Considering this I think there are three areas of challenge and opportunity to build, develop and maintain teams in a hybridised world?

While some roles and organisations may be able to go fully remote, there’s still value in some degree of physical interaction for most of us. Until Meta achieves the vision of an almost seamless virtual existence as described in Snow Crash, we’re still going to want to share physical space with colleagues. I wanted to consider three of the most valuable opportunities; when we onboard staff members, when we go ‘off-site’ and when we bring our teams and clients into our offices.

Supercharging the employee onboarding experience

In recent interviews, SalesForce CEO, Marc Benioff has been talking about his plans to buy a dude ranch (that’s a cattle station in Australia or a farm in the UK that’s been converted to tourism). His plan is to build a resort for onboarding new employees as well as running team building activities. He’s been citing the example of Crotonville, GE’s management training campus they build in 1953 on 59 acres of land north of New York City which they still operate today.

We had a similar facility when I was at Ogilvy, although in typical David Ogilvy style it was a French chateau in the Loire Valley. Chateau de Touffou was used to run client workshops, staff training programs and company retreats and as far as I know still is. While the bean counters at WPP are no doubt keen to get the 12th century castle off their books, it might just come into its own as a focal point for an increasingly fragmented network of knowledge workers and creatives in the world of hybrid working.

While it’s always possible to rent a facility for these kinds of events, at a certain scale it becomes economically viable to own the property. (hello Liz Taylor – I know what you’ve been building over at Camp Wandawenga – the ultimate corporate retreat location!)

And as Benioff makes the point when comparing his vision to Disney’s, it also enables for a full brand emersion;

“What they’ve done so successfully with their parks is you show up at a Disney park and you smell Disney, you see Disney, you feel Disney, you hear Disney. That’s what I want my new employees to feel for Salesforce. That’s the culture coming through.”

Re-imaging the office and bacon

If expressing that culture in physical form is important for high-touch points like onboarding and kickoffs for employees, then the same is also true for them during the regular working year, and for customers and clients. This is where I think we’re going to see the evolution of the office from a place to work to being a place to experience the culture and brand of a company.

There is a similar shift happening in retail. I worked with Burberry a few years ago on their social media strategy as they invested heavily in their in-store experiences, including turning their Regent Street store in London into an immersive brand experience including pop-up restaurants, a gallery and cinema. Always a leader in these areas, this kind of shop-as-brand experience is now spreading to a wider set of retailers.

As with all things, the pandemic has accelerated this, boosting digital sales. Bain consulting estimates luxury sales have gone from 12% online in 2019 to 23% in 2020 https://www.bain.com/insights/the-future-of-luxury-bouncing-back-from-covid-19/ . As a result luxury retailers are responding by rethinking their physical footprint. Quoted in ‘Re-engineering Retail (FT Weekend Subscription needed) Eleonore de Boysson of LVMH explained their strategy for luxury department store Samartine in Paris “We do have to offer something other than just product – we need to give the client a real experience, which goes far beyond shopping.” Selfridges MD Andrew Kieth expressed a similar point of view “We want people to have such a fantastic time at Selfridges that they come back..physically or online, it’s about making sure they value the relationship and enjoy the discovery.”

If retailers, whose customer ARPU is measured in the hundreds of thousands are making that commitment, what of consultants and SaaS companies whose average customer revenue is measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions?

Will offices look more like versions of Soho House, offering a range of enjoyable ways to engage with client services teams and other clients? Or will they encourage learning and development with features like the Genius Bars and lecture theatres of Apple’s flagship stores?

PP (pre-pandemic) I visited the Facebook offices in Rathbone Square. Being a company from the future they already embraced the concept of office as brand experience with a photo booth on steroids for Instagramming, a candy bar, multiple restaurants and cafes, and 3 types of bacon reflecting their internationalism; crispy strips, back bacon and the combo rasher varieties favoured by Americans, Canadians and Brits, respectively.

If we only bring our teams and clients into the office on specific and special occasions, what will we need to do to ensure they come away with a lasting and positive impression of the company’s culture, values and brand proposition? What does the company brand look like architecturally? How is it reflected experientially? What kinds of bacon will we have?

Making Off-sites Great Again

The final area of hybrid impact is one of my favourites; the Offsite.

I have long been a champion of Making OffSites Great Again. See earlier post here. If this is going to be one of the few times we get our teams together, then they are going to have to be significant cultural touch-points. No longer can these be back-to-back briefings from Nigel in sales in airless Radissons on the outer ring road of an airport.

As with the hybrid office, the hybrid offsite is going to have to work a lot harder to impart the company’s values, to build team connections and make a lasting impression that can get us from one quarter to the next.

They will need to be longer, they will need to be valuable (for both company and employee) and they will need to be enjoyable. Especially now that as we now have our routines so closely bound up in our domestic routines; breaking them is going to have to be worth it.

I’m excited about this evolution. In my experience, the bigger the company the harder it is to maintain culture and communications. This new barrier of remote working is an opportunity for multi national / multi site organisations to rethink these key employee touch-points and possibly to make up for the sins of the past. And to buy castles!

