Recent events in the idea crowdsourcing world herald a new business model for agencies. As the person responsible for putting Peperami on the internet in the first place (peperami.com 1996 for the historians amongst you) I'm well placed to comment on the recent move to find ideas using the internet. And as Jon Winsor and other (about to be ex-Crispin Porter) colleagues have announced in the early hours of this morning, it's time for a new model that takes crowdsourcing to the next level. And that involves asking you, the creatives out there working for other agencies, to contribute to their briefs. Transparently. And at your risk.
Are you up for it? Is it the end of the agency model as we know it? Everyone seems to agree that there is an enormous challenge in the agency group mentality of silo and sausage factory. We make our money in the wrong way, from downstream process transaction rather than from upstream advisory. We fight with each other constantly over budgets. We don't have enough people to handle the workload when we're busy. Or we have plenty of the wrong people who can't handle the workload because the work has changed.
Is the problem about size? The bigger an agency gets, it moves from selling ideas to selling meetings. This seemed fine, as clients have diverse needs and there are a myriad of ways to find service levels for those needs. The creativity of agencies moved into describing cross selling, to build scale and business relationships. And the creativity that clients actually want, ideas for better ways to engage consumers to sell more of their products and services tended to be a delegated and downstream service. Ideas became lone wolves that had to be 'fought for' by the creative department, instead of exciting 'cool' product developments that galvanise everybody involved.
Now there's an answer. A new model where brands owners can publicly describe their problem, and can garner public responses. There's been a few start ups that endeavour to capture this trend - idea bounty and so on, about which the naysayers claim they can't make money, they are estate agents for ideas, isn't it just like freelancing and so on. Well it does reflect all those things, accusations very easily levelled at any agency by the way, but the difference is that the ability to share and re-share briefs and answers quickly though the internet brings agility where previously there was treacle.
As Stuart Elliot put it in the New York Times - agencies should stop worrying about selling the status quo and start being a force for change. A 'catalyst of record', not an 'agency of record' - I love that. And believe that too. I worked on a pitch last year where the client invited five agencies to test drive their cars and pitch for their business. It was an expensive and overwrought process, on everybody's part. As we were hanging around having coffee, I said to one or two of the opposition - you know what, this is silly. They should just hire you, me, her and him. Each from a different agency - a 'dream team' as they say, as between us we'd provide the best answers, the best work, and it would be a laugh. Everyone agreed that it would be, but went home to prepare for the pitch battle in their own P&Ls. Ho hum.
I wish Jon and crew luck with their new venture. Watch that space!
follow me on twitter
2 comment(s)
Being able to laugh at yourself is an important part of social media etiquette. Last night the London Twestival event took place at Vinopolis, where twitterers from politics, investment, media and music come together in support of charity. It's a global event, a great show and a true demonstration of the need for people to combine their social computing habits with the human need to congregate, chat, drink and be merry. And in the morning, as this report shows, we find a little time for diversity and amusement, as this report shows.
follow the ever amusing @imlondonbridge and if you can be bothered @Alastair Duncan
1 comment(s)
The biggest criticism laid at the door of the big awards events is that they are a money spinner for events companies and celebrate only the most selfish or the most sophisticated self promoters. Sir John Hegarty and Steve Henry tell us that more than 90% of the work out there is rubbish. Obviously all of you are trying to do something about that. On the awards front, this year's BIMA awards have had a rethink, for the better.
I declare an interest here, as I'm on the committee. And we've made a few changes that are relevant and useful to entrants. We've made it a criteria for judging to give feedback to every single entry. No other creative award does this. We've also made the cost of entry accessible. Not just to entering work, but also to attending the event, which will be a big party bash rather than an expensive sit down do. We've gathered a list of luminaries that might be worth putting work in front of. Best of all, we've made the judging criteria simple - equally weighted across strategy, creativity, interactivity and effectiveness. And awards will be made for craft skills as well where the work is particularly cleverly executed.
