Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

Welcome to another installment of Last Week’s Meme at the Engine Digital Blog, where we investigate the latest internet meme, a week too late. I’m sure you can guess what this week’s Last Week’s Meme is, since we haven’t seen an explosion of traffic around a piece of video like this since 37 million of us took part in the much loved Rick Roll.
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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

Mobile Apps, the current holy grail of digital marketing, have only just replaced Social Media as the big opportunity for marketers. Mobile is a crucial part of the marketing mix for both B2B and B2C brands, as many blogs and marketing industry publications will boldly agree. And while the App space provides huge opportunity, it’s important to understand the opportunity and enter the space with the right set of goals and objectives – not just a half baked, quick-to-market Mobile App strategy.

As was recently stated at the Luxury Interactive 2010 Conference in NY, “A mobile strategy does not just mean rolling out an App.” More effectively, the branded App should be part of a broader multi-channel experience, be that mobile, online, social, and offline tactics.

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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.

If you’ve been seeing a lot of guys on one knee in your online travels as of late, I can assure you it’s not a springtime rush of romance that has a bunch of dudes proposing marriage. Instead, it’s romance of another kind, and it’s been drinking up the internet lately as last weeks meme. I’m talking about brosicingbros.com, the latest craze for bros on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and just about every other digital channel that you can bro down on.
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