This time around it’s different. While the GFC threatened the funding from DCMS and major sponsors, it didn’t threaten our daily bread; it didn’t stop the public crossing the threshold to buy sandwiches and postcards and pay to enter exhibits. 

So in this current time of weirdness we should heed the words of that immortal strategist Hunter S Thompson “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”. 

As I set about searching for inspiration and was pointed to a lecture given by Chris Michaels, Director of Digital at the National Gallery. (Thanks Louise) Michaels gave this talk at the MuseumNext conference in June 2018, ten years after the GFC, and it is clearly informed by the impact of that event on the cultural sector.

In discussing how museums develop strategies for survival and growth Michaels refers to a couple of concepts explored in the book ‘Antifragile’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The first concept is a reprise of the idea from Taleb’s previous book Black Swan; you can’t plan for the next crisis by looking back at the last crisis to prepare for what might be about to happen. This is for the simple reason that the worst thing to happen, by definition, has got to be worse than the next-to worst thing that you’re using as your benchmark. Little did Michaels know that we’d be living this only two years after he gave his talk; planning for a repeat of the GFC and a reduction in revenue but then being served up Covid19 and the annihilation of your revenues is a perfect Black Swan event. 

The second idea is what Taleb proposes as the solution to surviving crisis; turning them into opportunities. This is the idea Taleb explores in Antifragile; a thing that gets stronger the more it is put under pressure. Antifragile is the way that bones develop strength the more that they are stressed and allowed to recover. And so Michaels’ talk is an exploration of what kind of museum might be able to not just survive crises like this, but in fact flourish; “the weirder things got, the stronger it became.”
To do this Michael suggests that museums switch from seeing their mission as creating better societies to one of creating better economies. Specifically he suggests that they locate themselves within a part of the creative industries as these are a critical and growing part of the British Economy, a fact underpinned by some key reports released that year by DCMS.

Ways to become antifragile

Michaels identifies 5 different ways that museums can do this and gives examples 

1. Align with relevant partners in the creative industries. Examples being the NG partnering with Google, the BBC and Facebook and the ultimate expression of this which his NGX; a sort of fine art accelerator in partnership with Kings College and Google Culture and Art
2. Get out of the arts funding ghetto and partner with non-culture based government departments who have programs designed to drive innovation. Examples given include Catapult , the Industry Strategy Challenge Fund  and the Creative Industries Clusters program.
3. Find relevance with educational institutions; see the Liverpool cultural education partnership and the above NGX partnership with Kings
4. Bring the creative industries inside the building and house industry businesses, incubate startups, facilitate new ideas, products and ventures. He gives some great examples including the Singapore National Gallery’s innovation lab ,  Te Papa (The Museum of New Zealand’s accelerator program Mahuki, and New York’s New Museum’s New Inc, “an 8,000 sq ft cultural incubator”
5. Embracing different business models such dynamic pricing and monthly recurring revenue. I’d add to that the latest phenomena to challenge retail; Direct to consumer (D2C) in which new brands form direct relationships with consumers through digital, predominantly social, channels.

I think what all of these do is encourage institutions in the cultural sector to think and then hopefully behave differently. By partnering with different types of organisations we massively increase the chance of combinatorial thinking and the likelihood that when stressed that museums will produce non-standard responses. Responses that could in fact increase their audience, their revenues and their relevance. 

Brand Extensions

This kind of new thinking is what is referred to in brand strategy as a brand extension; finding new places and ways that the brand can operate. When successful, brand extensions result in new products and services, a larger addressable market and stronger revenues. In antifragile terms it means taking a stressor and responding with an innovative brand extension that makes the museum stronger.

An illustration of this from Michaels’ examples is the New Museum’s IdeasCity program. IdeasCity was developed by NewInc, the museum’s incubator. 

“IdeasCity operates on a two-year cycle. Each cycle focuses on three cities around the world and comprises high-profile public conferences and residency programs that provide in-depth insight into cities through the lens of local experts and initiate new projects designed to tackle key urban issues. The cycle culminates in IdeasCity New York, a major international event in which the ideas developed during the cycle’s earlier public conferences and residency programs are presented in New York.”

The way that NewInc describes this initiative is a classic brand extension; “IdeasCity builds on the New Museum’s mission of “New Art, New Ideas” by extending the Museum beyond its walls into the civic realm.” 

These are weird times and with museum teams on furlough and institutions fighting for their very survival it seems unreasonable suggest that they should ‘innovate their way out of trouble’. Unfortunately however, this is not the last of these crises.

Michaels ends his talk with the rather upbeat prediction based on Geoffrey West’s ‘Scale’; “In the next 30 years we will probably get two massive disruptions in society one way or another – it’s ten years now since the recession and I don’t think users have really absorbed even the shock waves of the last major shift. So in 2030 and 2040 we will get another of these great hits.”

COVID didn’t take a decade to arrive and there’s no knowing how long it’s impact will be felt or what the next surprise the fates have in store for us. But clearly museum business models that rely on physical proximity are not fit for purpose. So as unreasonable as it may be, we really are going to have to become anti fragile; what doesn’t kill us is going to have to make us stronger.

It struck me as an incredible lost opportunity; here’s an ex-customer, an evangelist and supporter of ours who, once she left our customer’s organisation, has been cast out into the proverbial SaaS darkness.