Need proof? Here are some of the judges. Paul Hammersley (The Red Brick Road), Robert Campbell (Campbell Lace Beta), Will King (King of Shaves), Gareth Jones (Revolution), Kelly Wright (Warner Bros.), Jody Smith (Channel 4), Adam Powers (BBC), Alex Smith (Microsoft). Need to enter? Click here.
See you in November.
Follow me on Twitter
no comments
Enter now people. This year the Best Blog awards will be decided via a public vote in two rounds. In the first round BIMA will take nominations for your favourite blogs and in the second BIMA will shortlist the nominations and publish a poll to allow the community to vote for their favourites. Entry is open to any blog as long as the content is not offensive in any way. Industry bloggers, are of course a jolly polite bunch, and will no doubt vote for others rather than for themselves!
go here to have a go http://www.bimaawards.com/categories/best_blog/
Today's the big day for Digital Britain. The consultations have produced a very long wish list. I expect Ben Bradshaw will read out his in Parliament this afternoon. In a ‘simultaneous broadcast’ (how quaint) Lord Carter will be presenting the outcomes of his investigations into the state of Britain as a digital nation at the RSA. So listen in to Parliament this afternoon.
Early reports indicate that a lot of people will be disappointed. In order of moan, the music industry will be upset that the government is unlikely to ‘criminalise’ filesharers. Fans of local news will have to put up with the fact that people don’t buy local papers any more. Court reporting from the Norwich assizes will be given over to Google. The Technology industry will think the government isn’t going far enough, especially in relation to developing a ‘next generation’ infrastructure.
The BBC will think it’s got off lightly, frankly. Ofcom will become busier. My mum won’t really care. Broadband is important to her, but not actually as important as water, or electricity, or chocolate, for that matter.
My wish list? 3 million more homes online. Phone boxes should become internet points (as opposed to condom dispensers). And creating a digital economy that supports British content production in a more intelligent way than previously, which actually comes from software rather than hardware, and from people rather than pipes.
I’d like to see a British Google, Digg or Microsoft. But somehow I don’t see that coming about as a result of policy thrash.
And the outcome? There'll be ideas for government policy that will either legislate for uncompetitiveness (Korea and Japan already have far more advanced internet infrastructures) and force media companies into accepting changing state for the future. There'll be liberal protectionism for the past (especially in salvaging lTN with BBC monies). It'll certainly be a long list of wishes. But as ancient Jinn will tell you, three's probably enough.
Anyone familiar with this brief? "We've been working on this for nearly a year, but we're not sure we've got anything good. You need to come up with a plan by next week that will save the world." Alright, it's not quite like that, but I was struck by the similarities between watching the Digital Britain Conference panel debates and the innumerable briefing meets I've been to over the years where the digital question has created an atmosphere of confusion, excitement, panic and opportunity amongst those charged with stewarding brands into the future. Everyone knows that a 'lick of digital paint' isn't quite enough. But nobody knows quite enough to make a decision. And those that do know feel they haven't been consulted.
In the case of Digital Britain, there are big unanswered questions. Defining 'digital' is problematic enough. Although the official consultation period was drawing to an end, it felt right to do something about these questions by posing them to a wider community of those who have been involved in the digital economy for rather longer than Lord Carter. From an original tweet by Bill Thompson on the backchannel at Gordon Brown's Digital Conference, 12 unconferences were held (including London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cornwall) to discuss the interim report and provide useful feedback for the Digital Britain team at BERR. Most of the communication took place on twitter (unconference was, briefly, a trending topic). The outputs of these sessions were compiled and edited into a series of reports, and then edited into a single submission given in this week, which the Digital Britain team are reading 'with interest'.
Will it make a difference? I hope so. Was it worth it? I guess so. As a whole new model of consultation it was an experience of our age, truly collaborative, intense, interested, bright people, with an interest in 'doing something important' and 'doing the right thing.' If only agencies could work this way.
