What to Expect from Your Agency When All Hell is Breaking Loose

My article from our new magazine, Connote. Enjoy, folks!

It’s a mess out there. Proven channels are delivering diminishing returns year after year. Everyone says engagement is important, but that usually means another coupon or promotion that inevitably forces you to lose profit for likes. The line between marketing and operations is getting murkier.

There are more opportunities than ever, but it’s only gotten harder to determine if or how they make a difference to your business.

Media channels have disintegrated into an increasingly complex network of possibilities. Broadcast television is noticeably suffering as Netflix, DVRs, and a hundred cable channels divide audiences.

Mobile is already upending the way the Internet works and altering how all of us shop, eat, read, drive, and communicate. The cost of attention has skyrocketed. It takes more time and more money to break through. Decades of paying for eyeballs has made the challenge of earned engagement that much more difficult. The good old days are gone.

WHERE’S THE SPARK?

The challenge of advertising was never a matter of making things. There was no app that helped you manage your shopping experience. We didn’t consider what happened after a click.

There was no expectation for the viewer to do much of anything. Agencies were left to do one thing really well—create a spark between a brand and a customer. Products were made more profitable through this inherently intangible notion.

After the screams of the death of advertising, the need to stop telling great stories and get on with making great utilities, our conversations changed. We spent less time on the spark and more time on where this or that button should go. We worried more about functionality and less about emotion.

It is the difficulty of doing. We are easily wooed by the rationality of the tangible, often at the expense of the spark.

Whether we are creating apps or status updates, you should expect advertising and marketing to do what it was always meant to do—add intrigue, emotion, thoughtfulness, story, surprise, magic—in ways that make you more noticeable. The biggest wins will always be when we use these new tools not just to make peoples’ lives easier, but to add the stuff of advertising at its best.

THE MODERN INTEGRATED AGENCY

“Integrated” can’t just mean campaigns that happen to cross channels. That’s table stakes. We’re meant to create conversations. To use data we didn’t have 10 years ago. To understand organizations, incorporate customer service, and invent new products. We’re meant to operate like publishing houses, pushing content on a daily basis and receiving judgment immediately through the tweets and likes of fans.

It also can’t mean that every potential need you might have will be executed within our walls. Sometimes you’ll need specialists, and it’s not realistic to trade expertise for practicality.

Advertising and marketing are not statements of a product we make, but of our purpose. We make products easy to like. We make them more famous, more attractive, and more familiar. Truly integrated agencies are those that keep this purpose central while remaining effective with new partners, in new places, and different methods. We will still create magic, but that magic will only sustain itself if we are repeatedly and ruthlessly committed to it.

In Defense of Big Strategy

I'll start by saying - I have much respect for Teehan + Lax. Most of what they do makes me insanely jealous. Same goes for Eric. Super smart human. But I was a bit perturbed by their depiction of big strategy as being necessarily wrong-headed, wasteful and exclusive. Strategy at its core is simply defining where you are, where you want to be, how you'll get there and how you'll measure your progress. If you spend 3 months crafting a strategy for a single tactical output, that's probably wasteful assuming you have good inputs and clear objectives. But combining all instances of strategy into that one bucket undervalues what strategy can be when done and applied properly.

Eric characterizers "big strategy" through this idea.

"They dutifully comb through consumer research and reports, hoping to uncover some magical insight that will unlock some door. For instance, they might discover that there is a statistically significant percentage of 16-24 year olds in Missouri who like kitten GIFs. So they recommend that their tortilla client sponsors a Facebook kitten GIF contest. Maybe they’ll even create a microsite for it. They will spend months planning and conceiving a campaign, cross their fingers and pray that it will ultimately deliver results."

So here's the thing. If that's your job, you are not doing big strategy. You are doing bad strategy. It's not all that hard to use 'big strategy' as a punching bag if you characterize it as chasing after inconsequential stats such as who likes gifs the most. When you actually need strategy, you should not be looking for one magical consumer insight to drive a single communication or platform, but a deeper understanding of the organizational inner workings, the competitive landscape and the marketplace that will uncover opportunities for new growth.

In big organizations with complex problems and complex marketplaces, creating a strategy helps to build commitment from the broader spectrum of the company. It helps us to consider the implications of what we do, both internally and externally. It helps us to get outside of our own assumptions and create a more nuanced understanding of those we need to reach. It helps us think more broadly about the business result of the outputs. When you leap too quickly into the product without working out some of those bits first, you are relying entirely on the generally limited knowledge that exists in the room. Again, sometimes that's okay. But not always.