Naryanan Murthy  the founder of Indian IT consulting giant Infosys made the oft quoted observation that “Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure that they come back the next morning.”

The same is true of the teams and individuals that work at our customers’ and clients’ organisations. Although we fanatically track the adoption and usage of the software, it’s the humans users who ensure subscription renewal and are the source of advocacy for our products.

The relationships we develop with our customers are not actually with the corporate entity that pays the fees or software subscription, it’s with the individuals with whom we have our daily interactions. It seems remarkable to me that we don’t go to greater lengths to keep these individuals in the fold when they move jobs.

Logically it is highly likely these people are going to a similar, or even more senior role than the one they had when they were our nearest and dearest. It’s also highly likely that they are going to an organisation that’s using a competitor product. Sometimes there’s a case of preference drag; where the fangirl customer brings us along into a new organisation, but I have never seen an instance where that process is industrialised.

It seems to me that if you calculated the CAC (customer acquisition cost) of past customers against new prospects they’d be infinitely more cost effective (I am assuming here that your product isn’t a dog) and being used to whatever issues your product might have, once they re-sign their churn will be lower and the LTV (life time value) higher.

It wouldn’t be difficult or even expensive to simply do these three things;

1. Keep them on the mailing list. If you must, you can exclude them from product sensitive info – if you’re that way inclined; my default is to overshare – typically it’s hard enough just to get them to pay attention, let alone share anything that’s sensitive.
2. Invite them to all of the customer events; the annual conference, the xmas client drinks, whatever. God knows the sales guys will invite enough random so-called prospects who will never buy your software, so why not include people, who already know and love you?
3. Promote alumni / customer networking; establish a facebook / Linkedin group, hold alumni networking breakfasts in that overly large broad room the VCs are always teasing you for and do drinks in decent pub twice a year.

There’s probably a similar case to be made for ex-employes, as long as they didn’t go to work for ‘those bastards’. And even if they did; what might they let slip after a few Pimms at the summer party?

Instead of thinking of past customers and employees as ex-spouses to be scorned and ignored, perhaps we should see them more as ex-flatmates; as long as they didn’t run off with the good set of cooking knives we should stay in touch and keep the flame of friendship alive.

Some lessons paraphrased from this delightful short documentary (Italics are my own interpretations)

• Symbiotic multi-faceted creatives (less ‘T’ shaped and more ‘O’ shaped)
• The importance of environment (context is everything)
• They drew on their own life experiences (the best usecase is personal)
• Invented their own processes – (when X doesn’t exist – make X up; which is how they developed the iconic Eames chair)
• Eventually everything connects (there are no ‘disciplines’, just avenues of focus that eventually converge)
• Creative minds fed by the execution of ideas, failure and reiteration (hey! That’s the design sprint right there!)
• They spent each day expanding their minds beyond their physical encounters in order to facility imagination and creation (feed the beast that is your imagination >> read widely and weirdly) 
• Each time they failed they learned and invaluable lesson that would adjust the course fo their design (see above design sprint) The creative process was one of ebb and flow…
• The older they got the more they played (well that just sounds like a sensible idea) and they were damn good at it
• They expressed their brilliance by having unadulterated fun (see above sensible idea)
• The two gods of architecture, design and creativity weren’t even qualified to do any of it themselves (career strategy: once i is possible to do a degree in something – its time to find a new something)

The reasons for this vary by individual and organization. One reason is an ongoing addiction to broadcast media where a content idea is evaluated on its ability to smack the audience over the head and be remembered, euphemistically referred to in the pre-testing process as “recall.” Another is the large volume of nonsense spouted by self-appointed social media gurus and thought leaders that clutters conference floors, pay-to-play media outlets, and coffee shops. One of my happiest moments recently was seeing this great piece of research from CBInsights:

So how can a beleaguered marketing director or social media manager ensure each piece of social media content provides the most bang for its buck? The temptation is to continue with self-serving broadcast habits of old and like a bore at a dinner party, talk only about yourself. I’m looking at you: social media influencer. Possibly worse is the opposite impulse: to rehash every meme and try to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible, thereby being relevant to no one. #AnyBrandLackingADistinctPointOfView

Why You Need the KUDOS Test

To effectively consider both business needs and the need to be externally relevant, a simple, five part rubric is required. For the past ten years, I have worked with a variety of B2B and B2C brands who have all been able to employ it successfully. It’s called KUDOS.

KUDOS is an acronym that embodies the essential attributes of great social media content: Knowledgeable, Useful, Desirable, Open, and Shareable.

While I was working in advertising, I found that brief templates were always based on the premise of audience manipulation. In other words: “What do you want them to think, feel, or do as a result of this communication?” There was no recognition that digital and social marketing are grounded in dialogue.

Social differs from traditional advertising in that it can only work if it achieves outcomes for both the audience and the brand. In the words of the now legendary Cluetrain Manifesto: “Markets are nothing more than conversations.” And as your aunt has no doubt told you: “Conversations are two way; you need to be both interested and interesting.”