The full report is available here. Other comments are available here, and here.
Fresh from the G20, so might be a bit of overclaim. Yet the ‘dodge-it-all’ bandwagon carries on apace, with #digitalbritain trending top on Twitter on Friday. Gordon gets digital, it says on the live feed twitter fail, lampooned so cruelly in the Telegraph. But the politicians aren’t saying very much really, other than now that the rest of the economy is fucked, it’s down to the digital economy to save the nation. Give or take an embarrassing email or two. Does that sound familiar to anyone in agency land?
I think there’s a problem defining the digital economy. Sly Bailey thinks it is EVIL. And is DESTROYING JOURNALISM, along with local councils whose efforts to publish Redbridge council newsletters should be BANNED. Lord Mandelson thinks it is the infrastructure and investment backbone the nation needs to prepare for the future. The Chinese government thinks it a means to take over the world. Will Hutton says the Long Tail is nonsense and we are slipping relentlessly towards a disturbing world of enormous monopolies. Lord Carter thinks it should spawn new business models. Lord knows how that’s going to happen whilst the majority of the consultative process takes place with the institutional behemoths of telecoms, media and technology.
And poor Stephen Fry – his ‘internet should be like driving’ analogy was rather shot down in flames, apposite given Mandelson’s efforts to bail out the flailing ‘British’ car industry. There is a serious debate to be had about digital skills, which lost its way on the day in the crossfire of opinion about how the education system doesn’t teach critical thinking anyway. Expecting teenagers to apply thoughtful analysis to web browsing habits is ignorant to the point of ridiculous. Note to self – distinguish between the development of creative and technical skills that school the talent that will keep the nation great from the general IT literacy and media literacy content of the national curriculum that will help the nation keep up.
Funnily enough, this digital conference diversity reflects the agency world quite well. Two schools of though are forming. Introducing, in the blue corner, the ‘old’. Without true expertise and effort to create new models of thinking, working and creating, this group will truck along into a state of blissful monopoly and lowest economic denominator of quality and nostalgia, until Google one day does swallow up WPP, Havas or indeed Trinity Mirror. And in the red corner, welcome the ‘new’ challengers who will reshape the way business is done, who seamlessly move between code and creativity in their arguments. What can we learn from the experiences of the digital agencies? There’s a decent body of people out there that really understand the digitisation of media, the democratization of content and on-demand business. Wouldn’t you rather hear from someone with ten years experience of articulating the value of user experience versus brand positioning, at the coalface of digital strategy?
Then there’s the third corner, the purply beige regulator, who looks at the ‘big picture’ of protecting the establishment whilst claiming to encourage innovation. As anyone involved in the start up scene will tell you, you don’t get much help with the latter from this government. Hats off to the founders of Bebo and Lastminute who’ve just set up an angel fund to support innovative businesses, identifying a real gap in the market for the micro-business community of new ideas. I’m an enormous fan of innovation, but short of the occasional social media start up, we aren’t seeing very much of it reported at the moment across Brand Republic. Yes, economic consolidation is a blunt instrument, bashing the experimental with the tried and tested.
Don’t take pioneer status for granted. Get involved in the Digital Britain debate. It’s more important than you think. For a start, you can follow the #unconference we’re putting together by searching #dbuc or @dbuc [ok, so you need to be on twitter for that]. Alternatively, contribute to the Fake Digital Britain report here, and test your digital literacy skills to the full. Beats writing to your MP.
An Econsultancy survey this week revealed that 75% of the top UK digital agencies don’t have Twitter accounts. Oops. Gotta love the irony, since these agencies usually boast that marketers prefer their agencies to practise what they preach, and should use the social tools they offer advice on, compared to what George Parker calls the BDAs (almost none* of which are on Twitter). It’s opened up the well-travelled discussion about why agencies don’t advertise themselves, or tweet, or have official Facebook pages and so on.
