a digital product firm
Archive for November, 2009
Creativity is dead. Long live creativity!
Friday, November 6th, 2009
In a recent article on Forbes.com, Mike Linton ask the question: “Is Creativity In Advertising Dead?”. He asks this question somewhat rhetorically, ultimately stating his belief that you need both the story and the numbers. But he’s clearly a guy who loves good creative (and don’t we all) and is frustrated by the appearance that the pendulum of prevailing thought in marketing has swung towards an obsessive focus on numbers to spite the story.
Yes, the pendulum has potentially swung towards everyone doing “brilliant” creative to everyone being focused on metrics. While an obsession with short-term gains is probably counterproductive (assuming that you’re looking at the right metrics in the first place), imagine how great things will be when the pendulum swings back to creative, only this time heavily informed by a thorough understanding of the business impact of that work (something that a great many agencies still refuse to pay attention to).
No more “big ideas” that are un-researched to begin with and un-validated after the fact.
If it were the case that the entire industry was suddenly focused on metrics instead of creative (a hyperbole at best), I can’t say I’d be sad for that. In fact it’s about time.
Of course, you SHOULDN’T be ignoring creative thinking and innovation, but you need to make sure that your creative and innovative solution actually meets the needs of both the company and the target audience AND is a promise that the company can deliver on. When these factors are all in alignment, that’s where we see the best performance.
Linton asks: “Do you think there’s a short-term ROI model to measure the culture, service and marketing creativity that delivers fun?”
The answer is “yes, of course there is”. Likely a campaign that tells a great story around a consumer need that a company can uniquely deliver on will generate short term sales. I’ve always wanted to run test ads that included nothing but a company’s logo, just to see what ROI there is there. Based on the tests that I HAVE run, it looks likely that such ads would be ROI positive.
What’s more important, however, is the long term ROI (as Linton suggests), and even there, you can get good indicators of that in the short term if you are looking at brand metrics. A short term lift in some brand measures (you are measuring brand metrics as well as direct response metrics, right?) should point to a subsequent lift in future sales (you are correlating the two, right?) assuming that the campaign has real legs.
Linton suggests that you have to take creative leaps and risks to move the ball, and this is exactly right. If you don’t make leaps from time to time, you’ll end up optimizing up a nearby hill while missing the mountain across the valley. But if you’re not measuring the impact on your business, then you can take a beautiful leap into the Grand Canyon and call it success while you kill your chance for future success. You should definitely take leaps, but you should evaluate where you land so that you can tell if you should abandon an approach, or build on it.
Yes, there may be a shorting of the creative side of the equation, but the business value side was sorted for so long, that I believe it’s ok that we spend a little time on the other side. We’ll be back to creative soon enough, and, with our new understanding of business impact, it will be better than ever.
Getting McLuhan Wrong – The Medium Is The Message
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
NB: Mcluhan’s famous slogan “The medium is the message” has often been mis-construed. For instance the ad that you see on the TV is not the medium or the message – Mcluhan suggest that the television circuits, screen etc. are the ad coaxing us to buy. Which leads us to – “The medium is an environment that produces effects.”
For anyone who has been aware of Marshall McLuhan’s life and work and who have read his many books and essays, he is perhaps best remembered for the slogan The Medium is the Message upon which he elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
For those who know the slogan but not the man or meaning behind it a timely book published by Mark Batty Publisher came out late last year entitled Everyman’s McLuhan written by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji and Jacob Albert. It’s basically a primer for those interested in McLuhan and who are ready to plunge into his work.
