Adventures in digital marketing

A recent Campaign article which asked the question "Should agencies outsource digital?", in which Kate Nettleton discussed the differing points-of-view within the industry regarding the outsourcing of the so called “techy” end of digital creativity, has promoted me to put down a few thoughts of my own on the subject.

I've actually discussed the outsourcing of production with quite a few people over the years and in fact it’s a model I’ve worked with in varying degrees for quite some time now, from right back in the late 90’s at TDPL/Leagas Delaney through to the present day.

We all know that agencies employ freelancers – it’s so common place it’s never questioned as a business practice – but for agencies of a digital slant to completely outsource a whole chunk of what is often perceived as being a key business function is quite a recent phenomenon.  In the past, and particularly in the pure-play world, having a dedicated production (and by that we’re really saying programmers right?) team in-house was taken for granted.  But I don’t think it has to be that way personally, and I can see it becoming less common as we continue to understand how Digital Marketing and Advertising has to function as a business over time.

Kate points out in her article that a “new breed” of agencies are taking a note from the traditional world and outsourcing skills which don’t necessarily fit in with the overall creative business of an agency.  And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense – in fact I completely subscribe to it myself.  I love Martin Brooks’s comment that “digital agencies can’t take the strategic high ground if their business model relies on building banners in-house”.  It’s completely right.  How often do we hear the buzz-phrase of “we sell ideas” and yet never see it delivered because people are tied into a particular back-end system or delivery method?

In an ATL agency for example, where the majority of business may be focused on TV commercials – it’d be extremely unlikely that they’d have a load of directors, editors, sound experts and the like sitting around as permanent members of staff.  Those people, with highly technical and creative skills are brought in on a case-by-case basis as and when required – because it allows everyone else to focus on what they need to do – come up with great creative ideas. 

Why, then, do we (and I include myself in this to some degree) think that to do digital creative work in marketing and advertising we need to have programmers and other technical experts sitting around on the books full time, rather than get them in on a similar case-by-case basis.

The outsourcing of digital production makes perfect sense.

However, what I can’t stress strongly enough is that outsourcing your digital production or development does not, in any way, mean that as an agency you can forget about the technical side of the business, regarding it as “not your job” or unimportant.  When you remove technology from one side of the equation it has to be replaced elsewhere – and invariably what that means is that the people who you do have on a permanent basis in your agency need to pick up some of the knowledge to make your ideas work.  What that means is that it is essential that the creative teams, strategists, planners and account managers are more technically minded than perhaps you would normally have, and are able to understand what is and isn’t possible.  They wouldn't normally be like that in an environment where programmers are sitting next to them. 

Allowing them to believe they don’t need to know that stuff because “they’re not technical” is not an option. Technology doesn’t disappear from your business because you’re outsourcing it – it just moves around a bit – but it is still present and is as important to the overall creative process and end deliverables that you provide as ever.

Bill Brock’s comment that by outsourcing digital you allow the agency to “be free to go for best-of-breed ideas, not end up selling website ideas because we had a website designer(s) free” is completely on the money and if you look at the other founding members you can see that together they can all help to provide that essential in-house technical knowledge that must be present.

Creative ideas should never be shoehorned into the technical solutions that your agency is capable of delivering in-house – they should be free to come from anywhere and delivered in any way you can think of that’s applicable.

Outsourcing production, to different 3rd-party partners who are expert in their specific fields allows agencies to mix-and-match what they need to answer a client’s brief and deliver on their objectives – and at the end of the day that’s what we are all trying to do.

It has made perfect sense in the offline and traditional world for the past few decades – are we not big enough now to admit that it makes perfect sense in our decade as well?

Howard

Earlier this week I attended another of the Chinwag Live events in Soho.  The topic this week was "Tomorrow's Ad Formats" and the panel of guests chosen to kick off the debate and impart their expert opinion was comprised of five people:

Priya Prakash - Creative Director, Hachette Filipacchi
Rhys Williams - Co-founder, agenda21
Steven Hess - Managing Partner, weapon7
David Burrows - Ad Operations Director, Phorm UK
Mat Morrison - Digital Planning Director, Porter Novelli

and the whole event was chaired by Guy Phillipson - CEO, Internet Advertising Bureau.