The full list of shame is available here. It’s a bit bloody, as there are plenty of comments from agencies cross that they were left off the list, but as in any assessment of the agency scene, there are many small agencies with energetic attention to any way of promoting themselves, and perhaps more cumbersome agencies that, arguably, have become a bit relaxed or paranoid behind their brand names. Mind you, the list surveyed isn’t exhaustive or representative of the entire agency community, but raises interesting parallels between the blurring of the corporate and the personal opinion.
It’s good to see so many agencies allowing their staff to tweet (and blog) freely, and people do step up with personal accounts and regular opinion. Would it be possible to stop them, though? There are notable instances where the tweeting and blogging individuals garner greater reputations and following than the agency brands they represent. I suppose it’s like having the columnists people bought papers for and not untypical for a business sector which is so personality driven. On the other hand, neatly put by one tweet “I asked if I could tweet about what I’m doing and got told nobody’s ever asked that before, can I get back to you”. They never did, and said twitterer left that agency shortly after.
* in Campaign's top ten anyway - comments welcome
75% of the world’s top advertisers and 80% of the UK’s are working with Facebook, says Blake Chandlee at today’s FT Digital Media conference [#ftmedia]. I love getting predictions right. Now the debate has moved on. It isn’t about getting it, it’s about measuring it. Doh. Instead of reach and frequency, we should be measuring interactions and engagement. Doh. Expect to hear more of the phrase ‘user connections per year’ in the coming year. Doh.
Now over the past couple of years in my companies we expended hours of angst and technical effort to build models that link online advertising activity with website traffic. It’s amazing to me how separate these [still] can be in the corporate world. Especially when it comes to business audiences, who spend most of their time online using client (that’s a technical term) communication tools. Interestingly, the 20th century model of agency infrastructure – a more generous definition than ‘BDA’ perhaps - created discipline specific revenue generating lines that often struggled to combine forces and do the right thing for the Clients' brands.
The Clients (the ones that pay the bill) were excited by these efforts. But not everyone was. The new measurement system exposed some quite glaring weaknesses in the world according to GAAP (that’s my personal definition of Generally Accepted Advertising Practise). Oh, how we argued wth all our other agency colleagues. We had simply set out to get a better bang from the online buck, we said. We weren’t planning to solve world peace or reorganise the entire marketing communication process. But in the end, that’s what's needed, and that's what's happening too.
I’m not keen on creating yet another social media discipline-specific argument. I am interested, however, in how brands go to market, how media is organised, how consumers engage with media, and how consumers engage or ignore brands. It’s clear from Facebook’s numbers that brands getting it isn’t the problem. brands are having a go. If you’re not online, you’re not on the map. It’s a more a question of how much control the brand's prepared to give up in the process, and who to turn to for advice.
George Parker on this site been railing at the average adverati’s incompetence with these social technologies and facile obsession with the next big thing bandwagon. He’s right (with notable exceptions on Brand Republic, of course) in the sense that there aren’t many agency CEO types who write their own blogs or twitter much. Funnily enough, a survey in October last year by Sapient* put understanding digital as a top priority for global CMOs, and agencies that understand digital as a DNA thing rather than an acquired thing should do well. I’d argue that there’s a starker truth behind this. Clients don’t want to pay agencies to learn on their paid time.
Reflection from the digerati at the FT conference so far is positive, and notably setting the agenda for everything else in adland. Plenty has happened in the last year that elevates the argument about common metrics, engagement, redefining media, redefining content and the role of the brands in providing the financial oxygen upon which media has traditionally depended. We have a long way to go, but it’s good every now and again to recognise how far we have come.
*Sapient is an interactive agency. Survey results: unsurprising.*Sapient’s numbers look quite good at the moment.