This is a pocket-sized book that’s handy to have around; you can pick up this book and start at any page, you can jump around too without losing the thread and it’s also worth having just for the graphic design. The writers also provide the back story to some of McLuhan’s writings including the slogans. For instance they flesh out his thinking behind “The Medium Is The Message.” They ask “How can the medium be the message? How can the television circuits, screen etc. be the ad coaxing us to buy?” They let us know that McLuhan never intended his phrase to have such a literal meaning. He often rephrased the slogan to fit different audiences and those paraphrases are not that well know. Here’s one – “The medium is the message, but the user of the medium is the content of the medium, in the sense that any medium is an extension of the human body.” By that he could mean that a mobile phone is an extension of our ears. The idea then extends itself to this – “The medium is an environment that produces effects.” I recommend picking up this fascinating book, it’s a mere $16.95 at Amazon right now. Everymans Mcluhan
Authority, Authenticity and Your Personal Brand on the Social Web
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
This post was originally written in June 2009. This is an updated version – DA.
On his blog Marketing | Truth, Mark Olson has a very interesting post that includes opinion from some like-minded smart people discussing the notion of authenticity vs authority across the social web. I left a comment of my own over there but I felt my initial thoughts may be worth expanding upon here.
In the comment, I ask first “Is social media marketing now just a channel where marketers are missing out on the Social Web?” my argument being based around my idea that once someone opens a browser they are participating in the social web. Also, as heated discussions arise around the idea of real-time search and its value versus indexed search, where experiential awareness and reputation management become all important, where does authority and authenticity fall in user perception?
Seth Godin kicks things off and arguably takes the laurels with his short, incisive paragraph:
“If it’s a word game, then authority wins, because authority is about the perception of the consumer. If they believe you are an authority, you are. In the long run, of course, authenticity will trump it, because your authority fades without it. The converse is not true. And yes, it’s a word game.”
Brian Solis has his say too. Anyone who cares about the idea of web communications, PR 2.0 along with social media marketing and advertising should know Brian Solis.
At its heart my response was really just my thoughts based around their opinions. Here is my comment [slightly edited]:
“Seth Godin begins his smart, short answer with “If it’s a word game…” as if planting a stake in the ground. He knows it is a word game and he knows that we know it too. Brian Solis proposes a list of new definitions but the problem is that they are more words. He suggests switching out new definitions such as ‘believability’ for ‘transparency’ where transparency is already perfect; transparency says it all very clearly, whereas believability makes me think of the possibility of opaqueness.
This search for ‘authenticity or ‘authority’ is an extension of television in my mind – who would we trust to read us the news? In the past it was always well spoken, handsome, gravelly-voiced white men. It is no coincidence that we view the web through the same lens, a rectangular screen, but it’s worth remembering that technology simply shortens the distance between us. As Marshall McLuhan has written “any history of technology is filled with unexpected reversal of form resulting from new advances.” Now we have the social web.
(more…)
Stefan Sagmeister at TED
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Stefan Sagmeister, owner of Sagmeister, Inc., explains in this TED talk how closing his business for a full year every seven years inspires creativity and innovation.
Deep Identity
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
In the marketing world, we tend to think of “Identity” as the style of a brand; what it looks like, how it talks, and the like.
And when we think of “Brand”, we tend to think of how a company wants to position itself in the market, and what values would seem to reflect that.
As such, the typical way this flows in a company is that Marketing owns brand, and identity flows from that.
At Fight we think this is backwards, or, at least, incomplete.
When we’re working on a business/marketing problem (we’ll probably talk about the relationship between those in a later post) we care less about what a company is trying to project, and more about what a company is. It’s “Deep Identity”.
If you think about a company (which I’m using interchangeably with a division of a company, or a non-company organization) as a person, what we want to know are thinks like: What is it good at doing? What does it LIKE to do? What sort of resources does it have available?
This sort of deep identity goes way beyond a marketing exercise. It doesn’t just determine how to project a company into the world, but gets to the core of what the company should be doing: what kinds of products should it make, what kinds of mergers make sense, how the company behaves in the world, what sort of employees it should hire, etc.
What we think of marketing is quickly moving beyond where a veneer of values is sufficient. The current digital landscape will slice into your organization in ways that it hasn’t previously, and what current and potential customers need to see when they make such a cut, is that the companies values, desires, and behaviors are consistent all the way through to the core. The result being that interactions with a company are very rarely off brand, because brand isn’t something that was added on at the end, but is rather rooted in its deep identity.