The KUDOS test provides a simple checklist to run through to ensure your content is exactly that: interesting to, but also interested in, its audience. By adhering to KUDOS, you’ll be able to evaluate your content ideas and social media activity to ensure they are contributing to your social capital — the wellspring of goodwill that you can build with your online audience — and not making you “that brand.”

The KUDOS test provides a simple checklist to run through to ensure your content is interesting to, but also interested in, its audience.

How to Evaluate Content Ideas Using the KUDOS Test

Knowledgeable:

Your social media content should actively demonstrate knowledge that is unique to your brand, product, or service. It should be knowledge that your audience will be grateful to receive and find relevant to what you stand for. Social listening can help you understand what knowledge your audience wants to receive.

Useful:

Useful begs the question for the audience: Is this knowledge that can be applied and is the usage clear and easy to understand? And for the brand, it helps answer an important business question: Is it assisting with awareness, consideration, or conversion?

Desirable:

Desirable is a step up from useful. Social media activity is desirable when both the brand and the audience actively want it. Think of eating your greens: useful, but not necessarily desirable. If something is desirable to your audience, in a tasty, can’t-get enough-of-it kind of way, you’ll have strong engagement.

Open:

To be open with your brand’s social media activity means to be honest and transparent. Don’t just be open about the parts of the message that are desirable to the brand, but the whole picture, warts and all. An audience will respond very actively and negatively when they believe a brand has been dishonest with them, especially when it’s about a concern or perceived brand failure. Such a negative reaction doesn’t even require active dishonesty, just a lack of being completely open.

Shareable:

Finally, consider if the adherence to all of the above attributes has contributed to creating something that your audience will want to share. Does it help them to demonstrate their own knowledge, to amplify their identity and values, or to assist others? Ensure the content checks off this last requirement so it spreads beyond your account.

The process of running proposed content through the KUDOS test can help brands decide if that content will be effective and revise it or reject it if not. The KUDOS test can check and balance the needs of both brand and audience. It can also help establish how this content should be measured so you can assess its success. So the next time you have an idea for social media content, make sure to use the KUDOS test to ensure it’s worth your valuable time.

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from the Contagious Report: Social Media Metrics, written by Leo Ryan and Iain Macmillan, commissioned by the creative and strategic intelligence service, www.contagious.com.

This version was originally published on the Khoros Blog here

From my point of view of a digital strategist the merger is wonderful news as the box of toys just got a lot bigger. And in some significant ways it takes me back to the roots of digital and why I first got excited by it more than 20 years ago. As social media rapidly consolidates into a paid medium the idea of reengaging with communities and the concepts of the digital commons and social capital comes as an exciting reboot.

These developments in our company gave me the opportunity to think more expansively about what I might welcome our guests with at the rebranded Khoros Engage conference and to go back to fundamental principles. I wanted to go back to the reason that so may of us entered digital marketing; because we saw it as being a revolutionary disruptor and to remind us all of what the fundamentals of what that disruption should be.

I have recently been doing some volunteer work as an advisor to the Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery in Ealing, West London. As a venue its a gorgeous building with a contemporary gallery (the current exhibition is of Anish Kapoor) and a good bistro style restaurant all located in a lovely park; perfect for a day out and you can book ticket here.

Beyond that, the Pitzhanger sits in the sweet spot of my interests; as a gallery and museum I’m able to draw on my time as a non-exec director at the National Gallery Company: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/organisation/national-gallery-company and as the country home of Sir John Soane it’s been an opportunity for me to scratch my itch for design that’s been with me since my architecture degree, but which rarely gets a chance to be activated.

Discussing Soane’s legacy with the team at the gallery I’ve re-looked at Soane as an architect and a creative force. What is fascinating about Soane is that his incredibly innovative architecture was built upon foundation of rigorous knowledge of the fundamentals of his discipline. There’s a wonderful essay here that explores this in more detail; but put simply it was because he was so fluent in the language of classical architecture that he could successfully transmute it, play with it and in the view of some, pervert it.

Soane had been steeped in the rules and traditions of classical architecture, having been apprenticed to the architect George Dance, attended lectures at The Royal Academy and topping it all off with grand tour of the canon of classical architecture of Europe. Yet, rather than being constrained by that classical education, he used it to innovate and develop his own unique architectural language and approach. 

Soane’s innovations were not just aesthetic, he was also technically innovative and in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the world’s first purpose built art gallery, he created what has become a lasting innovation in gallery design; the top lit gallery. By building what is essentially a conservatory along the roof of each of the gallery wings Soane flooded the walls of the gallery spaces with natural light as well as obviating the need for windows and so leaving as much space as possible for hanging. Alexander and Ng in their essay cite the ongoing influence of this innovation on galleries such as the Kimbell Art Museum, Texas and the Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.
The more I looked into this apparent dichotomy; that visionary and revolutionary innovations come from a grounding in the classical fundamentals of a discipline, the more examples I found.

A more contemporary example is Alexander McQueen. McQueen was known for his gravity defying costumes and ground breaking catwalk shows. Frequently the reason given for his ability to design those creations was because he had been classically trained as a tailor during his apprenticeship at Saville Row tailors Anderson and Sheppard. It is said that the understanding of the mechanics, physics and processes behind constructing the classic English gentleman’s suit that he learned at the Savile Row tailors enabled McQueen to be the avant garde designer that he eventually became.

