Relationships versus ideas

A recent Twitter exchange between John Winsor of V&S and Marty St. George of Mullen client, Jet Blue

Most successful ad agencies have been built around a combination of the two:  relationships and ideas. The former yields the kind of partnership that lets a brand team totally immerse itself in a client’s business, work as a partner rather than a supplier and take a vested interest in the success of the business.

That’s not to say that relationships are more important than ideas. After all, it’s the latter that goes into the market, attracting attention, generating buzz, driving results. No one gets famous from a relationship; it’s the ideas that make you immortal.

But you could argue that relationships contribute to great ideas in a big way. A strong relationship results in trust, which invites braver thinking. It yields a partnership that encourages client and agency to work through challenges and problems together. And it motivates creative teams to work even harder than they already do. We all want to please a client who appreciates what we do for them.

But if Will Burns, the founder of Ideasicle, is right, the relationship side of things just might be diminishing in value. In Will’s words, many clients care less about relationships and more about getting an idea faster, cheaper and more efficiently. He should know, having held senior account and new business roles at agencies that include Wieden, Goodby, Arnold and Mullen.

In response to that “trend,” Will created Ideasicle, an expert-sourcing agency.  Similar to the crowdsourcing model of Victors & Spoils, which also posts briefs to a vetted community of creatives, Ideasicle calls on an even smaller stable of hand-picked, experienced, award-winning creatives who have joined as “experts.” All of them have worked with Will in one of his previous positions, so he has a good sense of how to match them with assignments.

When Ideasicle secures an assignment – sometimes from an ad agency needing to augment and internal effort, but more often from a brand advertiser looking for fast, affordable access to top talent – it posts the news to members of the Ideasicle community. Those who are available agree to work on short notice as a swat team. They collaborate with each other online — conceiving ideas, revising them, making each other’s concepts better – but stay invisible and anonymous to clients. Hired guns, they work for the joy of creating and the guaranteed payday.

Ideasicle offers clients what it calls "expert sourcing."

Knowing my interest in crowdsourcing and new models, Will showed me a quick peek behind the curtain. The talent is impressive. And despite their anonymity, more and more clients are embracing the model, caring not who works on their business but rather what comes out of the process.

Like Victors & Spoils, which has generate impressive PR and clients – Harley Davidson, Levis’, Virgin America, General Mills, Discovery Channel – Ideasicle is challenging the traditional models as being inefficient and over-priced.

I’m not saying I agree totally with that sentiment. In a world where the only real trend that matters is hyper-connectivity, you could make an argument that brands need a deep relationship with an agency  like the one I work for, where a dedicated hyper-bundled team can deliver creative, paid media, earned media, mobile and digital all working together to produce coherent brand experiences that consider everything from context to culture.

But it’s also likely that the new models, anxious to prove the maxim that abundance breaks more things than scarcity, are to be taken seriously. Perhaps we should embrace aspects of what they do ourselves, finding ways to source ideas from more people and places and deliver them even more quickly and efficiently.

What do you think?

Mont Blanc crowdsources beauty by the second

A lot of crowdsourced or co-created projects yield questionable results. But there seems to be a new formula that works pretty well. Short snippets of film edited into something wonderful by a talented curator/editor. We saw the first big example of this with Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day.  And this week we see another great effort from Mont Blanc to celebrate its 190th anniversary.

To honor Nicolas Rieussac’s invention of the chronograph – he recorded time to a fifth of a second in 1821 – Mont Blanc has challenged image makers to capture beauty in a single second of a film. Participants choose their favorite 60, each of which becomes part of a short film and qualifies to be chosen as the single best one-second video by director Wim Wenders. Hard to imagine that one one-second film can be the best, but someone’s got to win.

There’s also an opportunity to craft your own playlist of other people’s videos and be recognized for your visual prowess even if you choose not to submit.

Is this a good idea? I think so for a host of reasons.