We all know how hard it is to win accounts, and how easy it is to lose them. Complacency is a disease that can attack the big networks at the core. Everything seems fine one minute, and some random project done by a tiny agency in Latvia suddenly gets dumped in your lap as the new global campaign idea. As Jerry Della Femina wrote, “The Client is lost as soon as it’s won, it’s just a matter of time.” And this doesn’t just affect the big networks; the tiniest agencies of all remain at the beck and call of outrageous fortune too.
The one thing that the smaller agencies can say truthfully though, is that it usually is down to them. In the networks, it’s easier to point the finger at others. And it frankly, often isn’t “the London Agency’s fault.” I’m sure we’ve all got hard and good experience of that, winning awards in the outposts of global marketing effort, but the client moves because the ‘global’ guys aren’t up to the mark or whatever. (I’m told that actually is the most common reason.) In the small agency, you live or die by your relationships and the value you bring on a daily basis to the Client’s business. The smaller you are, the more you tend to think about that, with no cushion of ten other global clients competing for the attention of your best people. People move, jobs change, markets change, yes, we all get that. But forgetting about what the Clients are worried about where and when it matters, usually before notice is served, remains unforgivable.
Another angle on this nutty little problem centres around where innovation comes from. A very clever marketing director told me once that in our business, innovation comes from the edges; sustainability comes from the core. Harsh, but fair. That’s why the Lithuanian mobile voting project on Twitter tends to get arguably more attention than it deserves from the CMO. And is used as a stick to beat the ‘big’ agency with. Turning ‘experimental’ work into a central platform for communication strategy is not simple to pull off, and there is bitterly argued example of this from all sorts of businesses around the world. (See lots of Cannes winners for details.)
So what’s the answer? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone the Client knew who was really good could think about the problem? Unfettered by agency P&L walls and wars, and the political machinations of control, how much fun could be had by everyone. This is what Clients (or some I’ve met recently, anyway) say they want. Paul Phillips at the AAR did a talk at the back of last year, for their relaunch, confirming that there were less and less ‘discipline specific’ agency briefs, and an increase in ‘marketing problem’ specific briefs. It’s a clue, isn’t it. Of course it still remains vital that Clients believe that you know what you’re talking about, get the space and the problems they face. They want senior people with insight and foresight. They often want things to be simpler. One agency rather than nine. And boutiques as well.
We’ll see more of this in the coming months, I’m sure, as Clients shrink their budgets and look to the agency supply chain for savings/value/people they want to stick with. At the school debating society, we used to have balloon debates, you know, where you argue who should be thrown out of the balloon as it ran out of air and descended slowly towards shark invested waters. Each debater booted extended the life of the others, until there was only one left. (A concept popularised by reality TV in more recent years). Well, balloon debates with clients are back. Big time. Make your cases sharp and quick, everyone.
Neatly put by the bloggers today – why don’t we just call it the Carter Report as opposed to the Digital Britain report? I get that it’s a status report on Government not of Government, but it’s a pretty big deal altogether and needs a lot of thought. Unpicking the innumerable strands that make up what Digital Britain is by no means a simple task, but then neither is creating a digital economy out of nothing. Critics of the report have suggested that there is a little too much ‘old media’ in it rather than new media. Peter Bazalgette today at the NESTA debate likened this to propping up the shipbuilding industry in the 70s. Given the news stories around LDV (that great engineering firm once known as Leyland Daf Vans) seeking a relatively paltry sum to stay alive yesterday, it seems an apposite analogy.
I also think there is rather more to content than TV shows and music clips, and the media publishers need to step into the fray a little more with points of view about their economic models of the future. There’s also a relatively new and ever fragile economy creating start up businesses, but this vital and future focussed segment has been ignored by the Digital Britain report, so far anyhow. One could argue that the fragility of the whole economy is more pressing, but encouraging innovation around the edges of the content industry, and commercial advertising industry, has to be an outcome of any discussion around Digital Britain.