Without laboring the point I’d offer one last example; in preparing for the Q&A with keynote speaker Dr Hannah Fry, I watched her BBC documentary on Ada Lovelace, widely credited with writing the first ever computer algorithm in 1843.

Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, the quintessential bad boy of romantic poetry. Having been abandoned by Byron shortly after the birth of Ada, her mother tried to inoculate her daughter against a similarly disastrous creative, impulsive life by having her tutored from an early age in logic and mathematics. Lovelace proved to be a more than able student and her talents found her working with Charles Babbage, one of the leading mathematicians of the age. Her visionary insight was displayed in the now famous ’Note G’ of the appendices Lovelace wrote for Babbage’s paper describing his Analytical Machine. While Babbage saw the Analytical Machine as an extraordinarily advanced calculator capable of immensely complex calculations, Lovelace took it to a whole new level;
“The engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.[

It was in Lovelace’s own view that she was able to make this leap as a result of the combination of her the creative abilities she inherited from her father and the mathematical abilities and grounding she received from her mother. Having her father’s creative flair wasn’t enough; to be truly visionary she needed both the flair and the grounding in the fundamentals.

Which brings me to the subject at hand; how are we to carve out our place as revolutionary visionaries in the world of customer engagement? What are the fundamentals we need to master and how do we then innovate on top of these to deliver truly visionary outputs in our organsiations?

A helpful handbook is available thanks to the work of Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez. Perez has looked extensively at technological revolutions and understanding the preconditions required for a new technology to move from being novel to being visionary and revolutionary. 
In her 2009 paper “Technological Revolutions and Technological Economic Paradigms” Perez makes this observation “the space of the technologically possible is much greater than that of the economically profitable and socially acceptable.”

Those in the audience responsible for any aspect of on-boarding new technologies at their companies will no-doubt appreciate the fundamental truth of this; just because there’s software that can do it, doesn’t mean its worth doing it or that anyone wants to do it!

While a new technology can be innovative and exciting it will not succeed in creating a visionary and revolutionary change in the business unless it meets this test of being ‘economically profitable and socially acceptable’. In business terms, I believe that ‘economically profitable’ means; does it provide value by driving up revenue or driving down costs and do we have the data to measure and substantiate that value? And to be socially acceptable in a corporate environment means; do we have the people, processes and governance in place for this to permeate the organization and to provide that value sustainably over time?

Considering any kind of technology we’re bringing into a business we need to ask these fundamental questions; Does it provide value; driving up revenue or costs down? Do we have away to measure and substantiate that? Do we have in place the people, processes and governance need for that value to be be sustained?

There is a further test that Perez uses to separate “random collection of technology systems” from a true technological revolution which is; “the strong interconnectedness and interdependence of the participating systems in their technologies and markets”.

We need to ask ‘How is the customer engagement technology being applied inside our business? Does it feed into areas such as customer engagement, CRM, programmatic and content marketing? Is it integrated and interconnected to enable a revolution across the business? Or is it sitting in a silo as a ‘random piece of technology’?’

Perez asserts that if a technology is integrated and interconnected in this way, it has the capacity to transform profoundly the rest of the economy (and eventually society). From a business perspective we should ask if our customer engagement technology is interconnected so that it is transforming profoundly the rest of the business.

This is not as wild a test as might first appear. Surely the point of gathering knowledge and insights from our customers is to do exactly that; transform our business through product range, service design, and the pricing and positioning of our offer.

This is the eventual promise of customer engagement technology; to have an impact so visionary and revolutionary that it creates transformation deep inside the business, not just in the marketing department where it has most likely originated, but across the whole organization. We know what this looks like already; ASOS, Net-a-porter, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and other ‘born digital’ businesses are created and grown this way. The challenge is for legacy businesses to embrace customer engagement technologies in away that enables transformation. And to do it at pace.

In a room filled with some of Germany’s best-known brands the usual teardown took place: how inadequate the mainstream ad agencies are at creating content and advertising for the digital age and how the specialist social shops are not able to deliver big cut through ideas that work across different media. It struck me that in the almost 3 years since I have left the agency world, so very little has changed at agencies, while so much around it has changed radically.

Advertising is arguably one of the most conservative industries in the world. The ways of working, client relationships and remuneration have barely changed in almost a century. Throughout this same century however there has been a significant change in the media used to communicate messages and how these messages are consumed, shared and acted upon by the audience. While there are certainly some creative marketing businesses who have changed their operations and output in response to these changes, from what I have seen they are in the minority.

Since working in the agency world, I have had time to observe from the outside and to reflect on how things might be done differently. While I loved the immediacy, energy and imagination of working in an advertising agency there was also so much that seemed outdated and unsuitable.

Working in a software start-up has exposed me to new ways of working, which combined with some of the ways of working pioneered in digital agencies would seem to be useful adaptations for traditional agencies or in-house creative teams. By pure coincidence they all start with ’T’…

TGI: The most commonly used data sources in the advertising industry are those based on panels and surveys. These are usually an expensive multi-market subscription service based on regular surveys of mind numbed consumers who suffer from more sub-conscious biases than a therapist can identify. The other time-honoured research process is pre-testing with groups. More than enough has been written about the problems of gleaning insights from a group of people who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday night than to sit in an airless room for the promise of an amazon voucher or a stale sandwich and answer questions about soap powder.

