Quite. Picture courtesy of giveawayboy
2009 was a pretty damn interesting year for mobile phones. Finally. Applications properly came to the mainstream, with Apple predictably blazing trails that left competitors in their wake. Palm and WebOS had some potential but ultimately network exclusivity and the subscriber constrictions that brings with it mean that the gulf now between their platform and the rest of the pack may be insurmountable. Google and Android are perhaps the most intriguing competitor to Apple in the smartphone race, but I haven't yet seen the kind of ruthless focus from Mountain View on a holistic mobile experience that Cupertino is obsessed with.
What will be interesting in all this mess of applications is how, now that it is the flavor du jour to simply 'have' an application for your company/service; differentiation will occur. There's only so much graphical gloss you can deliver on a mobile device if you're simply replicating functionality on a mobile phone.
In the past year we've started getting what we want right now on a mobile device. Sports news? Check, I have Sports Illustrated. News, online and offline is covered by the Guardian's excellent application. And the much lauded Spotify have a nice little app for those shelling out a subscription (p.s.. there is a way to get around this) to cover off music.
Remember the microsite? What a wasteful creation. Well now with applications, you have a place to put all the information you paid a crapload of money to make and then took down post campaign. When I was at GM I remember all the interesting content that would accompany a car launch, only for them to disappear once the launch microsite died a death. Of course the damn car was still being sold, but you couldn't access all that information. Microsites should die a painful and fiery death with the advent of rich mobile applications.
It's not a reach to suggest that the killer app for mobile is location, and pushing contextual data to location. Contextual location information will really bring alive the mobile platforms that networks have shelled out huge license fees for. If I was a network I wouldn't bother with my own application store because it can do more damage than good if not executed well (Hello Nokia - how can you have managed to become so incompetent so quickly?), I'd focus on helping developers make amazing applications for my platforms. I'd chase hotshot developers in the same way that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have tried to lock down amazing studios and create network or platform excessive rich, contextual applications that use location to perfectly tailor an experience.
Imagine if Guy Ritchie had done a Sherlock Holmes app that was available a week before the premiere of the movie in London. You download the app and using clips of Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law you run around the Baker Street area looking for clues and the winners get tickets to the premiere. For people who don't' feel the need to get their ARG's on, you offer one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Books and the prerequisite trailer for the movie, along with the ability to use GPS to book tickets at your nearest cinema wherever you are in the world. That would be pretty damn awesome, generate some nice buzz, earn a chunk of change and give fans of Sherlock some awesome content that mobile makes possible.
Or say you're Wallmart / Tesco / Wholefoods / Wallgreens / Carrefour and you have x amount of a product to get rid of at a firesale price, but only in a certain area of your vast retail network. A quick push update to those who have installed your application and are in the area means you have something real to offer to those who download your app, you reward your customers and move stock. Simples.
Disney has a ton of content and gets thousands of people through the turnstiles every year. How about they offer a mobile application that allows you to get the real deal on your favorite cartoon, with easter egg style offers in certain areas of the park, like money off those ridiculously expensive pictures and souvenirs. Sell the app for 5 bucks a pop and you'll get so many people downloading the damn thing that you'll make a killing and further the Disney experience.
Or Jerry Jones could do an app for MY Dallas Cowboys that pings you the weather report on gameday for ticket holders, tells you what time the car park opens, any offers at the ProStore and so on.
There are tons of ideas and much better ones. My point is simply that we've got the 'now' when it comes to mobile applications, it's time to get the 'here' locked down and watch how the mobile channel really becomes the glue that brings the dreaded marketing mix together. It's a joined up world. So get connecting those damn dots.
(I'm tired and am listening to the Transformers' score, so forgive my Michael Bay-like last paragraph).
That's some swagger. Picture courtesy of Yves
I used to work for Apple but I politely decline to indulge in worshiping at the altar of Steve. Despite my lack of religious fervor when it comes to the guy running the asylum at 1 Infinite Loop, I found the contrast between Steve Jobs raging at Google at a recent Apple townhall and Jon Rubinstein's almost juvenile throwaway admission that he'd never used an iPhone to be telling when it comes to the way that each company operates.
