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Why Foursquare Ruled #SXSW

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

foursquare sxsw

Late Sunday night I got back from my first-ever trip to the much-discussed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference for Film, Music, and Interactive in Austin, Texas. After seeing many friends and other folks in the business rave and tweet about this event for a few years, I felt compelled to add yet another conference badge to my collection. Overall I found it to be one of the best conferences for digital marketing that I have attended in some time. That means something, because I think I’ve been to more than a dozen different digital shows in the past 24 months alone. Over the course of the next few blog posts I plan to share some of my biggest takeaways and examples of Marketing with Meaning.

First up is an example of a start-up digital service that used meaningful marketing to make the conference better for nearly everyone involved: Foursquare. For those who haven’t heard, Foursquare is a mobile tool that allows you to “check in” at locations where you physically appear—essentially a way of broadcasting to friends that you are, say, having a coffee at Starbucks, or waiting in line at the DMV. This is the leading brand in a new category of “geo-location” services. You might call it “Geo-Twitter”—in fact, you can update your Twitter and Facebook accounts with Foursquare when you check in around town.

SXSW is a very big event for the folks at Foursquare for many reasons. It is the place where partners and customers gather to see what’s new. Investors are lurking everywhere to spy the next hot winner. And some of the earliest early adopters and trendsetters (including a few celebrities) share their latest findings with their friends at SXSW.

So it is a clear business objective to own this event in every way possible. For most companies, this means paying sponsorship dollars to put your name everywhere, employing booth babes to walk around with branded snacks, and maybe hosting a giant beer-for-all for everyone at the event. But not Foursquare. Instead, Foursquare stuck with what makes its service special, and spent most of its time and money making it more so.

Foursquare is already a killer app for conferences. It is most effective when a large group of people who know each other and want to get together are located in a pretty close environment. This is exactly what conferences are all about. So instead of calling or texting to find out where your friends and contacts are, you simply see where they have recently checked in and walk over to the conference room, bar, or restaurant where they happen to be. This even makes it easy to “run into” people who you might unable to reach via email or telephone.

This is why Foursquare became so popular at SXSW in 2009. So the business decided to do more with this hyper-engaged, ultra-important audience in 2010. When we got off the plane in Austin and checked into the airport, we noticed that Foursquare had created special new features for SXSW participants. The main add was a set of special “badges” that you could unlock by performing various check-ins during the six-day event. Badges are a key element of the basic Foursquare service—providing you a fun way to show that you have, say, checked in at 50 different total places or from five airports or from a boat. They are fun for the user, and cleverly (and cheaply) train people to make Foursquare check-ins a habit. Some of the special SXSW badges include the “Austin Explorer” for hitting five locations in the city, and the “Hookup” for checking in at two different hotels. For me and our team, we found that these badges turned Foursquare into a living game that made some of the boring moments between sessions and meetings much more tolerable.

Foursquare did more than virtual badges, though. The firm partnered with specific locations such as the Pepsi Refresh Cafe and SXSW Web Awards to give people temporary tattoos to match their unlocked badges. And it partnered with PayPal to donate $.25 for every check-in to Haitian relief efforts. Foursquare even reported a running total of how much you had earned for Haiti. (I believe I hit more than $8.)

Only the folks at Foursquare know how much this modest expense in programming time delivered for its business at this big event. One key data point reported on its site shows that there were more than 15,000 badges awarded, including 6,025 versions of the Austin Explorer. That is a pretty significant percentage of the total number of people at the Interactive conference, and a huge sign of successful engagement. This might have even helped the nascent company establish a business model; TechCrunch made the case that Foursquare could create a business around building similar special apps for other conferences.

So many thanks to Foursquare for helping me get a more out of my company’s significant time and money investment in sending me to SXSW. I will certainly repay the favor by giving this new service major attention in the months ahead.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Applications, Conferences, mobile | 1 Comment »

Must We GRP-ize the Tweet?

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

05_Flatbed_2 - MAY

This week our strategy team got up in arms around a question from a partner agency that focuses on traditional (i.e., non-digital) marketing, and I felt it was worth sharing and discussing here. The agency was working on a project for one of their clients and asked the question: “What percentage of tweets are seen?” The data team at this agency was sitting down to build an algorithm to model tweet impressions and was looking for our digital/social expert opinion. An interesting question, indeed, and an example of how much baggage we need to overcome to move to the next evolution of marketing.