• It’s a perfectly relevant idea. The beauty of a second. What better way to call attention to the chronograph?
• It’s remarkable easy to enter. Simply upload a film from a computer or mobile device.
• The prize is great: a trip to Berlin and a new Mont Blanc chronograph.
• The finished films that feature the top 60 seconds become something you can send to your friends with appropriate bragging rights.
• Mont Blanc generates a piece of content they probably couldn’t create themselves.
• And finally, the participants become a bit of a media channel, sharing and passing the videos around the web.
• Best of all, when you take a look at the first film, it lives up to the idea that a single second is plenty long enough to convey beauty.

Now if only the website weren’t, as Boing Boing called it, an obnoxious blob of flash.

Answers from your friends in advertising and digital

A month ago I crowdsourced questions here and on Twitter for the instructors at BDW’s Making Digital Work workshop.

We settled on five.

How do we get clients to embrace more innovative work?

What can we learn from software startups?

Do agencies have a role in social media?

How do we stop the talent drain?

What kind of people should we hire?

Here are the answers from my good friends and teachers Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Kim Laama, Tim Malbon, Sheena Matheiken, Scott Prindle and John Winsor.I weigh in, too.

Some of my favorite soundbites:

Matt Howell on innovation: If we’re serious about selling more progressive work we have to get serious about investing in prototyping, showing how something works and how you’d interact with it.

Gareth Kay on social media: One of the biggest problems with social media is that people are too focused on the media part of social media instead of on the social part.

Sheena Matheiken on software inspiration: Developers in general, especially the creatively inclined ones, are such doers. They just create stuff. They don’t sit around and noodle. They make and prototype.

Tim Malbon on software inspiration: Try not to treat what you’re trying to make like a piece of traditional media. It doesn’t need to be designed massively up front. It can be cruder; it can be quicker.

John Winsor on retaining talent: Traditionally agencies are siloed. The creative department stands on a pedestal. The account people are there to serve them. Strategy is somewhere in between. But great ideas come from everywhere so you need to set up a system that accepts that great ideas come from everywhere.

Scott Prindle on hiring: The core quality is an entrepreneurial spirit. Someone who is passionate about the digital space, maybe someone who thought about being in start-up. They have to come into the into the agency and quickly generate ideas and move things forward.

One thing about all of these folks is that they’re willing to share. Ideas, advice, insights. Take a look and connect with them on Twitter. It will be worth it. Thanks for stopping by.

TNGG lives on Boston.com

It was a year and a half ago when we (Mullen) launched The Next Great Generation. The idea was simple: practice a bit of crowdsourcing, experiment with online publishing, recruit young talent to the agency, create an opportunity for Gen-Y to speak its mind rather than be spoken for by all the marketers, planners and researchers who claimed to know about this generation.

We didn’t really know what we were doing, but what the hell. This was the new age of media. We didn’t have to have anything figured out. We could figure it out as we went along. Iterate. Pivot. (Pick your buzzword.)

In the beginning we thought we’d provide a window into the world of Millennials through which brands and marketers could peek and learn. We (Mullen) might get some credit, prove that we knew this generation, and maybe even snag a client or two. Fail. No young writer wanted to post a “let us tell you old folks about our generation” article in order that marketers could better figure out how to sell to or engage with 20-somethings.

Instead it turned out that the editors, writers and readers wanted to connect with each other. Share thoughts, observations and musings. Support one another’s efforts to get better at writing and developing content. And more importantly, try to build something that might have value and be enduring.

So we (Mullen) did what any smart grown-up ought to do. We got the hell out of the way. Alex Pearlman (she), a young editor right out college showed up and took over. She recruited editors, set up an editorial calendar, created theme weeks, evaluated writers and took the blog to a new level. Christine Peterson, a recent college grad employed as a social strategist at Mullen managed to find an extra 20 plus hours a week to become community manager — gathering and organizing the “crowd” of writers, suggesting articles, and injecting the project with a never ending supply of passion and enthusiasm.

Then, late last spring, the two of them decided it was time to expand. They contacted The Boston Globe, offered to show the newspaper the opportunity it was missing, and invited the editors to a presentation. And here’s where it got really good. My Gen-Y friends Alex and Christine polled Boston’s Millennials regarding their media habits. They shot and edited man-on-the-street interviews. They did an analysis of the kinds of relationships urban dailies and newsweeklies had with bloggers. And they put together a stand-up dog and pony show (without any help from anyone over 24 I might add) to take to Globe management, including its editor in chief Marty Baron. My favorite line from the presentation: “Our generation doesn’t want ‘the man’ telling us what’s news.” Mr. Baron is, of course, the man. But fortunately he didn’t seem to mind.

