even Brian Solis, a social media pioneer, correctly predicts that the videos will diminish in impact over time, but surprisingly suggests they should have included customized offers and discounts as part of their monologs.
You think so? I’m not sure incentives and offers in the videos would have aided views. Plus it misses the point. That being we should stop being so obsessed with the immediate impact of social media efforts. The real benefit of “Hello Ladies” is that like any good engagement advertising it generated over 95,000 new followers for the brand on Twitter and, combined with other marketing efforts, bumped its Facebook likes up to nearly 800,000. Those new community members are the real value. Long term value. Thousands of people who’ve opted in to be part of the conversation.
Engaging Brian Solis from EdelmanDigital on Vimeo.
Presuming that the “Hello Ladies” folks now engage with those fans and followers, they have something even better than a positive blip in weekly sales. They’ve got their equivalent of Dead Heads — people to whom they can market and introduce new products; a community from which they can crowdsource ideas and content; people they can mobilize to bring even more fans into the fold.
We all know that if you want to sell a lot of something you’ve got three things you can do.
One, do what Apple does and come up with an awesome product that everyone wants.
Two, run a promotion with incentives to try or buy the product.
Three, get good at contextual marketing so that you can push messages (don’t spam) to customers who’ve opted into receiving them on their terms.
And, if you really want, you can continue to use social media for short term, campaign oriented results. Give something away. Beef up your engagement ad budget. Incent people to un-friend or re-friend their friends.
But if your objective is to take advantage of social media, stop evaluating everything you (or others) do based on the immediacy of results. Long-term relationships are always better.
Digital ideas, platforms and eco-systems
For years, digital agencies have strived to distinguish themselves from traditional advertising agencies that practice digital with the claim that they build platforms – applications and utility that delivery functionality and integrate into people’s lives – while ad agencies come up with digital gimmicks. In fact it was in the news today. As the argument goes, the latter may generate awareness and buzz, but like all offline advertising campaign, they quickly lose their impact when the media buy comes to an end, calling for yet another campaign and then another.
This is true. It was true of Subservient Chicken, true of the Cadbury Gorilla, and true, inevitably, of Old Spice’s recent social media frenzy. In fact, once these campaigns end the only people who tend to remember them are agency types scrambling to replicate their temporary success while making it look as if they didn’t copy the idea.
Meanwhile platforms like Garmin Connect (bet you never even heard of it unless you’re a road cyclist and a Garmin user) and iPhone apps like Stylebook, Zipcar and Timberland Expeditions (one of ours) continue to attract users, generate downloads, and provide the kind of functionality that earns both loyalty and repeat business.
The fact is brands and marketers need both. Without awareness and buzz, the kind of utility that makes a brand indispensable (if that’s possible) never gets embraced. Nike Plus would be invisible if it weren’t for the brand equity built up with years of advertising.
However, the challenge now is more complicated than what’s implied by the debate between idea and platform. The new frontier is the ecosystem. (Yes I know that term gets used to mean a lot of things; but for this purpose it means the interdependency of a brand’s multiple digital properties.) Think about it. Most brands have an advertising campaign. They probably have a website that offers more than brochure-ware and delivers something of genuine use — either applications, commerce, customized user-experiences, community or how-to videos.
But with the proliferation of social media, chances are good that a brand also has a Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and at least one if not three iPhone apps. (I recently had a prospect tell me, “We need apps, lots of apps. It’s important for you to know that we’re app happy around here, so whatever you do bring us apps.”) And since the pre iPhone craze was “build me a micro-site,” chances are good it also has half a dozen of those.
Years ago, John Wanamaker said he knew that half his advertising worked, he just wasn’t sure which half. Today, with all the metrics and analytics baked into everything we do there’s little doubt that we know which stuff works. But do you know whether it all works together?
My suggestion is that if digital agencies and traditional agencies continue fighting over the idea versus the platform they’re wasting words and energy. The new frontier will be the brand’s overall digital ecosystem and figuring out how to get advertising, platforms, social media, conversation strategy and a brand’s existing community of customers to reinforce each other in a way that generates awareness, allows prospects to enter a relationship on their own terms (whether they want to learn, connect, join, transact, share or simply watch) and then holds onto them, ideally turning them into advocates.
Got eco-system?
Instant, personal, social and creative on a horse
It was only a year ago that most ad agencies turned their noses up at the mere mention of Twitter. (The comments are gone now, but half of them were beyond harsh.) It was only a year ago that most social media agencies went around declaring that traditional ad agencies just didn’t get it. It was only a year ago that advertising creative teams would scream bloody murder if you expected them to generate creative within a couple of days, never mind hours or even minutes.
Well, things change quickly on the Internet.
Today, ad agencies are scrambling to catch up on what Twitter’s all about. Even some of the old guys are showing up.
The social media “gurus” are pulling their feet out of their collective mouths as ad agencies start to raise the SoMe content bar.
And those writer/art director teams that used to whine about shorter timetables? They’re disappearing as quickly as those tweets you saw in your morning stream.
And if they’re not, they will be after today as the Old Spice campaign running on Twitter and YouTube reminds us that everyone was wrong.
The ads that even the anti-advertising crowd loves have harnessed the speed of Twitter and YouTube and combined it with the personal interaction allowed by both to produce a bunch of new spots that speak directly to individuals, responding to their Twitter posts, comments on Reddit , and ramblings on YouTube itself.
If the videos were genuinely being produced in real time, they’re brilliant. And even the whole thing was preplanned, with incoming Tweets and scripts prepared in advance, well the illusion is great. (Hope I don’t sound like a cynic; I want to believe it’s the former.)
I haven’t contacted or spoken with anyone at Weiden and Kennedy, the agency behind the Old Spice idea, but clearly they have just gone out and done what is likely to be labeled one of the best examples of “the new integration.”
Ingredients: big, clever brand idea; social presence that realizes content is as important as the product it represents; opportunity for consumers to participate; responsive, real-time engagement (including faux pas and obvious glances at the script); and a built-in ability to share.
Of course having the formula doesn’t mean you can replicate it. That requires more than free platforms and a branded Twitter account and YouTube channel. It takes talent.
Congratulations to all for a very cool and amusing idea. F@&*. Wish we’d thought of something like this first.
Relate posts:
ReadWriteWeb on how the videos were produced.
AdWeek on Old Spice ruling the web.
Even the New York Daily News