First, to address the question directly, our own Jonathan Richman provided some insights on the challenges of measuring how many people see a given Twitter message. He brought up the points that tweet readership varies by the time of day, how many people retweet a message, how many followers they have, the number of lists people might be on, the use of hashtags (#), and the types of Twitter API readers that people are using. There are challenges such as the fact that the more people you follow and more people who follow you, there are more “impression opportunities” but the ability to pay attention to any one of the individual tweets goes down. Richman’s answer as to how you can calculate all of these impacts: You can’t.

I added my own two cents to his response: You shouldn’t.

I didn’t have to ask my partner agency for an explanation to see what they were trying to do for their client. In the traditional marketing world that still dominates, clients want to measure marketing in common terms. For years this least common denominator has been the “impression”; brands have bought TV, print, and radio ads in the cost-per-thousand-impressions format, which allows them to compare spending across any form of interruptive media. In theory, this also helps marketers decide where to focus their budgets and time. Our industry’s most-frequent response to new media is to try and stuff it into the box of old media, so that dollars can flow from one to the other with confidence. So the question: How many impressions does each tweet receive?

So lots of very smart people are now spending their time modeling impressions per tweet, just because it’s the model we’re used to. The very obvious problem is that this is the wrong way to measure new media and new marketing that tools such as Twitter are bringing to brands. If we want to win in a world of exploding social change and killer competition, we must invent new measurement models rather than forcing ourselves through something that means less and less.

Last fall I wrote about how we marketers must abandon the common yet meaningless measure of impressions and instead begin to measure engagement—a key step on the path to Marketing with Meaning. Engagement to most of us in the industry occurs when a customer chooses to spend time interacting with marketing. It’s actually something that can be measured across all media as well. You can count the number of people who, say, choose to watch your YouTube video, subscribe to your email list, or become a fan of your brand on Facebook. Sorry, you do have to do a little more modeling to gauge the value of these different types of engagement—but this is how we marketers must earn our salaries, rather than just turning our jobs over to algorithms and up-fronts.

So instead of trying to count how many people view a branded tweet so that we can compare impressions to TV and print, how about we count something related to engagement? On Twitter, this would be the number of people who sign up for a brand’s Twitter feed, click on a brand-related URL through Twitter, mention the brand in Twitter posts, or retweet something about a brand. These are all examples of customers choosing to engage with a brand and share it with their friends. These activities (note the root “active” versus “impression”) show times when someone is consciously, choicefully dialed into your brand.

And, of course, we could develop similar metrics for traditional advertising. We could count the number of times people subscribe to your commercials on their TV sets, or how many people bring in print ads and hand them to their friends. Wait a minute: You can’t do that. No one does that. Which is exactly the point.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Measurement, Social Networking | 1 Comment »

Why Write a Book? For This Guy

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

open letter

This week I had lunch with an old friend who had not yet heard that I recently wrote a book. His first question was: “Why did you write a book?” It’s actually a question that I get a lot. It’s not that people believe that writing a book is a dumb idea. Rather, most people understand that it is a huge investment in time and energy on top of a day job, so they wonder what motivation drove me to make it happen. There are many answers that I give to this question. I usually talk about how I grew up with a father who wrote several books and his experiences struck a chord with me. I mention that it is a chance to help grow the profile of our business and serve as a point of pride for our agency, Bridge Worldwide. But at the end of the day, the reason I wrote the book was for people like Jason Sokol, who last week wrote “An Open Letter to Bob Gilbreath.”

In a post on his blog (please read it above or at this link), Jason shares the story of working at a large company and working to make changes in how the business does its marketing and sales. He writes about how the book was an inspiration, and he used it to craft a manifesto email for his senior leadership. The ideas in the book gave Jason “the leverage [he has] needed to make a difference.”

For me, this story represents the absolute height of personal satisfaction. When I got up at 6 a.m. every Saturday and Sunday for months to write the book, I was always thinking about people like Jason. I remembered being in his shoes, struggling to make changes in a big company that had been doing the same (broken) things for so long, and drawing on the words and suggestions of authors such as Seth Godin. I wanted to write a book that brought great ideas, along with tips on how to convince an organization to go along with them. My goal was not to sell a bunch of books, or even to have lots of people talk about it. I knew that I would fail if the book was unable to actually effect change in how companies work.

Ironically, last week Seth Godin wrote a post titled “Why write a book?” In this post he writes about the many reasons to write a book, and mentions that articles, blogs, and even tweets can all have some power to benefit others. But books can do something more:

“The goal isn’t always to spread an idea. Sometimes the goal is to make change happen…. If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen.”