TGI was launched in 1968. In the intervening 50 years and especially in the last ten there has been an explosion in data sources. Just for starters; web traffic and on-site search queries will tell us what an already brand aware audience is interested in getting from your brand. Social media can now also provide us with a wealth of real-time first person quant and qual data on a global scale that tells us what consumers think about your brand, product, category and competition.

During her talk Christina gave a great example of how German brand MyTaxi was able to create city specific ad executions based on what people in major German cities talked about when they discussed taxis and what they mean to them. Using Facebook’s targeting capabilities these ads were then exposed to incredibly specific audiences; playing back to them their topics of interest.

Facebook, YouTube and Google have all provided marketers with the opportunity to split test endless varieties of creative with very specific demographics. In another example Christina showed us how StainMaster in the US had trialled 3 different ad executions and by limiting their exposure to specific geographic regions they were able to track purchase uplift. The winning creative was then aired as a TVC having demonstrated its efficacy in the trial.

https://youtu.be/80juKtg1TSk

We are able to use Google search trends and Ad words to understand exactly what it is that specific audiences are interested in what John Battelle called the database of intentions

In 6 years of working in the planning departments of global advertising agencies I never saw insights from these data sources included on a communications brief. Not once.

Teams: The Creative Team is an art director and a copy writer. These hapless souls are typically paired like swans until their dying day. (Did someone say “confirmation bias”?) Invented over half a century by ago by Bill Bernbach, a partner at the venerable advertising agency known today as DDB, the creative team was was designed to produce print adverts featuring imagery as impactful as its copy. While that combination of communications is clearly still in demand, so are a few other skills such as UX, mobile, search, social, events and retail activation. At least. Most agencies now have access to these skillsets, but they are typically only permitted access to the brief once the Creative Team has developed The Big Idea. Specialists then have to reverse engineer their solutions to fit into a typically TV led concept. (My personal view is that in an age of almost frictionless intra and inter customer communications The Big Idea had better be the product, but that’s for a different post).

Until the skillsets of creative teams are widened at an individual level or are broadened by expanding their membership agencies will continue to produce the next problem; Templated Output.

Templated Output: Whilst the output is still an advert, it now sits on completely different platforms. Whereas all video adverts used to be made to sit on something that measured 42 inches diagonally they now also have to accommodate video players on laptops at 15.6 inches and on mobiles 4.7 inches on the latest iPhone X, iPad and Occuluus headset.

Despite this, the majority of digital ads are made like they are going on TV with no account for the change in screen size, or more significantly the change in viewing habits. TV ads used to be ignored by walking away to get a cup of tea, now they can be ignored by simply skipping the pre-roll or thumbing through the social feed. And that’s before we even start questioning the role of generating awareness through adverts in the first place. What about putting that effort into a better product, or service design or customer care…?

Titles: More hierarchical than the military, the roles and responsibilities of the creative team are highly regulated and regimented, as are those of the rest of the agency. Planners, suits, account execs, account directors, junior planners, data analysts and creative technologists all arrayed in their own hierarchies and sitting in their own departments. While these discrete elements on a production line would make Henry Ford proud they prevent the kinds of confluential, cross-pollinating, combinatorial thinking that so many other industries are reorganising to try and achieve. Steve Johnson has lots of interesting things to day about it here >

Timeline / process: Client brief, planning, insights, creative brief, lunch, briefing session, creative ideation time, brand immersion, lunch, creative review, budget negotiation, creative ideation again, beers at the pub, client presentation, client feedback, second round, third round, preview, groups, more beers, research…the equivalent of what Douglas Adams described the Hollywood moviemaking process as; “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.” I have actually seen this process take two years on one large FMCG brand.

An alternative process, that I have used to draw on a range of skills and that can circumvent the unbelievable length of the typical creative process is a workshop. God, how Advertising Creative Directors hate these. Putting a range of skill sets in a room, a bar or on a boat, using a facilitator to ensure all voices are heard and being really tight around timings and output.

Christina made the observation that traditional ad agencies need to follow software development in the move from Waterfall to Agile development. Waterfall looks a lot like the traditional agency process; one part of the process must be completed before the next can be begun. Agile involves a constant iterative process where small parts of the software are designed, build, launched and optimised all at the same time. Which coincidentally is how many social agencies develop their content.

A few years ago I saw a presentation from the director of the emergency housing NGO Architecture Sans Frontiers in which he described their process of 3 : 3 : 3. Within 3 days of a calamity they decide if they are going to go into a disaster area. In 3 weeks they have to be on the ground and working with the local community. They then commit to being present for 3 years. It’s a useful combination of fast decision making with long term commitment; two things notably absent in most marketing campaign design.

Ta da!: The client approval process: The Big Reveal, The Pitch, even The Tissue, are all predicated on the element of surprise and the agency cast in the role of magician or creative genius like an artist or chef. “Just give me paint and canvas and leave me in my garret to produce a masterpiece”…ta da!

