But we have failed to complement this with the “disruptive innovation” needed to create a paradigm shift in how our industry’s business model functions. All too often the agency Chief Innovation Officer’s role is to relentlessly pursue the latest new and original way of doing what we have done before (see this recent piece “Do agencies need innovation chiefs?” from Campaign magazine). And it is rarely about imaginatively and daringly finding new types of things to do with our creativity and new ways to get paid for them. That’s why despite the wealth of creative and technical talent available, so far a creative agency hasn’t created an Instagram or Angry Birds. Of course that is a very difficult thing to achieve. We are making tiny steps here at Dare, but as the hour we sell becomes commoditised, it isn’t an optional activity and so we are giving it a go. Are you?

That’s what I was left thinking after reading a couple of recent interesting posts on the topic of change. Ed Booty’s excellent BBH labs post took a skeptical look at the data behind consumers true adoption of digital technology. He also referenced this great post by Matt Edgar on our perception of the rate of change.

There was much to enjoy and agree with, and in the face of often evangelical enthusiasm for all things digital it is great to hear well reasoned skeptical and enquiring points of view. In particular I found a lot to agree with in Edgar’s view that we are far from unique as a generation to believe our era is experiencing exceptional change compared to the past.

However I can’t help but think this is the just totally the wrong debate to be having. It seems pretty irrelevant to me to argue about whether digital technology is changing our world or how fast. Digital technology already has changed our world and whether the revolution we are experiencing the start of will be fast or slow in coming, it IS coming and quite likely in our lifetime.

Leonardo Da Vinci's designs for an Archimedes screw

So instead I wish there was more debate about how to shape the revolution. How to make sure that we are designing and using technology so that it amplifies the best of human nature. This isn’t just some intellectual exercise either. On a daily basis we have the ability to shape the future of the internet with the products and platforms we recommend building for our clients. Do we build a closed proprietary mobile app with a flawless user experience that reinforces the dominance of a few corporations ecosystems? Or do we try to create something more open and accessible that attempts to fit technology around human behaviour rather than rely on humans changing their behaviour to suit technology? Douglas Rushkoff in his excellent book Program or be Programmed identifies 10 commands for living in the digital age, ways to think about your personal relationship with the world and with digital technology.

So if those are the guiding principles for your personal life, what are the guiding principles for your professional life? How should we build things on the internet? What principles should we live by as we go about our work for clients?

If you stop and think about it for a minute, the dominant position of mobile apps these days is mental. I can’t help but think that if more web publishers had innovated like the Boston Globe or the FT to produce a fantastic user experience on the web, we would feel less compelled to download an app, which requires me to jump through certain hoops (user account, downloading etc) and ultimately narrows my diet of content by keeping me in a walled garden.

So here are some thoughts about the things we could debate, that have been inspired by some recent articles with a variety of interesting points of view.

1. Open

When you write an iPhone app for a brand you are writing for the few and not for the many. On my train line into London you can download an iPhone app – as fine a piece of social exclusion as any I can think of for the thousands who use this public service but don’t have iPhones. In contrast a simple HTML page with the same content would be accessible to pretty much anyone with an internet connection. Of course often it is right to create an app to deliver a specific type of functionality or experience, but the internet’s revolutionary potential is that it can put power in the hands of ordinary people through the open web . And I think it would be a great shame if that potential wasn’t realised because of an obsession with creating slick user experiences and beautiful design.

I thought this point of view on the role of design in keeping the net open and accessible was an interesting one. Are we really designing for users or to satisfy our own egos as creative people? As a final note obviously the subject of net neutrality has some relevance here, it feels a dangerous slippery slope to me to give a policing role to service providers. Today’s well meaning prohibition can easily become tomorrow’s politically and ideologically motivated censorship.

2. Human centric

A key challenge with digital technologies is that they are new and mean a user has to some extent learn some new skills or adopt new behaviours. However I think we could work much harder to understand underlying human nature and create things that play to the strengths of human nature and amplify the behaviours that society values. Creating products that are ergonomic and delightful for the user to fit into their lives because they are based on real fulfilling needs. So we should stop thinking about what our clients need from consumers and rather think what our customers need from our clients and build accordingly.

3. Diverse

The open, human-centric web should allow people to express themselves freely within the framework of society and without fear of persecution. This was brilliantly argued for in this post by 4chan’s Chris Poole about user identity online. I think it is important for people to be able to express different facets of personality.