The lesson is more than simply 'know your enemy'. Approach and attitude often set the scene for success or otherwise, and we look to leadership to inform us and others within an organization of that. Your swagger or lack thereof inspires confidence or fills other with dread. So get your swagger on.
Because like Yogi Berra so famously said:
"Half of this game is 90% mental"
Indeed. Picture courtesy of Chris Radley.
One of the few good things about having time off while you wait for people to heal is the opportunity for introspection it provides you with. The rare relief to take a step back and think about what you're adding to what you do.
This time off coupled with PSFK's excellent series: Spur from Redscout (brought to my attention by the super smart Gareth Kay) have meant that yes, I've been thinking about stwategy.
When I first started applying to agencies, it was deemed I was "too unorthodox" and thus wouldn't be a good account exec, and because I didn't go to art school or have a partner, it would be impossible for me to have a creative thought. So almost by default (or maybe by blogging) I was branded (get it?) a planner. I was pretty damn happy because while some of the smartest and most generous people I'd met also happened to be planner/strategy types, the vast majority of them didn't fit the image that was being projected of the account planner. Regardless, I hoped I'd be able to absorb some of that collective and individual awesomeness by osmosis.
Imagine my surprise then, at the identity crisis and the need for validation that permeates through vast chunks of the strategic community with frightening regularity.
Brand, channel, engagement, immersion, emerging media, technology and many more that I can't remember. All these words are prefixes to strategy, to planner. And I believe all are wide of the mark.
Then there are the plannery things that are to be done. Drink tea, wear a cardigan, buy suitably plannery glasses. Call yourself a geek, stare out the window, be disparaging in equal amounts about your useless account management and egotistical and petulant creatives.
Read Stephen King, romanticize about how you would run the agency, obsess over the perfect proposition, make sure you remain 'strategically aloof' in meetings so your impeccable strategic nous cannot be questioned. Sit in your ivory tower with other planners and propagate rampant intellectualism.
Use big words when smaller ones will do. Talk about doing powerpoint a hell of a lot.
Stop. being. a. douchebag.
We bemoan the fact that our clients are trapped in antiquated models of media and thinking, yet we restrict our own job descriptions with the same philosophy.
The suits 'do', the planners 'think' and the creatives 'draw/write'.
What if I want to think about something, sketch a crude solution, talk to the creatives and muck up a concept and present it to a client at the end of a weekly status? Is that cool? Will we, as individuals and a collective industry survive? WILL THE CLIENT BE OK WITH IT?!?
I had the pleasure of lunch with Paul Isakson just before Christmas last year and he said a ton of smart things, one of which I remember being:
"I stopped caring about being a planner a long time ago".
And then it struck me. The people who are the best at marketing strategy are the ones who really don't care about planning. They just solve problems.
It's something Eaon and I wrestled with at Geronimo while coming up with what we called an innovation brief. There's a real need to break out of this "Client must brief us before we can think about something" mentality that plagues the industry. If I was a client I'd be disgusted if the company I hired to solve my communication problems only thought about something when I told them to. In fact, if I didn't get proactive solutions from my agency, I'd fire them and hire somebody who would.
We figured out that essentially, our job was to identify business problems and then create solutions for said problems that were contextual, culturally relevant, rewarding and engaging for people. And then impress upon our clients the need for that solution. So that's how I define what I do. Job titles be damned.
The masses of poor quality work we see and the repeated marketing-related disasters that crop up in the trade rags weekly are in my opinion, more of an indictment of the strategic community than any other. Aren't we supposed to be the ones hired for our saber-sharp intellect? Because let's be honest, we're not here because we look good!
I think there are some broad areas that we can improve to be better (insert your choice of flavor here) strategists.
1. Understand the individual pressures of your colleagues' and clients' jobs and then impress upon them that you're not there to show them up intellectually, but to make them better at their jobs. You should want them to be valued, get promoted and to get recognized for their achievements just as much as you want those things for yourself. Measure what you do by what they are held accountable for. You'll never have an 'irrelevant' idea again.
2. Immerse yourself in humanity (it's the best phrase I could come up with). We aren't burdened by budgets or studio deadlines, so we should (as I believe was the point of planning in the first place) take time to read, watch, listen and understand everything about the world in which we live in. Not the office, not the post/zip code, not the city. But the world. What are people's cultural references? Why?
