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The SoDA Report (Volume 2, 2015)
From the SoDA Board Chair
Tony Quin, Chairman of the Board, SoDA & CEO, IQ
recent report racked up over 350,000 views from around the world, making it the most widely read trends report
in the field of digital marketing.
A quick word about the phrase “digital marketing”. Today it means almost every activity within organizations
which touches their consumers, from advertising to product innovation and customer experience. It’s the same
for our members at SoDA, whose work defies easy labels in this era of change.
Like its predecessors this SoDA Report brings together insights and predictions from the luminaries of the digital
marketing world. To read a quick overview of the highlights of this report see the introduction by SoDA executive
director Chris Buettner that follows.
For those of you new to SoDA, we are a 10 year old network of digital agencies, leading production companies
and digital innovators from all over the world. Membership is by invitation only with only 14% of those
companies considered being voted in. The result is an organization made up of the most celebrated and
recognized companies in the digital marketing field.
In the last year SoDA has grown to 110 members in 40 countries on six continents and our work to bring together
the leaders of these trail blazers continues apace. In October we launched The Soda Academy in New York. This
invitation only educational event drew over 300 senior digital executives from all over the globe to the Pratt
Institute in Brooklyn. The mission was nothing short of reinventing professional education in our field. In 2016
SoDA will be expanding this ground breaking initiative among many others. We invite you to stay connected to
SoDA activites and sign up for our communications, including regular SoDA Reports at www.sodaspeaks.com.
Thank you for taking the time to dig into this treasure trove of insights. We hope you will share it with your
colleagues and look forward to your feedback.
Best wishes for a successful 2016,
Tony Quin
Chairman of the Board, SoDA
CEO, IQ Agency
As we charge into 2016 with our perennially complex, challenging world around us, we
can be sure of a few things. The influence of technology and digital channels continues
to grow at warp speed, consumers everywhere want innovation and brands to make life
easier and richer for them, and every January comes the new SoDA Report.
Published twice a year, the SoDA Report is the world’s leading trends snapshot for
digital marketing in it’s many forms. Produced by SoDA, the digital society, the most
From the Managing Editor
Chris Buettner, Managing Editor and Executive Director, SoDA
downloads. We’ll be expanding the special report series in 2016, with editions on everything from experience
design to data science.
We continue to be humbled and motivated by the positive industry feedback we’ve received regarding the
quality of our editorial content and the value of our primary research studies. We make this publication available
free of charge to the industry as part of SoDA’s mission to share thought leadership and ‘best known’ practices
from our member companies and other partners. Our overriding goal is to support and facilitate dialogue
between agencies and brands from around the globe to create the future of marketing and digital experiences.
In this issue, we continue to explore the editorial theme of Spurring Positive Change that was the focus of our
Volume 1, 2015 edition. Spurring positive change involves interpreting situations where problems are open and
ill-defined, tasks are unclear, processes are experimental and where knowledge is something that emerges step
by step through continuous interactions with other players.
In his Tech Talk piece, Stuart Eccles posits that the most promising change taking place in the industry today
is that more and more forward-thinking digital shops and consultancies are turning new ideas into repeatable,
scalable, ‘value-adding’ software solutions to sell to clients.
In Modern Marketer, Ann Ystén underscores that the digital agency of the future needs more than technical and
creative expertise. She maintains that it needs business consultants with a deep understanding of the client side
and the right skillset to engage effectively with professionals from a wide range of company disciplines beyond
just the marketing realm.
These are just a few of the articles in this edition casting a spotlight on the positive changes that SoDA members
and other forward-thinking industry players are making in order to drive true business transformation around
the globe.
I want to once again thank Barcelona-based SoDA member, Vasava, for translating our editorial theme of
Spurring Positive Change (and leaving behind that which no longer serves you) in a stunning visual metaphor for
the cover of this edition. I’d also like to thank our entire editorial team as well as our contributing authors.
Welcome to the Volume 2, 2015 edition of The SoDA Report.
The growth and development of The SoDA Report this year has been nothing short
of remarkable. In addition to our biannual trend publication (published in May and
December each year) which receives more than 350,000 views/downloads per edition,
we also launched a special report series. The latest issue in that series – “The SoDA
Report on the State of Agency Workflow Management” – has garnered close to 50,000
To become a subscriber of The SoDA Report, please email SoDA and we’ll make sure you have priority access to
the release of upcoming editions. We hope you enjoy this issue and, as always, we welcome your feedback, ideas
and contributions for future editions.
Saludos,
Chris Buettner
Managing Editor and Executive Director, SoDA
The SoDA Report Team &
Partners
Content Development
Editorial Team
Chris Buettner
Managing Editor of The SoDA Report
SoDA Executive Director
After a career on the digital agency and publisher side that spanned 15+ years, Chris
Buettner now serves as Managing Editor of The SoDA Report. He is also the Executive
Director of SoDA where he is charged with developing and executing the organization’s
overall strategic vision and growth plan. And with roots in journalism, the transition
to lead SoDA has been a welcome opportunity to combine many of his talents and
passions. After living in Brazil and Colombia for years, Chris is also fluent in Spanish
and Portuguese and is an enthusiastic supporter of SoDA’s initiatives to increase its
footprint in Latin America and around the world. Chris lives in Atlanta with his wife and
two daughters.
Sean MacPhedran, Industry Insider
Group Planning Director, Fuel
Sean is Group Planning Director at Fuel (based in Ottawa, Canada), where he currently
works with clients including McDonald’s Europe, Nokia, Mattel and Lucasfilm.
He specializes in youth marketing, entertainment & game development, and the
incorporation of pirates into advertising campaigns for brands ranging from Jeep
to Family Guy. Outside of Fuel, he is co-founder of the Ottawa International Game
Conference, managed the category-free Tomorrow Awards and spent a good deal of
time in the Mojave Desert launching people into space at the X PRIZE Foundation. They
all came back alive.
Rob Thorsen, Modern Marketer
Managing Director, Big Spaceship
As Managing Director, Rob oversees the development of Big Spaceship’s client
relationships and the disciplines of the agency that drive them. Equal parts relationship
builder and creative contributor, Rob brings over 15 years of agency building expertise
to the agency. His work includes launching Unilever’s AXE at BBH NY, joining Mother NY
as it’s first strategist stateside, to leading several flagship accounts at BBDO NY. When
not in the office, Rob is either chasing down his two children with his wife, Sarah, or
chasing after cyclists he so desperately tries to keep pace with. Also, he is from the
Great State of New Jersey.
Kate Richling, SoDA Showcases
VP of Marketing, Phenomblue
As Phenomblue’s Vice President of Marketing, Kate Richling oversees the agency’s
marketing and social media outreach, as well as its inbound marketing efforts.
Previously, Richling worked in public relations, creating and executing strategies for
institutes of higher education and Blue Cross Blue Shield, as well as providing social
media counsel to various non-profit organizations.
Emily Bloom, Talent
Managing Director, People, Viget
As Managing Director, Emily is responsible for recruiting, hiring, training and retaining
great people. She directly manages Viget’s recruiting events and operations teams,
oversees internal communications and is a member of Viget’s executive management
team. Emily joined Viget in 2007 to establish their first remote office in Durham, NC,
serving in a General Manager capacity to address facilities, new business development,
and service delivery. Prior to Viget, her professional background spanned education,
mental health and clinical research. She has a Bachelor’s in Sociology (Williams
College) and a Master’s in Education (Ole Miss), studied Psychology at Oxford, and
was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand. She currently lives in North Carolina with her
husband and two sons.
Partners
Lead Organizational Sponsors
Cover DesignWeb Development Content/Production
Founding
Organizational
Sponsor
The SoDA Report Production Team
Lakai Newman, Head of Production
Jessica Ongko, Designer
The responsive version of The SoDA Report was developed with a variety of solutions from the Adobe Creative Cloud
The opinions and viewpoints expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the
authors, and do not necessarily represent or reflect the opinions or viewpoints of SoDA.
Don’t just reach your customers.
Know them.
We can help you bring together all of your data and content
into a single place, so you can deliver the ideal experience
to every customer, every time.
Adobe Marketing Cloud
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Cultural Competency in the Digital Era
1.2 How the Industry Can Work with Millennials to Drive
Positive Change
1.3 Connecting with the Healthy Lifestyle Consumer
1.4 Ready for Your Agency’s San Andreas?
1.5 Think Like a Product Developer
Industry Insider
Introduction to Industry Insider
Sean
MacPhedran
Industry Insider
Section Editor
Group Planning
Director, Fuel
From apocalyptic metaphors likening the current tumultuous state of agency
health to the Ring of Fire in the Pacific Ocean basin to examples of homegrown
entrepreneurism in China in the social media realm, this Industry Insider will take you
on a journey across sweeping changes in the cultural landscape – both inside and
outside of your organization. Our contributing authors will take you down into the
underworld of (potential) organizational collapse, but also cast a spotlight on how
so many of our peers are doing incredible things, transforming their agencies into
product-based businesses and bringing their own IP to market.
As I read the great articles – authored by the brilliant Chelsea Perino of Big Spaceship,
Cody Simmonds of Struck, Sei-Wook Kim of Barrel, Michael Polivka of JUXT and Sean
McNamara of Omelet – the second thing that occurred to me was just how lucky we
all are to work in such an open, challenging and creative industry where we’re forced
to grapple with never-ending and increasingly rapid-fire changes taking place in the
world around us.
My first thought was, “How did five separately written articles observing patterns in
our industry all align so perfectly with the archetypes in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s
Journey?”
(Third was… “Do I really want to refer back to my high school English curriculum in
this introduction?”)
For those who don’t recall, The Hero’s Journey is a pattern in stories and mythology
that repeats itself everywhere, from The Odyssey to Star Wars. It’s like the Fibonacci
Sequence or fractals, but the repetition we’re talking about here is the pattern of
human life (the meeting with the mentor, the ordeals, the road back, etc.).
We’re lucky that our industry forces us to sit at the intersection of every imaginable
cultural force – from changes in commerce and technology to shifts in generational
values. And did we mention the friction and flow stemming from the globalization of a
hundred powerful, unique tribes of human identity?
We’ve finally moved beyond the era of weekly “Death of…” clickbait articles and are
ready to start surfing the patterns. For fun, dig into The Hero with a Thousand Faces
before reading through this section. You’ll see what I mean.
There will always be change. We’ve got this. It’s our thing. It’s what we do.
What we’re good at – and will get better at – is pattern recognition, and remembering
that as much as things change, all of this has happened before. There were just fewer
gizmos.
We’re not the heroes – those are our clients – we’re the ones who tell them where the
magic swords are. We’re the ones who see the patterns.
P.S. – In the next issue, the BS Buzzword Launcher will be back with an interview with
Chelsea Hardaway, Co-Author of Why Businesspeople Speak Like Idiots, and some brand
new horrible buzzwords from SoDA Members to force into awkward conversation.
Cultural Competency in
the Digital Era
Chelsea Perino, Big Spaceship
Global. Universally relevant. Culturally agnostic. These are phrases
that have become colloquial in the language of digital advertising
as brands have realized the power and reach possible through
effective digital communications.
Advertisers are increasingly being asked to ‘think globally while acting locally,’ but
this concept is a paradox in and of itself. Irrespective of global awareness, people are a
product of their culture, a fact that strongly influences consumer behavior. In order to
win the hearts and minds of consumers around the world, multinational advertisers
need to approach creative problem solving with an unprecedented level of cultural
competency.
The challenge is that as ‘the internet of things’ becomes ever more pervasive, brands
are struggling to reach everyone, and in real time no less. As a result, conversations
are forced into a reactive state and participants (both consumers and brands) rush
to express their opinions without taking time to consider the cultural implications of
their commentary.
“Consumers
and brands
rush to express
their opinions
without taking
time to consider
the cultural
implications of
their commentary.”
“There are endless
opportunities to
tailor overarching
brand messages to
niche audiences,
making the stories
being told more
relevant, personal,
and meaningful.”
While the Internet is the ultimate example of a ‘global’ communication channel,
people – somewhat ironically –use it primarily at a local level. They use the
technology within the context of their location, and adapt it to suit their needs. The
rapid localization of global brand websites into different languages, or the adaptation
of social networks to fit specific cultural behaviors are prime examples of this trend.
Let’s take China, for example. Restricted access to global communication channels led
the Chinese to create alternatives. From Facebook, RenRen was born; from Twitter,
Weibo. But what’s more interesting is that while RenRen started as an exact Facebook
clone, it quickly developed to suit the interests of its audience. In the case of RenRen,
a heavy social gaming integration soon changed the original platform schematic.
So what does this mean for global brands and advertisers as they travel through the
creative process? The answer is three-fold.
First, there are endless opportunities to tailor overarching brand messages to niche
audiences, making the stories being told more relevant, personal, and meaningful.
Advertisers are becoming increasingly talented at taking a global brand ethos and
extending it through a local cultural lens.
Advertisers are also becoming acutely aware of the fact that with limitless
opportunities come larger margins for error. Because everyone has access to
everything, all the time, advertisers have to be particularly careful about what they
say and how their stories are presented.
Third, international client relationships are turning into the new normal. However,
the differences and unique aspects of those types of relationships are often being
overlooked.
The question then becomes, what happens if the above points are not taken into
consideration? Being culturally unaware means that brands (and their respective
advertisers) can quickly find themselves in deep water. A single misguided tweet can
cause a global outcry and tarnish a brand’s credibility forever.
It also means an arduous and frustrating campaign development process. In short,
it’s easier to be frustrated with the unfamiliar than it is to take the time to fully
understand the context of feedback within the larger organizational and cultural
architecture from whence it came.
Overall, the solution needs to start with advertisers. Improving their cultural
competency wields a positive impact the development of creative solutions, agency/
client relationships, as wel as inter-agency and even inter-team collaborations. An
open perspective paves the way for relationships that are based on respect, mutual
understanding and collaboration, ultimately leading to creative solutions that have
global impact and local relevance.
About the author: A native New Mexican, Chelsea Perino moved to New York to attend
NYU for her undergraduate studies where she received a dual degree in Anthropology
and Linguistics with a minor in Chemistry. After graduating, she traveled abroad for 4+
years, visiting more than 70 countries. She eventually entered the marketing field in
Cape Town, South Africa. She returned to NYC to complete a Master’s Degree in Public
and Organizational Relations (with a focus on Digital Communications Strategy). She
is now based in South Korea where she leads Global Strategy at Big Spaceship’s Seoul
office for a global technology brand.
Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
How the Industry Can Work
with Millennials to Drive
Positive Change
Cody Simmonds, Struck
Whatever you choose to believe about Millennials, a key
differentiator of this group is a lack of respect and obligation
towards traditional structures and processes. According to
Iconoculture, Millennials are much less likely to value justice,
integrity and duty. On the flip side, they are significantly more likely
to value passion, diversity, sharing and discovery.
Whether you choose to believe they’re privileged, entitled or hypersensitive to failure,
Millennials are a passionate, self-motivated generation who want to drive meaningful
change through collaboration, transparency and ingenuity.
Pew reports that adults ages 18 to 34 currently make up 1 in 3 of workers in the
United States. By 2030, they will encompass almost 75% of workers (predicts the US
Bureau of Labor Statistics). As this generation inundates the marketing world, we’ve
heard hundreds, if not thousands, of opinions and perspectives on Millennials, and
every passing year brings a handful of new trend reports and listicles on what makes
“Consumers
and brands
rush to express
their opinions
without taking
time to consider
the cultural
implications of
their commentary.”
“There are endless
opportunities to
tailor overarching
brand messages to
niche audiences,
making the stories
being told more
relevant, personal,
and meaningful.”
Generation Y different.
So, how can we as an industry work with Millennials to drive positive change?
As agencies, it’s critical that we encourage and enable the Millennial desire for
discovery and ingenuity. Millennials expect all experiences to be seamless – even
those found in the workplace. They thrive in a work culture that provides freedom
to experiment and challenge traditional approaches to problems. And as Millennials
move into management and executive positions, more agencies will foster
freethinking, unique work styles (death to the 9 to 5) and an increase in collaboration
and leadership regardless of skill level and experience.
This emphasis on family time over work time is reinforced by the industry trend
towards more flexible work schedules and a larger list of benefits (often in lieu of
greater compensation). And, as Millennials fill up desks and conference rooms, we
will continue to see the industry focus shift more towards building relationships
over making a living, and quality of work and experience over rigid work schedules.
Millennials will look for ongoing support from managers in place of annual
performance reviews. Managers will act as coaches and build relationships with
employees through ongoing dialogue.
Additionally, Millennials tend to stray away from restrictive business systems and
software. They have spent years taking virtual classes and communicating socially
online and thus gravitate towards technology and tools that focus on connectivity
and seamless user experience. In a totally connected world that relies on technology
such as instant chat, video conferencing and tools like Slack, physical location loses
its importance during team construction. Now, agencies have the opportunity to
leverage technology to create integrated, high functioning teams that span across the
globe.
For Millennials, spurring positive change is engrained in how they perceive the world.
Nothing is sacred, everything can be improved. And because driving change isn’t
formulaic, predictable, or one-size-fits-all, the Millennial inclination towards discovery
and ingenuity through collaboration and transparency will lead to a wide range of
solutions for problems that have long been a part of traditional professional culture.
About the authors: Cody grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Texas Christian
University with a degree in International Communications and a minor in German.
Cody’s agency experience includes expertise in account planning, strategy, research,
analytics and product innovation. When Cody is not knee-deep in market research
crafting astute strategy for clients, he is traveling to new places, playing guitar or video
games and training for his first half marathon.
Rikki Teeters is passionate about creating a better future for humanity — one experience
at a time. She has devoted her life to making both digital and physical interactions more
human. After studying Interaction Design at Miami University, Rikki pursued her love of
design and technology by entering the field of UX. She served as a contributor to this
article.
Connecting with the
Healthy Lifestyle
Consumer
Sei-Wook Kim, Barrel
Consumers are allocating more and more of their financial
resources toward living healthy and active lives. Nielson’s 2015
Global Health & Wellness Survey of 30,000 people showed
that 88% of those polled are willing to pay more for healthy
foods, especially those that are GMO-free and all-natural. The
number of people who are passionate about living a health life
is skyrocketing. Especially among Generation Z and Millennials,
participation in physical activities, eating healthy diets, and getting
more sleep are behaviors that are on the rise. As “healthy” is
becoming mainstream, it’s important to differentiate products and
educate consumers.
“If you’re an
agency considering
specialization,
focus on an area
that aligns with
your core values
and select a
domain where
you already have a
moderate-to-high
level of ‘literacy’ as
well as a desire to
learn more.”