We out also be cautious that the way we organise our information sources doesn’t trap us in Eli Pariser’s filter bubble http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/google-personalisation-internet-data-filtering?CMP=twt_gu where our preferences and browsing history inform the content served to us dooming us to never see anything surprising challenging or different. Services that simply serve up what we already like exacerbate what F.S. Michael’s calls the monoculture http://theschooloflife.typepad.com/the_school_of_life/2011/09/fs-michaels-on-monoculture-and-the-stories-that-shape-us.html which is further compounded by things like frictionless sharing and limits our ability to think creatively and imaginatively.

So how can we create services that are expansive and diverse and allow people to make new discoveries and develop their own understanding of themesleves?

4. Collaborative

We also need to draw the distinction between participating in a community of like minded people and truly collaborating and cooperating with people different from me with different skills and opinions. The latter is what made possible the explosion in innovation at Bell Labs in the second half of the 20th century. The web makes such collaboration possible across geographies and time zones. But all too often we are drawn into communities of interest; like minded people who reinforce our own world view and give us props and retweets and +1 ‘s but don’t challenge us to develop and defend our opinions or see things differently.

We need an emphasis on good community behaviours like how to engage in debate and rational argument without descending into rhetoric, propaganda and abuse. I found this celebration of the central role of the scientific method (Fourth answer down) to progress a pretty good argument for that.

Could we aim to help our clients take a more active principled based approach to community management? Not just focusing on eradicating the usual top down bad behaviour from brands (deleting posts, boring, broadcast style content etc) but also trying to actively manage the community to encourage authentic debate, sharing and cooperation rather than just empty promotionally-motivated “likes”. This is a specialist skill, rarely found in agencies or client orgs.

5. Value based

It’s really important to create value for all stakeholders rather than just look to create wealth for shareholders. The expectations market dominates our economic system and we have the opportunity to reduce our reliance on it if we create things for our clients that are of value to all those who have a stake. Customers, employees, community and shareholders alike.

To know we are creating true value though we need to make sure we don’t simply rely on vanity metrics to give us the feeling that things are working and are ok. We need to make sure we are measuring the impact of our activities on actual perceptions and behaviour.

6. Expressive

I found this point of view particularly inspiring- In a world where consuming, liking, commenting, retweeting and sharing is getting easier and easier you can quickly fill up your days only doing that and never experience the satisfaction of making or be forced to confront your own point of view if you don’t have to express it through creativity. We are uniquely able to be creative with the tools we have at our finger tips. The only barrier is the age-old one of how we choose to spend our time.

For me brand’s role here is to invite, stimulate and reward true expression and creativity over the usual shallow participation usually thinly veneered over most marketing campaigns. Instead of thinking about what content the brand wants to “co create”, brands could think about what content consumers might find interesting, energising and illuminating to create around a topic relevant to the brands strategy. That way everyone wins, the brand, the creator and the rest of the community.

So there we go there are my five guiding principles for building digital technology to avoid both the Skynet and Mad Max dystopias of BBH Labs SxSWi talk.

Open, human centric, collaborative, diverse, value based and expressive.

What do you think? Are these the right kinds of things to be debating and discussing? Do you feel that we have the chance to shape things? I would love to have that conversation.

1. Adopt a “growth mindset”

It is pointing out the obvious but the rate of technological change we are experiencing is exponential.

Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns

This complicated chart shows just that. Futurologist and computing expert Ray Kurzweil predicts that by the 2020’s the computing power available for $1000 will be equivalent to the power of a human brain and that by mid century we will hit the singularity. Whether you disagree with Kurzweils timeframe (check out this argument from Paul Allen ) or buy into Kurzweil’s thinking (see his rebuttal here ) it is easy to agree that it is pretty much impossible for an individual to keep up with the change we are experiencing. So an obvious but important first principle is that it is essential to have what Standford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset” – a restless hunger to learn and develop skills and adopt new ways of doing things.

2. Be a collective not a clique.

Openness and acting with a generosity of spirit is crucial if an organisation truly hopes to adopt a growth mindset- how else can we hope to expose ourselves to innovative ideas and technologies if we don’t look to share with others and have things shared with us in return? So the second principle is to act as a collective – made up of small teams of collaborators from within and outside the agency who come together to work on projects in an agile, lean way acting with a philosophy of experimentation, a collective where everyone who has something to contribute is welcome to do so.