Godin’s point is that books are powerful tools that give great leverage to ideas. A book takes time to read and absorb; it is a journey into the mind of the author. The publishing process helps ensure that only a relative handful of the best ideas make it to the shelves. This power of a book is that it gives ideas more leverage to impact people’s lives and make change happen. Jason takes the idea of “leverage” further, by showing how a book can serve as the leverage he needs to make change.

This really represents the Purpose of my life: I want to figure out how the world works, and give as many people as possible ideas and tools to make positive change. I know that more than 10,000 people have purchased and read the book so far, which is great sales-wise for a marketing book after only a few months. But now I know that at least one person has been able to use my book to make positive change. That alone is worth everything that I put into it. My thanks to Jason for sharing his story—and I hope many more readers write their own meaningful marketing stories in the years to come.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Organizational Behavior, book, purpose | 2 Comments »

Linking Happiness and Meaning at Work and Home

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

happiness

For me, the start of a new year is a time to recharge the batteries with a few weeks off, and rethink about my personal work and home life. I usually try to unplug completely, and preferably take a few long-distance drives to see relatives to clear my mind. This gives me clarity to work through the past year and begin to think about what I want to work on in the year ahead. Over the holidays I had the good fortune to run across an article that aided my annual processing. In the December 21 edition of BusinessWeek, Marshall and Kelly Goldsmith share results of a study about happiness and meaning at work and at home, and they come away with some very interesting conclusions.

In a study that is at the heart of the appropriately titled forthcoming book, Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It, the Goldsmiths interviewed more than 3,000 professionals about what gives those people short-term satisfaction (happiness) and long-term benefit (meaning). The biggest finding from their survey is that there is a very high correlation between people’s happiness and meaning at work and home—”in other words, those who experience happiness and meaning at work tend also to experience them outside of work. Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.”

Because full-time workers spend the majority of their waking hours on the job, we might as well admit that happiness and meaning at work is the key to both in life overall. I have always felt this to be the case for myself, but I am surprised that so many others feel the same way. This idea lies in the epilogue of my book, where I describe how Marketing with Meaning not only helps improve sales and customers’ lives, but by doing the latter, we enjoy our work much more.

Another key insight in this study is that “since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are.” In other words, we are responsible for our own happiness and meaning—not passive beneficiaries or victims of our work or home environments. If we are unhappy, we must take control and make changes to get to a better place.

These two lessons are what I work to practice and improve upon every year. I accept that my work has a huge impact on my home and family life, and I work to shape my career to better tap into what makes me happy and what makes life meaningful. In 2009 I had the chance to progress very well on this in seeing my book published, in watching our company grow revenue and staff at a double-digit rate, and in providing opportunities for our employees to succeed with new clients and challenges.

On the other hand, there are a few other goals that I hoped to accomplish but fell short on. After reading this article I sat down to commit to some goals that will make me happier, accomplish more meaningful results, and help our company continue to grow and succeed. One big one is to see the “Marketing with Meaning” concept take on a life of its own beyond me. For me to accomplish my goals, the concept cannot just be a “Bob thing” or even a “Bridge Worldwide thing.” I can only succeed if you make the concept your own, and, as a result find happiness and meaning in your work/home life by creating marketing that people choose to engage with, and advertising that itself adds value.

Thank you for stopping by to read this blog or the book, and let me know how I can help myself succeed by helping you create more meaningful marketing.

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Posted in Achievement, Agency Marketing, Concept, Life | 3 Comments »

Book Review: “Adland”

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

adland

Just before the holiday vacation, I had the chance to attend a four-hour dinner with a diverse group of about 80 people who all happen to know our host and have some job in the fields of investing, advertising, teaching, writing, or other “new media.” I was lucky enough to be joined at my table by James Othmer, author of the new book, Adland. Interestingly, Adland was already on my shelf and in queue for holiday reading. Meeting James in person gave me more evidence that my book selection was strong and his written work certainly lived up to my positive impression in chatting with him.

Overall, Adland is a very unique and additive perspective on the future of marketing and is definitely worth your money and time. As a movie pitchman might say, it’s In Search of Excellence written by a David Ogilvy who has actually lived in and writes about the dirty trenches of the ad-agency business. Othmer tells his own story of a guy who somehow wound up in the advertising-agency business, learned how to thrive amid its crumbling, gradually discovered that it is not his calling, and escaped to a career as an fiction author (see his first book, The Futurist). Othmer returns to his old industry home in this book to share his experience with those of us still figuring out how to stick with it, and he shares insights from discussions with the leaders of some of the newest, most successful companies that are winning as the traditional-agency model falls apart.

