This is great storytelling (though some parts beg many questions). But as a content piece it has the various elements, emotions and insight to take you on a journey and at the end, after the emotional reveal, you look at the brand that did this and go, WTF does this have anything to do with hair colour.
This is probably why you need a brand planner. Creativity and storytelling is useless unless there’s a clear linkage to the brand.
An interesting piece of marketing by Hong Leong Bank for the launch of Mach
Over 8 million views in a week is no small feat of content marketing especially by an Asian bank. What this video has to do with banking however, is completely beyond me.
Many brands fail trying to leverage on technology to create something cool and gimmicky for their products in the digital space. Most of the time, it’s because these were executed frivolously with the technology solutions solving no genuine consumer problem whatsoever.
Enter this touch free recipe players by Unilever brand Flora. Rooted on a genuine consumer insight that following recipes online while cooking can be extremely messy business (which my wife can testify to), Handy by Flora is a new web app that aims to change all that though, by letting you control recipe videos on YouTube using gestures (detected using your webcam) without even having to touch your laptop.
Check it out at www.handybyflora.com
Dell celebrates the humble beginnings of all great companies in this unbelievably good Dell ad. Most companies get so big that they forget their roots as an innovator, a consumer champion and a company that set out into greatness and to solve a genuine problem with a fantastic product or solution.
Kudos to Dell for this great ad, a wonderful point of view that celebrates them becoming a private company once again. When you answer to no one and don’t have to worry about public opinion and your stock price, you can start acting on your roots again, manifesting your true brand purpose and putting your customers at the centre of everything you do.
This is simply brilliant storytelling from BBH London and Robinsons Drinks. A nice plot twist at the end with an extremely interesting and unique point of view – It’s good to be a dad but it’s better to be a friend, this ad plays (no pun intended) nicely into Robinsons’ tagline of Play Thirsty.
This is a great example of good storytelling that is rooted on a strong consumer insight.
The video shows a group of handicapped men playing wheel chair basketball and ends with a surprising twist. The voiceover alludes that the choices we make reveal the true nature of our character. This is strongly tied to the insight that at a pub/bar most people order beers but you need to make a conscious choice to choose a Guinness. Guinness drinkers make bolder choices. They aren’t spectators to life but active participants.
Done by BBDO Worldwide.
This is a timely reminder and a great example of how a simple digital idea can help drive a behavior change. See Your Folks is a website that predicts based on location, how often you visit your parents now and their individual ages. Based on data from the World Health Organization, it simply computes the number of times you will get to see them again based on your current frequency and their predicted lifespan.
A simple idea, but one that is sure to drive action to improve on frequency, especially now that it has dawn upon you that there’s a finite number of times you will actually get to see them before the inevitable happens.
Visit the site here.
For the past decade, ad agencies have spent considerable amount of resources beefing up their digital capabilities. These range from digital production teams, creative technologists, digital strategists, and the like. This primarily comes from a client shift toward digital, social, and mobile and a need for agencies to be able to deliver more integrated and holistic work that involves creating branded experiences over just advertising messages.
How has that worked out?
Looking at the recent scale of digital wins at advertising awards and the type of entries that win (Nike+ Fuelband won the 2012 Cannes Cyber Lions winner for great product innovation and the Johnson & Johnson Band Aid Magic Vision won the new mobile category), it looks like all these efforts are paying big dividends.
However, not all agencies get to do this level of work. Most agencies will typically have their digital team working on web banners, campaign microsites, and Facebook applications. Mostly done as part of a list of deliverables to support an integrated campaign message. Some might graduate into more enterprise-level work that shifts away from their core competency in creativity and communications and into the realm of software companies, developing e-commerce platforms and building content management systems.
One of the contributing factors is the existing ad agency structure and remuneration model. It works on client retainers based on man-hours and projects that need to be budgeted for and signed off by clients before work begins. Unlike most businesses, the ad industry does not heavily invest in R&D; rightly so because it is a talent and ideas business. This works well in the existing model where the outputs are strategy, ideas, and communication assets but not when you look at creative technology and design driven product innovation like the Nike+ Fuelband.
This has led to a certain level of frustration and the exodus of good digital talent from ad agencies as they find it difficult to embrace this model where the work is focused on outputs rather than outcomes that provide true value by solving a real-world problem through a product/service utility and experience. Some take their ideas out of the agency and into their own start-ups while others decide to set up their own digital shops.
Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer at AKQA raised an interesting discussion in early 2012 on how ad agencies need to act more like startups. He later spoke at SXSW on the same topic and shared his analysis and interviews with some notable advertising and start-up professionals. The jury is still out there but I believe there were some great points made including the need for agencies to be more nimble and have the capacity for experimentation and to make mistakes and learn which the current agency structure, compensation model, and processes do not allow for.
In addition, agencies needed to go beyond helping brands tell stories and toward helping brands enable stories through a culture of agile technology innovation focused on creative problem solving and making useful things.
The rise of the maker movement is well documented and it is a culture of building, experimentation, and agile development that more and more integrated and pure play digital agencies are embracing.
Many agencies out of Asia have already started evolving by developing innovation labs with various models, some integrating experiments and projects with client requirements while others spinning off a new business model akin to a tech startup.
Some well-documented ones include Pilot.is, which started off developing Projeqt as a way to unify the individual websites across TBWA’s 250-office network. Projeqt has since morphed into a real-time dynamic web presentation platform with a sizable number of users from advertising and marketing professionals to educators.