At Barrel, we made the decision in early 2015 to focus on working with healthy lifestyle
brands. As a team, we align with the values of companies trying to empower positive
changes in people’s lives. This was a deliberate decision to focus our company’s
positioning and strengthen our expertise in a single vertical.
Specialization is increasingly common in the agency space. But being a specialized
agency can mean many different things. It can signify a specific focus on a type of
work product (place-based digital experiences, analytics or user experience). It can
mean a niche focus on a particular industry (finance, CPG or pharmaceuticals) or a
consumer segment (babies, moms or teens). If you’re considering becoming more
specialized, it’s important to focus on an area that aligns with your agency’s core
values and to select a domain where you already have a moderate-to-high level of
‘literacy’ as well as a desire to learn more.
We attended healthy lifestyle industry conferences and spent time understanding
the industry, consumer, and competitive landscape. Through these experiences, we
have developed industry-specific thought leadership that supports our new agency
positioning.
Through our experience working with a range of healthy lifestyle brands in food and
fitness, there are some common challenges that companies in this space are facing.
Differentiation
With more and more entrants to the healthy lifestyle space, brands are seeing a
tremendous increase in competition. The scale became evident when we attended
the 2015 Natural Products Expo West, the world’s largest natural, organic and healthy
products event. There were over 2,700 exhibitors at the Expo, and 634 of them
were first-time exhibitors. With competitors popping up every day, it’s crucial to
communicate unique values and benefits through strong brand positioning.
Transparency
Consumers in this segment care about what they’re putting in (and on) their bodies
and are getting savvier and more discerning with their research. To gain the trust of
consumers, brands must become more transparent about their health claims and be
clear about their manufacturing processes. For food companies, this means greater
clarity into ingredients and the source of those ingredients. It’s important to help
educate consumers about health and wellness claims. The pressure is on brands to
create impactful content through channels like blogs, white papers and social media.
Personalization
Living a healthier life is a decision that often requires changing old habits. Research
shows that when people go through the process of trying something healthy, they’re
likely to fall back into bad habits. Not terribly surprising. However, one thing we’ve
learned is that personalization can be a highly effective way to help drive habit
change. This can start from the purchase phase – creating unique interactive content
to guide people to choose the right products or programs for them, and then taking
it further post-purchase to push relevant content based on previous interests and
behavior.
To continue to engage consumers, brands can provide relevant incentives or rewards
to encourage the repetition needed for developing healthy habits. Automated email
marketing can be a powerful tool to send timely reminders to support the new habit.
The data gathered about interests can be used to push information through wearables
and social networks. The goal is to create reminders and triggers that people can act
upon to engage with a brand.
Future Opportunity
Brands can drive positive change in consumers’ lives by developing innovative
products that clearly (and honestly) communicate healthy lifestyle benefits. The
market opportunities are immense, but – increasingly – so is the competition.
Strongly consider strategies, platforms and tactics that support personalization as
an approach that will not only help you stand out from the competition, but that also
reinforce the positive changes your consumers are trying to make in their lives.
Side note for agencies: Be smart about how you approach specialization. Choose your
focus wisely and do the work necessary to turn your acumen in a particular area into
unparalleled and widely acknowledged expertise.
About the author: Sei-Wook Kim is a Principal and Co-Founder of Barrel, a digital agency
based in New York City. He oversees Technology and Operations at the company. He
started Barrel with Peter Kang in June 2006 while at Columbia University and graduated
in 2007 with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.
Barrel is now a 30-person agency with a broad range of clients including KIND Healthy
Snacks, McGraw-Hill Education, Columbia University and NCR.
Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
Ready for Your Agency’s
San Andreas?
Michael Polivka, JUXT
Back in 1996, I saw Johnny Cash play at the Ohio State Fair with his
wife June Carter. Seeing this couple perform the Ring of Fire was a
magical moment. Interestingly, to this day there’s still some debate
over who wrote this song and what it’s actually about.
The Ring of Fire we’ll be referencing today is far less controversial. It’s the string of
volcanoes and earthquake-prone seismic hotspots that wrap around the edges of the
Pacific Ocean. 75% of the planet’s active volcanoes reside there, and nearly 90% of all
earthquakes occur there – including activity from the cinematically popularized San
Andreas Fault. Simply put, it’s the lifeline of our planet’s change.
RING OF FIRE
While it may be scary to ponder, violent change is quite natural and commonplace,
and leads to new growth and opportunities. Looking out my window, California
wouldn’t even be here today if not for huge shifts in the planet’s tectonic plates.
Jumping to the other side of the world for a moment, I recently learned there are
trilobite fossils at the top of Mount Everest, which stand at 29,000 feet and grow an
“Intense change is
quite natural and
commonplace,
and leads to
new growth and
opportunities.”
“The work we do
for our clients
today is more
advanced, more
difficult to scope
and requires more
trust.”
inch taller each year. Trilobites, a once prolific group of little buggers, were one of the
earliest known groups of arthropods. A whopping 500 million years ago, they began to
flourish in our oceans, falling to the bottom of the sea when they died. Their fossils at
the top of Mount Everest tell us the tallest point on Earth was at some time one of its
lowest. Crazy. Big. Change.
What the hell does this have to do with the workplace and positive change?
Everything!
I like to think that agencies live right along a sort of metaphorical Ring of Fire. And, for
companies here in San Francisco, we’re also living along the real one. As my friend and
business consultant Yumi Prentice once told me “Agencies are three phone calls away
from disaster.” I agree. But we’re also three phone calls away from incredible success.
Kind of like our planet.
CONSTANT CHANGE
Winston Churchill once said “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change
often.” With that, here are five pointers to help make the best of our constantly
evolving business conditions:
1. Always be ready
Our best employees will leave us. Our favorite clients will stop giving us their money.
Our newest clients will give us so much work we’ll need to hire twenty new people
in a week. Like it or not, this is agency life – and it’s how we roll. So be prepared for
change, and lots of it.
Agencies are like high performance cars. Much like owning a 1970 Corvette, we need
to know the condition of our parts at all times. This way, when something inevitably
breaks, we’ll at least have a general idea of how to remedy it, how long it will take to
fix it and how much it’ll cost.
When it comes to money, we need to manage our books responsibly and have
realistic predictive models for the year. When it comes to talent, we need to hire
great teammates and keep tabs on group and individual performance. Overall, we
as agency leaders must have day-to-day plans (as well as contingency plans) that let
us focus on the work at hand without distraction, yet allow us to be prepared for the
unexpected.
2. Be grounded in the present, but plant seeds for the future
The work we do for our clients today is significantly different than it was just a few
years ago. It’s more advanced, more difficult to scope, and requires more trust with
the client – and collaboration with their myriad partners – than ever before.
It’s wise for us to regularly break out our agency bifocals to address immediate short-
term needs while also considering our longer-term trajectories. We need to get our
current work done amazingly well with our best practitioners, but we also need to do
everything we can to support internal labs, incubators and intern talent farms. They
will be the next generation of our agencies.
The future will be upon us quickly, and this new and fresh talent, with different
“Break out your
agency bifocals to
address immediate
short-term needs
while also
considering longer-
term trajectories.”
perspectives and lifestyles than the team of today, will help our agencies grow and
prosper. These up-and-comers may not know what a cassette tape or a Walkman is
(unreal), but they’ve been using touchscreens almost half their lives (surreal).
3. Stay committed to growth
Sooner or later times will get tough, and we’ll need to make difficult choices in order
to survive. Things as unfortunate as layoffs, moving to a new (and somehow already
unpopular) office space, and spending freezes all come to mind.
But we mustn’t give up. Our eyes must always be on the prize.
It’s impossible to accomplish all of our dreams in the short term. But that’s ok. We
keep the ideas alive by using a parking lot list, along with the promise that we’ll grow
and make the agency better when we can.
There’s incredible value in reactive, short-term thinking, planning and actions. But
these alone obviously can’t be the basis of our business model.
4. Remember this is a performance business
I watch sports playoffs as well as pre-season preparation to see how teams in hyper-
competitive spaces adjust to all the changes they face. Sometimes change is minor
– adding and losing a few mid-value players. Sometimes it’s significant – such as the
rebuild of the San Francisco 49ers in 2015.
In the NFL, regardless of what anyone tells me, I know only about 6 of the 32 teams
are really considered contenders to win the Super Bowl at the beginning of any given
season. Some teams are rebuilding while others are making small tweaks. Some have
money to spend on talent, others don’t.
We need to know where our team is, being honest about expectations for the year. We
can then build around its core competencies constructively. Individual accountability
is key. If our team members simply aren’t performing – or if they demonstrate
behavioral issues – it’s our responsibility to help them. If they’re simply not going
to generate more energy than they consume, then it’s time for them to move on. In
those unfortunate instances, we need to make that happen before they take down our
agency’s morale. We need to own this.
5. Live by tenets of success
Truth, integrity, kindness and responsibility – these are values that ultimately lead to
genuine and long-lasting success. They are also values that attract other great people
to one another.
It’s simple: We all know right from wrong, and neither our employees nor our clients
want to work with bullshitters. So don’t be one. And don’t let fear of failure drive your
business decisions.
BENDING WITH THE WIND
Kensho Furuya, the legendary Aikido master, once said, “The warrior, like bamboo, is
ever ready for action.” And as Bruce Lee continued “Notice that the stiffest tree is most
easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.“
Agencies, like everything else in the universe, encounter continual change. With
flexibility and adaptive strength, we can succeed.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.
About the author: Michael Polivka is a business leader and transformation specialist
with a focus on human interaction, awareness, design and technology. He is the
Principal of Operations at JUXT, a San Francisco based creative innovation agency and
member of SoDA.
Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
Think Like a Product
Developer
Sean McNamara, Omelet
The traditional agency model is built for service. It looks something
like this: a client has a need – a marketing problem that said client
does not have the capabilities to solve itself – and an agency
fulfills it with generalized services. For the 99% of agencies that
bill themselves as full-service shops, that means bundling the
functions of strategy, creative, production and distribution, and
delivering 360-degree thinking, whether the client ordered the
whole pie or just a slice.
These services are often packaged under the guise of “the big idea,” an eminently
campaign-able concept that promises brand consistency across all mediums, not to
mention a protracted shelf-life, on the condition that the agency-of-record own the
linear process that nurtures that idea to life, from inception to delivery to the grave.
Value is measured by the perceived quality of the deliverables (translation: how well
the agency protects the idea from being smothered to a premature death by the
client). Price is determined by time and headcount. There’s scarcely any incentive for
alacrity or speed since the longer it takes to move the idea down that assembly line,
and the more workers who have to be involved in building it, the more lucrative the
engagement.
On the other end of the spectrum, a new breed of upstarts is prototyping a very
different agency model, focused on productizing solutions. By offering clients access
to media and technology platforms, supported by distributed networks of specialists,
they operate more like software developers than creative storytellers. In agency
circles, the words “automated marketing solutions” typically provoke one of two
reactions: sweaty night terrors for seasoned advertising veterans or the promise of
making money while sleeping for aspiring ad tech entrepreneurs.
For product-centric shops, value is measured in positive outcomes, and price is
determined by performance, or the ability of a black box solution – be it an algorithm,
artificial intelligence model, or data stream – to generate measurable sales results.
“The agency
model of the
future is neither
service-centric
nor product-
centric…it’s
guided by human
intuition, but held
accountable by
machine-based
learning.”
“Enlightened
agencies are
rethinking
organizational
designs, recruiting
in unconventional
talent pools,
hacking inefficient
workflows, and
testing new
methodologies
for intelligence
gathering and
analysis.”
The more efficiently and effectively it drives bottom-funnel conversions, and the lower
the cost-per-transaction, the higher the payout.
Somewhere in between these two polar opposites is the agency model of the future.
It’s neither service-centric nor product-centric. It’s guided by human intuition,
but held accountable by machine-based learning. It’s equal parts predictive and
reactive. It can balance the changing needs of clients with the unpredictable needs
of clients’ customers. Clients now need to out-think (not necessarily out-spend) their
competitors in an environment where consumers have more choice, and therefore
more control, than ever before. This model anticipates unstated needs earlier and
with greater accuracy, and informs rapid ideation, deployment, measurement, and
optimization of solutions.
It may sound utopian, even unrealistic, given the harsh realities of the bare-knuckle
boxing ring most creative agencies enter each day. But there is a new breed of
agencies that are actively adapting at the speed of change: rethinking organizational
designs, recruiting in unconventional talent pools, taking apart those linear processes,
hacking inefficient workflows, and testing new methodologies for intelligence
gathering and analysis.
These agencies are placing lots of smaller bets on opportunities that sit on the
far corners of the table, rather than reinforcing their core competencies. They’re
developing their own IP, investing in new ventures, and funding enterprises that have
no immediate revenue stream attached to them.
At first blush, these efforts may appear to be loss-leaders, or short-term tactics to
gain visibility in a crowded and homogenous space, but they’re more often strategic
initiatives designed to attract and retain the best talent, develop high-potential
employees, and build organizational intelligence that transcends those inbound
opportunities from paying clients that keep the lights on.
As more client organizations, from legacy incumbents to disruptive startups, move
towards structures where product development and marketing align under a single
team, this new agency models also reflects a shift in corporate strategy that’s pushing
the product into the spotlight. As a result, marketing stories are being seeded further
upstream in the R&D process to generate early demand.
And that’s the real opportunity ahead for futurists – to reorient the agency business
for a fast and fluid marketplace where everything, including ‘the big idea’, is forever in
prototype, and nothing is precious. Will you be ready?
About the author: In addition to steering Omelet’s strategic vision and leading all client
engagements, Sean recently launched The Roost, a strategic consulting and advisory
unit dedicated to accelerating growth and innovation. Sean graduated from Colgate
University with a degree in Latin American Studies, and has lived in Ecuador, Panama,
Venezuela, Hong Kong, and throughout the United States. When he’s not locked in a war
room at the office or on the road with clients, Sean can be found at the beach in Venice
with his daughter Quinn.
2.0 Introduction
2.1 The Inevitable Disruption of Advertising
2.2 The New Exceptionalism: Business Understanding
Modern Marketer
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Introduction to Modern Marketer
Rob Thorsen
Modern Marketer
Section Editor
Managing Director,
Big Spaceship
In the last edition of The SoDA Report, Modern Marketer took a look at the tools and
techniques that are being brought forward by agencies to help their client partners
spur positive change.
Implicit in that set of articles was the realization that what had previously been good
enough was no longer the right course of action. The time for positive change had
come.
Everyone knows the maxim: The only constant is change.
And in the grand sense that’s true. But in practice that’s obviously not the case. Our
experience tells us there are periods of change and there are periods of continuity.
Looking at it this way reveals what we all know to be the most difficult part of the
equation: determining when and how we should change.
Out of all the opportunities and challenges, this is the one thing we spend the most
time trying to tackle. Deciding when and how to change will continue to be the
defining challenge for agencies as we move into 2016 and beyond (unless of course
you’ve hit the bottom and the only choice is change, in which case it’s probably a bit
too late anyway…).
If there is no prescribed timeline or outcome, perhaps it’s really just a matter of having
a consistent mindset and perennially analyzing the best timing and methods for
driving change.
During a conversation here at our agency not too long ago, we began to question if
our industry is still fueled by the same spirit that abounded at its inception. At that
point in time, it was all risk, all the time. Our toolset was crap, there were no rules and
no one really knew where things were headed.
Fast-forward to today…our toolset is amazing, the rules are increasingly restrictive (or
at least defined) and – more often than not – the order of the day is mitigating risk.
Over the course of that discussion, we agreed that we’re undoubtedly at our best
as an industry when we’ve got the right balance between building mastery in our
current context and at the same time plotting for its disruption. Not for the sake of it,
but because we’ve harnessed our intelligence and judgment to uncover the fact that
there is a better way. Basically, we believe it’s important to apply the same spirit that
created our industry in new and forward-looking ways.
Change need not be the only thing that’s constant. The values that drive our approach
to leading change can be as well.
Our contributors in this edition of Modern Marketer do their part to address the
different facets of the ‘change’ question.
Understanding when to change is a theme Adobe’s Christian Cantrell builds on as he
takes a critical look at the state of online advertising.
For her part, Ann Ystén of Perfect Fools puts forward a point of view on how the
modern agency partner needs to evolve to play a more critical role in driving
transformative change for clients in ways that transcend the marketing realm.
Please enjoy these provocations and see what ideas they spark for you.
The Inevitable Disruption
of Advertising
Christian Cantrell, Adobe
Disruption requires two main ingredients. The first one is obviously
innovation. That’s the sexy side of technology: the iPhone, the
streaming music service, the nice clean Uber right around the
corner ready to take you and your crew out for cocktails. But the
second ingredient actually comes first, and though it is far less
compelling, it’s every bit as necessary.
Before there can be truly disruptive innovation, you need a long dark period of
stagnation: the frustrating and clunky proto-smartphone; the unwieldy, multi-
gigabyte music collection requiring hours of curation and syncing; the reckless taxi
that takes twenty minutes to hail, and then refuses to accept your credit card.
If there’s one technology I would compare to a miserable cab ride through a hot, loud,
and congested city, it’s online advertising. When animations aren’t competing for
your attention, pre-roll video ads are distracting you from your distractions. And, of
course, the moment you finally settle into a captivating read, you usually find yourself
assaulted by a full-screen, modal dialog begging you to subscribe so that you can
subject yourself to all of these abuses on a regular basis.
“Wherever inferior
experiences
and financial
opportunity
overlap, innovation
and disruption
can’t be far
behind.”
Yet, like taxis, online advertising is a vital service. Without it, that content we’re
trying so hard to get to, and then to focus on, wouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s
a complex and vaguely Freudian relationship wherein the very thing we hate makes
the things we love possible. Fortunately, wherever inferior experiences and financial
opportunity overlap, innovation and disruption can’t be far behind.
If your own experiences aren’t enough to convince you that we are firmly entangled
in a quagmire of online advertising gluttony, let’s take a quick look at how both
individuals and industries are responding. According to a joint 2014 study by PageFair
and Adobe, ad blocking grew by nearly 70% to about 144 million active users between
2013 and 2014. That places browser plugins like AdBlock and AdBlock Plus—once
secrets of the technorati—firmly within mainstream territory. And with Apple’s iOS 9
now supporting “content” blocking (a euphemism for stripping ads from websites),
ad blocking is rapidly being adopted in the one place the advertising industry was
expecting the most significant growth: mobile. In a series of tests conducted in
September of this year, The New York Times reported that for a number of websites
that contained mobile ads, web page data sizes actually decreased significantly and
load times accelerated enormously because so many users had enabled ad blockers.
Now that we’ve established both the stagnation of online advertising, and the pent-up
demand for disruption, let’s take a look at some of the innovations that will hopefully
lead to better experiences for readers, and therefore better returns for publishers and
advertisers.
