An International Smoothie

Filleting the Funnel: The Powah of Interactive

Digital advertising is dead. And agencies that tout their 'digital' credentials are deluded. I really hate the term digital. I actually think I detest it with the same passion that Nick Griffin hates people whose DNA unzipping didn't result in them looking 100% Caucasian. I hate it because it undervalues and plays down and puts into a box something that is unboxable. And I hate it because it has been taken for a ride by wanky ad agencies that have no clue what it means.

So digital as a silo like TV, like print, like direct mail, sucks. Digital as a silo is dead. It probably has been for a while. I mean think about it, really think about it - what does digital really mean? The wise folk of the world over at Wikipedia define digital (amongst other things) as the 1s and 0s that are everywhere, but never seen.

If we take that and run with it, is this digital?

Image courtesy of planetgordon.com via Flickr

How about this?

Picture courtesy of carla777

See where I'm going? Digital stuff is everywhere. It is, after all 2000 and frickin' 9. So this notion that you can put 'digital' into a department is nonsense. Agencies that have a discrete digital department need to wake up and smell the narcotics, because they are restricting themselves before getting to the starting line. 

It's this fundamental lack of understanding of how technology has changed the behavior of customers everywhere that trips up a large chunk of companies when they try to convert their siloed (can I say jurassic) creative processes into a seamless world. 

So for this reason along with others (the arrogance of the so-called brand guardians, the staggering sense of conformity that is nurtured in so many client-agency relationships and more...) I would take exception to Richard Huntington's claim that orthodox agencies have "got with the program when it comes to "digital". In many cases, self-proclaimed digital agencies haven't, with traditional agencies even further behind. 

How can I be so sure?

Because at their core, underneath all the extravagant and tantalizing models for integration that so many in the advertising business wax lyrical about, there remains the truth that the model we base the creative process on is archaic, flawed and in dire need of re-appraisal. 

I'm talking about the legendary communications funnel, that mysterious structure that no doubt sits in a locked vault in a secure room somewhere on Madison Avenue. It's wrong. And it's probably been out of date for a while, but I think in the last decade the disparity between how people behave and how the revered funnel states they behave has grown exponentially. So really it's up to us to try and evaluate where it's falling down, because you can bolt on whatever you like on a rotting foundation, eventually the whole damn thing will collapse. 

So let's begin.

Marketing 101 tells us that this is how communications works: 

You could argue that even when this model was proposed (sometime when Cyrus commanded the Persian empire), it didn't fully acknowledge the roles of what other people say and do play in an individual's decision-making process (something that we all would be wise to explore further by picking up my homeboy Mark Earls' book Herd and reading it multiple times).

If the assumption that this decision making process is hermetically sealed from other potential sources of input (friends, family, reading a review in the newspaper, seeing someone with it on the street.. etc) was contested before the advent of mass internet use, surely it is now safe to say that the model for making purchase decisions needs a total overhaul. And by extension the way in which we plan and organise communications needs to reflect the way in which a potential purchase decision is made.

The advent of the information age has, as well know brought an end to the corporate gravy train in many ways because as has been said many times before, it is now more important than ever that what you say in your communication equates to what you do. There are plenty of high-profile examples of what happens when this is not the case from United Airlines' painfully witless response to their breaking of Dave Carroll's guitar (which now ranks in the top 10 search results for a "United Airlines" Google search) to the whole Dominos pizza fiasco. And I think it's pretty safe to say that with the internet being increasingly in the palm of your hand (AdMob do an excellent monthly mobile internet metrics report which you should all check out if you don't already) and with everything from mobile phones to mp3 players being able to capture sound, photos and video; the amount of information that people can contribute and digest with regards to our clients' brands and products will only increase.

So what's my point? My point is that now, from the point of initial exposure to a piece of communication or the point of identifying a need/desire to purchase (i.e. the point where you flip the 'awareness switch' about a particular category/product/brand), a person's exposure to information has the potential to greatly increase with regards to whatever product he or she is now more acutely aware of. 

So if we were to talk about the stages of awareness, interest, evaluation and purchase in the context of how much information is sought to enable the decision making, perhaps the picture should be more like this: 

So, I'm saying that because of the vast amount of information we have at our disposal, and the ability for anyone to comment on their experiences with a brand/product/company, the inverted pyramid of the marketing funnel has to take into account the potential for a new injection of communication activity. 

Eaon talks about McKinsey and co labeling this stage as 'active evaluation'. The name is not really important, but the realization that this is occurring is crucial.

So to wind it back to the beginning of this ever-increasing ramble, I said that the majority of ad agencies and clients don't fully understand the power the information age has given us as practitioners and people as customers; instead having 'digital' penned in as a website, display advertising (which AdAge reminded us last week is a hugely flawed channel) and spunking a ton of cash on paid search. 

I'm not saying that we shouldn't build a website, shouldn't spend some money on SEM and so on, I'm saying that there needs to be an increase in creating content for people who are already coming into contact with your brand in a space where you're not saying anything. Review sites, Amazon, YouTube (now the 2nd largest search engine in the world, after it's daddy), app stores (from iTunes to Android to Ovi), the dreaded and loved at the same time social networks and so on are all places where whether you like it or not people are looking for what other people are saying about your company. 