The world has never really seen the mass migration that the past 2-3 generations experienced and there is no such thing as a homogenous culture (apart form perhaps some advertising agencies staff). Whether we like it or not, it's our job to know about Lost, Twilight, Microsoft's next operating system, Mass Effect 2, Avatar and High School Musical 3, American/Pop Idol, Big Brother, what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela, Dan Brown, the resurgence of the fixie scene, the situation in Palestine, what our budget deficit is, house prices, what's on the front page of the Enquirer / Daily Mail, how factory strikes in China may constrain laptop production this year and so on and so on.
Being a sponge means when it's time to distill our thinking down to that one perfect point, we have all the raw materials we need to make that point an absolutely bone-crunchingly "Boom" point.
3. Quickly move to a place where we begin to get uncomfortable again. Shake it up. Do what you haven't done. Defy convention. Break some rules. Ask for criticism. Ask to work on the most difficult piece of business in your company. Ask for forgiveness and not for permission. Inject some passion and lava back into our workplaces. Don't let the accountants win. Everyone knows a child who always asks "Why?" until you get to a point where you just say "That's how it is!!" and the kid shoots you a look where he knows you're trying to stop the conversation. Be that kid and never stop asking why.
4. Take interest in seeing things through to the end. And figure out how you can help. It's completely alien to me how someone could 'hand off' a brief and then see it next when something is presented to a client. Being well versed in all things tech is pretty damn crucial here, to help you stay ahead of the curve as well as help you get ideas to clients quicker, get approval quicker and get to market quicker. "But you'll step on creatives' toes!!" I hear some people saying. I'm not saying do their job, I'm saying help them do it better.
5. Don't constrain your and your company's ambitions by thinking only about client communications. Please, it's only been said a gajillion times. Make things and make things happen. And make it amazing.
There are more of course, and I'm probably off-target with a lot of what I've written, but that's the comments section and y'all are for :)
Let's make strategy awesome again.
Image courtesy of bthomso
Regular (and irregular for that matter) readers will know the disdain I reserve for certain media agencies because of their insistance on choosing commission over effectiveness, of routine over insight and efficiency over engagement.
Well I think we should all take a step back and appreciate the unbridled douchebaggery that Carat Boston and Facebook have been involved in recently with the case of one Harman Bajwa. Harman, like many of us, has a Facebook vanity URL, his being http://www.facebook.com/harman.
At some point this week Harman got a friend request from a guy called Tyler Bahl on Facebook. He added him and on Friday (22nd January) he received this message from him:
Harman decided that despite the fact that it's the "GRAMMYS" on Monday, he preferred to keep his vanity URL. He did, after all get it first.
What happened next is a little sinister and if the picture is as the evidence suggests, pretty despicable. Soon after he responded to Tyler and Carat, Harman got a message on Facebook from the mothership:
Facebook told him that they were taking away his vanity URL for violating their policies because "A Facebook username should have a clear connection to one's identity". Of course his name is Harman, I mean this isn't Chris Martin trying to steal Steve Jobs' apple.
If timing is everything, then everything about this seems a little suspect ne c'est pas? It would seem that Carat tried to bribe Harman out of his vanity URL and having failed called in the heavies at Facebook to get the job done. They got what they wanted so case closed right? Not quite.
See Techcrunch got hold of the story and people commented, tweeted and shared it all over the place. Harman also set up a Facebook group to tell people about the brazen stupidity that Carat and Facebook were showing. Mark Zuckenburg, stealer..ahem..I mean founder of Facebook then joined said group (WTF?!? Is he really that stupid?!?)
Inevitably, the morons at Facebook HQ realized that Techcrunch and the Washington Post (only the 368th most visited website on Earth) were going to give this little item of soiled clothing a little more airing than they felt comfortable with (also known as "Hey!! We can't crap on everyone all the time, because sometimes people talk to each other!!"). They then flipped the switch on their damage limitation apparatus and sent this message to Techcrunch:
So all was resolved in the Kingdom of Facebook.