The most well-known is probably the new Apple News application that was
introduced with iOS 9 (not coincidentally, along with content blocking). While Apple
News is primarily about aggregating and curating nicely formatted articles from a
wide variety of publishers, it’s also about a better advertising experience since all ads
served by Apple’s iAds platform must comply with strict content guidelines. Likewise,
over the summer, Facebook introduced their Instant Articles initiative which not
only caches content locally for near-instantaneous viewing, but also imposes a set of
guidelines on ads served by their own advertising network.
Then there are the more open (meaning less proprietary) approaches aimed at fixing
advertising. Although it may seem like the AdBlock Plus (ABP) browser plugin is in the
business of blocking ads, one might argue that it is, in fact, in the business of deciding
which ads not to block.
By default, ABP allows ads through their filter that they consider “acceptable” which
their manifesto defines as experiences that are neither disruptive nor annoying. In
response to concerns over a single company having the power to decide which ads
are acceptable and which get blocked, Eyeo, the company behind ABP, announced in
September of this year that it will relinquish control of the Acceptable Ads Program to
an independent review board. (Details forthcoming.)
And finally, there’s Google’s response. Like Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles,
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, or AMP, is ostensibly about delivering
and rendering mobile content many times faster than it is today. But it is also
very much about establishing a standard where ads know their place and behave
themselves, and readers therefore have less incentive to block them.
If we try to pinpoint where online advertising currently falls within the equation
of stagnation + innovation = disruption, I’d say we are still in the early stages of
innovation, but headed resolutely toward disruption. How this multibillion-dollar
industry will ultimately be transformed, nobody yet knows. Nonetheless, I’m
confident that it will be remade in a form that will strike a much more equitable
balance across stakeholders. It’s inevitable that there will be a redistribution of
winners and losers along the way, but as with most disruptive moments in tech
history, I believe we will be left with an environment where both media creation and
consumption will be able to flourish in ways that benefit everyone.
About the author: Christian Cantrell is a Senior Experience Development Manager on
Adobe’s XD team, and a science fiction author.
The New Exceptionalism:
Business Understanding
Ann Ystén, Perfect Fools
Digital agencies are feeling the squeeze at both ends – struggling
to compete for transformational work while simultaneously being
undercut by technology.
Web and social content has moved into an era of automation. Squarespace produces
pretty competent websites for $100 a month, while social content management
programmes such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social will pull out statistics and even
suggest popular posts. For many marketers, these sausage-machine services are
“good enough” and seriously undermine established agency offerings.
When it comes to new tech solutions for digital challenges, we’re also faced
with competition from innovation labs, tech start-ups and in-house product
developers, established by the likes of John Lewis in UK, and Unilever globally.
This unprecedented challenge reflects the fact that lines are blurring between
communication, business strategy and products. The digitalization and mobilisation
of business requires solutions that go well beyond the marketing department.
While agencies can provide these solutions, too many of us don’t talk the language
of business and therefore never get to deliver true digital transformation. To
“The lines are
blurring between
communication,
business strategy
and products.”
really challenge a client’s business performance, agencies must understand every
aspect of that client – from production and sales, to customer service and product
development. By developing a deeper understanding of the business challenges our
clients face, we can articulate more meaningful solutions and ensure that our offers
aren’t seen as experimental or simply a bit of fun.
For example, our work on a forthcoming FMCG* campaign has led to a new piece of
machinery being installed on the factory floor precisely because we were able to
demonstrate the business impact that would result from the investment. We were
able to make the case for this technical innovation only after deep research into target
group preferences and extensive conversation with the production department in
addition to the marketing department.
For the launch of Peak Performance’s collection of outdoor clothing, we worked with a
wide range of teams, including e-commerce, logistics, production and the company’s
creative director, as well as its global market team. Without this investment to
gain deeper understanding and insight, we would not have delivered work that
successfully transformed their business model by establishing virtual pop up shops in
remote locations.
We went even deeper with Sweden’s largest broadcaster (SVT) in building a second-
screen experience and pioneering app for a key programme, Melodifestivalen,
Sweden’s huge qualifying competition for the Eurovision Song Contest. We met with
a range of departments and acted as consultants within a complex, cross-discipline
team of professionals. The work resulted in significant changes to the TV show’s
format. Only by embedding ourselves within SVT were we able to innovate, increase
audience engagement and transform the show’s real-time scoring system. Our
solution is now being adopted across many other formats.
There are other great examples of agencies making a transformative impact on their
clients’ businesses. Great Works’ collaboration with Pernod Ricard to create ultra-
local brands of vodka is one of them. Setting up bespoke micro-distilleries in 12 cities
around the world clearly required a deep relationship and understanding of the
production department, as well as the marketing side of the business.
Similarly, IBM used Grand Slam tennis event Wimbledon to showcase its data
processing and analytics capability. A 10-strong technology team enabled the brand
to engage with fans via data-driven, amusing and shareable content that connected
with influencers and businesses in order to increase sales. Such examples, however,
are few and far between. There still aren’t very many of us who are ready to take this
route. Next-generation agencies need to contribute more than marketing benefits. I
believe we need to adopt three behaviours to deliver transformation.
First, we need to put the client’s business at the centre of our strategic planning and
think like business innovators rather than digital creatives. This is a huge cultural
challenge.
Second, we need an everyday process that encompasses all aspects of the client’s
business, giving various departments (not just marketing) the opportunity to
influence the new concepts we’re exploring. As we did with SVT, we need to
understand the timescales that each unit operates within and be willing to adapt the
process to make everyone comfortable.
Third, we must learn how to divide responsibilities and ensure that everyone involved
owns their part of the project. With so many people involved, there is an acute risk
that no one will feel ownership of the project. We must overcome that risk in order to
deliver true digital transformation.
In summary, the digital agency of the future needs more than technical and creative
expertise. It needs business consultants who have a deep understanding of the client
side and the right skillset to engage effectively with professionals from a wide range of
company disciplines, including logistics, production, sales and marketing. Only with
this insight can an agency offer sharp, workable solutions. Such consultants can talk
the same language as clients and will help agency teams move beyond being experts
in digital strategy to become agents of business transformation.
* FMCG = Fast-Moving Consumer Good, also known as a Consumer Packaged Good (CPG)
About the author: Ann Ystén is the CEO of Perfect Fools. With over 25 years in marketing
and advertising focusing on CPG and luxury products, her career is a journey through
some of Sweden’s best brands – from Pripps to SAS and Absolut Vodka. She has worked
in a number of executive leadership roles on both the agency and client sides of the
industry. Ann passionately strives to deliver the prerequisite business performance
by always nurturing the brand first and foremost. She strongly believes in technical
innovation as a critical part of creative communication.
“To really challenge
a client’s business
performance,
agencies must
understand
every aspect
of that client –
from production
and sales, to
customer service
and product
development.”
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Does Your Brand Help or Hinder Your Talent Development
Efforts?
3.2 Incentivizing Your Staff Beyond Carrot and Stick
Talent
Introduction to Talent
Emily Bloom
Talent Section
Editor
Managing Director,
People, Viget
Behind every piece of great work is a team of talented people. Our success as agencies
depends on our ability to consistently find, hire and empower those people. The
talent challenge isn’t new or unique to our industry, but the market is as competitive
as ever and roles seem to get more specialized each year.
Brooke Heck’s article builds a case for why developing a strong employment brand is
essential to any digital agency in today’s competitive market. She goes on to provide
practical steps for creating or fine-tuning your employment brand.
Of course, after making the right hires, we enjoy the continual challenge of keeping
people engaged in their work. Cain Ullah walks us through the approach at Red
Badger, largely informed by Dan Pink’s book, Drive. By “incentivising beyond the stick
and carrot,” Cain explains how we can tap into deeper and more lasting sources of
inspiration that sustain employees over time.
Cain also touches on a growing theme in our industry: hiring for diversity. Research
confirms that diverse creative teams solve problems more effectively than non-diverse
ones. Accordingly, diversity initiatives are emerging as both part of employment brand
strategies as well as critical business strategies.
We’re attracted to the constant changes of our industry in terms of technology; let’s
also embrace changing trends on the talent side. The articles that follow spark ideas
for keeping current and nimble in the evolving discipline of people operations.
Does Your Brand Help or Hinder
Your Talent Development Efforts?
Brooke Heck, Phenomblue
“Employment brand” is the term commonly used to describe an
organization’s reputation as an employer, as opposed to its more
general corporate brand reputation. An effective employment
brand reduces turnover and supports recruiting efforts, while
invigorating and aligning senior leadership and staff.
Employment brands are integral and imperative to an organization’s success, affecting
the bottom line now more than ever. However, getting it right can be a challenge.
Many organizations mistakenly assume their consumer-facing brand embodies the
same characteristics needed to attract the best talent, failing to articulate what
actually sets them apart in the employment space.
As of November 2015, the US unemployment rate was 5.0% — down from 10%
in October 2009, and the lowest it’s been since April 2008. When you couple the
low unemployment rate with recent reports that show nearly 55% of employed
professionals are actively seeking new employment or advancement, it means most
new jobs are going to people currently with jobs.
As such, the post-digital, connected age is one of the most competitive environments
“Organizations
must have a
clear, actionable
plan in place to
successfully attract
and retain the best
talent.”
“Hiring is
expensive. Losing
employees is even
more expensive.
Focus on the
desired outcome.”
for talent in the last 10 to 15 years. Today, employees choose their employer just
as much as the employer chooses them, and it’s never been more important to
recruit the right people and retain them. Prospective talent must be able to visualize
themselves working at an organization in order to feel comfortable choosing a place
of employment.
When crafting an employment brand, organizations must have a clear, actionable plan
in place to successfully attract and retain the best talent. You must ask yourself who
are the people looking for jobs? What would motivate them to accept a position with
your organization, or to stay in their current position? Today, with fair compensation
and benefits as table stakes, it’s paramount to take a close look at your organization’s
culture on a regular basis to ensure it’s a place that people want to be.
Hiring is expensive. Losing employees is even more expensive. Focus on the desired
outcome. Think about how your employees tell people what they do or what you
do. Are they happy? Authentic? Do they use their own words? Do they understand
your organization’s strategic goals and how they apply to their day-to-day? For most
companies, employees are the number one referrer of new talent. Employees who are
aligned internally are your organization’s best brand advocates. People who interact
with aligned employees and have positive experiences become influencers.
Organizations need to start by having a clear strategy in place. Something that
resonates internally and externally, something that differentiates your organization in
the sea of employers vying for the same talent and allows you to hire the right people,
on-board them and assimilate them into the culture purposefully and authentically.
Once they’re on board, you’ll need a plan (and specific tactics) to empower and retain
the best of them.
If your organization is looking to build an employment brand, here are a few
takeaways to get started:
	 1. Identify your work culture. Who are you? What makes you attractive to 	
	 potential talent? What makes people in your organization stay?
	 2. Define a position you can own and defend. How are you different than 	
	 everyone else competing for the same talent?
	 3. Create the perceptions you need to be successful. Determine what people 	
	 outside and inside your organization need to think and feel in order to attract 	
	 and retain top talent.
About the author: Brooke Heck is a Vice President and Practice Lead at Phenomblue,
a connected communications firm. Brooke is an acclaimed business leader, whose
strategies and tactical executions have helped numerous companies – including Disney
and GE – achieve success in the digital age. An experienced entrepreneur, having
launched two startups in the healthcare and wellness space, Brooke now works to help
prepare organizations of all shapes and sizes for success in the post-digital, connected
age.
Incentivizing Your Staff
Beyond Carrot and Stick
Cain Ullah, Red Badger
A common misconception is that financial rewards, such as
performance-based bonuses, always help improve employee
motivation. In fact, the opposite is often true. So what are the best
techniques for increasing employee motivation and productivity?
Early in my career, whenever I had a financial incentive to do well, I generally disliked
the process. My performance would typically be evaluated against a number of
arbitrary targets, including – at times – a review of my utilization rate. The targets may
have made perfect financial sense to the business, but encouraged a strange culture
of focusing on being billed or ticking boxes you knew would result in a bonus.
When designing a culture that would support our strategy and drive performance at
Red Badger, we decided to do things differently. We began research on motivation,
which led us down some very interesting rabbit holes with unexpected findings.
What motivates us?
As we researched the topic, we discovered decades of insights on the subject of
motivation and creativity as well as individual and team performance across a wide
“The key is to
allow our staff
the freedom to be
creative, to learn all
the time, to explore
new things and to
provide them with
work that they feel
really matters.”
array of fields ranging from business to psychology to sociology. Dan Pink’s book
Drive provides a particularly compelling review of the scientific research on human
motivation that has been conducted around the globe.
All of the research points toward a general misconception that the “carrot and stick
approach” (i.e. “If you do this, then you get that”) improves motivation. Carrot and
stick rewards are effective for tasks that are purely mechanical. For any task that
requires some level of cognitive thought, the science shows that such rewards have a
detrimental effect on productivity. The simple reason for this is that carrot and stick
rewards narrow people’s focus and stop people from thinking laterally, thus inhibiting
their creativity. Teresa Amibile, a prominent Harvard Business School Professor, has
underscored this finding in her own research:
	 “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is 	
	 detrimental to creativity.”
Intrinsic motivation is inside the body and mind. An example of intrinsic motivation
would be performing an action or activity because you enjoy the activity itself…
because it’s personally rewarding to you. Extrinsic motivation would involve
performing an action for tangible rewards (or pressures), rather than for the fun of it.
If you want to motivate team members performing cognitive tasks, you need to
find incentives that affect them emotionally. Cash simply doesn’t cut it. Of course,
paying your staff well is important to make them feel like they are being treated fairly.
However, once they are paid fairly, extra cash incentives related to their personal
performance is not recommended. The research shows that three of the key factors
that lead to better performance are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Dan Pink
describes these three factors as the following:
	 • Autonomy - Our desire to be self-directed.
	 • Mastery - The urge to get better at stuff that matters
	 • Purpose - To work in the service of something that is bigger than ourselves
So what can you do to motivate your staff? Below are a few examples of what we’ve
implemented at Red Badger to get you thinking.
Autonomy
Red Badger trusts our staff to do the right thing. The key is for staff to be in control of
the decisions they make day-to-day. We don’t have line management (only mentors),
so there is no micromanagement. We have flexible working hours and we offer a
£2K training budget each year that employees are able to use as they see fit. We run
projects with a loose framework designed with autonomous cells of people. Those
cells are in charge of the decisions from how the project is run from technology choice
to delivery approach. The more autonomy you provide your staff, the more productive
and happy they tend to be.
Netflix provides another great example of Autonomy. Employees at the company
have no holiday limit and are able to set their own schedule for paid time off. In
practice, their people typically work more than they would have otherwise with a
more traditional holiday benefits package. Best Buy also implements ROWE (Results
“If you want a
smarter more
productive
company, try and
build and hire for
a culture of gender
equality.”
Only Work Environment), where pay is not related to working hours at all.
Mastery
We try to provide our employees with the best possible environment to collaborate
and share knowledge. We explore various ways of doing this, including a monthly
company meeting at the office where everyone takes a turn to present key bits
of knowledge – be it a demo of a client project or some thought leadership. We
encourage them to innovate.
We never take predetermined solutions to our clients, but rather allow our teams to
cater solutions specific to the requirements at hand. If that means using technology
that we haven’t leveraged before, that’s fine. We also are heavily involved in the
open source community, building our own open source software and contributing to
others. Additionally, we do quite a lot of pro-bono work for philanthropic causes. Our
staff is always driving the evolution of how Red Badger does things because they are
passionate, smart people who love what they do and we don’t get in their way. The
key is to allow our staff the freedom to be creative, to learn all the time, to explore
new things and to provide them with work that they feel really matters. The more you
can turn work into play, the better.
Purpose
All great companies have a strong vision and reason for being. It is important for
your employees to know exactly what that is in order to feel like they’re a part of the
company’s cause. At Red Badger, we take this one step further. Every year we have
a company day where we get employees to do a workshop on the company’s vision
and purpose. The outcome of the workshop is a whole wall of post-its with insights on
why Red Badger exists, how we realize the ‘why’ and what the tangible outcomes are.
We then use the outputs of the workshop to drive our value proposition and service
offerings. By doing this, all of our staff feel part of a common purpose because they
have been instrumental in building it.
Something else that we do (not all companies will be comfortable with this) is to be
completely transparent with our financial results. Every quarter we present turnover,
profit, margins, cash in the bank, etc. We have found that this not only provide a
sense of job security, but it helps employees correlate what they do day-to-day with
the overall success of the company.
Gender equality
My final piece of advice is that you aim to build a company with gender equality.
We are nearly 50/50 at Red Badger. There is some great research by Anita Wooley,
Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon, on what makes
teams productive. Her findings pointed conclusively to gender equality being more
important to increased collective intelligence than individual IQ scores. So, if you want
a smarter more productive company, try and build and hire for a culture of gender
equality.
About the author: A computer science graduate who moved into business consulting,
Cain has been an advocate of agile and lean methods of software delivery for over
10 years. He has worked with large corporations helping them to reduce waste,
innovate and build excellent customer experiences. Now as CEO at Red Badger, Cain
is responsible for Strategy, Culture, Sales and Marketing. Red Badger is currently
working to help clients such as Tesco, BSkyB and Fortnum & Mason build enterprise
web applications using innovative technology, collaborative workflows and rigorous
customer experience strategy.
Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
The SoDA Report (Volume 2, 2015)
4.1 The Rise of Opinionated Software – And What It Means for
Agencies
4.2 Talking Unicorns
4.3 Tearing Down the Walls of User Experience
Tech Talk
The Rise of Opinionated
Software – And What It
Means for Agencies
Stuart Eccles, Made by Many
For years, tech entrepreneurs have been able to solve large-scale
problems for entire markets at a very broad level. Their ability to
do so is enabled by the unit economics* of software. Conversely,
business consultants and agencies, inhibited by the labor costs
and discernment required to develop and execute customized –
yet scalable - strategies, have oftentimes resigned themselves to
narrowly solve problems for clients facing distinct challenges at
precise moments in time. Never the two shall meet. Until now.
I’m convinced that the next big turn of the wheel for enterprise software belongs to
consultants and other experts looking to deliver their vision at scale. The foundation
is in place for them to deliver that vision within a more narrowly defined problem area
than has typically been the case in the enterprise segment which usually focuses on
broad service offerings.
These days, the most promising opportunity in the consulting realm is turning new
ideas into repeatable, scalable, ‘value-adding’ SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions
to sell to clients. The value upside is far greater than consulting models alone and it
can solve issues such as lumpy cash flow by producing monthly, recurring revenue
streams.
