Alberta Business Marketing

I admit, I’m like a dog with a bone when it comes to this topic. I’m in Advertising. Have been for the last 15 years. And over that time, I’ve heard everyone from the President’s of the various agencies I’ve worked in to the mail room guy – talk about the business we are in.

So let’s be clear.

Those of us in Advertising are in the business of IDEAS.

Ideas are our ‘product’. We research, we absorb, we analyze, we brainstorm, we concept and we eventually weave together an idea that will sell whatever our client is in the market of selling. Our ideas are our intellectual property and our passion. They are why we come into work in the morning and how we pay our mortgage. The actual production of these ideas is the easy part. Coming up with the ownable, unique, competitive, emotive and brand building communication solution is a task of Herculean proportions.

So I ask you – why in the world do we give it away for free?

I’ve never yet heard a client say “I’m going to buy that idea even though I hate it, provided you make it look really pretty on a website!” or “hmmm, I’ve seen that idea a thousand times before but as long as you dress it up in a pretty yellow starburst – we’re good to go!”. Clients want to work with agencies with big ideas. Clients buy big ideas. And big ideas put roofs over our heads. Don’t get me wrong. Flawless execution is also a mandatory. But NEVER at the expense of creativity. So again, why would we give it away for free?

I get that we are in a competitive environment and agencies fight for survival on a daily basis. I also get that clients want to sometimes see what you can come up with before handing you their trust (and their marketing budgets). But past work for other clients can demonstrate smarts and creativity. You would never dream of walking into a department store and saying to a clerk “I’m going to take that couch home for free. If I like it, I’ll come back and buy the armchair. If I don’t like it, sorry, I’ll just go shop at another store.” Sadly, I think agencies do this too often.

Perhaps if those of us in the business of ideas put a value to our product – our thinking & our creativity – we can slowly create a movement. A movement where we place a (reasonable) price tag on the process of ideation and demonstrate in the process that we place serious stock in what we do. In return, I believe that Clients would respect us for it and the outcome would be ideas that everyone is proud of.

Rant over :)

Robin Whalen

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I, like many of you readers, work for a communication agency. Formerly known as an advertising agency. I was ruminating recently about the mountainous inflection point I felt we were in the midst of as communicators. Here is the story:

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time there was advertising. ‘Advertising’ agencies created television ads, ads for newspapers and magazines and ads to run on the radio. Structured advertising agencies had different departments producing these advertisements, presenting them to a client and ‘putting them on the air’.

Around twenty years ago came the internet and hence ‘the digital space’. It lingered in its formative stage, mainly driving the emergence of e-commerce, for about a decade. Only about ten years ago, ‘advertising’ agencies decided that the internet could be a canvas for advertising. So advertising agencies started developing web sites and digital banner ads. They’d build these websites and banner ads and then ‘put them up’.

Maybe around five years ago, social media came to be. Suddenly all kinds of conversations were being had in the ‘digital space’; shared information was circulating among people without advertising agencies or their clients having anything to do with it.

And then mobile devices came to be which sped up all this communicating and commerce-related activity in the digital space to a lightning fast pace.

A Reality Check

Today, people everywhere - colleagues and friends, moms and dads, students, artists, technology gurus, teachers, policemen, investment bankers and academics – ‘live’ the internet. They access Google dozens of time every day and get their daily news updates online. Photos are shared and commented on via Facebook, Flickr or Instagram. Vacations are researched, planned and paid for online. Moms right now are circulating blog postings about some new organic pasta on the market. Grandparents are Skyping with their grandkids from continent to continent every day. Youtube is an entertainment channel for just about every single person I know, including my 67 year old father. New bands are born every day on MySpace. My mom lives by her iPhone as does my Dad; my niece and my daughter both carry their Nintendo DSi in one hand and their iPads in the other. This is not a minority report tech future; this is today, everyday, for more and more people as part of daily life.

When we step away from the language in communication circles about ‘the digital space’, ‘the social space’, ‘the mobile space’, this is the reality.

And so, The Inflection Point:

For all the decades past, we communication agencies and clients have considered traditional media to be king and digital media to be secondary, not even at queen status, but more so a court jester. I could go on separately about why: it’s cheaper to produce digital media so it doesn’t get as much attention as traditional media which is incredibly expensive still. And we don’t have good impact metrics yet around digital media to PROVE how much it is contributing to communications and brand health in the minds of our audiences.

But this has changed. Now, today, traditional media and digital media sit at the same table. They have rapidly come to be equals. And we communications agencies and clients are waking up to that reality. Brands are being built exclusively in the digital space in many cases. And among the new generation of consumers, traditional media may indeed be falling by the wayside.

Insert panic here.

If you accept that the above is true, because it is - now, today, traditional media and digital media sit at the same table - then what? Communications that happen in the digital, social and mobile space do not function like traditional media. You do not ‘put them on the air’ or ‘put them up’. They are ongoing, immediate and dynamic by their very nature. And this simple reality radically impacts everything.

We have to think about communications today as an eco-system: interconnected, always-on, living, and constantly evolving.

Impact 1: We can no longer think of communications development as projects that follow a straight path, each one in a separate lane, being developed in parallel. We need new ways of working: fluid, connected, nurturing. We need to ‘carry’ communications, constantly. This has radical implications for the mindset and consequently the processes of developing communications, evaluating communications, and maintaining communications.

