The thing about really good advice is that you never really know how good it was until a while after. If you knew it was good advice at the time you probably knew the answer but were fudging the decision. It's when you are in the moment, on a track hurtling in some direction when you just think you need someone to reinforce your position.

My old boss gave me a couple of great ones when I left the comfort of the payroll 6 years ago.

1. To be really great you have to make tough decisions when things are going really well

2. Make sure you pay yourself properly

Both fairly intergalactic in their own right. The first we could talk about for along time and something I really believe in, but its the second that I often come back to. For any new business its key that you get to a position where you start to pay everyone their market value. If you don't its fairly easy to run a business getting a £100k plus people to work for £15k, it just doesn't last very long. I fell into the trap with a business a while back - thinking I was "reinvesting", but the reality was that I was becoming more and more detached from the value of the business and the products we offered. The "reinvestment" plan made it all a little make believe vs feeling every penny you spend which is what a small business should be feeling.

Where I see this happening more and more is not so much in small businesses, but big organisations who are looking to change, or innovate with their products.

The advertising industry historically grew by around 3%. Essentially it didn't. This made most agencies  try and differentiate from the competition - you had to, it was about stealing. Then along came digital. the growth charts were phenomenal, it was the saviour. New products and services were launched things grew like mad, but the independents (media or creative) grew faster and innovated quicker. Why? They paid themselves properly. They charged clients properly, they paid their people properly, they paid their dedicated management properly and they had a crystal cler idea of their product and how to manage it and importantly grow it.

The "traditional" agencies, were trying to protect legacy revenue - TV media or production, the army of planners who sat in mild panic hoping they wouldn't get asked a digital question by the client. Money was taken from digital to invariably prop up the old model. Why? because clients didn't feel they needed to pay for this but agencies felt as though they should - so they took the money, thinking the strategic high ground would be safer than the commoditised trading or production. Clients want the job done, not save money on the money they give you. Its lack of belief in we do that makes it start to be about the money.

It all comes back to being paid properly. Having the tough conversation, being clear on what you are worth which makes you focus where you allocate you resource and why.

Since the web really launched, it has been direct response clients that have really ruled the roost, they made Google famous, responsible for underwriting most of the technology that runs the web and drove the whole ability to pay and transact online. The FMCG market and small ticket retailers have been very much left behind and a little confused. Its tough to sell beer online.

Online DR has been the darling of the web for a long time. It wasn't just a marketing tool for many, it was a full end to end business from initial touch to sale and service at the other end. Many of these businesses chuckled quite happily at retailers with shops, seeing the ball and chain of legacy.

But NFC seems to be the final link in the chain. We have seen the claiming back of technology by the people through the rise of social and now as smart phones continue to blur the edges of small computers and big phones, the good old fashioned outlet seems to be coming back into fashion. Not only location based services like Gowalla or Foursquare, but the ability now to really start to link into purchase and "on the move" behaviour.

For a long time brands haven't really leveraged their non cash assets or realised them as a marketing tool. On pack, instore, at event all suddenly seem very exciting and very relevant, all we needed was to wire them up, which is where NFC will come into its own. Bricks and mortar coming back into fashion and if anything being the competitive edge (perhaps this is why the second word of the moment is the "Pop Up Shop").

I suspect Google will make it work and Apple will inspire us with it. Exciting times ahead.

What are they and what is their value proposition? Super clued up on technology? Spot a trend a mile off? Do the things your current agencies can't do in terms of building and delivering or as Mark Cridge recently wrote in his piece Are digital agencies the new dinosaurs? more open and forward thinking in how technology remains relevant to people.

We forget that they evolved in a world without natural predators, which is why they grew so quickly and so were able to be broad. As the ad, comms, PR, media, CRM, BTL agencies start to really tool up and get what is going on, there isn't just one predator now but many and they know their discipline as well as which platform it sits on.

The final threat to digital agencies is that more and more of them are finding that the continual change in technology means that having specific disciplines on their books isn't commercially viable and so start to out source production and build. Which grows the production market.

So you are now left with the idea and approach. If we had a room of the industry's finest and someone said "probably the most important bit" everyone would nod rather wisely, but ask them who gets paid for their ideas, without any kind of execution underwriting their fees and it would be small.

Unfortunately businesses aren't great for paying for ideas and the getting someone else to execute and as  "non digital agencies" are very good at the idea and able to outsource the execution quite openly, it will continue to squeeze the digital agencies.