3. Embrace the Cult of done.

The third principle is to embrace the spirit behind this tongue in cheek manifesto “the Cult of Done”.
. Innovation is part creativity and a large part execution. Ideas are of course important but in many ways not as important as getting things done.
Getting things done helps us create experiments, helps us figure out what works and what doesn’t, helps us understand consumers, helps us learn how to succeed. So you need to get your hands dirty, adopt the lean start up approach of getting MVP’s to market in order to Build/Measure/Learn.
The point though is not to “Fail Fast” to coin that popular phrase from the start up world, the point is to “learn quickly”

4. Search for magical user experiences

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” Arthur C Clarke

It is a little overused quote but it inspires our third principle of always looking for ways to create magical user experiences.
To achieve this we will combine deep and insightful understanding of human behaviour with daring applications of cutting edge technology.
Just think about gestural UI’s. They don’t really add additional functionality. But they combine a human truth about how we want to use our hands to control devices with a cutting edge technology to create a more magical experience.

Experiments to create magical experiences won’t always succeed, there is a lot to be learnt along the way, and ultimately the role of innovation units is to take greater risks than is OK on client work.

5. Create value for stakeholders don’t just extract value for shareholders

Ultimately the goal is to create value for everyone involved. Creating job satisfaction and opportunities to learn and develop for the poeple working on experimental products. Creating brand equity and PR for the agency. Creating valuable magical user experiences for the end users of new products. And hopefully creating new revenue streams and business models.
——
So that’s the theory for what it is worth. We are rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. Watch this space for more news of our latest efforts.

And you‘ll probably also have been asked by your clients to collaborate with their other agencies, and it’s that subject I’m going to cover here.

As integrated marketing campaigns get more and more complex you can understand why clients are increasingly asking their agencies to collaborate, and relying less and less on a lead agency to develop a “big idea” behind which all the other agencies have to fall in line.

Good collaboration between agencies can also mean that more surprising ideas emerge from unusual places, as the role of serendipity comes in to play in a more fluid and open creative development process. Agencies collaborating well together can avoid slipping into the old habits of developing “messages” and simply using comms channels in concert to deliver those messages as effectively as possible. Instead there is a chance that an idea can be created that delivers value to consumers, creating a communications product, not just simply communicating products (See this ace slide set from Gareth Kay for more on that).

However for all the sensible talk within agencies and with clients about the need to collaborate, there is little talk about HOW to collaborate. I know that we’ve made plenty of mistakes here at Dare and certainly not got it right all the time. So I thought I would share some observations about what I think it takes to collaborate well from some recent experience and it would be great to hear any of your thoughts. Feels to me we need to change up a lot of stuff!

1. Change up the goal of collaborations from just being about building consensus to instead about achieving greatness

“the only rule in collaborations is that one should never strike deals and never compromise” John Berger, The Guardian, April 2011

Unfortunately often people assume that collaboration means being nice to one another all the time and reaching a consensus where there is broad agreement on ideas and activities. Combined with the age-old agency habits and training of being seen to produce the best ideas (more from Edward Boches on that here), the group descends into horse trading, everyone attempting to preserve bits of their idea and simultaneously make everyone else feel comfortable because that’s what good collaborators do! The result is often a Frankenstein’s monster, an unwieldy, complicated and confused idea that makes execution difficult and effectiveness doubtful.

The goal of collaboration should be to use different skills, experience, perspectives and mindsets from different people to arrive at ideas and solutions to problems that working separately those people wouldn’t have reached. Of course it’s important to stick up for yourself and have strong points of view and bring great ideas to bring to the table. But it is better to agree to disagree and move on to something new than cobble stuff together where the end result is an idea that everyone kind of likes but no one loves. I would also argue it is better to contribute to make someone else’s great idea come to life than arrogantly hanging on to your own average one.

2. Change up the role of the client to become the cross agency team’s quarterback

In my experience clients are woefully unwilling to play the role they need to in the cross agency team. Far too many times have I heard senior clients say “we want our agencies to work together” and then just expect everyone to get on with it. But when agencies have different motivations, remuneration agreements, skills and attitudes, it shouldn’t be surprising when they then spend most of their time is spent politicking and figuring out what the hell is going on rather than actually working on developing something interesting together.

Clients in general need to work harder to ensure that the team is working to the same shared vision, that each agency knows what they are expected to contribute, to be clear about where decision making responsibility lies and spend time fostering trust between the individuals in the team by keeping the playing field level and nipping unhelpful behaviour in the bud.