In this first post I'll try to summarise each of the panel member's introductions and the key points they set out when making their opening statements...

Priya
Priya is a proponent of user centered design and believes that it will play a key role in the future of marketing.  Agencies are limited by their briefs to some degree, in what they receive as instruction from the client, and the client's own vision of what they think the future of marketing is going to be. Agencies need to be able to separate themselves from this to help stretch the true boundaries of future marketing.

Quoting The Cluetrain Manifesto as a key influencer (there's a lot of that in this Chinwag -  maybe everyone rediscovered their copy of it sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere) she stated that in her opinion marketing has to start adding serious value to the customer and their experience in order to be valid, otherwise ads will serve as nothing but an interruption (a Disruption?) to what users are doing and they will ignore it.  In this way she thinks brands themselves are too narcissistic, thinking only of their own needs and ignoring the needs of the customer, and this is what really needs to change in order for them to stop getting in the way and increase relevancy.

Rhys
Rhys sees there being three things in the industry right now which are driving us towards more and more complex media spaces and format choices.

Stating in his first sentence that the problem with digital advertising right now is that everything is driven by jargon, Rhys thinks the media landscape is becoming more and more complicated all the time driven primarily by clients (advertisers), media owners, and lastly by the users themselves.

For a start, some clients, and often some agencies, always want to try and get some advertising Kudos by having a "media first", to appear to be the cutting edge and are always asking during a lot of briefings "what's the next big thing?"  This mentality, of associating new formats with cutting edge creative, is part of the problem with why the media landscape is getting so diverse and complex.  But it shouldn't be. He questioned why new format opportunities are so important to some clients, why do they see everything in that way as a first being so important?

Rhys then gave an example in Facebook at this very moment which goes for a media first but results in a run of the mill campaign - referring to the rash of experian search ads which have started to appear inside everyone's profile pages whenever they log on (yeah! Why are they SO annoying?)  He believes that advertisers who do this are actually being lazy, going for the cheap clicks through a misguided sense that being first will lend their (annoying, interrupting and unimaginative - my words) campaign some extra legs.

Secondly, another problem he sees is that media owners try to push new formats on their space in hope of getting increased CPM, as is the case right now for video formats which can often top £25 CPM as opposed to around £1-ish CPM for a banner placement.  Clients then see these formats as an answer to the problem of getting stand out in a crowded environment (certainly though there is some evidence to suggest this works I guess seeing as the CTR on video formats is way higher than on static formats?)

FInally, Rhys said that he thinks often creative agencies want to push the boundaries themselves in terms of formats available to get a creative edge, often resulting in nothing more than a larger amount of real estate with which to play, and that media planners often get pressured by creatives to create plans full of new, larger, more invasive formats. 

Steven
Steven said he finds new formats very confusing.  He thinks that often lots of things emerge into the spaces available which are simply nothing but technical innovations which are built for no other reason than because they can be - and certainly bear nothing in relation to them being useful for campaigns of customers.  He strongly believes that formats don't fuel the creative brief, and never will.

He raised the question that in this climate, how do we, the people working inside the digital industry right now, express creative ideas for a client that users and customers will be able to understand?

Technology in his opinion should be used as an enabler to meet a client's problems, and not as a stick to beat problems with until they fit into a technical shaped box.  In the past ten years or so, the digital industry has had a sense of entrepreneurism that's helped us all drive towards more innovative and creative solutions with what tools we had available to us at the time.  He fears that this mindset will disappear if we continue down this current path.  We must resist the urge to continually give names to all new shapes, formats, ideas and inventions that we all come up with in an attempt to commoditise them and sell them on to others for more and more profit. 

He thinks we need to demonstrate solid returns for clients for all of the ideas we give to a client, regardless of the format or what it is, rather than continually trying to turn new spaces we discover into extra formats.

David
Dave thinks that customers right now are fed up being bombarded by endless streams of junk and irrelevant advertising, and that the problem with advertising on the internet is that the signal-to-noise ratio is far too high.  For every good ad there are a hundred bad ones for IM smileys or a free iPod. (Oh come on Dave! If it weren't for those ads we would never have been blessed with "Smack The Monkey" banners).