I continue to believe "digital" is too broad to be given to one supplier and as such I think many of the digital agencies will disappear. Some will die, some will be picked up and turned into departments, but I'd like think there are some who would drop their digital flags be confident of their skills they have picked up and turn and charge the big guys again.

Looking at how digital technology can truly integrate into an organisation, one model that I came across was the business canvas which has been developed by the guys at Business Model Hub - a community and rattle bag of what appears to be some very smart and open people.

The model maps out key organisational components - value on the right and operational efficiency on the left. Money in vs money out. Value proposition in the middle. Great.

Couple of things came out. Firstly how does or could digital add value or efficiency into each area. Starting on the right.

Customer segments

Who are our current customer segments. Normally we define them by how we reach them. Young men who eat 4 bags of crisps, like to go out with their mates and are thinking about buying a car, are invariably distilled down to 18-24 year old men as that's the only size brush you have to paint with. With digital we can get into community areas, passion groups ... and reach them.As Clay Shirky said

"Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups."

Customer Relationships

What is the nature of your relationship with your customer? Just sell to them? Ask them? Involve them? Meet them afterwards and talk to their friends

Channels

This is really where most head resource gets used and most money spent. Which are the usual channels to reach our usual customers, So fairly easy, how are you using (getting excited about) digital to reach your customers.

I won't go the whole way across the canvas, but you get the idea. How are we engaging our resource? assets? people? Suppliers?

As you go through the exercise you realise that where digital technology really comes into it own is to start to facilitate and link boxes, that don't historically get linked. Using suppliers as a channel? Customers as a resource? New relationships through how we change activities? but some great work comes out when you link them up (I'm a huge fan of arrows and turning them round and thinking - "What would that look like"

Trendwatching.com show this perfectly when they look at how the canvas can describe emerging models.

.. but its the organisational effect that is very exciting. How do you decentralise digital thinking? How do you get your people and customers empowered and involved? That's where the opportunity of mapping out really helps.

The first 10minutes of this great video from Best Buy nails the point of how if done well, technology really starts to break down the inter-departmental boxes.

1. Getting customers to review your advertising

2. Suppliers to act as a route to market

3. Your team to develop your product

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson in conversation with Peter Hirshberg at Google Zeitgeist from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

This isn't new, but what I thought was great was that it gave a framework to engage an organisation and to map out value and actions. Planned brilliance vs an occasional cry of "Ureka" coming from the ghetto.

As always any feedback would be more than welcome.

I found this great presentation on new business models, which makes fantastic reading.

The thing that really hit the button was how Board of Innovation visualised each model.  I am a great fan of this and often refer to it as "wiring up" an idea.

Most organisations have been challenged at some point by the fluidity of digital and how tough it is to keep in one place. For many this is the wonder, for some this becomes the organisational nightmare. Trying to get your head round where it goes, could go and vitally should go is half the battle.

Wiring Diagrams - its not a new concept but it works. (paper, pen and 20 spare minutes required)

1. Put your idea at the centre and give it a name

2. Write in the box a description of the basic idea /content / desired interaction

3. Arrows in where people will come from. Go broad and wild !! Look at existing bought, owned and earned activity. Everything from on pack to in store, at event as well your whole comms plan

4. Arrows out to where people will go to. How can the idea get out of the box and where will it go and spread. See above for going wild...

5. Turn the arrows around to point in different directions and ask the question "How would that work"

6. Put people numbers on your arrows and costs if they apply

You'll probably be somewhere wild and extreme at this point, but with a common sense edit you quickly come up with how your idea lives and breathes and actually something very robust.

More importantly everyone involves gets it very quickly and becomes excited by the movement created by technology vs putting it in the too hard basket.

How many times do businesses think about "is this the best place to start?", vs post rationalising or included something already in place. The common one is driving traffic to a website that no-one can really remember what it was there to do and is so detached from any strategic (or tactical) objevctive that you can just see the marketing pounds flying out the window.

The number of smart people who will still say "We have spent a lot of money on it ...." ... pause ?!. In fact they will even put someone in charge of it who will love and protect it like the doting keeper of Jabba The Hutt's underground monster.

Is this the best place to start? Is including the website or taking people via that route really the best thing to d? Maybe - but maybe not and it shouldn't be assumed.

Chris Anderson's The web is dead. Long live the internet shows how websites are becoming less and less involved and his chart pretty much nails that point.



This is starting to resonate with the product and commercial market but perhaps still needs to be embraced by the marketing & comms teams.