For me the role of client should be to quarterback the team making sure the right people are in the right place and that they are doing the right things rather than acting as lord and master of some squabbling subjects. This also means clients taking a more active role in the idea development process as well, contributing their ideas and sharing ownership of the end product rather than just passing judgement. They should take a stake in the work, rather than simply “buy” it. This implies some big changes to how we currently conceive the client/agency relationship – after all you can hardly fairly lay the blame at the agencies door if the work doesn’t perform if you have played a role in creating it.

3. Change Up remuneration so participants are rewarded for the group’s performance

An associated and massive issue is the way that agencies are currently paid. If you are paid for your agency’s ideas, and paid for the execution of those ideas, it will always be difficult to truly take an objective view and do what is best for the team’s shared objectives because you will always be looking to justify your agency’s existence.

In true collaboration team members need to be able to share their ideas freely and without feeling that they need to sell anything. Sometimes you have to be grown up enough to recognise that someone has had a better idea. And rather than judging success on your individual contribution we instead need to judge success on the ability of the group to create an idea that adds value to customer’s lives. When everyone is in a room together it is hard to imagine your specialism not having a role, but collaboration doesn’t mean that every channel needs to be part of solving every problem.

And that means that clients need to remunerate their agencies in a different way so that people get paid for their contribution to the shared objectives of the team and that the team is rewarded for working well together. And it means agencies need to take a long view of their working relationships and that’s hard in a world where the average CMO is in role for 18 months.

4. Change up working practices and environment to foster and enable collaboration

I think that the other thing that needs more thought than it currently gets is the environment and conditions under which the team is going to work. Again we default to old habits, working behind closed doors in a waterfall style, trying to hit dates to present the work or hold tissue sessions.

Working in a collaborative cross agency team is always going to need to be more flexible and iterative. Often the “flow” of the team is interrupted because there is a client meeting to attend. Of course people need deadlines and there are always going to be stakeholders to manage, but a more flexible approach would help to make sure that team is allowed the space to breathe.

What physical space is the team going to have to work in? What digital tools make sense for everyone to share ideas and work? Are the right personalities involved in the right way to make the most of everyone’s skills? How are disagreements going to be resolved to avoid design by committee? How can we make sure there are different “gears” in the process to ensure time for working together and time for working apart?

It is also important to recognise of importance of T-shapeness in the members of the team. It is always going to be difficult to get somewhere great if the individuals in the team don’t have a deep level of awesomeness in a specific area. And it is an equally big problem if people don’t have a broad enough appreciation of other important disciplines to work well with the other team members. Assembling the right team in the first place is therefore clearly important.

Hopefully anyone who has been involved in one of these collaborative processes would agree that we do need to change up how we do things as the industry adapts to the changing world. In my view cross agency collaboration is a crucial tool that is being poorly used. What do you think? What could make for more effective collaboration between agencies?

The basic challenge is overcoming the temptation for businesses to extract value from the market place for the benefit of their shareholders instead of trying to create value for the benefit of all their stakeholders. There have been a couple of examples recently of brands falling foul of this temptation. It is particularly surprising to see, given both brands are not the usual monolithic 20th Century style businesses you associate with growth and profit focused capitalism.

First up, Twitter, who recently announced a massive scale back in the freedom with which developers can use their API. Clearly they need to figure out how to monetise the massive success that Twitter has become. But it is a shame they feel that they need to tightly restrict the user experience to do so and can’t have developers running around doing innovating for them. As is argued in this article on The Guardian’s blog they run the risk of destroying the very thing that made Twitter so successful – the fact that its core communications service was available to users in multiple forms that suited their myriad needs thanks to an open API and committed developers. It is a shame that they have resorted to such old economy methods to find a way of monetising the platform.

Secondly, and much more alarmingly as a UK taxpayer and hopeful Olympics spectator, LOCOG, who started selling tickets for the London 2012 Olympic Games this week. In an act of true corporate arrogance it is only possible to pay for tickets online using a Visa card or by collecting a form from a branch of Lloyds TSB. Surely there were some people advising these brands how to effectively activate and leverage their substantial sponsorship investments who had some conception that the general public might object to this facile and one dimensional restriction of their ability to get tickets Olympics. Do Visa and Lloyds TSB really want brand exposure at any cost to brand reputation? I really hope that there are some plans to use these sponsorship relationships to create something of value to Olympics goers in the near future and that this aspect is a just a small ill-thought through side effect of doing massive complex deals. Lord Coe explained away the decision to make these restrictions by saying:

“In fairness we wouldn’t have had a game without sponsors. This is not unusual. At major sporting events credit card companies do sponsor events…..the staging of the games is paid for by the private purse. it is not paid for by the national lottery or taxpayers money.”