Phorm, for who Dave now works having left Yahoo! for them recently, aim to help users strip down the junk and address the signal-to-noise problem.  Because 50% of ads don't work, but no one right now knows which 50% of the ads it is, phorm think they can start to target in a much more effective way than has been previously achieved.

Dave also believes that in the past there has been "an arms race" in terms of banner real estate sizes, for which he holds his hands up to some degree during his time at Yahoo!, and that all media owners, by behaving in this way, have been causing a lot of the problems.

He thinks that Phorm again have the key to this, and through their OIX targetting platform, they can help customers receive the ads which are most relevant to them, in turn helping the agencies and clients as well. 

All this with a very anonymous system in which privacy is apparently a key issue which Phorm have taken very seriously.

NOTE: At this point Dave was heckled by a member of the audience who shouted out "You're an advert!" (or something similar, it was hard to hear) basically making the point that Dave was here to talk about Tomorrow's Ad Formats and not just plug Phorm as the cure for cancer.

Mat
Mat claims he really doesn't have much to say about Tomorrow's Ad Formats as he has only worked in PR for about 6 months (perhaps he meant in relation to PR?  Because surely if he is ex-AKQA he would have something to say? To be honest I didn't quite understand what he meant here).

What he does think though is that the current climate feels a bit like the late 90's and that worries him.  He went on to quote from a press release circa 1997 from the IAB claiming that the 468x60 banner was the future of advertising and better than TV ads.

He wanted us to consider this ten years down the road and be careful of what claims we all make incase they come back to bite us in another ten years.

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That's it for now.  Tomorrow (well, hopefully but it is a bank holiday!)  I'll post details from the discussion part of the evening where the panel went on to discuss some format specifics in more detail.

Howard
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Grabbing hold of current trends in both music sales/distribution and digital advertising/marketing, Trent Reznor's band the Nine Inch Nails (disclaimer: I am and always have been a very big fan) have launched their new instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV, online in a variety of both digital and physical formats with prices ranging from free for the 9-track DRM-Free sampler album to $300 for the Ultra deluxe package.

With a nod towards Radiohead's recent launch of In Rainbows, which they offered online for the price the user felt they wanted to pay and was covered alongside the future of the music business as a whole in great detail in an article by David Byrne for Wired Magazine, Reznor has changed tack slightly by providing a large range of options to suit all pockets.

Free music being what it is recently, with a lot of artists testing the water one way or another, such as Prince with his Daily Mail (gah! must clean mouth out after saying that paper's name) free CD, there are lots of discussions ongoing as to whether this is a solid new approach or simply something already established artists with a loyal fan base are able to exploit at this time.

What really interests me in this instance is what Reznor has done alongside the variable pricing structure for his latest work - which is providing a whole host of other formats to the usual MP3, as well as material specifically designed to act in a marketing context.

When you download the album (I got the $0 version for now, although I will be getting the full thing on pay day!), you get a couple of folders full of wallpaper, the cover art for the album as a JPG, a PDF document which acts like the insert in a CD (some lovely photography contained within) and, most interesting in some ways for us digital marketing types, a whole host of pre-made banner, button and blog header images.

Reznor is doing something very intelligent and interesting here.  Not only is he experimenting with the free music approach, something which in itself will generate a load of PR one way or the other, but he's giving the music itself away in multi-track formats to encourage people to play with and remix his work (something he did previously on other albums, giving it away in Apple Garage band format at least), and by providing the ready made blog and banner formats, he's giving people a way to show their loyalty to the band, and in turn generate a viral style effect for the album which he couldn't possibly hope to achieve on his own or through an agency with a media plan.

By giving away so much stuff, stuff which fans will firstly think is way cool and want to put all over the internet, Reznor's actually giving the fans control over his marketing campaign, truly putting it right into the hands of the people who know and love the most about the band in the first place.

User generated advertising was a buzz word a short time ago, and perhaps still is in certain bars around Soho on a good night, but handing over the control of the campaign, utilising free media space in highly targetted areas with an applicable audience, is IMHO a master stroke and a perfect example of where marketing is possibly going in terms of control and transparency.