The Creative Britain report was about helping creative business move from the margins to the mainstream. The Digital Britain report is about establishing a proper platform for the digital economy, and will have far reaching impact across many industries, not just this one.
From a creative perspective, the Government is keen to leverage Britain’s internationally-recognised talent in online, as well as move on from a leading position in global entertainment formats, advertising, marketing services and research. There is indeed a lot to do to take the economy back from gloom to boom, but there is no doubt that a strong position in digital knowledge and understanding around content generation and ‘how to code’ is as important as the massive infrastructure issues facing the telecoms sector to deliver economically viable broadband to everyone in the nation. And what is the ‘second public service’ provider to consist of? All this and more will be debated over the coming months. I felt the Creative Britain report was about looking backwards to how great it was being a digitally illiterate creative director in the sixties. The Digital Britain report is about looking forward to how great it should be being a digitally literate creative business in the future. I, for one, welcome it.
Cocoa is now at its highest price for 24 years and the premium brands, those that use the most ‘cocoa solid’ content, will inevitably have to pass those raw material costs on to the consumer first. This swings things favourably for Cadbury’s and Nestlé, as they tend to use less cocoa solid in mass-produced bars, so may be able to hold prices for longer. If you compare the cocoa solids content of Dairy Milk to say, a bar of Green and Black’s you can work out the relative strength of pure chocolate for yourself.
As belts tighten, even for the indulgent, can purity at a price overcome the celebration of a joyful moment expressed in Dairy Milk advertising? The kerfuffle over ‘shrinking’ chocolate sizes (where’s my last rolo gone?) at countline level indicates that when the British consumer thinks about chocolate a tiny bit more than the three seconds it takes to snap up a KitKat as you head out of the tube, manufacturers have to sit up and take notice. Mind you, I liked one succinct Yahoo answer on that question “it’s not the chocolate bars getting smaller, it’s the people getting bigger.” Let’s see how consumers react as wallets get smaller.
Does today's report that Obama will be the first US president to use email mean digital is normal now? Mind you, yesterday the FBI announced an investigation into hacks who got hold of Sarah Palin's email.A whole new world of complication for authoritative and paranoid institutions opens up.One wonders if Obama's Candide-like attitude to technology will shift the attention from the real reason people take up email, Facebook, Twitter and so on - they want to communicate with each other, freely and without fear, to the miserable place of recrimination and *** covering, the downside of corporate communication management.
I recently receive hundreds of messages from around the world as I left MRM Worldwide, wishing me luck with my new venture and other kindly comments.Many of them were *not* by email on account of big brother concerns. It's a sad reflection on corporate life that individuals are subsumed to the corporate will without a second thought to the perfectly reasonable human desire to communicate with people they like.There is of course, email etiquette and certain guides to successful email life that I have promoted. Don't send email when you're a) pissed b) angry c) very angry. Do a) spell correctly b) make the message title relevant and c) consider the recipient may have two hundred unopened in an inbox.One excuse I've heard from corporate apparatchiks for not doing something they were supposed to was they were too busy dealing with hundreds of emails. Don't confuse activity with progress was my advice back. Let's hope Obama doesn't either.
First day at the new office, pop to Starbucks to write a speech. No plugs for the laptop. Grr. That’s why Starbucks is so annoying. You think you’re going to get decent coffee, but it’s a bit random. You think you can work wirelessly, but unless you have an account with T-Mobile, it’s expensive. Roll on local authority funded wireless networks, like they have in Islington. Or free wi-fi, like they have in most of the cafés in Stoke Newington and Valparaiso. Come on Starbucks. Catch up with the modern ‘knowledge-working’ habits please, and provide more than one plug for the low battery life mac users, and free wi-fi with the skinny caps. Loved the John Coltrane backgroud music though. Credit where credit's due in educating the world that A Love Supreme is not an ice cream at McDonalds.
4 comment(s)
Alastair Duncan
Blogging for:
Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 05 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 94