I’m sure that no one is fooled by this financial sleight of hand given the £9billion bill to build the venues and infrastructure that makes it possible for the private purse to stage the games for a profit. And I hope that the overall impact of the games and their massive investment is the creation of value that is lasting and of benefit to the 7 million Londoners who are the games stakeholders.

• Simple — find the core of any idea
• Unexpected — grab people’s attention by surprising them
• Concrete — make sure an idea can be grasped and remembered later
• Credible — give an idea believability
• Emotional — help people see the importance of an idea
• Stories — empower people to use an idea through narrative

I think this is a pretty damm good list. And I often think I should use it more in reviews and when discussing the merits of one idea over another.

But I think there is one crucial thing that the best ideas have that is missing from this list. And that is elegance.

Of course I don’t mean elegance like a Roland Mouret dress is elegant. I mean elegant like Mathematics can be elegant as described by Bertrand Russell means elegant in The Study of Mathematics:

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”

Elegance can take other forms too.

Hogarth developed the notion of the line of beauty in art. The elegant Ogee s- shape that enlived art and drew the attention of the viewer….

….The golden ratio has long been admired in Geometry and architecture as fundamental form of elegance….

When we look at conceptual ideas we are looking for something similar. An elegance that is instantly appealing, that you want to revisit again and again and share with others. The sort of elegant idea that when you stumble upon one a sense of calm fear falls upon you.

Calm because your gut tells you intuitively it is fresh, exciting and has a simple beauty.

But accompanied by a fear that it is an idea without precedent and that maybe others won’t see the idea’s elegance the way you do.

By now you are thinking, come off it Will, we are trying to advertise insurance, or motor oil or beer. Elegance has nothing to do with it.

Well obviously I am not talking about the content of the idea but it’s innate structure. And advertising idea for a humble a Lager Beer, has one of the most elegant structures. Stella Artois’ Reassuringly Expensive.

It is a beautifully simple and economical phrase, the idea is immediate and accessible, it has a levity and wit it says so little but tells you so much. It is an idea that is born out of a truth.

“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know“
Ode to a Grecian Urn. John Keats.

It’s an elegant idea and I can’t wait to find the next one……

The power of creativity, digital and data visualisation to make the abstract and invisible urgent and unmissable. It is hard to watch this and not despair for way our civilisation prioritises use of its financial resources and the absurd inequality of the system.

Another weekend just gone and another article in the papers about a supposed backlash against Social Networking, this time from The Observer.

Which is strange given the continued rise in numbers of people using things like Facebook and Twitter. But anyway that aside it seems to me that the mainstream public discourse around new technologies and in particular social networking is asking the wrong question. The question we should be asking isn’t “are these new technologies good or bad?” Rather we should be asking ourselves how do we make sure technology is used to express and enable the good in human nature rather than the bad?

We have to constantly question what parts of human nature we want to celebrate and what parts to challenge and refine. There is no need to allow the direction we first set off in influence the rest of the journey like a bullet leaving a gun. Rather we need to shape iteratively the technology we are creating and how it serves us.

One of the most exciting questions I think we have to answer is – How are we going to manage all the data we have flooding towards us in a way that elevates our humanity rather than smothers it?

Right now we are in the position where the amount of information available to us is rapidly moving beyond what we can reasonably stay on top of but we still think we can. The addictive nature of this phenomenon is wonderfully described here by Jim Stodgill . Soon it will far exceed what we can stay on top of and then people will actually probably be able to relax. David Gelernter talks brilliantly about this future scenario and the technology that will emerge to allow us to experience information in “lifestreams” that we dip into as suits us.

This is exactly the type of thing we should be thinking about- recognising the positive benefits and thinking about how to improve the negatives of technology rather than naively positioning our choices as yes or no to social technologies that are here to stay.

We are learning a lot about human nature as research allows us to understand more and more about the Primate brain. We are discovering that the fundamental wiring of the brain isn’t as self-centered as we first thought and is actually highly empathetic and social in nature. It’s incredibly excitingly described by Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends in the video above from the fantastic RSA Animate series. Rifkin concludes by discussing the role of technology in empowering our underlying empathetic nature to create what he calls the empathic civilisation.