This new opportunity exists because service businesses are now more readily able to
couple their deep understanding of their clients’ problems with new creative ways of
solving those problems. The goal (and promise) in this new era is to produce better
ways of doing things, not just more efficient ways of doing things. Such a vision
requires the deployment of Opinionated Products.
An Opinionated Product is a software product that has been developed based on
the belief that a certain way of approaching a business process is inherently better
than the alternatives. Products always start out with a plan and a purpose, yet it is
fairly common to see them morph and deviate from their intended path over time.
And that’s fine to a certain degree as long as the new end-product is a byproduct
of your opinion, your vision and your strategic assessment of the product’s usage.
Non-opinionated products are jam-packed with settings and configurations
developed to provide ultimate flexibility to users. The problem with this approach is
that no product can do all things equally well when it has an inordinate number of
configuration settings.
Enterprise SaaS is to some degree opinionated, in that the very act of prioritizing
which features are included in the product requires the creators to assert what they
think is important. But as these products and the market mature, they become
less opinionated. They do so because more features are added to provide feature
parity with competitors and more customization options are offered in response to
customers with particular needs. This then creates a more generic product able to
broadly handle many types of workflows (good and bad), a product that is off-vision,
and one that has eschewed best practices by offering an excessively large feature set.
These products then run the risk of being disrupted by new entrants that are not only
leaner, but also more ‘opinionated.’ In fact, some products are now using opinion
as a competitive advantage (not just in their content marketing, but baked into the
software code itself). The mantra that you can’t be all things to all customers is clearly
starting to resonate in the enterprise software market.
An opinionated product can be a strong complement to a consulting practice. We
know, for example, that professional services make up 20% of the revenue associated
with most enterprise SaaS products. Building a truly opinionated product, however,
requires a more narrow category focus and a tighter definition of the problems the
solution will address.
There’s a reason that Marc Andreessen’s adage “software is eating the world” has
become one of the most quoted observations in the startup community in recent
years. Any consultancy or agency out there right now would be foolish to side-step
the question:
“How do we make the software version of what we do?”
“Every consultancy
and agency
should be asking
themselves how
they can make the
software version of
what they do.”
* Unit economics = the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model expressed
on a per unit basis. To study the unit economics of each customer, ask yourself… “Can I make more profit
from customers than it costs me to acquire them?” If the answer is yes (as it has been for many enterprise
software companies), you have a business.
About the Author: Stuart is the Co-Founder and CTO of Made by Many, a digital product
innovation company. He has a Master’s degree in Engineering and 16 years of experience
creating large-scale software based products. He is an advocate and frequent speaker
on the use of agile project methodologies and lean manufacturing philosophies applied
to the strategy, design and development of digital products.
Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
Talking Unicorns
Simon Hudson, CloudRaker
Many companies see the addition of a Chief Marketing
Technologist as a crucial step in fighting digital disruption.
According to the Harvard Business Review, Mayur Gupta is the
epitome of what a Chief Marketing Technologist should be. He’s
been busy keeping the personal care giant Kimberly-Clark at the
forefront of the digital marketing revolution. Among other forward-
thinking initiatives, he has brought in a number of emerging
enterprise technologies and has also been instrumental in creating
a global digital innovation lab at the company.”
We sat down with Mayur to get his take on the future of tech in marketing and the road
to digital coherence.
SIMON HUDSON: What brought you to Kimberly-Clark?
MAYUR GUPTA: I think it was a combination of good timing in terms of where
Kimberly-Clark was headed, where I was in my career and the technology-driven
disruption happening all around us. Marketing is currently in an era of convergence,
and it needs marketers who are no longer T-shaped (specializing in one specific area).
We need what a lot of people are calling “unicorns”, a new breed of marketer living at
the intersection of marketing, technology and storytelling.
However, there is a clear dearth of this talent. Educational systems are still focused on
raising siloed professionals, either technologists or marketers or sales professionals
or finance specialists, when the needs of modern marketing are highly convergent. We
need a fundamental shift at a foundational level. It’s a rare talent that is bred almost
organically on the job.
SIMON HUDSON: Where is this organic breeding happening?
MAYUR GUPTA: Some businesses, Kimberly-Clark and a few others, are taking it
on themselves. It’s not happening in a recruiting shop or within the context of an
educational system. Companies intent on driving growth make it a priority, funding
internal programs for top talent, teaching them the art and science of breaking down
silos and becoming “consumer-obsessed”.
SIMON HUDSON: What’s the starting point for a company looking for digital
coherence?
MAYUR GUPTA: At Kimberly-Clark, we often joke that it’s a journey from unconscious
incompetence to conscious incompetence and then, someday, you become
consciously competent. A company in the second stage is already winning. The
question is: how do you create a partnership? How do you collaborate and build the
capability that’s at the intersection of marketing and technology, marketing and sales
or marketing and finance? It’s not that IT is going away or that marketing is going
away; marketing and IT are both evolving to a point where technology is now the
interface of marketing.
The perfect example is the iPhone. Is it a technology solution, a consumer experience,
or a marketing solution? That’s the state we live in: you can’t isolate marketing or
consumer experiences from technology anymore.
SIMON HUDSON: What’s your biggest accomplishment so far at Kimberly-Clark?
MAYUR GUPTA: It’s the establishment of a global marketing technology organization
at the intersection of marketing and IT that has gotten tremendous support and
leadership from both our CMO and CIO. In a massive company like ours, at first, it was
like The Shawshank Redemption, where you take a small hammer and dig a tunnel bit
by bit every day. We have been fortunate enough to have tremendous leadership with
vision and foresight, people who believed that staying where you are is more risky
than moving forward. We are still in the early stages of our journey, and we continue
to pivot as we encounter new challenges.
Overall, it took tremendous leadership in the C-suite. They never gave up. They
strongly believed in the vision we had, and we just ploughed through. To me, that is
the biggest accomplishment, along with the bridges we’ve created to connect with
our IT leadership. That’s what makes me feel good.
SIMON HUDSON: Is your role there permanent or do you see yourself as facilitating a
transition?
“Educational
systems are still
focused on raising
siloed professionals,
either technologists
or marketers or sales
professionals or
finance specialists,
when the needs
of modern
marketing are highly
convergent.”
MAYUR GUPTA: Tough question! But I see what you mean. Look, it’s almost
impossible to predict what the future has in store, but two things are certain: first, the
world we live in will continue to change and it will change fast. Second, the need to
converge across silos will only get stronger and stronger. The future CMO is definitely
someone who understands and recognizes the role of data and technology in driving
seamless consumer experiences.
Needless to say, there are many fancier names for this role, including CDO (or Chief
Digital Officer) which I have reservations about.
SIMON HUDSON: Why don’t you believe in the CDO role?
MAYUR GUPTA: When working with a highly fragmented operating model, the way
to drive a connected, seamless omni-channel experience is by driving convergence.
When you establish C-level roles like the CDO and put them on par with the CMO,
you’re creating the exact problem you are trying to solve, which further fragments the
system.
Clive Sirkin, our CMO at Kimberly-Clark, says: “We don’t do digital marketing, we do
marketing (or brand building) in a digital world.” That means everything is marketing,
or in other words, it’s only “marketing”— not digital or analog or content marketing.
You can’t separate digital, ecommerce, content or other fragments from marketing.
That’s being channel-centric when what we need is to be consumer-centric.
That said, the CDO role can definitely be a good first step towards an ultimate vision
of converging offline and online marketing, but giving somebody a C-title to run
digital outside of marketing is short-term thinking. If you’re far behind and have no
digital footprint, you may need someone to come on board initially to drive your
digital objectives and agenda. Your ultimate goal, however, should be to converge this
person into broader marketing.
We create these oxymorons in the industry: omni-channel retail, omni-channel
commerce... They’re oxymorons because we want to drive omni-channel, yet we try to
bucket it in an e-commerce silo. The CDO role is similar. It makes sense as a first step
to gain maturity, but it cannot be your end-state.
SIMON HUDSON: Can CIOs and CMOs implement those changes?
MAYUR GUPTA: Why not? A good CMO will establish marketing technology leadership
to unify marketing, technology, data and analytics. They’re adopting these crucial
capabilities because at the end of the day, they are the ones who are accountable to
drive the ROI and category growth as well as to build legendary brands.
CIOs who commit to transforming their organizations and making them more digitally
savvy by rethinking their understanding of traditional IT to reflect new marketing
needs are already taking a huge step. The ones who don’t, believing the CMO should
only focus on marketing and exclude digital, are working with a broken model.
SIMON HUDSON: Can an external agency help bring digital coherence to a company?
“Marketing and IT
are both evolving
to a point where
technology is now
the interface of
marketing.”
“The future CMO is
definitely someone
who understands
and recognizes
the role of data
and technology in
driving seamless
consumer
experiences.”
MAYUR GUPTA: I strongly believe that brands and Fortune 500s will continue to
expand their capabilities by building thought leadership and top digital talents
internally to provide vision while leveraging agency partners to both collaborate on
the strategy and execute it at scale. But the “set it and forget it” times are over. Brands
need to exercise a much higher level of control and direction now.
About the Author: From teaching to quality assurance, technical development to
international marketing, business development to business start-ups, Simon has
flitted, butterfly like, learning from each experience and bringing that breadth to his
client facing and business development activities. Simon is articulate, opinionated,
understanding and suffers from an insatiable curiosity.
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Tearing Down the Walls of
User Experience
Jackson Murphy, Pound & Grain
Putting the user first is the only defense against the increasingly
barrier-ridden UX ecosystem of brands. To thrive in today’s
environment, agencies need to go beyond campaigns and solve
user problems anywhere and everywhere.
Maslow pushed out his hierarchy of needs in 1943 in a nostalgically cute world of
push-only marketing and brick and mortar commerce – an era when the funnel was
still a relatively straightforward concept.
The marketers of the Mad Men era never had to worry about mobile, tablets, desktops,
apps, social, the Internet of things, wearables, Virtual Reality, and enough data to
make our head spin. In 2015, consumer needs live in a complex world of customer
journeys across devices – the operative word being complex. While consumers’ needs
have largely remained constant, trying to fulfill them now requires constant vigilance
and an anytime / anywhere approach.
Managing those user experiences across touch points is arguably the hardest part of
any marketer’s day. And by hard, we mean it’s reached a byzantine level of complexity.
“Managing user
experiences across
touch points
has reached a
byzantine level of
complexity.”
“As users move
seamlessly across
channels and
screens, marketers
need to optimize
experiences
along the journey
at every single
opportunity.”
As Econsultancy reports, one third of marketers manage these touch points in
silos, and 38% say they have no way to impact or manage the complete customer
journey, despite understanding the acute need to do so. And since we’re piling on the
numbers, a recent Google commissioned Forrester Consulting report noted that only
2% of companies have the “capabilities necessary to identify, deliver on, and measure
moments of intent.”
Ouch! It’s these so-called “micro-moments” that Google has been pushing on us and
which dominate every touch point along that user journey. This is a 24/7 competitive
space where brands are having increasingly fractured interactions with current or
prospective customers while they are in latte lines, during transit rides, when their
Instagram feeds have nothing new, and even while they’re ignoring your ads. Think
Hunger Games, but with far more brands getting blown up by consumers gleefully
playing the role of Katniss. That is today’s battleground for the hearts and minds of
the consumer.
The challenge for marketers is that in many cases we’re not pulling all the levers in the
tool kit in a cohesive way. Between multiple agencies (advertising, digital marketing,
ecommerce, social), a cottage industry of new buzzword inspired sub-category
agencies (customer experience agencies, service design agencies) and new and
powerful internal groups (modeled after start-ups, versed in agile development and
builder culture that are becoming true innovators in their own right), the right arm
doesn’t always know what the left is doing.
We have a real opportunity to break silos, tear down barriers, and once and for all put
the user in the center of every brief, conversation and customer experience regardless
of which department or what agency is working on the initiative.
In less than 75 years, we’ve gone from broadcast to interaction, from content is king
to context is king. We are now all hurling towards a place where we always needed to
be, where the user is king no matter what, when or where. As they move seamlessly
across channels and screens, marketers need to optimize experiences along the
journey at every single opportunity. May the odds be ever in your favor.
About the Author: A Creative Director with over a decade of copywriting and content
experience, Jackson is passionate about evangelizing innovative digital solutions and
delivering results.
Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
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Testing provides high quality, highly responsive
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Showcases
Adobe FEED
AIM Group
Array Interactive Brown-Forman
Barrel Jacob’s Pillow Dance
Big Spaceship Samsung Mobile
Bluecadet The Hoover Mason Trestle
Born05 KLM
CloudRaker
Digital Kitchen Microsoft
EffectiveUI American Express
Engine Digital BC Hydro and Power Authority
Fuel DreamWorks
Grow Google
IE Mecca Brands
Instrument Google
Invoke Modo
IQ Geico
Jam3 Lincoln Motor Company
Koombea Samsung
LaneTerralever GORE-TEX® Brand
Made by Many Universal Music Group
Metajive WowWee Toys
Method Henri
Perfect Fools Betsson’s Sverige
Phenomblue Readywire
Pound & Grain Arc’teryx
Ready Set Rocket Kenneth Cole
Red Badger Fortnum & Mason
SapientNitro Fisher Island
VLT Hello Roaming
Zemoga XPO
Make It Challenge
What started as a crazy conversation between Adobe and FEED
several months ago ended with a bold new holiday campaign to
end hunger and make the world a better place.
This project all began with an audacious question: What if Adobe’s amazing creative
community and FEED’s impactful products could be brought together to create
something that would really move the needle on hunger this holiday.
The call soon went out to art directors, copy writers and designers to compete
to create FEED’s holiday campaign. Adobe dubbed the competition the Make It
Challenge. The creatives were expected to concept, pitch, shoot, design and produce
print, video and web assets for FEED’s holiday campaign in just seven days. Seven
days!
Creative teams were selected from Adobe’s Behance community, the world’s largest
creative platform with 5MM+ members. Behance job profiles were posted in early
August and phone screenings were conducted in mid-to-late August. The six art
director and copy writer finalists were flown to New York to be coupled into three
teams of two. After the initial concepting and pitching, only one team was asked to
move forward with the production of their idea.
Adobe presented the challenge in seven consecutive daily episodes starting
November 5th, leading right up to the launch of the FEED Projects Holiday campaign.
CLIENT:
FEED
PARTNER COMPANY:
Adobe
Since FEED’s inception,
over 87 million meals
have been provided
to people in hunger
as a result of the
company’s various
initiatives, including the
“Make It Challenge” in
partnership with Adobe.
View Project
View Project (video)
Identity as a Service
Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance in emerging and developing
markets is a big challenge. In today’s digital age, the ability to
map an individual’s identity is paramount across a wide range of
industries, including financial services, insurance and healthcare.
Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process of a business verifying the identity of its
clients. KYC policies are becoming much more important globally to prevent such
nefarious activities as identity theft, financial fraud, money laundering and terrorist
financing.
In emerging markets, KYC compliance traditionally involves thousands of hours
of manual data entry and paperwork. The AIM Group – a Tanzania-based digital
innovation agency - saw the need for a digital product that would go beyond simply
streamlining identity verification compliance, which would have been a worthy goal in
and of itself.
The product they created – EKYC – uses sophisticated technology (including facial
recognition software) that has been optimized to work on even the lowest-end, photo-
capable smartphones. The quality of the data captured is vastly improved and the
platform is widely accessible rather than being limited to the wealthiest consumers
with access to the latest tech gadgetry. The platform also has robust reporting and
data mining capabilities that facilitate more agile business decision making and
greater efficiency overall.
The product solves an acute operational problem in much of Africa and other
MEMBER COMPANY:
AIM Group
In a period of less than
6 months, the EKYC
platform has amassed
more than 3,000,000
registrations. The
solution is also 60%
more cost effective per
registration than paper-
based and other more
rudimentary identity
verification methods.
View Project
View Project (video)
developing regions where paper-based and other rudimentary solutions rack up
costs and limit the reach of national identity programs, making it difficult to verify
individual identity.
The solution has already been rolled out to three of the largest mobile telephony
operators in Tanzania (Vodacom, Tigo and Airtel) and is scaling fast.
Bringing Gentleman
Jack to Life
From Jack Daniel’s® to Finlandia®, Array brings Brown-Forman’s
iconic brands to life through an immersive, interactive brand
experience.
For more than 140 years, Brown-Forman Corporation has enriched the experience
of life by responsibly building fine quality brands in the distilled spirits and wine
categories. While the Brown-Forman name may not be readily familiar, their brands
certainly are — Jack Daniel’s®, Southern Comfort®, Korbel®, Chambord®, Woodford
Reserve®, Old Forester®, and Finlandia®—just to name a few.
The care they take in building brands is unparalleled. So too is the innovative, yet
responsible, approach they take to marketing their many products. This can be
evidenced by the company’s latest digital installation, an expansive interactive
video wall and content solution conceived by Array Interactive for their corporate
headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky.
Audiences can now touch, access and engage with Brown-Forman brand campaigns,
branded entertainment, social media conversations, new product packaging and
more in an entirely new and immersive way.
CLIENT:
Brown-Forman
MEMBER COMPANY:
Array Interactive
The Brown-Forman
touch interactive
experience showcases
the best-known
beverage brands within
their portfolio.
View Project
Dance Reimagined
An immersive video collection that brings dance performances
to life.
Jacob’s Pillow is a nonprofit that organizes America’s longest-running international
dance festival as well as performances, talks and events throughout the year. It also
runs The School at Jacob’s Pillow, one of the most prestigious professional dance
training centers in the U.S.
Barrel worked with Jacob’s Pillow to redesign and build their Dance Interactive
website, as well as an extensive archive of videos highlighting festival performances
from 1936 to present day.
The new website features customized video players that allow visitors to enjoy
performances full-screen and to learn more about each piece in an immersive and
engaging way. An interactive guessing game and themed playlists encourage visitors
to explore and discover new content, while the enhanced browse experience allows
dance fans to easily search through 300 videos.
The site is fully responsive and built on WordPress.
CLIENT:
Jacob’s Pillow Dance
MEMBER COMPANY:
Barrel
Since the site’s launch
in May, it has won
Site of the Day on CSS
Design Awards and
has also received a
Communications Arts
Webpick of the Week
award.
View Project
View Project (video)
It Doesn’t Take A
Genius
A campaign to spoil the launch of a product heralded as a ‘great
step forward’ that in fact just duplicated much of the innovation
Samsung had pioneered three years earlier.
Samsung created the Phablet category back in 2011 when it launched its GALAXY
Note phone and since then has gone on to dominate the lucrative large-screen phone
category. On September 6, 2014 that was about to change with the launch of one
of the world’s most anticipated phones, a direct challenge to Samsung’s market
position.
Competitive advertising is always fraught with danger. However, when you’re taking
shots at the world’s biggest brand (by market capitalization) around their highly
anticipated launch events, you better be sure to get it right.