Fast forward a few months later. The contract with the Globe’s parent company The New York Times is done. TNGG lives on Boston.com. It will post hyper-local content for the city’s students, recent grads and 20-somethings, covering “what’s going on on-campus, in the clubs and pop-up galleries, in those boardrooms where flip-flops are allowed, and everything in between.”

If things work out, here’s what might happen. TNGG will have taken the first step in a new distribution model that might earn it a larger audience. A slew of young writers and journalists will gain visibility. Boston.com will demonstrate its progressiveness and win over a new generation of readers who might otherwise eschew a mainstream news channel. Alex and Christine will have set an example for young professionals everywhere. New TNGG boston.com editor Angela Stefano will have a really cool job. And I’ll be able to say I knew them all when.

Wish them luck. Become a reader of Boston.com/tngg. And share the links. They get paid based on traffic.

Boulder Digital Works instructors in innovation, software companies, social media and more

I got plenty of questions here and on Twitter for the 10 folks who spoke at the last Boulder Digital Work Making Digital Work sessions, which just ended this past Thursday.

Here’s where we netted out. Thanks to the willing Nick Todd, who shoots and helps edit the videos we do at these sessions, we got eight of the 10 speakers on film answering all five of the questions below. Believe it or not, while many of the answers were consistent, few if any were overly redundant.

It might take a few weeks to get a finished video together, but my instinct tells me you’ll find it both interesting and insightful to hear answers from Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Tim Malbon, Ben Malbon, John Winsor, Kim Laama, Sheena Matheiken and Scott Prindle when we do.

In the meantime, below are the final questions and a few of the answers.

How can agencies inspire clients to do more innovative work?

Answers ranged from setting up internal labs to experimenting more ourselves. That way we can vet new technologies and platforms and develop ideas that we know will work before taking them to clients. Scott Prindle suggested taking on the role of teacher, educating clients more frequently in what’s possible with all the software, social networks and digital toys coming at us. Others talked about the need to bring inexpensive ideas to the table in hopes of inspiring more experimentation. In short, spread excitement.

What lessons can agencies learn from software companies and start-ups?

As an industry, we no longer look to each other for ideas and inspiration. We draw on Silicon Valley, new social platforms, as well as companies like Google and Apple. If any answers stood out, they were these.  Speed is your best friend. Stop perfecting the design of something and get to a Minimum Viable Product quickly by prototyping.  Another equally compelling suggestion – stop organizing people around disciplines and put people together by team.  It accelerates solving problems.

How can agencies stop the drain of talent to young startups and tech giants?

As we hire more creative technologists and developers, we’re competing with a much broader range of companies. Want to attract and retain people whose goals are to make things that matter? Give them more responsibility sooner. Consider a program like Google’s 20 percent time. Eliminate organizational hierarchy.

Do agencies have a role in executing a brand’s social media when authenticity, transparency and access are the key attributes for good social engagement?

This was the most controversial question. Some participants insisted outright that agencies should have no role. Social media and all the new platforms simply emphasize the diminished need for the middleman. Others vehemently disagreed, suggesting that if agencies master the art of conversation strategy and engagement that they should take the lead. Creativity matters even in the new space and agencies are better prepared to be inventive there than clients might be themselves.

What are the core talents you look for when hiring people who’ll drive change and implement contemporary digital work?

This might be the only real throwaway question, but the answers were still pretty good. Kim Laama wants familiarity with the entire digital landscape. I suggested curiosity and a T-shape. Tim Malbon wouldn’t consider anyone who didn’t have a real social presence. (If you haven’t already connected, interacted, shared and contributed on Twitter forget about working at Made by Many.) Ben Malbon, director of strategy at Google’s Creative Lab had my favorite answer. “I’m less interested in people who use technology and more interested in people who want to create it.”

Eventually we’ll have more thorough answers on film.  In the meantime, thanks for joining in.