Apart from the fact that Harman's name is Harman, and (an Oxford comma experiment in honor of Mr. Oke and William Tweed Humphrey) apart from the fact that had Techcrunch not made such a big deal out of it, it's likely that Facebook wouldn't have moved an inch.
Facebook's dossier of dalliances in douchebaggery is ever expanding, but what of Carat Boston? Surely Tyler Bahl, a self-proclaimed emerging media strategist should have thought more about his strategy (he basically said "Give it to us or we'll get it given to us") in the emerging medium that is Facebook? In addition what does it say about Carat Boston's proficiency within social media (aside from this shining example of their excellence) that the example that Tyler quoted to Harman (twitter.com/AVTR) is an account that has tweeted a grand total of 6 times since September and follows a grand total of 0 twitter users? Some engagement. What do his colleagues say now to their counterparts at Harman International? How do they explain that as of Saturday 24 January, on the first page of a Google search for Harman International is the headline "Facebook Snatches User's Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman"? And of all the weeks to pull a stunt like this, it's days away from the GRAMMYS!
This is a classical case of a lack of awareness of the ecosystems that exist online. There are some lessons for all of us to learn from this:
It's a new world for everyone. Mistakes are magnified, autopsied and put back together again in front of more people than ever before. It's not easy or cheap to make every interaction worthwhile, or to own up to our mistakes. But it is more important than ever before.
(Props to Techcrunch and Tribble for their coverage of the story)
Image courtesy of geoconklin2001 via Flickr
Today's Martin Luther King Jr. day. There's not a lot that needs to be said about the man, but if you want to read more, his Wikipedia page is a good place to start.
My absolute favorite quotes from the man are these two:
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"
and
"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."
The power of what we do. Image courtesy of emmapebble
I've had a lot of time recently to think about family. And given the particular hand that fate has dealt my family, who apart from myself are all doctors, my thoughts have turned to medicine. Medicine is one of those professions where those on the outside wax lyrical about the nobility that accompanies the pursuit of one's income, but those within the profession often become jaded and the pursuit of saving lives often takes a back seat to administration, KPIs and trying to get out the door at exactly 1700 when a patient walks into the clinic at 1655.
I was discussing this with my brother (who's just about to finish med school) when he made a couple of points that have in the last couple of days really started to resonate with me, given where I think we should be headed as an industry and what I want to do with my career. He told me about this 'Careers in International Medicine' workshop that he went too (you could say the international smoothieness runs through all the Ismail veins) and how he was told by a bunch of people that when you finish med school, you think you can save the world one patient at a time. After a few years you think it's field work in nations with less developed healthcare that will save the world, you soon realize that aid is all about money, and therefore all about governments giving money. But politics is a dirty game, and he was told politicians really only answer to one thing, and that's mass communication. Or more accurately, the pressure that mass communication can put on them by giving the masses information that the politicians may not necessarily want in the public realm. Readers from the UK will know that the MP expenses scandal is a perfect example of this. All this has got me ruminating on communications and the role our industry can play in doing amazing stuff.
It's easy to lose focus when we're being pulled to two extremes, the pressure of having to produce creative that will eventually entered into award shows that never matter and are presided over by failed directors, artists et al; and the pressure we face when forced to increase sales year-on-year that sucks any kind of innovation or intellectual enthusiasm out of our work.
Having a job where we have input into how businesses behave and communicate in in the 21st century is an immense responsibility given the challenges we face as economies and as a collective humanity. To waste that opportunity by chasing frivolity or mechanical efficiency would be a massive shame.
The future of communications isn't Twitter, or the internet or whatever else banal trend watchers would have you believe. It's doing something worthwhile for a person or people, be it education, providing a service or removing a barrier that stops them doing what they want to do in their day to day existence.
It's that simple.
Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of that, the vast potential we ignore on a day to day basis, so props to my little bro for reminding me how fortunate we are, and why this really matters.
Cheeseburgers are pretty damn awesome. Picture courtesy of roboppy via Flickr.
I started writing this post 6 weeks or so ago when the IAB joyfully announced than internet adspend had overtaken TV adspend for the first time in history, and am only happy with it now. So much for the immediacy of the interwebs.
Anyway, now that the self-appointed and anointed digerati have had their parties and patted themselves on the back, maybe we can come crashing back down to reality.