Take a look at the video, it certainly inspired me with the opportunity we have to create a future around a new idea of human nature.

Will be updating more regularly in 2011

Thanks for stopping by

Will

Presentation to the inaugural meeting of the International Guild of Sponsors.

“….

We are a society of editors

I don’t need to preach to the converted today about the fragmentation of media and the explosion of commercial messages that surround us. We are all consumers, and we experience that on a day to day basis.

The fragmentation of media also means consumers can select the content they want from many sources and simply try to avoid commercial messages and edit them out of their lives.

These days that editing is just as much about turning over a full page ad to read the article you are really interested in, or looking at what your fellow train passengers are wearing and not the billboards going by, as it is about not listening to commercial radio and playing a game on your Ipod. Or Nokia N97!

And of course consumers are more digitally empowered than ever before, more able to physically edit out and ignore the explosion of commercial messages. Enabled by digital tools that let you to skip ads using Tivo or Sky + or simply clicking close on an annoying pop up.

Our accelerated culture means that consumers are expert at editing their environment – we have evolved into a society of editors.

This has had an enormous impact on the marketing industry and examples of that impact are familiar to anyone working in marketing today.

And it means that brands must play a valuable role when present in the context of the things consumers care about – including through sponsorship activities- if you don’t get it right consumers will edit it out.

The paradox of choice

Consumer’s ability to edit out commercial messages is increasing at a time when they have more choice available to them than ever before.

Choice is often seen as the ultimate achievement of our civilization, the pinnacle of an ascent through a hierarchy of needs.

“It is choice with equity we are advancing. Choice and consumer power as the route to greater social justice not social division”

Tony Blair
2003

“We have always wanted to be authors of our own lives”

Will Hutton
The Observer

If you can choose your home, your kid’s schools, your healthcare, your car, your job, and the things that you buy, well that is the ultimate in self-actualization.

However even though being able to choose may be satisfying, it doesn’t follow that the more choice there is the better.

In fact Barry Schwartz talks about the Paradox of Choice.

“All of this choice has two negatives effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all……”

Most of us have busy lives and are time poor and attention poor. So set in that context it is possible to feel that you can have too much choice. Choice can be paralyzing and distressing. What do I choose? If if have so much choice how can I possibility have chosen the right option? Choice turns out to be the consumer problem of our age.

Role of brands and marketing in a world of choice

It would be quite easy to get depressed working in marketing given these two trends. Consumers can ignore your marketing at will by editing it out, and marketing can exacerbate their choice overload, cluttering up the environment with things they don’t need and advertising encouraging them to think they do.

I was struck recently by this definition of marketing by evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller.

“ At its heart consumerist capitalism is not ‘materialistic’ but ‘semiotic’.
Marketers understand they are selling the sizzle not the steak, because a premium brand of sizzle yields a higher margin of profit, whereas a steak is just a low-margin commodity that any butcher could sell.”
Geoffrey Miller
“Spent”

As a marketer it is easy to see the value of brands to companies.

But that intangible, “semiotic” nature of brands creates value for consumers too.

So it is possible for marketing to be useful as it builds brands, despite the challenges proffered by the trends we have just been looking at.

Brands help you navigate choice. Brands help you feel better about what you have chosen. Brands always have and always will. Consumers love brands. Brands help them answer that question “What do I choose?”

And Marketing plays an important role in building brands and creating that intangible value

Like a bird building a nest, consumers gather facts, images, experiences, perceptions and feelings together to create a brand in their mind.

Marketing communications can add a twig or two to that nest, and so help address the issue of choice overload by helping consumers edit out brands that have low intangible value and select the brands they love.

But marketing can only play that role if it creates a twig that is picked up by the consumer

The role of experiences in engaging consumers

Distributing the twigs – raising awareness – is the easy part. Few brands suffer a lack of prompted awareness, certainly few of the brands that we all work for. But engagement is an issue for many brands.

One way we can try to ensure that twig is picked up is by creating fantastic experiences that entertain and reward.

In their book, The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore, talk about the power of experiences to engage consumer attention and provide a new unit of economic value-experiences.

In their view consumers seek out authentic experiences from brands. Their definition of authenticity means being true to ones self, so Disneyland is authentic because it is what it claims to be – a make-believe magical kingdom.