Samsung Mobile came to Big Spaceship, as their global social media agency, to get
to work. They created a faux backroom where in-store mobile repairs are made, cast
actors, and set up a Brooklyn war room where the core team maintained constant
communication with the film studio (a few miles away) and the client in Seoul (a few
thousand miles away).
The team used intense social listening during the lead-up to the launch to help
identify the persistent rumors about what the fanboy community was expecting to see
CLIENT:
Samsung Mobile
MEMBER COMPANY:
Big Spaceship
The campaign resulted
in 14 million video
views, coverage in more
than 60 global news
outlets, a reach of 300
million and extremely
positive sentiment for
competitive advertising.
The press, fans and
client all agreed that Big
Spaceship successfully
took a bite out of the
competition.
View Project (video)
from the new device and how they might be disappointed. Big Spaceship needed to
find a way to get press coverage around the timing of the event that would deflate the
buzz and show consumers the new phone was not as innovative as its competitor’s
marketing made it seem.
On the day of the competitor’s big launch, Big Spaceship spent the entire day shooting
videos in direct response to the presentation. Within 24 hours, they pushed out six
videos showing fanboy dismay at the “groundbreaking” large screen claims and
taking digs at the competitor’s faltering live stream. After the videos went viral, the
campaign continued through shareable reaction GIFs taken from the videos.
The SoDA Report (Volume 2, 2015)
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The SoDA Report (Volume 2, 2015)

  • 2. From the SoDA Board Chair Tony Quin, Chairman of the Board, SoDA & CEO, IQ recent report racked up over 350,000 views from around the world, making it the most widely read trends report in the field of digital marketing. A quick word about the phrase “digital marketing”. Today it means almost every activity within organizations which touches their consumers, from advertising to product innovation and customer experience. It’s the same for our members at SoDA, whose work defies easy labels in this era of change. Like its predecessors this SoDA Report brings together insights and predictions from the luminaries of the digital marketing world. To read a quick overview of the highlights of this report see the introduction by SoDA executive director Chris Buettner that follows. For those of you new to SoDA, we are a 10 year old network of digital agencies, leading production companies and digital innovators from all over the world. Membership is by invitation only with only 14% of those companies considered being voted in. The result is an organization made up of the most celebrated and recognized companies in the digital marketing field. In the last year SoDA has grown to 110 members in 40 countries on six continents and our work to bring together the leaders of these trail blazers continues apace. In October we launched The Soda Academy in New York. This invitation only educational event drew over 300 senior digital executives from all over the globe to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The mission was nothing short of reinventing professional education in our field. In 2016 SoDA will be expanding this ground breaking initiative among many others. We invite you to stay connected to SoDA activites and sign up for our communications, including regular SoDA Reports at www.sodaspeaks.com. Thank you for taking the time to dig into this treasure trove of insights. We hope you will share it with your colleagues and look forward to your feedback. Best wishes for a successful 2016, Tony Quin Chairman of the Board, SoDA CEO, IQ Agency As we charge into 2016 with our perennially complex, challenging world around us, we can be sure of a few things. The influence of technology and digital channels continues to grow at warp speed, consumers everywhere want innovation and brands to make life easier and richer for them, and every January comes the new SoDA Report. Published twice a year, the SoDA Report is the world’s leading trends snapshot for digital marketing in it’s many forms. Produced by SoDA, the digital society, the most
  • 3. From the Managing Editor Chris Buettner, Managing Editor and Executive Director, SoDA downloads. We’ll be expanding the special report series in 2016, with editions on everything from experience design to data science. We continue to be humbled and motivated by the positive industry feedback we’ve received regarding the quality of our editorial content and the value of our primary research studies. We make this publication available free of charge to the industry as part of SoDA’s mission to share thought leadership and ‘best known’ practices from our member companies and other partners. Our overriding goal is to support and facilitate dialogue between agencies and brands from around the globe to create the future of marketing and digital experiences. In this issue, we continue to explore the editorial theme of Spurring Positive Change that was the focus of our Volume 1, 2015 edition. Spurring positive change involves interpreting situations where problems are open and ill-defined, tasks are unclear, processes are experimental and where knowledge is something that emerges step by step through continuous interactions with other players. In his Tech Talk piece, Stuart Eccles posits that the most promising change taking place in the industry today is that more and more forward-thinking digital shops and consultancies are turning new ideas into repeatable, scalable, ‘value-adding’ software solutions to sell to clients. In Modern Marketer, Ann Ystén underscores that the digital agency of the future needs more than technical and creative expertise. She maintains that it needs business consultants with a deep understanding of the client side and the right skillset to engage effectively with professionals from a wide range of company disciplines beyond just the marketing realm. These are just a few of the articles in this edition casting a spotlight on the positive changes that SoDA members and other forward-thinking industry players are making in order to drive true business transformation around the globe. I want to once again thank Barcelona-based SoDA member, Vasava, for translating our editorial theme of Spurring Positive Change (and leaving behind that which no longer serves you) in a stunning visual metaphor for the cover of this edition. I’d also like to thank our entire editorial team as well as our contributing authors. Welcome to the Volume 2, 2015 edition of The SoDA Report. The growth and development of The SoDA Report this year has been nothing short of remarkable. In addition to our biannual trend publication (published in May and December each year) which receives more than 350,000 views/downloads per edition, we also launched a special report series. The latest issue in that series – “The SoDA Report on the State of Agency Workflow Management” – has garnered close to 50,000
  • 4. To become a subscriber of The SoDA Report, please email SoDA and we’ll make sure you have priority access to the release of upcoming editions. We hope you enjoy this issue and, as always, we welcome your feedback, ideas and contributions for future editions. Saludos, Chris Buettner Managing Editor and Executive Director, SoDA
  • 5. The SoDA Report Team & Partners Content Development Editorial Team Chris Buettner Managing Editor of The SoDA Report SoDA Executive Director After a career on the digital agency and publisher side that spanned 15+ years, Chris Buettner now serves as Managing Editor of The SoDA Report. He is also the Executive Director of SoDA where he is charged with developing and executing the organization’s overall strategic vision and growth plan. And with roots in journalism, the transition to lead SoDA has been a welcome opportunity to combine many of his talents and passions. After living in Brazil and Colombia for years, Chris is also fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and is an enthusiastic supporter of SoDA’s initiatives to increase its footprint in Latin America and around the world. Chris lives in Atlanta with his wife and two daughters. Sean MacPhedran, Industry Insider Group Planning Director, Fuel Sean is Group Planning Director at Fuel (based in Ottawa, Canada), where he currently works with clients including McDonald’s Europe, Nokia, Mattel and Lucasfilm. He specializes in youth marketing, entertainment & game development, and the incorporation of pirates into advertising campaigns for brands ranging from Jeep to Family Guy. Outside of Fuel, he is co-founder of the Ottawa International Game Conference, managed the category-free Tomorrow Awards and spent a good deal of time in the Mojave Desert launching people into space at the X PRIZE Foundation. They all came back alive.
  • 6. Rob Thorsen, Modern Marketer Managing Director, Big Spaceship As Managing Director, Rob oversees the development of Big Spaceship’s client relationships and the disciplines of the agency that drive them. Equal parts relationship builder and creative contributor, Rob brings over 15 years of agency building expertise to the agency. His work includes launching Unilever’s AXE at BBH NY, joining Mother NY as it’s first strategist stateside, to leading several flagship accounts at BBDO NY. When not in the office, Rob is either chasing down his two children with his wife, Sarah, or chasing after cyclists he so desperately tries to keep pace with. Also, he is from the Great State of New Jersey. Kate Richling, SoDA Showcases VP of Marketing, Phenomblue As Phenomblue’s Vice President of Marketing, Kate Richling oversees the agency’s marketing and social media outreach, as well as its inbound marketing efforts. Previously, Richling worked in public relations, creating and executing strategies for institutes of higher education and Blue Cross Blue Shield, as well as providing social media counsel to various non-profit organizations. Emily Bloom, Talent Managing Director, People, Viget As Managing Director, Emily is responsible for recruiting, hiring, training and retaining great people. She directly manages Viget’s recruiting events and operations teams, oversees internal communications and is a member of Viget’s executive management team. Emily joined Viget in 2007 to establish their first remote office in Durham, NC, serving in a General Manager capacity to address facilities, new business development, and service delivery. Prior to Viget, her professional background spanned education, mental health and clinical research. She has a Bachelor’s in Sociology (Williams College) and a Master’s in Education (Ole Miss), studied Psychology at Oxford, and was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband and two sons.
  • 7. Partners Lead Organizational Sponsors Cover DesignWeb Development Content/Production Founding Organizational Sponsor The SoDA Report Production Team Lakai Newman, Head of Production Jessica Ongko, Designer The responsive version of The SoDA Report was developed with a variety of solutions from the Adobe Creative Cloud The opinions and viewpoints expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent or reflect the opinions or viewpoints of SoDA.
  • 8. Don’t just reach your customers. Know them. We can help you bring together all of your data and content into a single place, so you can deliver the ideal experience to every customer, every time. Adobe Marketing Cloud
  • 9. 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Cultural Competency in the Digital Era 1.2 How the Industry Can Work with Millennials to Drive Positive Change 1.3 Connecting with the Healthy Lifestyle Consumer 1.4 Ready for Your Agency’s San Andreas? 1.5 Think Like a Product Developer Industry Insider
  • 10. Introduction to Industry Insider Sean MacPhedran Industry Insider Section Editor Group Planning Director, Fuel From apocalyptic metaphors likening the current tumultuous state of agency health to the Ring of Fire in the Pacific Ocean basin to examples of homegrown entrepreneurism in China in the social media realm, this Industry Insider will take you on a journey across sweeping changes in the cultural landscape – both inside and outside of your organization. Our contributing authors will take you down into the underworld of (potential) organizational collapse, but also cast a spotlight on how so many of our peers are doing incredible things, transforming their agencies into product-based businesses and bringing their own IP to market. As I read the great articles – authored by the brilliant Chelsea Perino of Big Spaceship, Cody Simmonds of Struck, Sei-Wook Kim of Barrel, Michael Polivka of JUXT and Sean McNamara of Omelet – the second thing that occurred to me was just how lucky we all are to work in such an open, challenging and creative industry where we’re forced to grapple with never-ending and increasingly rapid-fire changes taking place in the world around us. My first thought was, “How did five separately written articles observing patterns in our industry all align so perfectly with the archetypes in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey?” (Third was… “Do I really want to refer back to my high school English curriculum in this introduction?”) For those who don’t recall, The Hero’s Journey is a pattern in stories and mythology that repeats itself everywhere, from The Odyssey to Star Wars. It’s like the Fibonacci Sequence or fractals, but the repetition we’re talking about here is the pattern of human life (the meeting with the mentor, the ordeals, the road back, etc.). We’re lucky that our industry forces us to sit at the intersection of every imaginable cultural force – from changes in commerce and technology to shifts in generational values. And did we mention the friction and flow stemming from the globalization of a hundred powerful, unique tribes of human identity? We’ve finally moved beyond the era of weekly “Death of…” clickbait articles and are ready to start surfing the patterns. For fun, dig into The Hero with a Thousand Faces before reading through this section. You’ll see what I mean. There will always be change. We’ve got this. It’s our thing. It’s what we do.
  • 11. What we’re good at – and will get better at – is pattern recognition, and remembering that as much as things change, all of this has happened before. There were just fewer gizmos. We’re not the heroes – those are our clients – we’re the ones who tell them where the magic swords are. We’re the ones who see the patterns. P.S. – In the next issue, the BS Buzzword Launcher will be back with an interview with Chelsea Hardaway, Co-Author of Why Businesspeople Speak Like Idiots, and some brand new horrible buzzwords from SoDA Members to force into awkward conversation.
  • 12. Cultural Competency in the Digital Era Chelsea Perino, Big Spaceship Global. Universally relevant. Culturally agnostic. These are phrases that have become colloquial in the language of digital advertising as brands have realized the power and reach possible through effective digital communications. Advertisers are increasingly being asked to ‘think globally while acting locally,’ but this concept is a paradox in and of itself. Irrespective of global awareness, people are a product of their culture, a fact that strongly influences consumer behavior. In order to win the hearts and minds of consumers around the world, multinational advertisers need to approach creative problem solving with an unprecedented level of cultural competency. The challenge is that as ‘the internet of things’ becomes ever more pervasive, brands are struggling to reach everyone, and in real time no less. As a result, conversations are forced into a reactive state and participants (both consumers and brands) rush to express their opinions without taking time to consider the cultural implications of their commentary.
  • 13. “Consumers and brands rush to express their opinions without taking time to consider the cultural implications of their commentary.” “There are endless opportunities to tailor overarching brand messages to niche audiences, making the stories being told more relevant, personal, and meaningful.” While the Internet is the ultimate example of a ‘global’ communication channel, people – somewhat ironically –use it primarily at a local level. They use the technology within the context of their location, and adapt it to suit their needs. The rapid localization of global brand websites into different languages, or the adaptation of social networks to fit specific cultural behaviors are prime examples of this trend. Let’s take China, for example. Restricted access to global communication channels led the Chinese to create alternatives. From Facebook, RenRen was born; from Twitter, Weibo. But what’s more interesting is that while RenRen started as an exact Facebook clone, it quickly developed to suit the interests of its audience. In the case of RenRen, a heavy social gaming integration soon changed the original platform schematic. So what does this mean for global brands and advertisers as they travel through the creative process? The answer is three-fold. First, there are endless opportunities to tailor overarching brand messages to niche audiences, making the stories being told more relevant, personal, and meaningful. Advertisers are becoming increasingly talented at taking a global brand ethos and extending it through a local cultural lens. Advertisers are also becoming acutely aware of the fact that with limitless opportunities come larger margins for error. Because everyone has access to everything, all the time, advertisers have to be particularly careful about what they say and how their stories are presented. Third, international client relationships are turning into the new normal. However, the differences and unique aspects of those types of relationships are often being overlooked. The question then becomes, what happens if the above points are not taken into consideration? Being culturally unaware means that brands (and their respective advertisers) can quickly find themselves in deep water. A single misguided tweet can cause a global outcry and tarnish a brand’s credibility forever. It also means an arduous and frustrating campaign development process. In short, it’s easier to be frustrated with the unfamiliar than it is to take the time to fully understand the context of feedback within the larger organizational and cultural architecture from whence it came. Overall, the solution needs to start with advertisers. Improving their cultural competency wields a positive impact the development of creative solutions, agency/ client relationships, as wel as inter-agency and even inter-team collaborations. An open perspective paves the way for relationships that are based on respect, mutual understanding and collaboration, ultimately leading to creative solutions that have global impact and local relevance. About the author: A native New Mexican, Chelsea Perino moved to New York to attend NYU for her undergraduate studies where she received a dual degree in Anthropology and Linguistics with a minor in Chemistry. After graduating, she traveled abroad for 4+
  • 14. years, visiting more than 70 countries. She eventually entered the marketing field in Cape Town, South Africa. She returned to NYC to complete a Master’s Degree in Public and Organizational Relations (with a focus on Digital Communications Strategy). She is now based in South Korea where she leads Global Strategy at Big Spaceship’s Seoul office for a global technology brand. Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
  • 15. How the Industry Can Work with Millennials to Drive Positive Change Cody Simmonds, Struck Whatever you choose to believe about Millennials, a key differentiator of this group is a lack of respect and obligation towards traditional structures and processes. According to Iconoculture, Millennials are much less likely to value justice, integrity and duty. On the flip side, they are significantly more likely to value passion, diversity, sharing and discovery. Whether you choose to believe they’re privileged, entitled or hypersensitive to failure, Millennials are a passionate, self-motivated generation who want to drive meaningful change through collaboration, transparency and ingenuity. Pew reports that adults ages 18 to 34 currently make up 1 in 3 of workers in the United States. By 2030, they will encompass almost 75% of workers (predicts the US Bureau of Labor Statistics). As this generation inundates the marketing world, we’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands, of opinions and perspectives on Millennials, and every passing year brings a handful of new trend reports and listicles on what makes
  • 16. “Consumers and brands rush to express their opinions without taking time to consider the cultural implications of their commentary.” “There are endless opportunities to tailor overarching brand messages to niche audiences, making the stories being told more relevant, personal, and meaningful.” Generation Y different. So, how can we as an industry work with Millennials to drive positive change? As agencies, it’s critical that we encourage and enable the Millennial desire for discovery and ingenuity. Millennials expect all experiences to be seamless – even those found in the workplace. They thrive in a work culture that provides freedom to experiment and challenge traditional approaches to problems. And as Millennials move into management and executive positions, more agencies will foster freethinking, unique work styles (death to the 9 to 5) and an increase in collaboration and leadership regardless of skill level and experience. This emphasis on family time over work time is reinforced by the industry trend towards more flexible work schedules and a larger list of benefits (often in lieu of greater compensation). And, as Millennials fill up desks and conference rooms, we will continue to see the industry focus shift more towards building relationships over making a living, and quality of work and experience over rigid work schedules. Millennials will look for ongoing support from managers in place of annual performance reviews. Managers will act as coaches and build relationships with employees through ongoing dialogue. Additionally, Millennials tend to stray away from restrictive business systems and software. They have spent years taking virtual classes and communicating socially online and thus gravitate towards technology and tools that focus on connectivity and seamless user experience. In a totally connected world that relies on technology such as instant chat, video conferencing and tools like Slack, physical location loses its importance during team construction. Now, agencies have the opportunity to leverage technology to create integrated, high functioning teams that span across the globe. For Millennials, spurring positive change is engrained in how they perceive the world. Nothing is sacred, everything can be improved. And because driving change isn’t formulaic, predictable, or one-size-fits-all, the Millennial inclination towards discovery and ingenuity through collaboration and transparency will lead to a wide range of solutions for problems that have long been a part of traditional professional culture. About the authors: Cody grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Texas Christian University with a degree in International Communications and a minor in German. Cody’s agency experience includes expertise in account planning, strategy, research, analytics and product innovation. When Cody is not knee-deep in market research crafting astute strategy for clients, he is traveling to new places, playing guitar or video games and training for his first half marathon. Rikki Teeters is passionate about creating a better future for humanity — one experience at a time. She has devoted her life to making both digital and physical interactions more human. After studying Interaction Design at Miami University, Rikki pursued her love of design and technology by entering the field of UX. She served as a contributor to this article.
  • 17. Connecting with the Healthy Lifestyle Consumer Sei-Wook Kim, Barrel Consumers are allocating more and more of their financial resources toward living healthy and active lives. Nielson’s 2015 Global Health & Wellness Survey of 30,000 people showed that 88% of those polled are willing to pay more for healthy foods, especially those that are GMO-free and all-natural. The number of people who are passionate about living a health life is skyrocketing. Especially among Generation Z and Millennials, participation in physical activities, eating healthy diets, and getting more sleep are behaviors that are on the rise. As “healthy” is becoming mainstream, it’s important to differentiate products and educate consumers.