But it should never stop there. There's a concept in almost every sport that the effectiveness of say a tennis shot, a quarterback's throw, a square cut and a litany of other moves depends on the the wind-up and the follow through. Without both the actual shot/throw/stroke are greatly diminished. The same can be said for effective communication. 

If you can't get on the shopping list, your work in creating ads is essentially useless. If you provide a less than memorable in-store/purchase/aftersales experience, you might get one sale, but you won't get another. And you definitely won't get recommended. Do that to enough people and someone will hammer you somewhere on the web. And if you're not creating content that is entertaining/useful/genuinely engaging then people who search for you will find that someone hammering you and the Google monster will start to pull that further up the rankings, to a place where even Mediacom won't be able to buy space.

So what do we do? I haven't done a list in a while, so now's as good a time as any:

1. Know your product, know your category intimately. What matters in that category, what features do people base their decisions on (note this is likely to be diametrically opposite to what you want them to base decisions on), what stops people from considering your product? Ask these questions.

2. Understand that people don't think or act in a linear fashion when it comes to making a purchase decision, they're constantly shopping around, looking for reviews, talking to store staff/friends/co-workers about their dilemma (I remember when I was working at Apple we found that on average, people would buy a mac after visiting the store 6 times!). 

3. Find where people are asking questions about your category, find the communities that already exist devoted to informing people about TVs, locking wheel nuts, Morris dancing shoes or the markings on Master Chief's helmet in Halo 3. They could be on a forum, on ICQ or at a periodic meetup in a dark alley somewhere. Wherever they are, become a valuable part of that community by offering advice, answering questions or addressing complaints. And please take the time to discover people who are already talking good about you and make them the heroes of your story, facilitate fandom and your fans will be your most effective marketing ever.

4. Lock down both point of sale and after-sales. Make sure your staff/retail partners are who you want them to be (it's tough but then no-one said this was easy), provide as many points as possible for people to complain about you and then respond to each and every one. I promise you, from personal experience, that when you're pissed off at a company and vent and then that company replies in a polite and timely manner, it is a million times harder to remain that angry at them.

5. Make it your business, and the business of your ad agency/ideas factory/whatever to intimately focus on the technology of tomorrow and today, how people use it, how their use changes and how their interactions with it provide you with opportunities to facilitate activity related to your clients' company (there's a great post about how agencies need to think like software companies that you should all read as well).

Until we do that, we won't get the age of interaction. No matter what type of agency we work at, no matter what we say on our agency websites, in our client meetings, or on our blogs. It's simple. 

So really digital is dead, the funnel is actually an hourglass and it's time to get our interactive on. Boom.

As a sort of postscript, I found this cartoon over on Le'Nise's blog (via Something Changed), about converting awareness into a sale, it kind of illustrates my point - I think...

The Wrong Questions

Picture via The B@man

An oft-quoted but still understated benefit of being someone getting to grips with working life in the midst of the (often ridiculed) blogosphere is the enormous amount of wisdom that is out there. To be able to work with, befriend, listen to and read the work of amazing people everyday is something that many of us take for granted but remains an enormous privilege and benefit of the fantastic times we live in.

To that end, I must give thanks to (in no particular order) Mark, Hugh, Lloyd, Johnnie, Neil, George, Doddsy, Charlie, Paul and Eaon for their individual and in the end collective inspirations (along with the many many others that sit in the blogroll - I read them all and so should y'all) that have got me to this point, where at 3am on a Wednesday morning I'm grinning like an idiot and unable to sleep. So I blog...

Since starting in the big bag world of advertising (full-time at least) the phrases 'context is everything' and 'everything changes' have been two of the staples that I fall back on. Not just in the advertising framework, but the life framework. We spend so much time at work that trying to break it down from the time when you're 'living' is a futile exercise; either you're living all day everyday or you're dead at work. In which case you really should find some other way to earn your daily bread. Because life is, as we're so often reminded, never as long as we think.

Back to these fantastic times then. Words like convergence, utility, passion and downturn are thrown around, remixed and spat out as if this journey that we're all was either mapped out by some people a hundred years ago and we're just passing checkpoints or we're somehow in a vacuum that means we can ride out the storm without so much as a drop of water on our collective communication industry anoraks. No.

Not a single soul planned for this contingency (where are all the trends and forecasting people now? I haven't heard a single word from them on the collapse of capitalism - either in the form of a prediction or an attempt at the beginnings of a solution) and we can't huddle in our ghettos of Madison Avenue and London's West End waiting for the storm to pass. It's not a storm, it's not a story, it's something we'll all have to adapt to. It's change. And whether you believe in it or not is irrelevant. Because it's here, having crashed through our front doors and it's now sitting in our front rooms, waiting for us to acknowledge its presence.

The fantastic thing about this situation is that no-one knows what's going to happen. Isn't that amazing? We can hypothesize that issuing bonds and throwing more cash a wound that cash caused will only help to salve the wound long enough to surprise us when things crash again - but we don't know. We can say we're going to move towards a simpler way of living and exchanging goods for services - but we don't know. The point is to put ourselves, as self-proclaimed creative businesspeople in a position to shape, learn and be involved in the debate as it unfolds. In that light I find the We20 happenings fascinating and look forward to the great minds that will be present when these meetings begin.