Deutsch LA recently launched its product invention arm Inventionist while BBH Labs has existed since 2009 as a “marketing skunkworks” dedicated to global marketing innovation. BBH’s other brand development unit Zag has also built a commercially viable product development and IP partnership model. Even Droga5, one of the most respected creative agencies spun off De-De as a product development studio that developed Thunderclap, a crowd-powered platform that allows social messages to be amplified through crowdsourcing.
In the U.S, businesses like Nordstrom have also created an innovation lab that operates like a lean startup inside the fashion retailer to look at product innovation to help fuel marketing and the shopper experience. Just look at this amazing case study video of the Nordstrom labs team in action developing a sunglass iPad app (to help customers select sunglasses) in the world’s first “flash build” – a flash mob where the lab team shows up in the store and builds the app in real time through rapid experimentation and prototyping, all while getting constant feedback from actual customers in the store.
This shift toward creative innovation and product development will be a continuous evolution in the agency space and one in which I believe will form the foundation of the digital agency of the future. There is a real synergy between product innovation and what agencies are currently doing and this looks like the next evolution in extending what agencies can offer to their clients.
So how do agencies transition into an innovation-led product development model, especially when it is highly disruptive to the current ad agency model?
Here are five thoughts I have that might help those within the agency who are looking for such change to manage this paradigm shift:
1. Complement, not challenge the status quo
The core business of an ad agency will always be focused on communications not innovation. What needs to start is a shift in how digital is perceived and being used within an agency and this needs to be done through a progressive change in culture, structure, and processes. It starts with a group of people (usually within the digital team) coming together who share a common vision and passion for creating stuff. And it might have to fly under the radar in the beginning to avoid rocking the bigger boat.
Structurally this could be in the form of an innovation lab or marketing skunkworks project that looks at creating product ideas and developing them through fun experimentation, rapid prototyping, and learning. This is a shift from the agency culture of working on an idea till it is fully “cooked” and perfected before presenting it to a client. Rather, it works on a “lean startup” model where the focus is on agile development to get prototypes out as quickly as possible into the real world to test and refine.
The objective at this stage is to build a culture where agile iterations are favored over rigid plans and the focus is on the actual “making” of things that going beyond software and into the Internet of Things to help create integrated physical/digital experiences. One of my favorite examples to describe this is Chaotic Moon Lab’s Board of Imagination.
2. Focus on the right outcomes
The focus is not to create stories (i.e., advertising) but to enable them through a product or service. To do that, we need to look to solve a consumer problem and develop ideas and products that will help enable the solution. Furthermore, the labs team can leverage on the marketing expertise within the bigger agency to identify relevant consumer insights that may lead to product or service solutions.
Some of my favorite examples of this include Westpac Impulse Saver, Red Tomato Pizza VIP Fridge Magnet and Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskin.
3. Develop a long-term objective and business model
To ensure sustainability, the natural progression for any innovation lab is to move from fun experiments into a sustainable monetization model.
There are a couple of ways that this could be done. Akin to a startup, agencies could monetize the product or software by offering it to consumers (e.g., a mobile utility) at a price or via a subscription model (e.g., a social listening tool for brands). This provides a whole new revenue stream for the agency.
Another way is to match product ideas developed to appropriate business problems of existing clients or even use these ideas to pitch for new businesses. Rather than trying to get clients to fund the entire project, an IP-based revenue or equity-sharing model might provide agencies with a more lucrative payback along with a longer term relationship with these clients due to the nature of product partnerships.
The last model is to provide product innovation as part of a service to selected clients, as what Inventionist(the product innovation arm of ad agency Deutsch LA) has done.
4. Don’t do all the heavy lifting
Even the most talented group of digital people will find it hard to go solo by themselves trying to juggle experimentation and learning along with their day-to-day agency work. It is always best to find partners who can contribute expertise, skillsets, and connections. For example, W+K partnered with innovation studio Deep Local to get the necessary hardware and software expertise to build Nike Livestrong Chalkbot.
Agencies can also look at partnering with academic institutions that have innovation incubators such asNUS-CUTE Centre.
5. Put it all out there
Sometimes, the fastest way to challenge yourself, learn, and move forward is to put things out there for the world to see and critique. When Inventionist decided to revamp the Deutsch agency website, they decided to put their money where their mouth was and apply the same agile development model that they would use on clients.
What better way to prove to your clients that building digital products in more agile manner is ultimately the best approach than a public challenge to the agency to rebuild their website in 30 days. Out came#30Days2Beta, where the entire development process was live-streamed for the world to see in a transparent and participatory manner.
Digital products have the power to improve and drive marketing by creating real value, solve real problems, and create long-term connections with people. One of the speakers at Spikes Asia 2012 encapsulated this nicely with the thought of “Think 365 not 360.” Rather than trying to surround your consumers with 360-degree communications, give them a reason to engage with you and love your brand 365 days a year instead.
This is an amazing social project done by a truly remarkable group of people in Paraguay: An orchestra that plays instruments out of trash. A truly awe inspiring tale of the things that can be done when people band together against adversity and circumstances to create music and an emotional experience for everyone that watches this.
This is a true testament to digital agencies, the ones that make and build things be it for their clients or for themselves. Those that go beyond creating web banners and microsites to actually building applications and physical objects; marrying the disciplines of design, sociology, hardware and software engineering.
Credit to AKQA for this great musical mobile orchestra in their collaboration with the Pacific Chamber Symphony to present Carol Of The Bells this Christmas 2012.
You can try it out with your own mobile devices here
The Digital Marketer 