One of the most enjoyable and cathartic elements of the book is Othmer’s stories from his work with some of the biggest advertising agencies and clients in the world. We laugh and/or cry with him through horrible bosses, time-churning pitches, and arrogant clients on million-dollar commercial shoots. Those of us who have seen this dark side of the business will enjoy Othmer’s biographical romp. But all is not dark; for example, I loved Othmer’s musings on the creative brainstorming process, and how it creates “intellectual adrenaline” that is hard to find in any other kind of business. This alone is worth the book price.

But Othmer’s book is really about the future of the advertising-agency business, as he weaves in stories of visits to and discussions with upstart agencies such as Droga5 and Fahrenheit 212—as well as old-school ad firms that seem to have crossed the chasm into new media success, such as Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. One of my favorite passages comes from Othmer’s discussions with the leaders of The Barbarian Group, who set the world on fire with Subservient Chicken in 2004. Co-founder and COO Rick Webb was asked, “Isn’t all this digital work actually more intrusive and dangerous than ‘traditional’ ads? Isn’t the Internet just another pipe through which marketers can pump more insidious, nuanced, and targeted messages?”

“On the Web, aside from banner advertising, I pretty much have to decide to experience a marketing message. I have to click on that banner, I have to visit that Web site, I have to add that Facebook app or watch that viral video. I have to start the engagement. And therefore advertisers have to incent me to do so, the same way they incent me to visit their showroom. Think of VW ads—jarring, in-your-face, edgy. They have to be, because they have to catch my attention. Now think of their showrooms. Clean, friendly, inviting, with nice couches and coffee. Because they have to be, because they have to convince me to come in. Interactive advertising is the showroom.”

Of course, it’s a perfect fit with the gospel we’re trying to espouse around Marketing with Meaning, and it’s what I talked about in a blog post here a few months ago about how digital agencies fundamentally think differently. The best line of the book comes soon after this passage, delivered by Barbarian co-founder and President Ben Palmer: “I see the Internet as a way of taking advertising back from the evil assholes.”

At the end of Adland, we see a survivor of some of the bloodiest battles in the business escape to a new career as a fiction novelist. Reading this, I felt as though I was cheering the hero, but it also left me acknowledging that I’m still knee-deep in the business that Othmer found mainly meaningless. I and many others do not necessarily have the will or means to escape. So we must try to find a way to make a living and make a difference in “adland.” For me, that’s by creating Marketing with Meaning.  I hope you do, too.

Posted in Agency Marketing, book | No Comments »

“Elf Worldwide” Brings Service and Laughs to Bridge Worldwide Clients

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

elf worldwide

(Click here to buy The Next Evolution of Marketing with a portion of proceeds to go to one of our featured case studies, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America.)

Right about now, the first of several hundred people on the client and partner list of our digital advertising agency, Bridge Worldwide, are finding this man on the cover of a holiday card. Don’t be afraid, dear readers; it’s just Mike Glisson, one of our Tech stars—and for a special few weeks of shopping season, a helpful help. Welcome to the Bridge Worldwide Holiday Card, 2009 edition. I’m happy to share a pretty fun and useful example of Marketing with Meaning from the agency that spawned this concept.

Every year agencies and vendors around the world are challenged to figure out how to say “thank you” to their customers and partners for another mutually beneficial year. I remember coming to Bridge Worldwide in October 2004 and being handed this responsibility along with many others, and somehow it has stuck with me. Historically agencies loaded their clients with personal gifts and presents, but around 2004 we started getting letters from the Purchasing Departments of our clients warning us that anything more than a small, agency-branded trinket was taboo. So we had to figure out other ways to show how much we cared.

For the past five years, we have taken the opportunity to entertain our clients, share more about ourselves, and give back to good causes. We have made donations to the food bank on behalf of clients, we have shared families’ secret recipes, and we even created a video game with key employees as avatars. More or less, these were all solid examples of Marketing with Meaning, but the bar keeps going up every year.

Our teams also love to use the Holiday Card as a way to test out and impress our partners with kick-ass digital creative. Different teams take turns working on this project, and each one wants to one-up the previous effort thanks to our friendly competitive nature.

But this year’s challenge was set at a higher level for a few reasons. First, we just launched our manifesto book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, so we knew that all eyes would be on Bridge Worldwide to practice the meaningful marketing that it has been preaching. Second, we were extremely time-constrained thanks to a huge surge in new business from both historic clients and new wins throughout the year. In an economy that has hurt many other agencies, we have been lucky enough to keep growing at a torrid rate. But that didn’t leave a lot of time for company marketing efforts such as a Holiday Card.