So we know change is coming, how does that affect us in our ivory communications towers? In the last week or so I've been asked to comment on recent comms work for Sony and Toyota - in both instances I've been told that it's great work, or a technological tour de force. Before I had a look at both pieces, I did a quick search for how these companies are performing - because of course at the root of it all, effective communication will solve business problems. I found that Sony's net profit fell 95% in year on year terms and Toyota is widely rumored to be slipping into its first net loss since 1950. Read that last sentence again, these are things you hear about when wars happen, not when downturns occur. Within this context, I find it hard to think about how the cost and effort of organising and producing an ad is at all relevant to how help a slumping consumer electronics giant - or how being able to move your hand in front of a webcam to simulate a test drive is going to convince me, or anyone else in fact to spend money on a new car. It's the advertising equivalent of "mine's bigger than yours". These things may well have their place, but I'll venture a guess that today, these are not the ideal points of focus. When I mentioned this, I was told that it was great work, and great work would always have a place - no matter the economic conditions.

My reply to this was two-fold, this may not just be a condition, it may be a transformation - a paradigm shift if you will and the questions we ask ourselves in the definition of 'great' work may be incorrect. Great work is contextual, in terms of the product, service, market, political landscape and socioeconomic climate. That's what makes it great. That what shows passion. To have the drive to sweat out the small stuff and build upon a solid foundation of knowledge of the world that distills into knowledge of a particular product/service area. Like genius, passion is perspiration followed by inspiration. Every pound/dollar/euro (they're almost worth the same now so I can probably get away with grouping them together) that is spent on marketing is a luxury so we must think and then think again as to how to make it have a lasting positive effect on the company/product/service we are pimping. Not how to get a creative hard-on when we roll statistics of how epic the production was, or how we used a never thought of visual effect to deliver something sexy. Note I'm not saying bells and whistles are superflous. I'm saying if we make them the centerpiece then it's a waste of money. Eaon calls it making every action a service positive interaction - I'm personally not so comfortable with all those syllables but the point remains. Move your brand/product/service forward with everything you do - from a customer's point of view. In the context of our world today.

At NESTA yesterday Peter Bazalgette made an excellent point that sometimes needs repeating more often, particular in hallowed halls of advertising agencies/idea companies/whatever.

"The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten year's time"

Again, no-one knows. But they know it's changing. So rather than clinging to the edifices of a brilliant past, ask yourself how will I make the future awesome?

This leads me to my next point on passion and positivity. The words are bandied about all the time. But this is the time when passion will really show. So shut up and show it. Don't talk about it. Live it. Some social media luminaries proclaimed that it's easier to be positive and deluded because dealing with bs is something people can't face up to. Lord Carter yesterday then quite astutely pointed out that "being a pessimist is a national activity". Again I thought some people are just asking the wrong questions.

Yes the world's climate is screwed, the global economy is trashed and wars are ravaging innocent people everywhere. If you can't deal with reality then go to a corner and deal with it. I've said time and time again and it's reinforced even more often by the great people around me that this is an opportunity to exact change. To make something a little better. That makes my juices flow (liquid metaphor placed for Eaon and Neal at Geronimo) more than a Cannes Lion or an invite an awards show will ever do. If you're asking someone why they would even attempt to help make a change then get out of the way and let someone who's asking how they can help show up.

Kd tweeted out a quote that is much more eloquent about it then I could ever be:

"Pessimism is a luxury of good times...In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence" - Evelin Linder

Or as I like to put it: Fuck off and smile.

And it's dawned on me that my last point in all this fits rather nicely. And that's about the awesomeness of those you hang your hat with. I was on my way home and fired up Twitter when the dude next to me pointed to an article he was reading about how the existence of Tweetdeck on my laptop was a clear indicator to a huge lack of self-esteem and a cavernous hole in my soul that was probably down to playing videogames and watching WWF (it was called that back in the day). Aside from the irony of people sitting in designer clothes chastising you about your lack of self-worth, it's not about Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or anything.

It's the people.

The people. The community. The homies. The posse. The whatever word you use to talk about people. I find it hard to start defending my use/lack of use of Twitter or any other tool because the mechanism has very little to do with the motive. It's the people. Those who lay into Twitter/Brightkite/whatever might not understand the point. The point isn't to tell people what you're doing. The point is to learn from others, to push yourself forward and take whatever you can with you. If you don't like it then don't be on it. Everyone finds something that works for them. Do that. But if someone finds meaning in something you don't please don't become a hater. But if you find yourself in the midst of haters, let them hate. It's their job.

So, everyday we should ask ourselves:
How can I be better at what I do in light of what I see around me today?
How can I make the best of myself in these amazing times in preparation for whatever may come?
How can I learn from those better than me?

In spite of our self-appointed grandeur and majesty as custodians of this planet, we still cannot choose when change comes - only how we will react when it does. We haven't been getting a lot of good answers. Maybe we just need to ask better questions.