One of the most powerful aspects of agile software development is co-location. Either for the duration of a sprint (a time-boxed design and development phase for a specific feature) or for a set number of days per week across the project, the client is required to physically sit along side the development team so that concepts can be tested with them and ideas can be codeveloped without the extraordinary waste of scheduling, travelling, nattering and back and forth-ing.

I once discussed a role at a web development agency to be the Three Month Marriage Counsellor. The directors of the agency knew from experience that on each significant web development project there would be a breakdown in trust, communications or enthusiasm at about the three month mark. So instead of waiting for that to occur and then awkwardly stumbling towards a rapprochement they wanted to have the breakdown marked in the project plan and my role was to be the external marriage guidance counsellor who would come in an bring back marital bliss. I declined, but considering that role is a healthy acknowledgement that the creative process is more tension than ta-da.

The shoot: Agencies still make TVCs, print ads and radio ads in much the same way as they always have; in Soho production studios or on location, ideally on a beach or in a sexy city. If consideration is given to the content required to be distributed through social channels it’s by making a ‘behind the scenes’ video that the digital team is then asked to make ‘go viral’, because the media agency forgot to put any distribution budget into the social element. To expect anyone in the advertising industry to watch a  3 minute ‘how it was made’ video beggars belief, to think that a member of the public might watch it and then share it is just delusional.

The shoot or the process of making creative assets needs to be rethought to acknowledge the variety of assets now needed and their different technical and creative requirements. As an alternative to the reverse engineering that typically happens, the  expensive location, set, talent and crew could be used to create content for a range of channels. I know. It seems so logical, and I’m sure some agencies and brands are doing it, but honestly from my observations and conversations with current clients it’s still a radical thought.

The marketing industry media has forever been obsessed with the next model for advertising agencies. I’m not pretending that what I am proposing is a new model and from what audience consumption data tells us there is still plenty of runway for the creation of traditional assets as per the current model. But it seems unforgivable that agencies (or indeed internal brand’s internal creative departments) don’t consider utilising some of the advances that have been made available with the advent of software development and the practices that have evolved from there.

For the past 20 years digital (and now social) has been a creative output that clients have been willing to pay cash money for and yet it remains, at best, an afterthought for traditional advertising agencies. In order to understand why agencies have resisted the drive to incorporate these changes into their processes for two decades I looked at Clay Christensen’s ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’. Looked at through Christensen’s lens, it’s logical: why would an agency making good money from creating television adverts bother with the complicated small beer of social and digital content? It’s not worth the investment in new skills and has nowhere near the same margin as making TV adverts. Meanwhile smaller more agile creative shops with different processes, people and costs bases have taken this work off the table. The result is that traditional agencies now find themselves unable to compete with the challengers and their relevance is threatened as clients look for different skills and output.

A recent piece in the FT Magazine by Tim Hartford dismissed Christensen’s approach as being too elegant, and instead put forward Rebecca Henderson’s theory on why it is hard to do new things in old organisations. What Hartford refers to as “architectural innovations”.

Hartford spoke to Henderson who explained; “An architectural innovation is an innovation that changes the relationship between the pieces of the problem. It can be hard to perceive, because many of the pieces remain the same. But they fit together differently.” 

In other words;  it’s just too hard.

From my experience and talking to others across the industry the truth seems to lie somewhere between the two; agencies and extremely well rewarded individuals inside those agencies are just making too much money doing what they have always done to worry too much about about doing things differently. And when clients start to demand they behave differently those well rewarded behaviours are just too hard to change or reorganise or reprioritise.

The result is status quo and stasis.

I’ve worked in digital made for over 20 years and in social media for over a decade and notwithstanding two bubbles and subsequent corrections (yes, younger readers look up 2000) this has to be the most interesting time to be in this industry. I am almost tempted to use the word ‘interesting’; in the manner of the proverbial Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times’, because what we’re facing is a crisis of trust and one that is critical at many levels.

At a societal level we’re asking ourselves; is social media even good for us? With fake news, election rigging, reports of increased isolation and narcissism we’re asking ourselves do we even want this as a part of our society?

At a business level, as marketing budgets are restricted and digital advertising faces constant issues of transparency and accountability, social media is also being questioned. The big societal questions aside there are questions around the efficacy and ethics of social as a marketing channel.

And finally, because of these two macro trends I believe there are many in our industry who are asking themselves “Can I actually trust this as discipline or an industry to build my career on?

Looking at the first question of the societal challenges of social it’s worth remembering that social media is relatively young as an industry. Facebook itself is only 14 years old; an adolescent really. If you’re honest with yourself, how many adolescents do you know who have their shit sorted out? Adolescence is typically a period of ones life to work through things like morals, life mission and testing the guard-rails you adopt to achieve that mission. It’s hardly typified by mature thoughtful behaviour. As a society we tend to make allowances for adolescents to work through these central questions, often within safe environments and with guidance to avoid undesirable outcomes.

Unfortunately for this particular adolescent their ‘coming of age’ is being played out on a global stage and is happening very fast. The consequences of their missteps have far reaching implications and the need to grow up is very immediate and real. For any of you who has a teen in their life you’ll know this scenario is anathema; they hate doing anything that’s not on their terms and to their own timeline.