Despite these challenges (or perhaps because of them), our team responsible for this project pulled together a killer idea in record time. I gave them a pretty simple brief, which essentially asked them to: (1) show off our unique Bridge Worldwide culture; and (2) provide Marketing with Meaning. The team actually came up with four great ideas, but I fell in love with Elf Worldwide….

Elf Worldwide is a service in which our own employees are providing gift suggestions to our clients and partners who are in need of help to come up with ideas for their loved ones. We realized that this can be a challenge for many people, especially when there are generation or interest gaps. And we saw an opportunity to tap one of our greatest strengths: a large, diverse group of employees who represent just about every age and interest group. As you can see on our website, it takes only seconds to request a gift idea from our group of volunteer elves. What you cannot see is that there is a pretty sophisticated series of steps that each request goes through (including prioritization of client requests and multiple checks for appropriateness!). The team thought of everything that could go wrong and planned accordingly.

Of course we couldn’t just offer this tool in a plain brown wrapper. Our team took over a corner of the office for a day and filmed hours of elf hijinks. The security-cam video on the home page actually has more than 30 minutes of unique footage and you just might find yourself unable to turn away. I also believe the site has some of the funniest copywriting we’ve ever produced as an agency.

As you might expect, we’re also using this tool as a way to make sure that people have put our book on the shopping list for that special marketer in their lives. The icing on the cake is that we are partnering with one of the featured meaningful marketers profiled in the book, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. A percentage of each book sold through this special link will go toward the partnership.

I don’t say this every year, but I really do believe this is our best Holiday Card effort yet. Let me publicly thank the entire team that put this together. Great work!

Go ahead and give it a try and let us know what you think!

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Cause Related, holiday | No Comments »

Digital Agencies “Do” Think Differently

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

digital agency difference

Across the world of Twitter, Power 150 blogs, and advertising trade magazines, the marketing industry is increasingly obsessed with the question of what’s next for digital agencies. Just last week, Jacques-Herve Roubert wrote the latest salvo in Advertising Age that we digital agencies are, in fact, ready to lead. And today, the same publication asked whether or not the industry needs big digital agencies anymore. The lesser-known story is that this debate is perhaps more active in the halls of some of the biggest companies in the world. Although clients are getting that digital is important, they’re unsure who should be holding the digital reigns.

In fact, one of our big clients recently posed a question in an annual review; this is the $500 billion question, and one that clients are wrestling with intently as they try to decide whether to trust their longtime, traditional agencies with the future, or throw their lot in with the younger upstarts with less gray hair and less gray flannel. A few days ago, my fellow executive leaders at Bridge Worldwide gathered to do some thinking on the state of traditional versus digital agencies in an effort to answer our clients’ questions and examine our own place in the ad world. This post represents what we came out with: At minimum, digital agencies have a unique perspective that is worth mixing into the brand strategy process—and taken to the logical evolution of meaningful marketing, we have the only mindset that will survive.

The History of Digital Agencies

Looking back only a few years, digital agencies’ point of difference was that we could get stuff done. We brought technology know-how that allowed us to swoop in and execute in ways that the traditional agencies with only a handful of digital folks couldn’t achieve. The large AORs often screwed up important details such as Flash and SEO, and even creative hot-houses such as Crispin Porter were forced to hire The Barbarian Group to develop Subservient Chicken. This skill in “making it happen” ensured that we were kept around and had at least a partial seat at the table. Over time, we took the opportunities to move up on the food chain and help come up with big ideas at the start of the process, informing strategy versus just finishing the last mile.

But this strength in getting it done is starting to erode. Traditional agencies are getting better at getting digital “good enough” so that their clients don’t notice the little things. Clients are also getting tired of paying for multiple people at the planning table, and some of them turn a blind eye to their historic, traditional AORs’ lack of capability. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the rise of low-cost programmers based in developing nations who offer up execution at $25/hour—again, not as good as a one-stop digital shop, but good enough for a brand manager who doesn’t want to know the details. So digital agencies are under new pressure just when they should be high-fiving.

The Future of Marketing

All this pressure from the AORs and programmers happens most with the “traditional digital” work that is the first step of many brands. Basic banners, emails, and websites are all handled pretty easily by these players. Some marketers are kicking their heels up on their desks figuring that they’ve mastered the new world of digital just because they are playing their TV commercials on Hulu. This allows them to keep hitting the same old sales message to eyeballs in a new place. This might seem like a solution, but it is but a small step to where marketing is really going. Already, banner spending is declining in 2009, and there is not enough online video ad viewership to make up for people turning off their network TV stations.