  • 18. “If you’re an agency considering specialization, focus on an area that aligns with your core values and select a domain where you already have a moderate-to-high level of ‘literacy’ as well as a desire to learn more.” At Barrel, we made the decision in early 2015 to focus on working with healthy lifestyle brands. As a team, we align with the values of companies trying to empower positive changes in people’s lives. This was a deliberate decision to focus our company’s positioning and strengthen our expertise in a single vertical. Specialization is increasingly common in the agency space. But being a specialized agency can mean many different things. It can signify a specific focus on a type of work product (place-based digital experiences, analytics or user experience). It can mean a niche focus on a particular industry (finance, CPG or pharmaceuticals) or a consumer segment (babies, moms or teens). If you’re considering becoming more specialized, it’s important to focus on an area that aligns with your agency’s core values and to select a domain where you already have a moderate-to-high level of ‘literacy’ as well as a desire to learn more. We attended healthy lifestyle industry conferences and spent time understanding the industry, consumer, and competitive landscape. Through these experiences, we have developed industry-specific thought leadership that supports our new agency positioning. Through our experience working with a range of healthy lifestyle brands in food and fitness, there are some common challenges that companies in this space are facing. Differentiation With more and more entrants to the healthy lifestyle space, brands are seeing a tremendous increase in competition. The scale became evident when we attended the 2015 Natural Products Expo West, the world’s largest natural, organic and healthy products event. There were over 2,700 exhibitors at the Expo, and 634 of them were first-time exhibitors. With competitors popping up every day, it’s crucial to communicate unique values and benefits through strong brand positioning. Transparency Consumers in this segment care about what they’re putting in (and on) their bodies and are getting savvier and more discerning with their research. To gain the trust of consumers, brands must become more transparent about their health claims and be clear about their manufacturing processes. For food companies, this means greater clarity into ingredients and the source of those ingredients. It’s important to help educate consumers about health and wellness claims. The pressure is on brands to create impactful content through channels like blogs, white papers and social media. Personalization Living a healthier life is a decision that often requires changing old habits. Research shows that when people go through the process of trying something healthy, they’re likely to fall back into bad habits. Not terribly surprising. However, one thing we’ve learned is that personalization can be a highly effective way to help drive habit change. This can start from the purchase phase – creating unique interactive content to guide people to choose the right products or programs for them, and then taking it further post-purchase to push relevant content based on previous interests and behavior. To continue to engage consumers, brands can provide relevant incentives or rewards
  • 19. to encourage the repetition needed for developing healthy habits. Automated email marketing can be a powerful tool to send timely reminders to support the new habit. The data gathered about interests can be used to push information through wearables and social networks. The goal is to create reminders and triggers that people can act upon to engage with a brand. Future Opportunity Brands can drive positive change in consumers’ lives by developing innovative products that clearly (and honestly) communicate healthy lifestyle benefits. The market opportunities are immense, but – increasingly – so is the competition. Strongly consider strategies, platforms and tactics that support personalization as an approach that will not only help you stand out from the competition, but that also reinforce the positive changes your consumers are trying to make in their lives. Side note for agencies: Be smart about how you approach specialization. Choose your focus wisely and do the work necessary to turn your acumen in a particular area into unparalleled and widely acknowledged expertise. About the author: Sei-Wook Kim is a Principal and Co-Founder of Barrel, a digital agency based in New York City. He oversees Technology and Operations at the company. He started Barrel with Peter Kang in June 2006 while at Columbia University and graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. Barrel is now a 30-person agency with a broad range of clients including KIND Healthy Snacks, McGraw-Hill Education, Columbia University and NCR. Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
  • 20. Ready for Your Agency’s San Andreas? Michael Polivka, JUXT Back in 1996, I saw Johnny Cash play at the Ohio State Fair with his wife June Carter. Seeing this couple perform the Ring of Fire was a magical moment. Interestingly, to this day there’s still some debate over who wrote this song and what it’s actually about. The Ring of Fire we’ll be referencing today is far less controversial. It’s the string of volcanoes and earthquake-prone seismic hotspots that wrap around the edges of the Pacific Ocean. 75% of the planet’s active volcanoes reside there, and nearly 90% of all earthquakes occur there – including activity from the cinematically popularized San Andreas Fault. Simply put, it’s the lifeline of our planet’s change. RING OF FIRE While it may be scary to ponder, violent change is quite natural and commonplace, and leads to new growth and opportunities. Looking out my window, California wouldn’t even be here today if not for huge shifts in the planet’s tectonic plates. Jumping to the other side of the world for a moment, I recently learned there are trilobite fossils at the top of Mount Everest, which stand at 29,000 feet and grow an
  • 21. “Intense change is quite natural and commonplace, and leads to new growth and opportunities.” “The work we do for our clients today is more advanced, more difficult to scope and requires more trust.” inch taller each year. Trilobites, a once prolific group of little buggers, were one of the earliest known groups of arthropods. A whopping 500 million years ago, they began to flourish in our oceans, falling to the bottom of the sea when they died. Their fossils at the top of Mount Everest tell us the tallest point on Earth was at some time one of its lowest. Crazy. Big. Change. What the hell does this have to do with the workplace and positive change? Everything! I like to think that agencies live right along a sort of metaphorical Ring of Fire. And, for companies here in San Francisco, we’re also living along the real one. As my friend and business consultant Yumi Prentice once told me “Agencies are three phone calls away from disaster.” I agree. But we’re also three phone calls away from incredible success. Kind of like our planet. CONSTANT CHANGE Winston Churchill once said “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” With that, here are five pointers to help make the best of our constantly evolving business conditions: 1. Always be ready Our best employees will leave us. Our favorite clients will stop giving us their money. Our newest clients will give us so much work we’ll need to hire twenty new people in a week. Like it or not, this is agency life – and it’s how we roll. So be prepared for change, and lots of it. Agencies are like high performance cars. Much like owning a 1970 Corvette, we need to know the condition of our parts at all times. This way, when something inevitably breaks, we’ll at least have a general idea of how to remedy it, how long it will take to fix it and how much it’ll cost. When it comes to money, we need to manage our books responsibly and have realistic predictive models for the year. When it comes to talent, we need to hire great teammates and keep tabs on group and individual performance. Overall, we as agency leaders must have day-to-day plans (as well as contingency plans) that let us focus on the work at hand without distraction, yet allow us to be prepared for the unexpected. 2. Be grounded in the present, but plant seeds for the future The work we do for our clients today is significantly different than it was just a few years ago. It’s more advanced, more difficult to scope, and requires more trust with the client – and collaboration with their myriad partners – than ever before. It’s wise for us to regularly break out our agency bifocals to address immediate short- term needs while also considering our longer-term trajectories. We need to get our current work done amazingly well with our best practitioners, but we also need to do everything we can to support internal labs, incubators and intern talent farms. They will be the next generation of our agencies. The future will be upon us quickly, and this new and fresh talent, with different
  • 22. “Break out your agency bifocals to address immediate short-term needs while also considering longer- term trajectories.” perspectives and lifestyles than the team of today, will help our agencies grow and prosper. These up-and-comers may not know what a cassette tape or a Walkman is (unreal), but they’ve been using touchscreens almost half their lives (surreal). 3. Stay committed to growth Sooner or later times will get tough, and we’ll need to make difficult choices in order to survive. Things as unfortunate as layoffs, moving to a new (and somehow already unpopular) office space, and spending freezes all come to mind. But we mustn’t give up. Our eyes must always be on the prize. It’s impossible to accomplish all of our dreams in the short term. But that’s ok. We keep the ideas alive by using a parking lot list, along with the promise that we’ll grow and make the agency better when we can. There’s incredible value in reactive, short-term thinking, planning and actions. But these alone obviously can’t be the basis of our business model. 4. Remember this is a performance business I watch sports playoffs as well as pre-season preparation to see how teams in hyper- competitive spaces adjust to all the changes they face. Sometimes change is minor – adding and losing a few mid-value players. Sometimes it’s significant – such as the rebuild of the San Francisco 49ers in 2015. In the NFL, regardless of what anyone tells me, I know only about 6 of the 32 teams are really considered contenders to win the Super Bowl at the beginning of any given season. Some teams are rebuilding while others are making small tweaks. Some have money to spend on talent, others don’t. We need to know where our team is, being honest about expectations for the year. We can then build around its core competencies constructively. Individual accountability is key. If our team members simply aren’t performing – or if they demonstrate behavioral issues – it’s our responsibility to help them. If they’re simply not going to generate more energy than they consume, then it’s time for them to move on. In those unfortunate instances, we need to make that happen before they take down our agency’s morale. We need to own this. 5. Live by tenets of success Truth, integrity, kindness and responsibility – these are values that ultimately lead to genuine and long-lasting success. They are also values that attract other great people to one another. It’s simple: We all know right from wrong, and neither our employees nor our clients want to work with bullshitters. So don’t be one. And don’t let fear of failure drive your business decisions. BENDING WITH THE WIND Kensho Furuya, the legendary Aikido master, once said, “The warrior, like bamboo, is ever ready for action.” And as Bruce Lee continued “Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.“
  • 23. Agencies, like everything else in the universe, encounter continual change. With flexibility and adaptive strength, we can succeed. Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’ I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow. About the author: Michael Polivka is a business leader and transformation specialist with a focus on human interaction, awareness, design and technology. He is the Principal of Operations at JUXT, a San Francisco based creative innovation agency and member of SoDA. Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
  • 24. Think Like a Product Developer Sean McNamara, Omelet The traditional agency model is built for service. It looks something like this: a client has a need – a marketing problem that said client does not have the capabilities to solve itself – and an agency fulfills it with generalized services. For the 99% of agencies that bill themselves as full-service shops, that means bundling the functions of strategy, creative, production and distribution, and delivering 360-degree thinking, whether the client ordered the whole pie or just a slice. These services are often packaged under the guise of “the big idea,” an eminently campaign-able concept that promises brand consistency across all mediums, not to mention a protracted shelf-life, on the condition that the agency-of-record own the linear process that nurtures that idea to life, from inception to delivery to the grave. Value is measured by the perceived quality of the deliverables (translation: how well the agency protects the idea from being smothered to a premature death by the client). Price is determined by time and headcount. There’s scarcely any incentive for alacrity or speed since the longer it takes to move the idea down that assembly line, and the more workers who have to be involved in building it, the more lucrative the engagement. On the other end of the spectrum, a new breed of upstarts is prototyping a very different agency model, focused on productizing solutions. By offering clients access to media and technology platforms, supported by distributed networks of specialists, they operate more like software developers than creative storytellers. In agency circles, the words “automated marketing solutions” typically provoke one of two reactions: sweaty night terrors for seasoned advertising veterans or the promise of making money while sleeping for aspiring ad tech entrepreneurs. For product-centric shops, value is measured in positive outcomes, and price is determined by performance, or the ability of a black box solution – be it an algorithm, artificial intelligence model, or data stream – to generate measurable sales results.
  • 25. “The agency model of the future is neither service-centric nor product- centric…it’s guided by human intuition, but held accountable by machine-based learning.” “Enlightened agencies are rethinking organizational designs, recruiting in unconventional talent pools, hacking inefficient workflows, and testing new methodologies for intelligence gathering and analysis.” The more efficiently and effectively it drives bottom-funnel conversions, and the lower the cost-per-transaction, the higher the payout. Somewhere in between these two polar opposites is the agency model of the future. It’s neither service-centric nor product-centric. It’s guided by human intuition, but held accountable by machine-based learning. It’s equal parts predictive and reactive. It can balance the changing needs of clients with the unpredictable needs of clients’ customers. Clients now need to out-think (not necessarily out-spend) their competitors in an environment where consumers have more choice, and therefore more control, than ever before. This model anticipates unstated needs earlier and with greater accuracy, and informs rapid ideation, deployment, measurement, and optimization of solutions. It may sound utopian, even unrealistic, given the harsh realities of the bare-knuckle boxing ring most creative agencies enter each day. But there is a new breed of agencies that are actively adapting at the speed of change: rethinking organizational designs, recruiting in unconventional talent pools, taking apart those linear processes, hacking inefficient workflows, and testing new methodologies for intelligence gathering and analysis. These agencies are placing lots of smaller bets on opportunities that sit on the far corners of the table, rather than reinforcing their core competencies. They’re developing their own IP, investing in new ventures, and funding enterprises that have no immediate revenue stream attached to them. At first blush, these efforts may appear to be loss-leaders, or short-term tactics to gain visibility in a crowded and homogenous space, but they’re more often strategic initiatives designed to attract and retain the best talent, develop high-potential employees, and build organizational intelligence that transcends those inbound opportunities from paying clients that keep the lights on. As more client organizations, from legacy incumbents to disruptive startups, move towards structures where product development and marketing align under a single team, this new agency models also reflects a shift in corporate strategy that’s pushing the product into the spotlight. As a result, marketing stories are being seeded further upstream in the R&D process to generate early demand. And that’s the real opportunity ahead for futurists – to reorient the agency business for a fast and fluid marketplace where everything, including ‘the big idea’, is forever in prototype, and nothing is precious. Will you be ready? About the author: In addition to steering Omelet’s strategic vision and leading all client engagements, Sean recently launched The Roost, a strategic consulting and advisory unit dedicated to accelerating growth and innovation. Sean graduated from Colgate University with a degree in Latin American Studies, and has lived in Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Hong Kong, and throughout the United States. When he’s not locked in a war room at the office or on the road with clients, Sean can be found at the beach in Venice with his daughter Quinn.
  • 26. 2.0 Introduction 2.1 The Inevitable Disruption of Advertising 2.2 The New Exceptionalism: Business Understanding Modern Marketer
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  • 28. Introduction to Modern Marketer Rob Thorsen Modern Marketer Section Editor Managing Director, Big Spaceship In the last edition of The SoDA Report, Modern Marketer took a look at the tools and techniques that are being brought forward by agencies to help their client partners spur positive change. Implicit in that set of articles was the realization that what had previously been good enough was no longer the right course of action. The time for positive change had come. Everyone knows the maxim: The only constant is change. And in the grand sense that’s true. But in practice that’s obviously not the case. Our experience tells us there are periods of change and there are periods of continuity. Looking at it this way reveals what we all know to be the most difficult part of the equation: determining when and how we should change. Out of all the opportunities and challenges, this is the one thing we spend the most time trying to tackle. Deciding when and how to change will continue to be the defining challenge for agencies as we move into 2016 and beyond (unless of course you’ve hit the bottom and the only choice is change, in which case it’s probably a bit too late anyway…). If there is no prescribed timeline or outcome, perhaps it’s really just a matter of having a consistent mindset and perennially analyzing the best timing and methods for driving change. During a conversation here at our agency not too long ago, we began to question if our industry is still fueled by the same spirit that abounded at its inception. At that point in time, it was all risk, all the time. Our toolset was crap, there were no rules and no one really knew where things were headed. Fast-forward to today…our toolset is amazing, the rules are increasingly restrictive (or at least defined) and – more often than not – the order of the day is mitigating risk. Over the course of that discussion, we agreed that we’re undoubtedly at our best as an industry when we’ve got the right balance between building mastery in our current context and at the same time plotting for its disruption. Not for the sake of it, but because we’ve harnessed our intelligence and judgment to uncover the fact that there is a better way. Basically, we believe it’s important to apply the same spirit that created our industry in new and forward-looking ways.
  • 29. Change need not be the only thing that’s constant. The values that drive our approach to leading change can be as well. Our contributors in this edition of Modern Marketer do their part to address the different facets of the ‘change’ question. Understanding when to change is a theme Adobe’s Christian Cantrell builds on as he takes a critical look at the state of online advertising. For her part, Ann Ystén of Perfect Fools puts forward a point of view on how the modern agency partner needs to evolve to play a more critical role in driving transformative change for clients in ways that transcend the marketing realm. Please enjoy these provocations and see what ideas they spark for you.
  • 30. The Inevitable Disruption of Advertising Christian Cantrell, Adobe Disruption requires two main ingredients. The first one is obviously innovation. That’s the sexy side of technology: the iPhone, the streaming music service, the nice clean Uber right around the corner ready to take you and your crew out for cocktails. But the second ingredient actually comes first, and though it is far less compelling, it’s every bit as necessary. Before there can be truly disruptive innovation, you need a long dark period of stagnation: the frustrating and clunky proto-smartphone; the unwieldy, multi- gigabyte music collection requiring hours of curation and syncing; the reckless taxi that takes twenty minutes to hail, and then refuses to accept your credit card. If there’s one technology I would compare to a miserable cab ride through a hot, loud, and congested city, it’s online advertising. When animations aren’t competing for your attention, pre-roll video ads are distracting you from your distractions. And, of course, the moment you finally settle into a captivating read, you usually find yourself assaulted by a full-screen, modal dialog begging you to subscribe so that you can subject yourself to all of these abuses on a regular basis.
  • 31. “Wherever inferior experiences and financial opportunity overlap, innovation and disruption can’t be far behind.” Yet, like taxis, online advertising is a vital service. Without it, that content we’re trying so hard to get to, and then to focus on, wouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s a complex and vaguely Freudian relationship wherein the very thing we hate makes the things we love possible. Fortunately, wherever inferior experiences and financial opportunity overlap, innovation and disruption can’t be far behind. If your own experiences aren’t enough to convince you that we are firmly entangled in a quagmire of online advertising gluttony, let’s take a quick look at how both individuals and industries are responding. According to a joint 2014 study by PageFair and Adobe, ad blocking grew by nearly 70% to about 144 million active users between 2013 and 2014. That places browser plugins like AdBlock and AdBlock Plus—once secrets of the technorati—firmly within mainstream territory. And with Apple’s iOS 9 now supporting “content” blocking (a euphemism for stripping ads from websites), ad blocking is rapidly being adopted in the one place the advertising industry was expecting the most significant growth: mobile. In a series of tests conducted in September of this year, The New York Times reported that for a number of websites that contained mobile ads, web page data sizes actually decreased significantly and load times accelerated enormously because so many users had enabled ad blockers. Now that we’ve established both the stagnation of online advertising, and the pent-up demand for disruption, let’s take a look at some of the innovations that will hopefully lead to better experiences for readers, and therefore better returns for publishers and advertisers. The most well-known is probably the new Apple News application that was introduced with iOS 9 (not coincidentally, along with content blocking). While Apple News is primarily about aggregating and curating nicely formatted articles from a wide variety of publishers, it’s also about a better advertising experience since all ads served by Apple’s iAds platform must comply with strict content guidelines. Likewise, over the summer, Facebook introduced their Instant Articles initiative which not only caches content locally for near-instantaneous viewing, but also imposes a set of guidelines on ads served by their own advertising network. Then there are the more open (meaning less proprietary) approaches aimed at fixing advertising. Although it may seem like the AdBlock Plus (ABP) browser plugin is in the business of blocking ads, one might argue that it is, in fact, in the business of deciding which ads not to block. By default, ABP allows ads through their filter that they consider “acceptable” which their manifesto defines as experiences that are neither disruptive nor annoying. In response to concerns over a single company having the power to decide which ads are acceptable and which get blocked, Eyeo, the company behind ABP, announced in September of this year that it will relinquish control of the Acceptable Ads Program to an independent review board. (Details forthcoming.) And finally, there’s Google’s response. Like Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, or AMP, is ostensibly about delivering and rendering mobile content many times faster than it is today. But it is also very much about establishing a standard where ads know their place and behave themselves, and readers therefore have less incentive to block them.