It is however the very public nature of this process that gives me cause for optimism. If you consider the two main protagonists in this debate; the platforms and the regulators, both have our interests as their central concerns and both need to deliver on those interests.

From the point of view of the platforms we are all central to their existence as individual users. How we want to connect and engage with our families, friends, brands and causes is a central focus for them. On top of that those who attended our conference and more than likely the readers of this post are also central to the platforms’ concerns as advertisers. As advertisers, your needs in terms of how trust is maintained and how the effectiveness and accuracy of connections between brands and audiences is ensured is a key concern on which the very life blood of the platforms depends.

All of us are also central to the focus of those on the other side of the conversation; the regulators. As voters in representative democracies the regulators’ foremost concern for us must be to maintain the integrity of our communications and electoral systems. Beyond that, as citizens the regulators must work to ensure our more general demands for privacy and transparency are upheld.

Given the focus of both protagonists and the public nature of the conversations it’s incumbent on all of us to have our views heard, as advertisers, as users and as voters. This is by no means an easy dialogue. Within each of us individually there is the potential for conflict of interests as a user who wants privacy to be upheld to the highest standard and at the same time as marketers requiring as much accurate data as possible to ensure we’re providing the right audiences with then most useful content and offers.

It’s clear that these sorts of conflicts are also top of mind for businesses. Frequently I am challenged with questions like ‘What’s the value of social for my business?’ ‘What kind of ROI can I expect from social?’ My fear is that questions like this completely miss the point of social media. Imagine reframing it by acknowledging that the social platforms are the world’s largest collection of our customers, prospects and employees. We can then rephrase these questions as addressing key business challenges;

• What is the value of my customers to my business: of understanding their needs and views of my products and services?
• What is the return on investing in my prospects; of knowing what they’d potentially buy and how they’d buy it?
• What is the value of harnessing my employee’s advocacy: of having them speak accurately and enthusiastically about our company and its values?

Once you frame the question in these terms the answers become self evident, but we rarely do.

One of the things that has become clear to me in my work with brands both at agencies and at Spredfast is that to lead social within a traditionally structured business frequently means to take on the role of an agent provocateur. You have to adopt the Fabian maxim of ‘educate, agitate and organise’, forming dark alliances with whomever will aide you in your mission in whatever part of the company you can find them. Operate under the cover of dark. Steal your opportunities as fate makes them available. Wear a ski mask.

Consider the way that businesses are typically structured. Operational silos make it difficult to create the real-time seamless internal connections that are required to engage in conversation on social. Corporate comms picks up a message that needs a response from product who need it signed off by legal before it goes to marketing to produce a response that will be distributed by the customer care team. Oh, and in a way that is timely, on brand, appropriate to social and legally compliant…

The same challenges are presented by the traditional business models that pit region against region, wholesale against retail, market against central. The sorts of operational concerns that drive a matrix structured multi-national are the kinds of friction that make social commerce an organisational minefield.

Finally, if we look at the marketing departments that are so frequently tasked with overseeing social media we’re very often looking at a legacy way of thinking that is the antithesis of social. A conversation on social that unfolds exponentially in scale over time stands in stark contrast to the sledgehammer of broadcast media. In many ways I feel that the joining of the words ‘social’ and ‘media’ was the most unhelpful linguistic combination possible. It puts a ‘media’ or ‘messaging’ emphasis on what should be seen as a participatory environment. Of course that participation can happen at scale, but marketers who grew up on broadcast media are hooked on advertising like a junkie on smack. The ‘media’ appellation serves to reinforce the reductive approach to social that it should be for hammering people over the head at scale with the same messages they’re ignoring on TV and in print advertising.

All of this could be seen to call into question the wisdom of our career choices in social media. However, despite the societal and commercial challenges I am still bullish on our chosen career paths. Any group inside an organisation that can answer the key business challenges of what will my customers buy, how will they buy them and how can I answer their complaints when they found fault, is always going to have a seat at the table. A seat that that will increasingly get closer to the top of the organisation.

As social sorts out its growing pains, as we mature as an industry and a discipline we will see it spread across organisations either as a source of data or as a functional role. As trust is reestablished both brands and consumers will put trust in the connections they can make on social platforms. As the value of social data becomes clearer to businesses who are reorganising for the age of digital, those who can both harness that value and make it available to their organisation to solve key business challenges will become central to its success. In the same way that we now see chief digital officers take board level positions we will see those who can harness social elevated to key business roles.

These are clearly non-trivial issues, but they are central to the promise that digital once held of democratising access to information and the promise of social to level the playing field of human connections. Economic reasons aside there is still a great deal of good to be gained if we can grow beyond adolescence to fulfil the promise of the young idealistic visionary adult that many of us imagined in the late 90s.

Three new skills to crack old problems

1. The Role of Networks in Organizational Change (Cross, Parise and Webb, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2006)
2. Making the emotional case for change: An interview with Chip Heath (McKinsey Quarterly 2010)
3. The irrational side of change management (Aiken & Keller, McKinsey Quarterly 2009)
4. Organising for Successful Change Management:  A Global Survey (McKinsey Quarterly June 2006)