Undoubtedly the freedom NIN and the like are now experiencing in terms of no-label is also extending itself into their thinking for no-agency marketing and no-control PR.

In more ways than just my musical taste alone I have to say right now Trent, I am a big fan.

Howard

Absolut vodka have worked on an arty project called Absolut Machines that tries to explore the boundaries of artificial intelligence, music, technology and creativity. It all seems to be an interesting mix of robots or mechanical machines and computer generated music. The real world locations are in Stockholm and NY and online users can interact with the installation.

There are lots more great pics of the robots being installed on this Flickr set.

Jonathan

Just a quick plug for the new venture of a boss I had once for about four days (ok, a month, but she'll know what I mean by four days!)

Deirdre McGlashan, with whom I worked for a short period at Carat, before it became the Isobar Network, has moved onto pastures new it would seem to become a founding partner in Analogfolk, a new agency based in Clerkenwell, London.

With the interesting strapline running in the titlebar of "We make communications products" the agency's website, which has a very interesting navigation structure I have to say, but not sure how practical it is on a day-to-day basis, explains that they strive to create work which lives in the intersection between digital technology and rich analog experiences.

It's certainly an interesting position for a new agency and it'll be equally interesting to see how it progresses.  Certainly though it's got a great start with the talent involved (one of the other founding partners is Vincent's old boss from Tribal as well!).

Good luck all - we here at adventures will be watching!

Howard
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Thiago de Moraes has started a fantastic illustration blog to capture his oodles of doodles. There are lots of wonderful characters and I look forward to seeing many more.

Keep up the good work!

Jonathan

In this months revolution magazine (which incidentally seems a better read than usual - have you guys changed some stuff around at revolution towers?) john Owen, planning partner at dare, comments that "online marketers have succumbed to an attack of generosity" and that a rash of campaigns involving various product and physical world integrations (ie giving stuff away for free) show that for a modern marketing mix product or sales promotion "ideas like these are now central to the marketing effort".

I couldn't agree with him more on this and it makes me happy to see a comment in an industry print mag along those lines.

I'm working very hard to tie together the seemingly disconnected worlds of product and digital and am, I think, making good steady progress, but don't be fooled - it can and often is a hard slog.

Consumers don't live in bubbles - we all know and respect that. But often the promotional side of things is seen as a poor relation to it's trendy cousin digital - it shouldn't be like that.

What interests me is tying these two together more and more and making them work with and around each other to create fully integrated campaigns.

John adds that perhaps in a past life "this stuff would have been classified as sales promotion or brand activation".

I personally think they still are john and that actually it's being realised more and more in the traditionally offline and plastic "gift with purchase" SP worlds that digital is a key component of those kind of marketing campaigns rather than the other way around.

Howard

Working in a digital role, particularly a senior one, in adland has it's ups and downs.  And in the integrated world, it's can present distinctly different challenges to that of the pure-play shop.

These can, and do, come in all shapes and sizes, with common ones being a lack of faith that digital will make an impact, territory defense from the rampant digital hordes here to steal your land, and plain old "not getting it".

It's this last one which i've been noticing more and more recently, but it's always been around in every agency I've ever worked in.

And it boils down to one key phrase which will never fail to make my blood boil...

"I'm not technical"

three simple words which can be used to such amazing effect as to instantly put a digital person on a defensive back footing in any meeting.

Here's an example.  You're in an integrated campaign kick-off meeting.  All the usual parties are represented - creative, account management, planning and, of course, digital (if i've missed anyone out who thinks they should be here don't get offended :P).  The meeting is going as well as can be expected and you, as the digital type, are chipping in as and when appropriate, when all of a sudden, someone, usually an account manager I have to say, but not always, pipes up with...

"I'm not technical"

this could be in relation to almost anything and often is about the really basic stuff we've all been doing for ten years or more.

"I'm not technical" is used by those who fear the digital environment.  It's employed as the catch all to make them look good in a mixed room.  It's a way for them to instantly let it be known they potentially have no idea about digital marketing, even the easy stuff, but that actually it's not their fault!  they're not out of touch with the modern marketing environment.  no, no, no.  Actually, it's your fault, as digital expert, because quite simply (ready? one, two three..!)