In the future, interruption will get harder and be less effective. Consumer control will increase. The design of sales messages and taglines—the staple of traditional agencies for eons—will slip in significance. Instead, we are already seeing the rise of Marketing with Meaning as an entirely new way of engaging with customers. Instead of tell-and-sell messages designed in 30-second ads or 5-second banner rotations, winning brands will move to create marketing that people choose to engage with—and advertising that itself adds value to their lives.

The Difference Between Traditional and Digital Agencies

I am a firm believer that companies have a natural bias in strategy and approach to challenge and change. They continually go in the direction of their company founders and leaders. This holds true in how agencies approach their work every single day, and there is a big difference between how Traditional and Digital agencies approach the market.

Traditional agencies have always been about Declaring what a brand stands for. They are focused on the positioning of the brand, and hone in on an insight about how the consumer thinks about the category or product. They figure out this one core message, turn it into a simplified ad and tagline, and hammer it home over and over again. This is a real, legitimate skill—and in the world of three TV networks, regional (versus global) markets, and less-sophisticated consumers, it works very, very well. But the problem is that this is increasingly a less and less valuable experience for the consumer who receives this perfectly crafted sound bite. And low consumer value corresponds to low brand value. These ads just don’t have much impact on people’s lives.

Some agencies have learned to Demonstrate what a brand can do and create experiences around products. These are the event marketers and activation agencies that find ways to bring brands to life in a very real, tangible way. One of my favorite examples of this kind of agency is the folks at the agency Gigunda, who were behind the Charmin Times Square bathrooms. You have to agree that these positive, engaging brand experiences are more valuable to the consumers who interact with them; and research continually shows that more engaged, interested consumers translate to higher sales.

Finally we come to Digital agencies, which have always lived in the world of Doing. We digital geeks got into this business because we saw the possibilities of software early on. When we first logged onto AOL or programmed in PERL we realized that we could do things for consumers by creating tools and services. We realized early on that we couldn’t force people to subscribe to our emails or visit our websites; instead, we had to attract them by doing something positive. Our focus has been on figuring out how to invent a “thing” that brings the brand to life and personally adds value to consumers’ lives. I believe the “Do” offers the highest consumer value, and thus greatest return on marketing investment.

Where Digital Agencies Are Leading

If you take in this model and begin to apply it across some of the biggest agencies and most talked-about work in the marketing world, I think it starts to make a lot of sense. For example, only a digital doer such as R/GA would have been able to conceive what became Nike+. Only a digital agency such as AKQA would have thought you could launch Halo 3 by creating a future military museum. Only my team at Bridge Worldwide could have launched a new Healthy Choice product by creating a live, lunchtime improv show. Or take Razorfish, which had the lead on Best Buy’s launch of a musical instrument business. Its Chairman, Clark Kokich, said, “They could have just run ads telling people that Best Buy now sells instruments… [but] we wanted to become a partner in helping people rediscover their love for music.”

It’s also little wonder that the agencies that are leading the dialogue around Marketing with Meaning all come from this “digital doing” perspective. Aside from us at Bridge Worldwide, there’s The Barbarian Group, who came up with the idea of “Branded Utility,” and Renegade, which coined the term “Marketing as Service.” Let me also say that we digital agencies are already leading in new realms such as social media, without having to “prove” that we now “get it.” I find it interesting that PR agencies are trying to recast themselves as those who “deserve” this important new work, even though they have ignored digital tools for years and are used to pushing a single, simplified message on reporters.

It’s also not hard to pick out the brands that have cast their lot with the big, tell-and-sell, “Declare” model of traditional agencies. There’s the Gatorade “Got G” campaign that I’ve picked apart multiple times for trying to coin a catchphrase that no one bothered to waste time on. Sadly, once innovative companies such as eBay (”eBay it!“) and Yahoo! (”It’s Y!ou“) have turned the advertising keys over to big, sexy campaigns that offer nothing more than a tagline. And in one interesting battle between the past and future, Visa has gone to a celebrity laden, single-word declaration of “Go,” while MasterCard is now advertising a free, value-added iPhone app that helps people discover priceless places.

