As you probably know, our recent Planningness session revolved around getting people to think about new tools for marketing. We were the penultimate session and, to be honest, were pretty worried that everyone was going to be completely exhausted. However in the end the energy was very high, and I walked away with a bunch of new ideas.

To get everyone started, we kicked off with a quick primer on modern branding just to get everyone’s heads on the same page:

It seemed to resonate and was a good recap of many of the themes that had been discussed over the last two days. After that, the real fun began. We started by brainstorming a list of all of the tools that aren’t relevant anymore.

It was a revealing list. Even more revealing was that we managed to fill a whiteboard in just 5 minutes.

Next, we broke the group into teams according to birth month and asked everyone to think about a new “tool” that could be used to replace the ones on the board.

In no particular order here were the ideas:

Max from Good and his team came up with the idea of a dual audit for companies. Things both customers and employees love and things they hate. The idea would be then to work on the things we hate in a transparent way and enlist our customers in helping. Here’s Max explaining:

Next up was a team inspired by a presentation on Alternative Reality Gaming from Ken Eklund. They came up with the idea of scenario planning a brand using an ARG framework. As we ran out of time I didn’t get to hear their presentation on this, I’d love more details if any of the people on this team are reading.

Avin and his team came up with a really cool idea for breaking down monolithic research projects and briefs into micro-research and micro-briefs. This is research and briefing for an ongoing, iterative marketing model. The anti-campaign. (p.s. Avin, commenting on Posterous sucks – I logged in using FB connect and they still asked me to log in to Posterous)

Rob Perkins and his team came up with replacing the messaging model with the invention model. The goal of this is to create brand experiences that surprise and delight. I love this thought – again, because we ran out of time I we didn’t get to hear them present. If any of y’all are listening, stop by and tell us more.

Next up was a team that came up with the idea of using stories to present the belief. This one needs some voiceover I think so I won’t try to explain this. It’s very intriguing – can someone tell us more?

The always entertaining Jason Oke and his team came up with the idea of creating the anti-awards show. A show based on failure so that we can actually learn from it and move forwards rather than shovelling failure under the carpet and stepping away. I really like this idea. In a time when we’re really all trying to figure things out, our failures are way more instructive than our successes.

The November birthday group had a really nice idea about creating a repository of good, interaction-based marketing examples. I love this! We’re all always looking for case studies to put in our decks and always end up coming up with the same old examples. I think this is something we should start STAT on planningness.com. Mark, are you listening?

Next was an idea for a new kind of creative team. Agency structure came up a bunch in the brainstorm about tools that don’t work – it’s nice to see new thinking around this.

This next team had a really interesting idea around getting to the truth of a company’s culture by using technology. While some of the examples are a bit extreme, I really think there’s something to this thought. It’s a really nice application of social technologies pointed inwards at the company rather than outwards at the customer.

The June birthdays group came up with a really interesting looking dashboard for monitoring a brand’s health. It combines both internal and external inputs and could really do with some further explanation. Nien, care to jump in and elaborate? (Apologies for the smallness, that’s what I got given)

In a similar vein to the ARG group, the July group came up with the idea of role playing as a brand R&D tool. Again, I think this is a really interesting approach – it gets to a larger theme which is that truth is often revealed by doing rather than by thinking. I think this is a big insight that we’re all starting to come to terms with.

Last but not least was a group who proposed the idea that brands should act first and think later. Again this is another dimension of doing and then seeing what happens.

So what can we learn from all of this? I’ll be buggered if I know but the themes that stuck out for me were:

1. We’re all pretty clear on the fact that many of the tools we use currently aren’t working
2. We’re much more interested in dynamic processes than static tools
3. We want our new tools to be social, to be participatory not just for individuals
4. We’re looking for our tools to reveal complexity and depth rather than hide it with simple-mindedness
5. We need tools to plan the company as much as we need tools to plan the customer
6. We want to learn by doing rather than by thinking and strategizing

I find all of this extremely exciting and promising. I’ll post more on Planningness separately but I came away from this session really inspired and filled with a bunch of new ways to look at stuff. I have no doubt that this kind of thinking will continue to be sharpened and refined over the next few years and I’m looking forwards to the results.

These documents and the discussion around them are to be posted on the Planningness wiki soon. I hope to see you over there.

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the challenges of running a business of scale. I often think it’s something that we in the marketing industry don’t really know that much about as we’re, even in the biggest agencies, only really responsible for selling our “products” to a small number of people. However, when I walk through the aisles of a Nordstrom store (for example) – I realise that most of our clients’ businesses are very different. They make a living by selling to lots and lots and lots of people, over and over again.

The skills and ideas that grab small groups of people are very different from the skills and ideas that grab large numbers of people. I refer to one of my favourite models (above) to illustrate why. Ideas that only need to grab a small number of people can be extremely innovative and disruptive. They can appeal to the risk takers and ignore those who want familiarity, safety or tradition. Ideas that need to appeal to large numbers of people can’t make that sacrifice. In order to get to really large numbers of people, you have to start bringing in the more mainstream audiences. For these people, really new thinking isn’t going to be that appealing.