And the reality is the majority of this adspend online is on search, which leads to another interesting point - people who work in the digital space have been crowing for some time how online isn't just 1 channel (it's a brazillion), yet when it suits them in the epic battle against the evil forces of above-the-line they fly the 1 channel banner while sticking their tongues out with all the grace of the 4 year old version of the guy typing these words throwing a tantrum in aisle 7 of a Toys-R-Us when he didn't get a He-Man sword.
This announcement, and the subsequent fanfare from parts of the advertising fraternity, seemed to be completely missing the point: The way we look at media and channels is totally broke.
If I went solely by my experiences with media agencies (particularly those who talk about people first and better results ), I'd be able to confidently say that they're primarily staffed by robots for whom analytical thought is impossible.
I don't say that lightly. I'm sure you'll all agree that seeing media 'plan' (in the loosest sense of the word) after media plan wheeled out with the same channels, the same 'strategy' and the same sense of enthusiasm gradually wears any benefit of the doubt down to finely ground dust. As an example, the aforementioned media agency this year has, for 5 different clients shown me the exact same media plan. For toothpaste, car insurance, shower gel, the same. Great planning.
Of course, I know that not all media agencies are the same. But I think the way we look at media doesn't reflect the way the people we try to connect with do. And that's the biggest indictment of the model that I can think of. I could add how every media plan I've seen basically is about buying the lowest cost media with the highest margin for the purchasing company, but I won't.
How do regular people divvy up media? Does the man on the street think "I need to check the Premier League scores, let me interact with the mobile channel" as he walks down the street? Does he find himself in front of a store window with the TVs showing Sky Sports and think "Oh, let me now direct my attention to the television medium"? Of course not. He, like pretty much every other person just wants to be able to get to whatever content he wants quickly, and preferably without being interrupted by banal mutterings about products he may or may not need.
Which leads to what I call my Cheeseburger theory of media (patent pending of course). When you sit down to eat a cheeseburger, everything that makes that burger (the bread, the cheese, the lettuce, the condiments, the meat and so on) is crucial in making the experience of eating that cheeseburger awesome. If the cheese is off, you could peel it off and throw it out, but then it's not a cheeseburger. If the condiments aren't to your taste, then you lose flava. And so on...
Rather than looking at media channels in isolation, we should consider what the cheeseburger for each brand should 'taste' like. And I believe that means ditching the way we consider channels and media for something that fits better.
For example, I might watch Heroes on TV, on NBC.com, on my iPhone or on another streaming service like Hulu. It's still Heroes for me and it's in video. No matter where or when I watch it, it's video. I might listen to Radio 4 in the car, on an iPod Nano (or similar portable player) or as a podcast on my laptop, or on my phone. It's still whatever program I was listening to (let's call it File on 4, cause that's awesome). It's audio, whichever way you slice it. See where I'm going with this?
I think it's time we slice our channels the way we take them in, it makes life a LOT easier.
So we have:
Simples right? I thought so too initially but then Eaon raised a valuable point about where we digest media - that and Charlie's "Context is King" thinking got me thinking again. We've got the what we process, but what about where?
When it comes to where content/media is digested (I refuse to use the word consumed in this post) there is a company's website, perhaps they have in-house media like a magazine, their social media presences and other media they own. So that's owned media.
Then there's the media that's purchased, be it time on TV, the radio, or real estate online and so on. Paid media then.
Finally, there's the form of media that makes marketing managers and communication folk the most nervous, but the type that people trust the most, other people. What people are saying about your product in reviews, on their own blogs, on YouTube, in forums and the litany of other personal places where people can express their feelings about a product, company or service. This is earned media.
When I think of media, those 3 slices are the way I cut the pie up:
So to make that a little bit easier for me to understand, I've very quickly mucked around and put all that into a picture
(At this point, I totally realize I've talked about Cheeseburgers and then come up with a weird picture that's definitely NOT a cheeseburger. I'm going to say that I'm under duress and leave it at that)
People who work in communications love to play lip service to 'integration' and the like, but in reality they're too busy trying to hoard their slice of the 'channel pie' to give a damn about how their idea fits with anyone else's.