Even the military photo introducing the post is wrongheadedly dismissive to the impact of strategy. Military organizations use strategy and planning more extensively than any other organization on the planet, precisely because they are dealing with incredibly complex challenges that require a nuanced understanding of the people they may affect. What you will see from the military is a model more like the one I endorse; understand the problem, get agreement on the end state, define the decision making frameworks and measures tha'll help you know whether or not you're progressing, then finally - make sure everyone knows and understands that direction so you can decentralize decision making to the highest degree without losing effectiveness. But frankly, you can't do that last part without understanding those before it.

Eric goes on to say.

"This is the main source of digital marketing landfill – countless microsites that were never visited, mobile apps that nobody used, contests that only had 20 entries, and tweets that were never read. They are the unfortunate result of an approach that attempts to predict a positive outcome in a world that resists these types of predictions."

Frankly, that's just wrong. The idea that the digital marketing landfill is a product of big strategy is ridiculous. It's usually matter of total marketing myopia where everyone in the room doesn't question whether anyone would actual use the thing. A good strategist will help bring a customer or segment to life in a way that externalizes the team's thinking. That's a really really good cure to bullshit microsites.

"Big Strategy" helps us define the right problems to solve precisely so we can break old dogma and forge into unexplored territories while remaining rooted in the realities of the outside world. I would ask:

• Does it make sense to understand how customers buy a product before we jump in and start designing how we'll make it easier?
• Does it make sense that a company looks outward to understand what has worked and what has not when approaching a new market?
• Does it make sense for a company to analyze what competitors have done if they want to stand out themselves?
• Is it ever important for a company to consider the resources they have that may help them grow in new areas they may not have considered?
• Is it ever important to develop a new capability rather than creating a new tactic in order to accomplish an objective?
• Are the problems our clients face ever about doing too many things rather than not enough?
• Are there times when investment is required, even if profits haven't caught up with the potential?

If you are not equipped to tackle these kinds of questions, it doesn't mean that they won't be asked and answered. It just means that it will happen without you. We are screaming towards a time when digital shops will either need to diversify and move up the chain or focus and act more like technology companies than marketing agencies. Both will exist. Both will probably thrive. But it is a choice.

So I guess all I'm really saying is that you can't throw all strategy into one big bucket and call it a waste of time. You can rail against misapplied strategy, bad strategy or non-inclusive strategy that assumes it is only the purview of intellectuals, but it remains an effective tool in sustaining growth across a series of tactics when done at the right time and in the right way.

"The great virtue of thought and analysis is that they free us from the necessity of following recipes, and helps us deal with the unexpected, including the imagination to try something new."

Harold McGee on Food and Cooking

Photo credit: Carmen Marchena

Good Problems and the Core Thought

As many of you know, I'm a big believer that the better the problem, the more likely you are to get to work that works. Wrongheaded problems leave us in a ditch. Boring problems invite uninspired solutions. And when you only ask advertising questions, unsurprisingly - you get lots of advertising answers. The best of the best understand the value in taking the time to get the question right. 

With that, here's a presentation I did to get the point across the girls and boys of Twist a few months back. Hopefully you'll find some value in it, too.

[slideshare id=14075358&w=512&h=421&fb=0&mw=0&mh=0&style=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px;&sc=no]

On Strategists as Connectors

In Tim Harford's latest article he said, "The advancing frontier of scientific knowledge forces most researchers to specialise in ever narrower fields and, as a result, collaboration between these silos is essential." As he also mentions, this isn't something happening just in science or research, but many other sectors from finance to retailing. We've progressed so far because of our ability to work together. But now we're so specialized that we're having trouble speaking to one other.

For anyone that's ever walked into a company from another industry, it doesn't take long to realize that it's not just what they do that's different, but also the entire language structure that allows them to do what they do. If splicing language was apparently so effective at creating barriers in babel, just imagine the hinderence our evolution to specialist groups can be.

So now the need for the glue is even greater, those few that bridge the gap between one person who knows how to do one thing and another who knows some complementary thing. If our world is more reliant on working together towards some end, these roles are not nice to haves but baseline essentials for progress. Especially now as a single engagement may touch everything from HR to community managers to media types and technologists working towards the same ends.

This is where strategists have to be at their best, defining meaty problems that allow various specialist types to find solutions meaningful to them, building a common language and environment that allows teams of different thinkers to work together and rallying the commitment that encourages projects to bloom.

Or as Tim finished, "Perhaps the real lesson is that promoting cross-disciplinary research need not require a mysterious blend of social-networking tools and funky collaborative architectural spaces. All that is sometimes required is a shared problem, or a shared set of tools, and, above all, the money to pay for the job to be done."

photo via carl heindl