Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

During the creative phase of any project we spend hours doing interviews with our clients, collecting reference and doing creative explorations that usually result in what I like to refer to as a total mess. Through the ungentle process of elimination, arguing, late-night epiphany and revision what we distil is still a dog’s breakfast of ideas. In the days following we start becoming more attracted to certain elements and as we continue to remove what isn’t working we start to find out what does. It’s an ugly process but by the process of elimination we’ve end up with a cohesive message that will eventually end up on a screen or device somewhere and hopefully in front of the audience for who it was intended.
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Here is a video from TED that you have to watch. Okay, I know you keep hearing that. Love TED. But this one ties in the business and economic truth of what the consumer wants to marketing.

Joseph Pine is a somewhat academic, but brilliant marketing professor and expert who has written many books, one of which is called the “Experience Economy”.

He talks about the difference between a brand being compared on price, price, price versus it becoming an experience and differentiating it’s value proposition to make it unique. Mini Cooper does that exceptionally well. While Toyota Corollas sell for much less, you have a small car being sold for much more margin with “the Mini Cooper experience”, giving the consumer the ability to have millions of options”.

While I was helping Club Penguin with their global marketing strategy, we realized that we had something unique. A child could experience the brand and personalize it to their own experience. That’s why the site became and still is one of the top MMOs. Disney itself wasn’t quite sure how to handle that because this was particularly unique in their marketing experience with relatively pre-determined and planned experiences that were the opposite of customization. It’s definitely unique to the new digital economy, with available technology to personalize an experience. More importantly, when a company can streamline it’s supply chain beyond the Henry Ford model, it creates new opportunities for brands and for the customers who crave personalized, unique and innovative experiences.

The recent positive sales results related to the Old Spice Guy campaign not only tell us that guys everywhere are smelling better, but that being able to consider how a character in a television ad responds to consumers on the internets can be wildly successful. I can’t think of many examples of an agency for one of the big CPGs being able to react so quickly and fluidly to it’s audience. It’s a great feat for Wieden + Kennedy, and kudos needs to go to them for reacting with a very, well, small digital agency nimbleness.

Yes, everyone is talking about it, but at the risk of exhaustion, let’s break it down. A simple and humorous television ad with actor Isaiah Mustafa asks, “does your man smell like me?” The ad itself was brilliant, for it’s use of great special effects as much as it’s quirky copywriting. With the ad’s success, (which definitely would have been a Top 10 on AdCritic.com), the ad of course went viral on YouTube. Wieden + Kennedy immediately reacted by placing the content on Old Spice’s existing YouTube channel. From there they promoted a “Be My Friend” connection on Facebook. In addition, they created the conversational Twitter feed from Old Spice guy. What’s great is that they responded to comments, via the actual video and physical being of the Old Spice guy. Not a copywriter responding as if he was the guy from the curtain behind the Twitter account, but actually responding with humour and copywriter’s wit on video. Pure advertising awesomeness. A campaign that came alive.

But was this luck or planning?

We recently returned from a series of discussions with clients in New York on the exhaustive topic of social media, and we talked with them about the importance of platform thinking versus campaign thinking alone. The platform means that you first monitor, then participate, then mobilize. The platform means that you have a handle on how to react in the way that this campaign did. The platform is about investing mindshare in social media for the long term. Monitor means watching trends, positive and negative sentiment and knowing where the audience is socially, emotionally and physically. Participate means learning how to enter the conversation sounding like a human being, and not like you’re marketing something. Mobilize means enabling your audience to act.

W+K did all three. And they did it with the creative skillset of the traditional agency combined with an agility and understanding of the digital channel. The win? They created the great ironic soapbox salesman, and they had listened and monitored enough in the social channel to know how to make the conversation work. Think about how easy it would be for the campaign to fail. The character could have come across as cheesy, irrelevant or salesy. None of these things happened. The social channel conversation from the OS guy was relevant, authentic to the character and insightful, for example, to the playfulness with women, which the original ad spoke to. “JS Beals writes, can you ask my girlfriend to marry me?,” he says with all of his best musty Old Spice baritone reacting via the Twitter feed. Smartly, he responded to popular online celebs like Perez Hilton and Alyssa Milano. Ironically, Axe laid the ground for the success of the quirky and humorous irony that the Old Spice guy kinda now owns. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

Ask me about how we have succeeded in this platform approach with creating positive and profitable success through social shopping, enabling one client to become the largest seller of eyeglasses online,  and creating a mobilization social movement for another client through social media through that drove significant awareness and high engagement.

Vancouver, Canada., July 14, 2010 – Engine Digital Executive Creative Director Stephen Beck announced today that James Riley, former Global Director of Marketing for Disney Online and CEO of AdCritic.com, has joined the firm as a Partner and Executive Vice President of Client Services

“James is a formidable strategic marketing talent who will bring innovation, new thinking and solutions to our Canadian and US clients,” comments Beck. “Our agency has maintained a solid reputation as a high growth, strategic creative agency in the digital space, and our partnership with James will help solidify our goal of providing deeper value to our existing clients and increasing our reach into the US market to provide services to larger North American brands.”

Prior to joining Engine Digital, James served as Global Director of Marketing for Disney Online where he managed brand and product marketing teams across several countries for Club Penguin and other online Disney properties. Most recently, James was principal of a strategic marketing firm, servicing a broad list of consumer and business-to-business brands across North America. James has also held roles including Category Director at IBM Global Consulting managing the Unilever account; Director of Digital Strategy for a Connecticut based Omnicom agency; CEO of a Los Angeles based digital media agency working with the Hollywood community; marketing manager at Microsoft; and CEO of AdCritic.com, which he sold to Advertising Age.

Get in touch:
james.riley@enginedigital.com / @MrJamesRiley

Reading a great book that a number of top marketing executives have written, including Rita Clifton of Interbrand. The book is called “Brands and Branding” and is published by the Economist.

From the book: ‘As one CEO recently noted, those who move from the traditional idea that brand is about marketing and advertising, to using the brand as an organising idea in their corporate strategy, to touch and inform everything their people make, do and say, may find that they “have made more progress as a business than we achieved in the previous ten years.”

I recently did a deep brand audit including developing a brand DNA and brand mapping for a client. Indeed, the first sets of  assumptions we had to weigh through was that we were simply changing the logo. In fact, whether conscious or not, that was the biggest problem for the owner, who had had the same logo for many years. It was other members of the management team who wanted to drive the process to finally articulate in a consistent way what they knew to be the truth of their brand. Eventually, once the process was complete, the owner came to see an appreciation of what he knew to be true, articulated with more clarity and consistency.

A well managed brand process can give you an advantage in demonstrating to your customer that your brand equals quality, and that it in fact simplifies the buying process for the busy consumer by quickly communicating your key brand attributes and providing a trust in what you deliver in your product or service. In the case of this brand process, we went as far as to map out five pillars of the vision for the company and equated the new brand mapping to incorporate this business vision.

We also looked at the larger brand, and asked “where will we be in five, ten and fifteen years?” The principles laid out about what the brand is today simply become more three-dimensional and realized as time goes on. At the same time, we set about a measurement strategy to determine how we were faring against those goals, and a means of measuring how the brand was continuing to be perceived by customers.

In fact, the entire brand process is now used in all staff training, investor presentations and is referred to for all marketing and communications.

It’s more than a logo. Just ask Toyota and Hyundai, who use their brand vision as a mission to remind every one in the company every day the purpose of the contribution they are making to customers. Next post, I’ll talk about how branding and digital relate.