This difference comes to a head in the differing criteria that agencies and clients will apply when evaluating ideas. Agencies have always been proponents of innovative or disruptive ideas. Some of this has emerged from the need for communications to “break through the clutter” but often, if we’re honest, it’s simply been a product of ego. While ego is also a factor for some clients, more often, they’ll be looking for ideas that are going to deliver the biggest bang for the buck. These two viewpoints are always going to result in a completely different way to evaluate and judge the same idea.

I think this is another reason why we agencies need to develop a different aesthetic sense in order for us to become holistic marketing partners rather than just communications providers. I think we need to begin to celebrate ideas of scale rather than disruptive or niche ideas. I also think this will be an extremely difficult transition.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, mass, scale

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• The long-winded answer.

Via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorgeq82/

One of the themes that occupied my mind in 2008 and continues to intrigue me is how things can have a number of different value streams associated with them. You may recall, I wrote that a simple penny coin can have four (or more) different dimensions of value, from its face value, the value of its materials, the cost of its production, and so on.

The point here is that value is not an absolute, it is entirely dependent upon context. Therefore by examining an object from a variety of different contexts you can discover very different scales of value.

I think the same is true for marketing ideas. The best marketing ideas have multiple dimensions of value. The best ideas create value for the company AND the customer. It’s entirely possible create value beyond even these two audiences. Great marketing ideas also create value for shareholders, communities and potentially, the planet.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of “Green” marketing. I’m not necessarily talking about big, hairy initiatives, but rather small steps companies can take to reduce their impact upon the environment.

Consider Apple’s (yes I know them again) move to replace printed receipts in its stores with emailed receipts. There are a large number of value streams associated with this one action.

Customers gain convenience and better archiving from having a digital (e.g. searchable) record of their purchase. They also gain an easily shareable (e.g. for expenses or for sending to friends) record of their actions. And then finally, they also get the (small) emotional reward of having helped to reduce litter and waste.

Apple gets your email address, which as many marketers know is a pretty reliable revenue stream. They gain from any sharing of your purchases that you might now be able to do. They gain from the reduction of cost of printing, ink, paper, waste management etc. And they gain by being seen as a company that’s doing its bit to help.

The planet gets…well lets just say every little bit helps.

If marketing is, as the AMA states, an “…an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders,” then emailed receipts qualifies as a brilliant marketing idea on all accounts.

It’s examples like this that have forced me to shift my thinking on what is great marketing and what is a great idea. Where we (me and my partners) used to judge an idea based upon its ability to create a large number of extensions to be a central jumping-off point or platform for a number of different coordinated or coherent activities. We now judge the quality of an idea by its ability to create a large number of value streams.

These two frameworks don’t necessarily have to be incompatible but they often are. In our eagerness to extend an idea into multiple channels or forms, I think it’s increasingly important to ask whether we are we actually creating more value or simply making everything we do less valuable?

As an industry, I also think we also ought to ask why ideas like Apple’s printed receipts aren’t awarded, yet extravagant uses of time, money and resources that (often) generate very little value for anyone but media company owners are?

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One of the quotes that’s been repeated to me most often was this from Alex Bogusky in a 2004 Money interview:

“Anything and everything is an ad.”

Agencies of all kinds have used this as a rallying cry to expand their product and scope – giving them licence to present ideas which reach deeply into company operations. There’s no doubt that this has created some very smart and impressive collaborations between clients and their agencies, and it’s also raised general awareness of the marketing opportunities created by many different parts of a company’s operations.

It’s also led to heinous presentations (yes I’ve been there) where ignorant agency people present naive and (in some cases) damaging ideas which demonstrate their utter lack of understanding about a client’s business and how that client makes money. This is not terribly surprising. Agency people aren’t trained to run businesses, they are trained to create communications which help to achieve business goals. (Charitably, you could say the same dynamic is on display in the efforts of many clients who attempt to create communications.)

However, this trend has also backfired on the agency world, because if I am a client who realises “everything is an ad” and I can communicate by simply running my business then why should I hire an agency at all?

And in fact, that’s exactly what’s happening. The chart above from brandchannel is an extreme demonstration of this. Of the top 10 brands in their reader’s choice awards for best brands – five of them don’t really use advertising agencies and instead rely upon innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers.

I was reminded of this recently when Brian asked me who I thought was doing interesting stuff. I admit I don’t follow this sort of thing as closely as I should but in my opinion the most interesting advertising ideas aren’t coming from agencies, they’re coming from clients.

Some recent examples from my delicious are:
Redfin a web service that delivers better results than human Realtors.
Leica’s M8, taking the route pioneered by the Linn Sondek, offering a camera that evolves.
Mobile fitting from Japanese optician Megane Top, lets you try glasses on via your phone.

Even the government is getting in on it:

Satlav, find a toilet via your mobile phone, very useful in London.

What differentiates these from the typical ideas that get presented in the last 20 minutes of most agency presentations is that they make money for the company first and communicate second. It’s this shift in emphasis that most agencies don’t understand.

Rather than creating “communications objects” that help to grow a client’s business, agencies who champion the idea that “everything is an ad” should instead be helping to magnify and extend the communication and marketing effects of the client’s own business objects. This is a pretty unpopular perspective in creative and production departments because it means that you start with the client’s idea rather than starting with something created from scratch. Perhaps this is is why most agencies aren’t advocating it.

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