Where We Go from Here

Agencies will be what agencies will be. Those who are good at Declaring will continue to do so, while we who have grown up in the business of Doing will keep marching down that road. The choice is up to you Brand Marketers out there. You must decide whether to cast your lot in one direction or the other, or keep both on hand and do the hard work of balancing their perspectives (and egos). If you think the world will continue to be ruled by clever interruption and one-word taglines, then please don’t waste your time and money dealing with leading digital agencies. But if you believe that the future is about creating true connections with your customers by adding value to their lives, then go ahead and give any one of us a call. We’re standing by and ready to help Lead and Do.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Concept, Organizational Behavior | 3 Comments »

More Coverage of the Book Launch

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

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Before I get into the subject of this post, let me say a giant THANK YOU to everyone who participated in our “Hack Day” company project yesterday. I know that we got a little bit over-competitive and probably hit you with too many messages in one day, but the day was a huge success and we owe you many thanks. Next week I promise to share a full wrap-up of the event and results.

The purpose of this post is to share some of the great media coverage that The Next Evolution of Marketing is getting this week. As you can see from the list below, it is getting attention from a wide variety of sources and the response has been outstanding. Check out some of the things that have popped in just in the past 48 hours or so:

So things are off to a great start, as witnessed by the book sticking in the #2,000 ranking on Amazon, and #3 or #4 in Advertising books. My many thanks to the people above for their kind words and actions. It seems as though The Next Evolution of Marketing is well on its way!

Posted in Agency Marketing, book | 3 Comments »

Preparing for Our Book Launch Event

Monday, October 5th, 2009

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In a matter of hours, at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, about 240 Bridge Worldwide employees will launch a social-media marketing experiment to support the launch of our new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. I’m excited about the launch, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the groups’ work—and I look forward to readers’ participation and feedback.

The book officially launched on Friday, October 2, and it got off to a great start. That morning Advertising Age published an outstanding book review by Pete Blackshaw. I could not have asked for a better and compelling review of the book, and sure enough the sales lift-off was immediate. On Amazon.com, the book rose to the #1,200 seller across all books, and shot up to #2 in the Advertising category, just under The Tipping Point. McGraw-Hill emailed me soon after to let me know that they are already getting ready for a second printing. Thanks to all of you for helping me along the way and for your early book orders.

Tomorrow morning our entire company is going to try to generate some more buzz around the book by engaging in an exercise modeled after P&G’s successful “Hack Night” from back in March 2009. You might recall that the company brought together a couple hundred senior-level marketers and external digital experts for an evening to compete on teams, using social-media tools to sell the most Tide T-shirts in support of its “Loads of Hope” cause marketing program. I got to attend that event and saw it not only raise a lot of money in a few hours, but also get people to learn by working together and experimenting.

A few months ago, our President, Jay Woffington, asked me if we might do our own company-wide “Hack Night” in support of the book launch. His goal was to not only juice book sales, but to give all of our people a chance to further improve their digital sensibility by rolling up our sleeves and working together. This conversation spawned a project and a team and tomorrow’s event.

Here’s how it will work: The goal of the competition is to get as many people as possible to download the free chapter of the book.  We decided to do this because the free chapter itself is Marketing with Meaning, and it is much easier to track chapter downloads than actual book sales. We have split up the company into teams, and assigned each team a specific medium to use to market the free chapter: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, WPP resources, and this blog and community. The teams first met a little more than a week ago to start planning and preparing, and tomorrow at 9 a.m. they will begin their activities in earnest. We will have them each in separate War Rooms, with a live monitor feeding in the total downloads of each team. Everyone will stop working at 1 p.m. so we can go to have some fun at our annual company offsite, where we will announce the winner of the contest and present a few other awards.

Already people to seem to be having fun and are learning a lot. I don’t know much about what they have planned, though. A few teams have asked me mysterious questions, and one team dragged me into a room to film something before I left on a trip last week. “Winning” is one of the key words of our agency’s equity, so I’m sure the competition will be hot and heavy.

My only fear for the day is that the competition will drive people to do things that end up angering our carefully crafted audience. During the P&G Hack Night, one of my friends, Kevin Doohan, who knows several of the participants, wrote about how the contest felt like spamming. I have tried to reduce this risk by providing a coaching brief on how to approach people, as well as how to ask for forgiveness when you make a mistake. But I am sure that some of you might find tomorrow’s event annoying. I apologize in advance and hope that you see that our hearts are in the right place.

Although I am the author of this book and the most public voice of “Marketing with Meaning” I really believe that I am just one of many members of what can be an important movement. This idea has been driven by nearly everyone at Bridge Worldwide, readers of this blog have been incredibly supportive during the past 18 months, and now we have new tools such as our community to bring others into the cause. I am excited that our experiment tomorrow might give many more people exposure to what we’re trying to do together, and give more people the chance to be a part of driving a better future for marketing and society.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Sampling, book | 4 Comments »

A Meaningful 90-Second Sales Pitch

Monday, September 21st, 2009

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Last week I had the chance to present our Marketing with Meaning concept and hand out copies of my new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, at the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego. There were some excellent case studies, including a Dunkin’ Donuts case that I wrote about here on Friday. But today I wanted to share an interesting experiment of my own that shows how meaningful marketing can even be the basis of a 90-second new business pitch.