I can name employees of 5 so called creative agencies in London who in the past 12 months have looked at an idea from another agency (be it a PR, ambient, interactive or in-store concept) and said something like "That won't work with the TV". I'm considering naming and shaming, but hope that at some point, these organizations and employees cotton on that if they truly give a damn about their clients' businesses (rather than giving a damn about the fact that their invoices are paid up), they'll change the way they approach 'integration'. And maybe, they'll start taking the cheeseburger approach. Stranger things have happened, barely.
Digital advertising is dead. And agencies that tout their 'digital' credentials are deluded. I really hate the term digital. I actually think I detest it with the same passion that Nick Griffin hates people whose DNA unzipping didn't result in them looking 100% Caucasian. I hate it because it undervalues and plays down and puts into a box something that is unboxable. And I hate it because it has been taken for a ride by wanky ad agencies that have no clue what it means.
So digital as a silo like TV, like print, like direct mail, sucks. Digital as a silo is dead. It probably has been for a while. I mean think about it, really think about it - what does digital really mean? The wise folk of the world over at Wikipedia define digital (amongst other things) as the 1s and 0s that are everywhere, but never seen.
If we take that and run with it, is this digital?
Image courtesy of planetgordon.com via Flickr
How about this?
Picture courtesy of carla777
See where I'm going? Digital stuff is everywhere. It is, after all 2000 and frickin' 9. So this notion that you can put 'digital' into a department is nonsense. Agencies that have a discrete digital department need to wake up and smell the narcotics, because they are restricting themselves before getting to the starting line.
It's this fundamental lack of understanding of how technology has changed the behavior of customers everywhere that trips up a large chunk of companies when they try to convert their siloed (can I say jurassic) creative processes into a seamless world.
So for this reason along with others (the arrogance of the so-called brand guardians, the staggering sense of conformity that is nurtured in so many client-agency relationships and more...) I would take exception to Richard Huntington's claim that orthodox agencies have "got with the program when it comes to "digital". In many cases, self-proclaimed digital agencies haven't, with traditional agencies even further behind.
How can I be so sure?
Because at their core, underneath all the extravagant and tantalizing models for integration that so many in the advertising business wax lyrical about, there remains the truth that the model we base the creative process on is archaic, flawed and in dire need of re-appraisal.
I'm talking about the legendary communications funnel, that mysterious structure that no doubt sits in a locked vault in a secure room somewhere on Madison Avenue. It's wrong. And it's probably been out of date for a while, but I think in the last decade the disparity between how people behave and how the revered funnel states they behave has grown exponentially. So really it's up to us to try and evaluate where it's falling down, because you can bolt on whatever you like on a rotting foundation, eventually the whole damn thing will collapse.
So let's begin.
Marketing 101 tells us that this is how communications works:
You could argue that even when this model was proposed (sometime when Cyrus commanded the Persian empire), it didn't fully acknowledge the roles of what other people say and do play in an individual's decision-making process (something that we all would be wise to explore further by picking up my homeboy Mark Earls' book Herd and reading it multiple times).
If the assumption that this decision making process is hermetically sealed from other potential sources of input (friends, family, reading a review in the newspaper, seeing someone with it on the street.. etc) was contested before the advent of mass internet use, surely it is now safe to say that the model for making purchase decisions needs a total overhaul. And by extension the way in which we plan and organise communications needs to reflect the way in which a potential purchase decision is made.
The advent of the information age has, as well know brought an end to the corporate gravy train in many ways because as has been said many times before, it is now more important than ever that what you say in your communication equates to what you do. There are plenty of high-profile examples of what happens when this is not the case from United Airlines' painfully witless response to their breaking of Dave Carroll's guitar (which now ranks in the top 10 search results for a "United Airlines" Google search) to the whole Dominos pizza fiasco. And I think it's pretty safe to say that with the internet being increasingly in the palm of your hand (AdMob do an excellent monthly mobile internet metrics report which you should all check out if you don't already) and with everything from mobile phones to mp3 players being able to capture sound, photos and video; the amount of information that people can contribute and digest with regards to our clients' brands and products will only increase.
So what's my point? My point is that now, from the point of initial exposure to a piece of communication or the point of identifying a need/desire to purchase (i.e. the point where you flip the 'awareness switch' about a particular category/product/brand), a person's exposure to information has the potential to greatly increase with regards to whatever product he or she is now more acutely aware of.