They aren't technical!

See how it works?

This phrase, to the unaware, doesn't make them look non-technical.  It makes you look too technical - simply because you understand what a web browser does or how flash needs a plug-in to play or why YouTube is a great way to get videos out into the world.

"I'm not technical" is the joker card they can play to get them out of an potentially awkward "I really don't get any of this digital stuff" situation - whilst still, however, making them look perfectly capable in terms of marketing and communications - which in this day and age of near ubiquitous digital communications globally, with only more on the horizon - isn't true.

And that's the whole point of the phrase.  it's used to maintain an air of marketing and comms superiority, whilst downgrading the work of the digital specialist to that of a nerdy techy geek.

we need, as digital experts (whether you are pure play or integrated), to help people get rid of this ingrained sense that because something is displayed on a computer, or on a mobile phone, or even in a window via projection, that it's technical in nature.

because - and here's the big surprise for all who have used this phrase - it isn't!

it's all marketing, advertising, communications.

that's all you need to worry about.

don't worry about delivery - which can be technical in the fine details - because we'll cope with that.

don't worry about building or putting something together - we'll do that too.

all you, they, them - the "i'm not technical" bunch - need to remember is that, as marketers, you need to understand how to communicate and talk to people about products and services - and how those facts are changing in the new landscape (dialogue, honesty, transparency).

most people don't know how a television camera, edit suite, or even the broadcast network work from a technical level - but it doesn't stop them from putting together a media plan and storyboarding/producing a TV commercial.

hardly anyone, apart from print traffic experts, understand the intricacies of a four colour spot process (or what ever you print people do all day!) and yet they can put together a paper based DM campaign till the cows come home.

But, for some reason, as soon as you introduce the concept of digital communications, all hell breaks loose and the phrase comes out again and again and again.

it's 2007 people in agency land!  not 1997 (when I could just about forgive this attitude, just) - forget technology (because I guarantee you the consumers have, especially the young ones) - and concentrate on communicating with the audience.

remember your marketing 101 lessons and don't even try to concern yourself with the back-end of things.

i swear, the next person who says to me "I'm not technical" I'll cease to talk to them in anything resembling "translation talk" (i.e. me being the buffer between tech and non-tech developer types) and I'll do nothing but talk in the most technical, geeky, hard-core industry speak I can think of.

then we'll see how "not technical" they really are.

communications! communications! communications! - remember that - it's the very reason why we work in marketing/advertising at the end of the day!

quit playing the joker.

Howard
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In a move that's bound to raise a few eyebrows in many different industries, Sony BMG has granted Gresso, the makers of a "luxury" mobile phone which is made from African Black Hardwood, license to produce and market a "luxury" USB stick, with 1GB memory on it, that will feature the new J-Lo album on it.

Priced at $70 (£35 approx) the stick isn't actually that expensive when you put together the price of a 1gb stick (about £12 average) and a CD from a store on the high street (£16.99 RRP) - adding about £6 or £7 to the total price.  Of course, that's in the USA so things are always cheaper over there.

What's interesting is the merge of physical marketing product with a campaign and a promotion.  This trend keeps moving on, the merging of the real and the digital worlds until they meet together in the form of a new (ok, not so new in this case) product, like Nike+ (it's OK, I just put £1 in the nike+_as_an_example swear box!)

Whether this will sell or not I have to say I am not sure - I imagine fans of J-Lo are fans of bling as well, but would they stretch to a $70 USB key?  Maybe, maybe not.

But undoubtedly it keeps the wheels in motion for more excuses for physical and digital world campaigns working together.

I have doubts whether this kind of thing would be able to stop the move from physical music purchases to downloads only however, which surely is the way it's all going to go.

Howard
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This new Dove ad from Ogilvy Canada is the follow up to the very successful evolution ad - winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes. I think it manages to follow up a very difficult first act by hitting hard. It has lots of shocking plastic surgery images as well as disturbing of binging and purging. The campaign is to support the Dove self-esteem fund. The tag line "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does". is a nice dialogue opener. The casting and execution here are just perfect.

The atmospheric music is by a UK band called Simian, now known as Simian Mobile Disco.

Jon