One of the recurring iMedia events is something that its organizers call “One Minute Matchups.”  It’s essentially a speed-dating concept in which “buyers” sit at tables around a room and “sellers” rotate every minute or two and pitch their product or service. As odd as it may seem, it can actually be very useful. For both buyers and sellers it is a low-investment way to quickly size up whether there is enough interest to merit a follow-up discussion, and both sides get to weed out those that are not a great fit.

In March of this year I first experienced the “One Minute Matchups” concept at iMedia’s Breakthrough conference. In this case, I was a “buyer” and many specialty media vendors and digital services companies rotated to speak with me. I was disappointed, though, that nearly all of the 40 sellers I met with had done zero research on my agency. So most of the first 90 seconds was me answering their question, “What does Bridge Worldwide do?”  Needless to say, I didn’t find any great matches.

But this time was a little bit different. On Thursday evening, just 36 hours before my flight out, I got an email from the folks at iMedia with a list of companies that I would be matched up with. I actually had no idea that my keynote address would afford me this opportunity. As an agency guy at this conference I was to be in the “seller” position, so now it would be my turn to see if I could do a better job of pitching. I huddled with Jonathan Richman, my Director of Business Development (and top blogger over at Dose of Digital). We quickly decided that I had to do something meaningful in my matchups, and likely something related to my keynote topic. We decided that the best thing to do would be to bring each company one or two ideas for how they might practice meaningful marketing. I stayed up until 1 a.m. that night coming up with ideas by using their websites and my gut as a guide.  Then on Friday Jonathan and Carole Amend from our team worked on turning these ideas into blown-up cards with the idea on one side and my contact information on the other.  I picked them up Saturday morning on the way to the airport and they looked great.  The image at the top of the screen is one example (the person from Atkins didn’t show up), and at the bottom you can see the contact info side.

Now, let me pause to say that it’s very, very difficult to sell a full-service digital agency like Bridge Worldwide in only 90 seconds. While brand managers may feel free to “date” specialty service providers, working with a full-service agency is like getting married–as you typically stay with the agency for a long time and make them strategic partners on the core business. Maybe one or two of the marketers in attendance expected to hire an agency sometime soon. My real goal was to leave each person with a positive brand experience with Bridge Worldwide, so that when they are looking for a new i-agency at some future time they remember to give us a call.

It was an interesting experience sharing my ideas at the event.  My time with the first group of about 25 marketers came before I had given my keynote speech, so they had no clue who I was or what I was speaking about. My approach was certainly unlike others that the marketers had experienced. About one-third of them reacted very positively and were appreciative to get something personalized and clever.  The other two-thirds had a hard time figuring out how to respond, mainly because they thought I was selling them a specific idea. So there was some defensiveness (”we already have an agency”) and dismissal (”we tried that once and it didn’t work).  I felt pretty good, though, because I knew my keynote the next day would help connect the dots in their minds.

Sure enough, when I went to the next batch of matchups just minutes after leaving the stage of my keynote address, every marketer I spoke to understood what I was doing. I also changed my talking points a bit to adjust, for example, by starting off with “I’m not selling you an idea; I’m selling you on how we work as an agency partner.” People were overwhelmingly positive and excited to hear the ideas I shared, and a handful promised to reach out on some specific work.

But one of the best things about this approach was that I really enjoyed these one-minute matchups.  The decision to bring a unique idea for everyone forced me to do my homework on the companies, and better prepared me for longer discussions with prospects over meals and cocktails.  The ideas gave me more confidence in sitting down with a stranger for 90 seconds, and I felt great knowing that I would be giving them something worth remembering when they got back to the office later that week.  This approach was more meaningful to me, too.

Part of me thought that I shouldn’t write this blog post and share this idea with the world. I wondered if now everybody else would take the idea and outdo us at the next iMedia show.  But the reality is that most people just don’t bother to make the effort. It’s too easy to stick with the traditional path and “rules” of the game, whether you’re a salesperson or a big brand. But it goes to show that our success is less about what our competitors do, and more about how we take advantage of new opportunities. And as my friend Brian McNamara always said, “If it was easy, anyone could do it.”

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Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Conferences, Organizational Behavior | 1 Comment »

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