  • 32. If we try to pinpoint where online advertising currently falls within the equation of stagnation + innovation = disruption, I’d say we are still in the early stages of innovation, but headed resolutely toward disruption. How this multibillion-dollar industry will ultimately be transformed, nobody yet knows. Nonetheless, I’m confident that it will be remade in a form that will strike a much more equitable balance across stakeholders. It’s inevitable that there will be a redistribution of winners and losers along the way, but as with most disruptive moments in tech history, I believe we will be left with an environment where both media creation and consumption will be able to flourish in ways that benefit everyone. About the author: Christian Cantrell is a Senior Experience Development Manager on Adobe’s XD team, and a science fiction author.
  • 33. The New Exceptionalism: Business Understanding Ann Ystén, Perfect Fools Digital agencies are feeling the squeeze at both ends – struggling to compete for transformational work while simultaneously being undercut by technology. Web and social content has moved into an era of automation. Squarespace produces pretty competent websites for $100 a month, while social content management programmes such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social will pull out statistics and even suggest popular posts. For many marketers, these sausage-machine services are “good enough” and seriously undermine established agency offerings. When it comes to new tech solutions for digital challenges, we’re also faced with competition from innovation labs, tech start-ups and in-house product developers, established by the likes of John Lewis in UK, and Unilever globally. This unprecedented challenge reflects the fact that lines are blurring between communication, business strategy and products. The digitalization and mobilisation of business requires solutions that go well beyond the marketing department. While agencies can provide these solutions, too many of us don’t talk the language of business and therefore never get to deliver true digital transformation. To “The lines are blurring between communication, business strategy and products.”
  • 34. really challenge a client’s business performance, agencies must understand every aspect of that client – from production and sales, to customer service and product development. By developing a deeper understanding of the business challenges our clients face, we can articulate more meaningful solutions and ensure that our offers aren’t seen as experimental or simply a bit of fun. For example, our work on a forthcoming FMCG* campaign has led to a new piece of machinery being installed on the factory floor precisely because we were able to demonstrate the business impact that would result from the investment. We were able to make the case for this technical innovation only after deep research into target group preferences and extensive conversation with the production department in addition to the marketing department. For the launch of Peak Performance’s collection of outdoor clothing, we worked with a wide range of teams, including e-commerce, logistics, production and the company’s creative director, as well as its global market team. Without this investment to gain deeper understanding and insight, we would not have delivered work that successfully transformed their business model by establishing virtual pop up shops in remote locations. We went even deeper with Sweden’s largest broadcaster (SVT) in building a second- screen experience and pioneering app for a key programme, Melodifestivalen, Sweden’s huge qualifying competition for the Eurovision Song Contest. We met with a range of departments and acted as consultants within a complex, cross-discipline team of professionals. The work resulted in significant changes to the TV show’s format. Only by embedding ourselves within SVT were we able to innovate, increase audience engagement and transform the show’s real-time scoring system. Our solution is now being adopted across many other formats. There are other great examples of agencies making a transformative impact on their clients’ businesses. Great Works’ collaboration with Pernod Ricard to create ultra- local brands of vodka is one of them. Setting up bespoke micro-distilleries in 12 cities around the world clearly required a deep relationship and understanding of the production department, as well as the marketing side of the business. Similarly, IBM used Grand Slam tennis event Wimbledon to showcase its data processing and analytics capability. A 10-strong technology team enabled the brand to engage with fans via data-driven, amusing and shareable content that connected with influencers and businesses in order to increase sales. Such examples, however, are few and far between. There still aren’t very many of us who are ready to take this route. Next-generation agencies need to contribute more than marketing benefits. I believe we need to adopt three behaviours to deliver transformation. First, we need to put the client’s business at the centre of our strategic planning and think like business innovators rather than digital creatives. This is a huge cultural challenge. Second, we need an everyday process that encompasses all aspects of the client’s business, giving various departments (not just marketing) the opportunity to influence the new concepts we’re exploring. As we did with SVT, we need to
  • 35. understand the timescales that each unit operates within and be willing to adapt the process to make everyone comfortable. Third, we must learn how to divide responsibilities and ensure that everyone involved owns their part of the project. With so many people involved, there is an acute risk that no one will feel ownership of the project. We must overcome that risk in order to deliver true digital transformation. In summary, the digital agency of the future needs more than technical and creative expertise. It needs business consultants who have a deep understanding of the client side and the right skillset to engage effectively with professionals from a wide range of company disciplines, including logistics, production, sales and marketing. Only with this insight can an agency offer sharp, workable solutions. Such consultants can talk the same language as clients and will help agency teams move beyond being experts in digital strategy to become agents of business transformation. * FMCG = Fast-Moving Consumer Good, also known as a Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) About the author: Ann Ystén is the CEO of Perfect Fools. With over 25 years in marketing and advertising focusing on CPG and luxury products, her career is a journey through some of Sweden’s best brands – from Pripps to SAS and Absolut Vodka. She has worked in a number of executive leadership roles on both the agency and client sides of the industry. Ann passionately strives to deliver the prerequisite business performance by always nurturing the brand first and foremost. She strongly believes in technical innovation as a critical part of creative communication. “To really challenge a client’s business performance, agencies must understand every aspect of that client – from production and sales, to customer service and product development.”
  • 36. 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Does Your Brand Help or Hinder Your Talent Development Efforts? 3.2 Incentivizing Your Staff Beyond Carrot and Stick Talent
  • 37. Introduction to Talent Emily Bloom Talent Section Editor Managing Director, People, Viget Behind every piece of great work is a team of talented people. Our success as agencies depends on our ability to consistently find, hire and empower those people. The talent challenge isn’t new or unique to our industry, but the market is as competitive as ever and roles seem to get more specialized each year. Brooke Heck’s article builds a case for why developing a strong employment brand is essential to any digital agency in today’s competitive market. She goes on to provide practical steps for creating or fine-tuning your employment brand. Of course, after making the right hires, we enjoy the continual challenge of keeping people engaged in their work. Cain Ullah walks us through the approach at Red Badger, largely informed by Dan Pink’s book, Drive. By “incentivising beyond the stick and carrot,” Cain explains how we can tap into deeper and more lasting sources of inspiration that sustain employees over time. Cain also touches on a growing theme in our industry: hiring for diversity. Research confirms that diverse creative teams solve problems more effectively than non-diverse ones. Accordingly, diversity initiatives are emerging as both part of employment brand strategies as well as critical business strategies. We’re attracted to the constant changes of our industry in terms of technology; let’s also embrace changing trends on the talent side. The articles that follow spark ideas for keeping current and nimble in the evolving discipline of people operations.
  • 38. Does Your Brand Help or Hinder Your Talent Development Efforts? Brooke Heck, Phenomblue “Employment brand” is the term commonly used to describe an organization’s reputation as an employer, as opposed to its more general corporate brand reputation. An effective employment brand reduces turnover and supports recruiting efforts, while invigorating and aligning senior leadership and staff. Employment brands are integral and imperative to an organization’s success, affecting the bottom line now more than ever. However, getting it right can be a challenge. Many organizations mistakenly assume their consumer-facing brand embodies the same characteristics needed to attract the best talent, failing to articulate what actually sets them apart in the employment space. As of November 2015, the US unemployment rate was 5.0% — down from 10% in October 2009, and the lowest it’s been since April 2008. When you couple the low unemployment rate with recent reports that show nearly 55% of employed professionals are actively seeking new employment or advancement, it means most new jobs are going to people currently with jobs. As such, the post-digital, connected age is one of the most competitive environments
  • 39. “Organizations must have a clear, actionable plan in place to successfully attract and retain the best talent.” “Hiring is expensive. Losing employees is even more expensive. Focus on the desired outcome.” for talent in the last 10 to 15 years. Today, employees choose their employer just as much as the employer chooses them, and it’s never been more important to recruit the right people and retain them. Prospective talent must be able to visualize themselves working at an organization in order to feel comfortable choosing a place of employment. When crafting an employment brand, organizations must have a clear, actionable plan in place to successfully attract and retain the best talent. You must ask yourself who are the people looking for jobs? What would motivate them to accept a position with your organization, or to stay in their current position? Today, with fair compensation and benefits as table stakes, it’s paramount to take a close look at your organization’s culture on a regular basis to ensure it’s a place that people want to be. Hiring is expensive. Losing employees is even more expensive. Focus on the desired outcome. Think about how your employees tell people what they do or what you do. Are they happy? Authentic? Do they use their own words? Do they understand your organization’s strategic goals and how they apply to their day-to-day? For most companies, employees are the number one referrer of new talent. Employees who are aligned internally are your organization’s best brand advocates. People who interact with aligned employees and have positive experiences become influencers. Organizations need to start by having a clear strategy in place. Something that resonates internally and externally, something that differentiates your organization in the sea of employers vying for the same talent and allows you to hire the right people, on-board them and assimilate them into the culture purposefully and authentically. Once they’re on board, you’ll need a plan (and specific tactics) to empower and retain the best of them. If your organization is looking to build an employment brand, here are a few takeaways to get started: 1. Identify your work culture. Who are you? What makes you attractive to potential talent? What makes people in your organization stay? 2. Define a position you can own and defend. How are you different than everyone else competing for the same talent? 3. Create the perceptions you need to be successful. Determine what people outside and inside your organization need to think and feel in order to attract and retain top talent. About the author: Brooke Heck is a Vice President and Practice Lead at Phenomblue, a connected communications firm. Brooke is an acclaimed business leader, whose strategies and tactical executions have helped numerous companies – including Disney and GE – achieve success in the digital age. An experienced entrepreneur, having launched two startups in the healthcare and wellness space, Brooke now works to help prepare organizations of all shapes and sizes for success in the post-digital, connected age.
  • 40. Incentivizing Your Staff Beyond Carrot and Stick Cain Ullah, Red Badger A common misconception is that financial rewards, such as performance-based bonuses, always help improve employee motivation. In fact, the opposite is often true. So what are the best techniques for increasing employee motivation and productivity? Early in my career, whenever I had a financial incentive to do well, I generally disliked the process. My performance would typically be evaluated against a number of arbitrary targets, including – at times – a review of my utilization rate. The targets may have made perfect financial sense to the business, but encouraged a strange culture of focusing on being billed or ticking boxes you knew would result in a bonus. When designing a culture that would support our strategy and drive performance at Red Badger, we decided to do things differently. We began research on motivation, which led us down some very interesting rabbit holes with unexpected findings. What motivates us? As we researched the topic, we discovered decades of insights on the subject of motivation and creativity as well as individual and team performance across a wide
  • 41. “The key is to allow our staff the freedom to be creative, to learn all the time, to explore new things and to provide them with work that they feel really matters.” array of fields ranging from business to psychology to sociology. Dan Pink’s book Drive provides a particularly compelling review of the scientific research on human motivation that has been conducted around the globe. All of the research points toward a general misconception that the “carrot and stick approach” (i.e. “If you do this, then you get that”) improves motivation. Carrot and stick rewards are effective for tasks that are purely mechanical. For any task that requires some level of cognitive thought, the science shows that such rewards have a detrimental effect on productivity. The simple reason for this is that carrot and stick rewards narrow people’s focus and stop people from thinking laterally, thus inhibiting their creativity. Teresa Amibile, a prominent Harvard Business School Professor, has underscored this finding in her own research: “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.” Intrinsic motivation is inside the body and mind. An example of intrinsic motivation would be performing an action or activity because you enjoy the activity itself… because it’s personally rewarding to you. Extrinsic motivation would involve performing an action for tangible rewards (or pressures), rather than for the fun of it. If you want to motivate team members performing cognitive tasks, you need to find incentives that affect them emotionally. Cash simply doesn’t cut it. Of course, paying your staff well is important to make them feel like they are being treated fairly. However, once they are paid fairly, extra cash incentives related to their personal performance is not recommended. The research shows that three of the key factors that lead to better performance are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Dan Pink describes these three factors as the following: • Autonomy - Our desire to be self-directed. • Mastery - The urge to get better at stuff that matters • Purpose - To work in the service of something that is bigger than ourselves So what can you do to motivate your staff? Below are a few examples of what we’ve implemented at Red Badger to get you thinking. Autonomy Red Badger trusts our staff to do the right thing. The key is for staff to be in control of the decisions they make day-to-day. We don’t have line management (only mentors), so there is no micromanagement. We have flexible working hours and we offer a £2K training budget each year that employees are able to use as they see fit. We run projects with a loose framework designed with autonomous cells of people. Those cells are in charge of the decisions from how the project is run from technology choice to delivery approach. The more autonomy you provide your staff, the more productive and happy they tend to be. Netflix provides another great example of Autonomy. Employees at the company have no holiday limit and are able to set their own schedule for paid time off. In practice, their people typically work more than they would have otherwise with a more traditional holiday benefits package. Best Buy also implements ROWE (Results
  • 42. “If you want a smarter more productive company, try and build and hire for a culture of gender equality.” Only Work Environment), where pay is not related to working hours at all. Mastery We try to provide our employees with the best possible environment to collaborate and share knowledge. We explore various ways of doing this, including a monthly company meeting at the office where everyone takes a turn to present key bits of knowledge – be it a demo of a client project or some thought leadership. We encourage them to innovate. We never take predetermined solutions to our clients, but rather allow our teams to cater solutions specific to the requirements at hand. If that means using technology that we haven’t leveraged before, that’s fine. We also are heavily involved in the open source community, building our own open source software and contributing to others. Additionally, we do quite a lot of pro-bono work for philanthropic causes. Our staff is always driving the evolution of how Red Badger does things because they are passionate, smart people who love what they do and we don’t get in their way. The key is to allow our staff the freedom to be creative, to learn all the time, to explore new things and to provide them with work that they feel really matters. The more you can turn work into play, the better. Purpose All great companies have a strong vision and reason for being. It is important for your employees to know exactly what that is in order to feel like they’re a part of the company’s cause. At Red Badger, we take this one step further. Every year we have a company day where we get employees to do a workshop on the company’s vision and purpose. The outcome of the workshop is a whole wall of post-its with insights on why Red Badger exists, how we realize the ‘why’ and what the tangible outcomes are. We then use the outputs of the workshop to drive our value proposition and service offerings. By doing this, all of our staff feel part of a common purpose because they have been instrumental in building it. Something else that we do (not all companies will be comfortable with this) is to be completely transparent with our financial results. Every quarter we present turnover, profit, margins, cash in the bank, etc. We have found that this not only provide a sense of job security, but it helps employees correlate what they do day-to-day with the overall success of the company. Gender equality My final piece of advice is that you aim to build a company with gender equality. We are nearly 50/50 at Red Badger. There is some great research by Anita Wooley, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon, on what makes teams productive. Her findings pointed conclusively to gender equality being more important to increased collective intelligence than individual IQ scores. So, if you want a smarter more productive company, try and build and hire for a culture of gender equality. About the author: A computer science graduate who moved into business consulting, Cain has been an advocate of agile and lean methods of software delivery for over 10 years. He has worked with large corporations helping them to reduce waste,
  • 43. innovate and build excellent customer experiences. Now as CEO at Red Badger, Cain is responsible for Strategy, Culture, Sales and Marketing. Red Badger is currently working to help clients such as Tesco, BSkyB and Fortnum & Mason build enterprise web applications using innovative technology, collaborative workflows and rigorous customer experience strategy. Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
  • 45. 4.1 The Rise of Opinionated Software – And What It Means for Agencies 4.2 Talking Unicorns 4.3 Tearing Down the Walls of User Experience Tech Talk
  • 46. The Rise of Opinionated Software – And What It Means for Agencies Stuart Eccles, Made by Many For years, tech entrepreneurs have been able to solve large-scale problems for entire markets at a very broad level. Their ability to do so is enabled by the unit economics* of software. Conversely, business consultants and agencies, inhibited by the labor costs and discernment required to develop and execute customized – yet scalable - strategies, have oftentimes resigned themselves to narrowly solve problems for clients facing distinct challenges at precise moments in time. Never the two shall meet. Until now. I’m convinced that the next big turn of the wheel for enterprise software belongs to consultants and other experts looking to deliver their vision at scale. The foundation is in place for them to deliver that vision within a more narrowly defined problem area than has typically been the case in the enterprise segment which usually focuses on broad service offerings.
  • 47. These days, the most promising opportunity in the consulting realm is turning new ideas into repeatable, scalable, ‘value-adding’ SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to sell to clients. The value upside is far greater than consulting models alone and it can solve issues such as lumpy cash flow by producing monthly, recurring revenue streams. This new opportunity exists because service businesses are now more readily able to couple their deep understanding of their clients’ problems with new creative ways of solving those problems. The goal (and promise) in this new era is to produce better ways of doing things, not just more efficient ways of doing things. Such a vision requires the deployment of Opinionated Products. An Opinionated Product is a software product that has been developed based on the belief that a certain way of approaching a business process is inherently better than the alternatives. Products always start out with a plan and a purpose, yet it is fairly common to see them morph and deviate from their intended path over time. And that’s fine to a certain degree as long as the new end-product is a byproduct of your opinion, your vision and your strategic assessment of the product’s usage. Non-opinionated products are jam-packed with settings and configurations developed to provide ultimate flexibility to users. The problem with this approach is that no product can do all things equally well when it has an inordinate number of configuration settings. Enterprise SaaS is to some degree opinionated, in that the very act of prioritizing which features are included in the product requires the creators to assert what they think is important. But as these products and the market mature, they become less opinionated. They do so because more features are added to provide feature parity with competitors and more customization options are offered in response to customers with particular needs. This then creates a more generic product able to broadly handle many types of workflows (good and bad), a product that is off-vision, and one that has eschewed best practices by offering an excessively large feature set. These products then run the risk of being disrupted by new entrants that are not only leaner, but also more ‘opinionated.’ In fact, some products are now using opinion as a competitive advantage (not just in their content marketing, but baked into the software code itself). The mantra that you can’t be all things to all customers is clearly starting to resonate in the enterprise software market. An opinionated product can be a strong complement to a consulting practice. We know, for example, that professional services make up 20% of the revenue associated with most enterprise SaaS products. Building a truly opinionated product, however, requires a more narrow category focus and a tighter definition of the problems the solution will address. There’s a reason that Marc Andreessen’s adage “software is eating the world” has become one of the most quoted observations in the startup community in recent years. Any consultancy or agency out there right now would be foolish to side-step the question: “How do we make the software version of what we do?” “Every consultancy and agency should be asking themselves how they can make the software version of what they do.”