Consumers are incredibly savvy. Whilst they will edit out anything that doesn’t engage, they are happy to engage with brands that provide them with enriched experiences of the things that matter to them, experiences where the brand is playing a valuable role in their passion.

So that is the context. In an effort to engage with a society of editors, brands can try to create experiences that engage consumers

Sponsorship’s limitations

The trouble with sponsorship viewed as a traditional discipline is that it evolved as a tool to distribute the twigs – to increase reach and raise awareness or maybe influence brand associations and not as a tool for creating engagement.

Like broadcast TV which was dominated by a few terrestrial channels with a monopoly on an audience and serving thousands of advertisers, the sponsorship marketplace has had far more demand than supply.

This has led to a buyer/seller relationship between advertisers and rights owners. The lucky advertiser would have the chance to buy the right to associate with the property and reach its audience.

And if we have learnt one lesson from the last 10 years, it is – what is the use of delivering reach, even if it represents fantastic media value, if that doesn’t engage consumers?

A new role for sponsorship

The lessons we are learning about digital can be applied to sponsorship. As all the media that surrounds us is infused with digital connectivity – and we move from digital as internet advertising to digital as social media, interactive TV, digital billboards, and mobile etc, it no longer makes sense to think of digital as a channel.

Similarly as reach and association become blunt tools in the era of engagement we need to stop viewing sponsorship as a channel.

If we are trying to engage consumers by enriching their experience of their passions then we should consider sponsorship as a means to deliver the subject matter, the content, the hook or the stories that infuse our communications.
The discipline of sponsorship can cut across all of our channels. Sponsorship activation shouldn’t be restricted to standalone activities that extract value from the sponsorship assets. Sponsorship activation should be the task of the whole marketing department.

So how do you make sure that the whole marketing department wants to activate the sponsorship? Well I am not going to pretend that is easy.

But I think that the core of this approach is to do deals on the basis of common interests, and around a shared activity,

A collaboration around an idea.

However, the buyer/seller relationships that typify many sponsorship conversations are based on preconceived notions and prejudices. And the negotiation that follows, where each side takes positions makes it impossible to have a creative, developmental conversation.

It is not a new concept to instead base negotiations on the common interests of both parties and Fisher and Ury’s thinking Getting to Yes from 1981 still seems fresh today. But it is still hard to put into practice.

And It can be seductive to see this as a simple question of establishing brand fit. A comparison of brand steering wheels or brand onions. But too often this is an exercise in post rationalization. A reconciliation of vague and generic concepts.

True brand fit has to manifest itself in action, playing a valuable role in the lives of consumers, and that comes from creative, developmental conversations around mutually beneficial ideas

It can help to take a consumer centric view not and industry centric view. Rather than viewing the relationship as Advertisers VS rights holders. We should think about Brand PLUS Brand.

After all that is how consumers see things – as lots of different brands. Ones they care more about and ones they care less about

With the consumer in mind it is easier to focus on working together in order to engage them.

So what is needed is advertiser and property developing an idea together for how they will create a collaborative activity that adds to the consumer experience and creates engagement.

This should build on the equity that exists between the property and consumer,
and perhaps create a transaction between the consumer and the advertiser.
The end result should be that value is created for all parties– a win/win/win.

Value Based Partnerships

Collaborating around an idea also means doing the deal to support it.

It puts the emphasis on an exchange of value, and in fact we talk about trying to create “value based partnerships”. In a value based partnership the value of the totality of what each partner is bringing to the table is taken into consideration when doing the deal.. Not just what is being bought by one party and sold by the other. This includes brand equity, consumer bases, marketing, digital and retail platforms, skills and expertise. In reality this of course doesn’t mean no cash will change hands, but probably, well hopefully, it does mean less cash will change hands!

It also means there is less of a distinction between the budget for creating the sponsorship and the budget for activation. In the ideal world the majority of the budget would be invested in the joint activity. This means we can rely less on the usual evaluation metric where we look at media value delivered, and rather we need to look at specific metrics to do with engagement.

Conclusion

So I will conclude by saying that whilst the principles of collaboration I have described have been inspired by working for a technology brand like Nokia, I hope you will agree that in fact they are relevant to brands from any sector who are able to work together to create a win/win/win.

What can we jointly do together?

What is our idea?

From those questions a partnership can spring, where doing a deal is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Thanks a lot for your attention. …..”