So if we were to talk about the stages of awareness, interest, evaluation and purchase in the context of how much information is sought to enable the decision making, perhaps the picture should be more like this:
So, I'm saying that because of the vast amount of information we have at our disposal, and the ability for anyone to comment on their experiences with a brand/product/company, the inverted pyramid of the marketing funnel has to take into account the potential for a new injection of communication activity.
Eaon talks about McKinsey and co labeling this stage as 'active evaluation'. The name is not really important, but the realization that this is occurring is crucial.
So to wind it back to the beginning of this ever-increasing ramble, I said that the majority of ad agencies and clients don't fully understand the power the information age has given us as practitioners and people as customers; instead having 'digital' penned in as a website, display advertising (which AdAge reminded us last week is a hugely flawed channel) and spunking a ton of cash on paid search.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't build a website, shouldn't spend some money on SEM and so on, I'm saying that there needs to be an increase in creating content for people who are already coming into contact with your brand in a space where you're not saying anything. Review sites, Amazon, YouTube (now the 2nd largest search engine in the world, after it's daddy), app stores (from iTunes to Android to Ovi), the dreaded and loved at the same time social networks and so on are all places where whether you like it or not people are looking for what other people are saying about your company.
But it should never stop there. There's a concept in almost every sport that the effectiveness of say a tennis shot, a quarterback's throw, a square cut and a litany of other moves depends on the the wind-up and the follow through. Without both the actual shot/throw/stroke are greatly diminished. The same can be said for effective communication.
If you can't get on the shopping list, your work in creating ads is essentially useless. If you provide a less than memorable in-store/purchase/aftersales experience, you might get one sale, but you won't get another. And you definitely won't get recommended. Do that to enough people and someone will hammer you somewhere on the web. And if you're not creating content that is entertaining/useful/genuinely engaging then people who search for you will find that someone hammering you and the Google monster will start to pull that further up the rankings, to a place where even Mediacom won't be able to buy space.
So what do we do? I haven't done a list in a while, so now's as good a time as any:
1. Know your product, know your category intimately. What matters in that category, what features do people base their decisions on (note this is likely to be diametrically opposite to what you want them to base decisions on), what stops people from considering your product? Ask these questions.
2. Understand that people don't think or act in a linear fashion when it comes to making a purchase decision, they're constantly shopping around, looking for reviews, talking to store staff/friends/co-workers about their dilemma (I remember when I was working at Apple we found that on average, people would buy a mac after visiting the store 6 times!).
3. Find where people are asking questions about your category, find the communities that already exist devoted to informing people about TVs, locking wheel nuts, Morris dancing shoes or the markings on Master Chief's helmet in Halo 3. They could be on a forum, on ICQ or at a periodic meetup in a dark alley somewhere. Wherever they are, become a valuable part of that community by offering advice, answering questions or addressing complaints. And please take the time to discover people who are already talking good about you and make them the heroes of your story, facilitate fandom and your fans will be your most effective marketing ever.
4. Lock down both point of sale and after-sales. Make sure your staff/retail partners are who you want them to be (it's tough but then no-one said this was easy), provide as many points as possible for people to complain about you and then respond to each and every one. I promise you, from personal experience, that when you're pissed off at a company and vent and then that company replies in a polite and timely manner, it is a million times harder to remain that angry at them.
5. Make it your business, and the business of your ad agency/ideas factory/whatever to intimately focus on the technology of tomorrow and today, how people use it, how their use changes and how their interactions with it provide you with opportunities to facilitate activity related to your clients' company (there's a great post about how agencies need to think like software companies that you should all read as well).
Until we do that, we won't get the age of interaction. No matter what type of agency we work at, no matter what we say on our agency websites, in our client meetings, or on our blogs. It's simple.
So really digital is dead, the funnel is actually an hourglass and it's time to get our interactive on. Boom.
As a sort of postscript, I found this cartoon over on Le'Nise's blog (via Something Changed), about converting awareness into a sale, it kind of illustrates my point - I think...
It's not what you say that matters, it's what you do.
Credit to the ever-wise Paul Isakson.
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