  • 48. * Unit economics = the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model expressed on a per unit basis. To study the unit economics of each customer, ask yourself… “Can I make more profit from customers than it costs me to acquire them?” If the answer is yes (as it has been for many enterprise software companies), you have a business. About the Author: Stuart is the Co-Founder and CTO of Made by Many, a digital product innovation company. He has a Master’s degree in Engineering and 16 years of experience creating large-scale software based products. He is an advocate and frequent speaker on the use of agile project methodologies and lean manufacturing philosophies applied to the strategy, design and development of digital products. Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
  • 49. Talking Unicorns Simon Hudson, CloudRaker Many companies see the addition of a Chief Marketing Technologist as a crucial step in fighting digital disruption. According to the Harvard Business Review, Mayur Gupta is the epitome of what a Chief Marketing Technologist should be. He’s been busy keeping the personal care giant Kimberly-Clark at the forefront of the digital marketing revolution. Among other forward- thinking initiatives, he has brought in a number of emerging enterprise technologies and has also been instrumental in creating a global digital innovation lab at the company.” We sat down with Mayur to get his take on the future of tech in marketing and the road to digital coherence. SIMON HUDSON: What brought you to Kimberly-Clark? MAYUR GUPTA: I think it was a combination of good timing in terms of where Kimberly-Clark was headed, where I was in my career and the technology-driven disruption happening all around us. Marketing is currently in an era of convergence, and it needs marketers who are no longer T-shaped (specializing in one specific area). We need what a lot of people are calling “unicorns”, a new breed of marketer living at
  • 50. the intersection of marketing, technology and storytelling. However, there is a clear dearth of this talent. Educational systems are still focused on raising siloed professionals, either technologists or marketers or sales professionals or finance specialists, when the needs of modern marketing are highly convergent. We need a fundamental shift at a foundational level. It’s a rare talent that is bred almost organically on the job. SIMON HUDSON: Where is this organic breeding happening? MAYUR GUPTA: Some businesses, Kimberly-Clark and a few others, are taking it on themselves. It’s not happening in a recruiting shop or within the context of an educational system. Companies intent on driving growth make it a priority, funding internal programs for top talent, teaching them the art and science of breaking down silos and becoming “consumer-obsessed”. SIMON HUDSON: What’s the starting point for a company looking for digital coherence? MAYUR GUPTA: At Kimberly-Clark, we often joke that it’s a journey from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence and then, someday, you become consciously competent. A company in the second stage is already winning. The question is: how do you create a partnership? How do you collaborate and build the capability that’s at the intersection of marketing and technology, marketing and sales or marketing and finance? It’s not that IT is going away or that marketing is going away; marketing and IT are both evolving to a point where technology is now the interface of marketing. The perfect example is the iPhone. Is it a technology solution, a consumer experience, or a marketing solution? That’s the state we live in: you can’t isolate marketing or consumer experiences from technology anymore. SIMON HUDSON: What’s your biggest accomplishment so far at Kimberly-Clark? MAYUR GUPTA: It’s the establishment of a global marketing technology organization at the intersection of marketing and IT that has gotten tremendous support and leadership from both our CMO and CIO. In a massive company like ours, at first, it was like The Shawshank Redemption, where you take a small hammer and dig a tunnel bit by bit every day. We have been fortunate enough to have tremendous leadership with vision and foresight, people who believed that staying where you are is more risky than moving forward. We are still in the early stages of our journey, and we continue to pivot as we encounter new challenges. Overall, it took tremendous leadership in the C-suite. They never gave up. They strongly believed in the vision we had, and we just ploughed through. To me, that is the biggest accomplishment, along with the bridges we’ve created to connect with our IT leadership. That’s what makes me feel good. SIMON HUDSON: Is your role there permanent or do you see yourself as facilitating a transition? “Educational systems are still focused on raising siloed professionals, either technologists or marketers or sales professionals or finance specialists, when the needs of modern marketing are highly convergent.”
  • 51. MAYUR GUPTA: Tough question! But I see what you mean. Look, it’s almost impossible to predict what the future has in store, but two things are certain: first, the world we live in will continue to change and it will change fast. Second, the need to converge across silos will only get stronger and stronger. The future CMO is definitely someone who understands and recognizes the role of data and technology in driving seamless consumer experiences. Needless to say, there are many fancier names for this role, including CDO (or Chief Digital Officer) which I have reservations about. SIMON HUDSON: Why don’t you believe in the CDO role? MAYUR GUPTA: When working with a highly fragmented operating model, the way to drive a connected, seamless omni-channel experience is by driving convergence. When you establish C-level roles like the CDO and put them on par with the CMO, you’re creating the exact problem you are trying to solve, which further fragments the system. Clive Sirkin, our CMO at Kimberly-Clark, says: “We don’t do digital marketing, we do marketing (or brand building) in a digital world.” That means everything is marketing, or in other words, it’s only “marketing”— not digital or analog or content marketing. You can’t separate digital, ecommerce, content or other fragments from marketing. That’s being channel-centric when what we need is to be consumer-centric. That said, the CDO role can definitely be a good first step towards an ultimate vision of converging offline and online marketing, but giving somebody a C-title to run digital outside of marketing is short-term thinking. If you’re far behind and have no digital footprint, you may need someone to come on board initially to drive your digital objectives and agenda. Your ultimate goal, however, should be to converge this person into broader marketing. We create these oxymorons in the industry: omni-channel retail, omni-channel commerce... They’re oxymorons because we want to drive omni-channel, yet we try to bucket it in an e-commerce silo. The CDO role is similar. It makes sense as a first step to gain maturity, but it cannot be your end-state. SIMON HUDSON: Can CIOs and CMOs implement those changes? MAYUR GUPTA: Why not? A good CMO will establish marketing technology leadership to unify marketing, technology, data and analytics. They’re adopting these crucial capabilities because at the end of the day, they are the ones who are accountable to drive the ROI and category growth as well as to build legendary brands. CIOs who commit to transforming their organizations and making them more digitally savvy by rethinking their understanding of traditional IT to reflect new marketing needs are already taking a huge step. The ones who don’t, believing the CMO should only focus on marketing and exclude digital, are working with a broken model. SIMON HUDSON: Can an external agency help bring digital coherence to a company? “Marketing and IT are both evolving to a point where technology is now the interface of marketing.” “The future CMO is definitely someone who understands and recognizes the role of data and technology in driving seamless consumer experiences.”
  • 52. MAYUR GUPTA: I strongly believe that brands and Fortune 500s will continue to expand their capabilities by building thought leadership and top digital talents internally to provide vision while leveraging agency partners to both collaborate on the strategy and execute it at scale. But the “set it and forget it” times are over. Brands need to exercise a much higher level of control and direction now. About the Author: From teaching to quality assurance, technical development to international marketing, business development to business start-ups, Simon has flitted, butterfly like, learning from each experience and bringing that breadth to his client facing and business development activities. Simon is articulate, opinionated, understanding and suffers from an insatiable curiosity.
  • 53. Shopify Plus is the solution for building high-volume ecommerce stores for your clients. Learn about our customizable, cloud-hosted platform with 24/7 support. shopifyplus.com/soda Enterprise ecommerce software without the headaches Lily Rogers Shopify Plus Account Manager
  • 54. Tearing Down the Walls of User Experience Jackson Murphy, Pound & Grain Putting the user first is the only defense against the increasingly barrier-ridden UX ecosystem of brands. To thrive in today’s environment, agencies need to go beyond campaigns and solve user problems anywhere and everywhere. Maslow pushed out his hierarchy of needs in 1943 in a nostalgically cute world of push-only marketing and brick and mortar commerce – an era when the funnel was still a relatively straightforward concept. The marketers of the Mad Men era never had to worry about mobile, tablets, desktops, apps, social, the Internet of things, wearables, Virtual Reality, and enough data to make our head spin. In 2015, consumer needs live in a complex world of customer journeys across devices – the operative word being complex. While consumers’ needs have largely remained constant, trying to fulfill them now requires constant vigilance and an anytime / anywhere approach. Managing those user experiences across touch points is arguably the hardest part of any marketer’s day. And by hard, we mean it’s reached a byzantine level of complexity.
  • 55. “Managing user experiences across touch points has reached a byzantine level of complexity.” “As users move seamlessly across channels and screens, marketers need to optimize experiences along the journey at every single opportunity.” As Econsultancy reports, one third of marketers manage these touch points in silos, and 38% say they have no way to impact or manage the complete customer journey, despite understanding the acute need to do so. And since we’re piling on the numbers, a recent Google commissioned Forrester Consulting report noted that only 2% of companies have the “capabilities necessary to identify, deliver on, and measure moments of intent.” Ouch! It’s these so-called “micro-moments” that Google has been pushing on us and which dominate every touch point along that user journey. This is a 24/7 competitive space where brands are having increasingly fractured interactions with current or prospective customers while they are in latte lines, during transit rides, when their Instagram feeds have nothing new, and even while they’re ignoring your ads. Think Hunger Games, but with far more brands getting blown up by consumers gleefully playing the role of Katniss. That is today’s battleground for the hearts and minds of the consumer. The challenge for marketers is that in many cases we’re not pulling all the levers in the tool kit in a cohesive way. Between multiple agencies (advertising, digital marketing, ecommerce, social), a cottage industry of new buzzword inspired sub-category agencies (customer experience agencies, service design agencies) and new and powerful internal groups (modeled after start-ups, versed in agile development and builder culture that are becoming true innovators in their own right), the right arm doesn’t always know what the left is doing. We have a real opportunity to break silos, tear down barriers, and once and for all put the user in the center of every brief, conversation and customer experience regardless of which department or what agency is working on the initiative. In less than 75 years, we’ve gone from broadcast to interaction, from content is king to context is king. We are now all hurling towards a place where we always needed to be, where the user is king no matter what, when or where. As they move seamlessly across channels and screens, marketers need to optimize experiences along the journey at every single opportunity. May the odds be ever in your favor. About the Author: A Creative Director with over a decade of copywriting and content experience, Jackson is passionate about evangelizing innovative digital solutions and delivering results. Illustration provided by Kate Sheridan.
  • 56. Trusted by top tier digital agencies, ULTRA Testing provides high quality, highly responsive software testing services through onshore teams that include individuals on the Autism Spectrum. Thank you to our agency clients for trusting ULTRA to UpSource Your QA! Test Planning - Functional Testing - Unit/Regression Testing - Agile Team Integration Mobile Testing - Browser Testing - Design QA - Copy QA/Content Entry - UX Validation Analytics & Tracking - Exploratory Testing - Accessibility Testing - Strict Compliance QA Call ULTRA at 212.730.6710 or email lisa@ultratesting.us
  • 57. Showcases Adobe FEED AIM Group Array Interactive Brown-Forman Barrel Jacob’s Pillow Dance Big Spaceship Samsung Mobile Bluecadet The Hoover Mason Trestle Born05 KLM CloudRaker Digital Kitchen Microsoft EffectiveUI American Express Engine Digital BC Hydro and Power Authority Fuel DreamWorks Grow Google
  • 58. IE Mecca Brands Instrument Google Invoke Modo IQ Geico Jam3 Lincoln Motor Company Koombea Samsung LaneTerralever GORE-TEX® Brand Made by Many Universal Music Group Metajive WowWee Toys Method Henri Perfect Fools Betsson’s Sverige Phenomblue Readywire Pound & Grain Arc’teryx Ready Set Rocket Kenneth Cole Red Badger Fortnum & Mason SapientNitro Fisher Island VLT Hello Roaming Zemoga XPO
  • 59. Make It Challenge What started as a crazy conversation between Adobe and FEED several months ago ended with a bold new holiday campaign to end hunger and make the world a better place. This project all began with an audacious question: What if Adobe’s amazing creative community and FEED’s impactful products could be brought together to create something that would really move the needle on hunger this holiday. The call soon went out to art directors, copy writers and designers to compete to create FEED’s holiday campaign. Adobe dubbed the competition the Make It Challenge. The creatives were expected to concept, pitch, shoot, design and produce print, video and web assets for FEED’s holiday campaign in just seven days. Seven days! Creative teams were selected from Adobe’s Behance community, the world’s largest creative platform with 5MM+ members. Behance job profiles were posted in early August and phone screenings were conducted in mid-to-late August. The six art director and copy writer finalists were flown to New York to be coupled into three teams of two. After the initial concepting and pitching, only one team was asked to move forward with the production of their idea. Adobe presented the challenge in seven consecutive daily episodes starting November 5th, leading right up to the launch of the FEED Projects Holiday campaign. CLIENT: FEED PARTNER COMPANY: Adobe Since FEED’s inception, over 87 million meals have been provided to people in hunger as a result of the company’s various initiatives, including the “Make It Challenge” in partnership with Adobe. View Project View Project (video)
  • 60. Identity as a Service Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance in emerging and developing markets is a big challenge. In today’s digital age, the ability to map an individual’s identity is paramount across a wide range of industries, including financial services, insurance and healthcare. Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process of a business verifying the identity of its clients. KYC policies are becoming much more important globally to prevent such nefarious activities as identity theft, financial fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing. In emerging markets, KYC compliance traditionally involves thousands of hours of manual data entry and paperwork. The AIM Group – a Tanzania-based digital innovation agency - saw the need for a digital product that would go beyond simply streamlining identity verification compliance, which would have been a worthy goal in and of itself. The product they created – EKYC – uses sophisticated technology (including facial recognition software) that has been optimized to work on even the lowest-end, photo- capable smartphones. The quality of the data captured is vastly improved and the platform is widely accessible rather than being limited to the wealthiest consumers with access to the latest tech gadgetry. The platform also has robust reporting and data mining capabilities that facilitate more agile business decision making and greater efficiency overall. The product solves an acute operational problem in much of Africa and other MEMBER COMPANY: AIM Group In a period of less than 6 months, the EKYC platform has amassed more than 3,000,000 registrations. The solution is also 60% more cost effective per registration than paper- based and other more rudimentary identity verification methods. View Project View Project (video)
  • 61. developing regions where paper-based and other rudimentary solutions rack up costs and limit the reach of national identity programs, making it difficult to verify individual identity. The solution has already been rolled out to three of the largest mobile telephony operators in Tanzania (Vodacom, Tigo and Airtel) and is scaling fast.
  • 62. Bringing Gentleman Jack to Life From Jack Daniel’s® to Finlandia®, Array brings Brown-Forman’s iconic brands to life through an immersive, interactive brand experience. For more than 140 years, Brown-Forman Corporation has enriched the experience of life by responsibly building fine quality brands in the distilled spirits and wine categories. While the Brown-Forman name may not be readily familiar, their brands certainly are — Jack Daniel’s®, Southern Comfort®, Korbel®, Chambord®, Woodford Reserve®, Old Forester®, and Finlandia®—just to name a few. The care they take in building brands is unparalleled. So too is the innovative, yet responsible, approach they take to marketing their many products. This can be evidenced by the company’s latest digital installation, an expansive interactive video wall and content solution conceived by Array Interactive for their corporate headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Audiences can now touch, access and engage with Brown-Forman brand campaigns, branded entertainment, social media conversations, new product packaging and more in an entirely new and immersive way. CLIENT: Brown-Forman MEMBER COMPANY: Array Interactive The Brown-Forman touch interactive experience showcases the best-known beverage brands within their portfolio. View Project
  • 63. Dance Reimagined An immersive video collection that brings dance performances to life. Jacob’s Pillow is a nonprofit that organizes America’s longest-running international dance festival as well as performances, talks and events throughout the year. It also runs The School at Jacob’s Pillow, one of the most prestigious professional dance training centers in the U.S. Barrel worked with Jacob’s Pillow to redesign and build their Dance Interactive website, as well as an extensive archive of videos highlighting festival performances from 1936 to present day. The new website features customized video players that allow visitors to enjoy performances full-screen and to learn more about each piece in an immersive and engaging way. An interactive guessing game and themed playlists encourage visitors to explore and discover new content, while the enhanced browse experience allows dance fans to easily search through 300 videos. The site is fully responsive and built on WordPress. CLIENT: Jacob’s Pillow Dance MEMBER COMPANY: Barrel Since the site’s launch in May, it has won Site of the Day on CSS Design Awards and has also received a Communications Arts Webpick of the Week award. View Project View Project (video)
  • 64. It Doesn’t Take A Genius A campaign to spoil the launch of a product heralded as a ‘great step forward’ that in fact just duplicated much of the innovation Samsung had pioneered three years earlier. Samsung created the Phablet category back in 2011 when it launched its GALAXY Note phone and since then has gone on to dominate the lucrative large-screen phone category. On September 6, 2014 that was about to change with the launch of one of the world’s most anticipated phones, a direct challenge to Samsung’s market position. Competitive advertising is always fraught with danger. However, when you’re taking shots at the world’s biggest brand (by market capitalization) around their highly anticipated launch events, you better be sure to get it right. Samsung Mobile came to Big Spaceship, as their global social media agency, to get to work. They created a faux backroom where in-store mobile repairs are made, cast actors, and set up a Brooklyn war room where the core team maintained constant communication with the film studio (a few miles away) and the client in Seoul (a few thousand miles away). The team used intense social listening during the lead-up to the launch to help identify the persistent rumors about what the fanboy community was expecting to see CLIENT: Samsung Mobile MEMBER COMPANY: Big Spaceship The campaign resulted in 14 million video views, coverage in more than 60 global news outlets, a reach of 300 million and extremely positive sentiment for competitive advertising. The press, fans and client all agreed that Big Spaceship successfully took a bite out of the competition. View Project (video)
  • 65. from the new device and how they might be disappointed. Big Spaceship needed to find a way to get press coverage around the timing of the event that would deflate the buzz and show consumers the new phone was not as innovative as its competitor’s marketing made it seem. On the day of the competitor’s big launch, Big Spaceship spent the entire day shooting videos in direct response to the presentation. Within 24 hours, they pushed out six videos showing fanboy dismay at the “groundbreaking” large screen claims and taking digs at the competitor’s faltering live stream. After the videos went viral, the campaign continued through shareable reaction GIFs taken from the videos.