Impact 2: This acknowledgement that communications is now an eco-system, requires by definition that the people charged with managing those communications understand ‘systems’ and this is not a common capability. Understanding systems means having an incredible ability to see the big picture – how everything is working together – productively, seamlessly, responsively. And yet it also means having an ability to go deep into any singular ‘node’ within the system to maximize its individual role in the system. This is complex thinking.

Impact 3: Communications producers – writers, art directors, technologists, etc… – need to truly work together to create. Which means they need to understand each other’s craft, in order to truly be able to integrate and build off of each other. This is not a skillset that has been nurtured or taught either through the education system or inside agencies historically.

Journey through the Inflection Point:

There is a mountain to climb to be able to really traverse this inflection point. It may seem straightforward, but it is anything but. It requires:

a) The acceptance that the digital space is seated at the table right next to the traditional media space and that the need to adjust to it is urgent.
b) The acknowledgement that communications today are not about ‘putting it on the air’ or ‘putting it up’; communications today are about creating and managing eco-systems of activity.
c) A change in communications agency processes and client review, ‘purchase’ and maintain processes.
d) An upgrading of communication producers skill sets – to foster a better cross-discipline understanding.

Insert easy button.

I, for one, believe that if brands want to continue to have a place in people’s lives in the future, traversing this inflection point is a must-do. Adjust or be left behind seems to me to be the harsh reality. But more optimistically, this required shift in communications could get us to a much better place on so many levels. This shift will get us communications that matter to people; by default that means brands that are engaging in ways that matter to people. And ladder that further to a place where communications (and brands) can be positive contributing forces in the world. This is free market dynamics at work. Best to acknowledge and understand what people want, and deliver it, because it’s those who will survive.

Heidi McCulloch

Tags: Branding, Digital, Integration, Strategy
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Tags: Growing Concern, McRobbie Optamedia
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Tags: groupon, Sales & Marketing
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I was recently in a room with some industry folk whereby I stated that marketing is not some manipulative discipline designed to aggressively and unethically sell people things they don’t need. I told them I had always considered that marketing is more simply about making people aware of options and related information about those options to aid in the mandatory decision making that takes place in the purchase process. I don’t know, maybe I sounded all naïve and idealistic (wouldn’t be the first time I was accused of that) but I really do believe that to be true.

Fundamentally, I believe that marketing is about conveying accurate ‘information about products, services or brands’, for those people who are interested. And furthermore, I believe good marketing makes that conveying of information enjoyable for the interested party. And that when you add these things together, you get marketing that is, by definition: Authentic.

Let me explain a little more what I mean about ‘information about products, services or brands’:

Consumer Joe has to navigate the world of purchasing on a daily basis. What kind of alarm clock will waken him, what shampoo will he use, what milk goes on his cereal, what car does he drive, what service provider powers his smartphone, what band does he listen to, what food outlet does he frequent for lunch, what supplier to use at work, what beer to drink at the end of the day, what camp to book his daughter into for summer and I could go on and on and on…

Every day, in every way, consumer Joe’s attention and time is spent consuming. And every consumption decision requires an evaluation of what to consume, from an ever increasing number of options. So how does each and every one of those decisions get made? Well, perhaps he chose it cause it was the cheapest. Or because it would be most reliable. Perhaps it was because it was locally produced. Or the one which did no wrong to its workers. Perhaps it was the one with the most appealing packaging. Perhaps it was one he had the most personal experience with. Or the one that makes the least impact on our physical world. Perhaps it’s the one that gives back financially to support social or charitable causes. Or perhaps it’s was the sexiest, fastest, most posh, most elitist option. Perhaps it’s the one his family has chosen for decades. And I could go on and on and on.

For varying reasons, reasons that vary from product to product, situation to situation and even day to day, consumer Joe makes his purchase decisions.

So how does a product, brand or service navigate within this chaotic consumer behavioural environment?

Option 1: Try to define the largest segment of potential buyers or some niche select subset of that buyer group, and define them as your ‘target market’. Seek to understand the drivers of behavior for this now defined target market. Craft a message about your product, service or brand that will be appealing based on what you’ve come to understand. This is the option that has the potential to slide down the slippery slope of becoming ‘manufacturing information about your product, service or brand to try to appeal to your defined target market to try to get them to buy your product, service or brand’.

Option 2: Consider your product, service or brand as an organism: a living, thinking thing. A living, thinking thing with strengths (and weaknesses), with beliefs and values, with a vision and a philosophy. Uncover them, capture them. They exist. Then be a product, service or brand that authentically lives those strengths, beliefs, and values. As a means of growth and development, build on that vision and that philosophy, as a product, service or brand. Then let this naturally attract interested people in the authentic merits of your offering.

Option 2 is where authentic marketing naturally occurs. A product, service or brand seeks to uncover and capture the qualities that define it. It prepares that ‘information about the product, service or brand’ for the attention of interested parties. And then if the product, service or brand is really good, it crafts its communication creatively to be enjoyable for the consumer’s consumption.

Good Example 1. Old Spice. Knows what it is, and isn’t trying to be something it’s not. And communicates it in an utterly entertaining way.

Good Example 2: Van City. Knows who it is, and isn’t trying to be something it’s not. And communicates it in an utterly entertaining way.

So, I’m going to go right back to the beginning, to that naïve, idealistic place where I stated that marketing can be about simply conveying ‘information about products, services and brands’ to interested parties. And doing it in an interesting way.

That’s Authentic. And I believe that can be Marketing.

Heidi McCulloch

Tags: Branding
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