David Friedman, president of Avenue A/Razorfish, Central Region, closed out today’s Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada’s Toronto opening stop in this month's MIXX Canada 08 coast-to-coast speaker series with a refreshingly clear-headed talk on “The Client of the Future”. Given he’s an agency guy, mind you, it wasn’t quite as no holds-barred as it might have been. Still he offered some realistic recommendations on how marketers should start thinking and organizing themselves for the new digital world. (And the Successories-style parody image here from Friedman’s PowerPoint captures the cheeky Dilbert-esque tone of much of his talk.)

It may have struck a special chord with me as I’m moderating a panel on essentially this very question later this week- The Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Leadership Forum at the Harbour Castle Westin Oct. 2, featuring Doug Checkeris, CEO, MediaCom USA –Canadian boy made good in the Big Apple- , Goodwin (Goody) Gibson, President, MacLaren MRM and Tammy Scott, Vice-President, Marketing, Telus. (I have a preview post on the CMA’s blog with more details).

Friedman’s four key points to build the better Client of the Future:

1) Identify One Customer

Surpassingly –or maybe not- most companies, if you look close enough, don’t have an internal consensus of who their customer really is. Is it the end consumer, the channel, shareholders? It often depends on the department. And even if everyone is agreed that it’s an external end consumer, who that actually is if often different in the minds of each internal division.

Having a clear common vision of whom you are speaking to is essential.

2) Focus on Experiences Instead of Messaging

Marketers needs to change how they think about talking to that one customer. The TV age, which is -make no mistake- ending, meant developing 15, 30, 60 or occasionally longer videos with a fixed message.

Consumers now “experience” the brand and organization far more often than they learn about it through paying attention to any messaging from it. And this trend will accelerate.

(In a way, Friedman noted, this is the biggest stretch for the marketing communications people in companies. Many other disciplines like retail channel folks and in store and promotion marketers, have always been all about the “experience.”)

3)  Conduct the Agency Ballet

The pool of specialist –and generalist- agencies working for a marketer all have to perform in harmony. And it’s up to the client to choreograph that dance.
 
Friedman used the example of AT&T, which has every one of its many roster agencies at the table for the same briefing, and then has every agency back at the same time for a full presentation of each shop’s contribution to the overall marketing show.

A key, however, he said is to ensure that every agency has a defined role and task that no other player will be allowed to pitch or poach away.

4) Reach Détente with I.T.

Companies have to continuously work to bridge the marcom –information technology chascim that exists in almost every organization.

This one was in some senses the most controversial recommendation Freidman made. As IABC president Paula Gignac was quick to point out, several other presenters during the MIXX day had advocated outsourcing projects and digital experiments to avoid the roadblocks that intransigent IT teams seem to inevitably throw up.

Friedman pointed to JC Penny in the U.S., which has apparently had some success at getting IT and marketing working in harmony. Although he conceded, this has been a decade-plus exercise, and in the early going (as in first 5-6-7 years) would use outside suppliers to “prime the pump” and show what was possible in Interactive.

But ultimately, if digital marketing is to become a core driving principle of business, an organization is going to have to embrace it across the board with every department buying in and working together to common goals.

It’s all easier said than done, but all does need to be done.

How to get there?

Friedman recommended companies create a digital plan, and to use a cross-functional and cross-departmental committee (with both digital believers and skeptics involved) –that reports to the highest-level management committee- to do it. This committee should assess what’s needed now and in the future and develop a road map to achieve it. And, as almost every one else speaking at MIXX also recommend, he urged companies to experiment with new digital tools and tactics wherever possible.

Friedman cautioned, however, that there’s “almost no point” in even bothering with this kind of exercise if the CEO hasn’t bought in and isn’t prepared to actively support it. But there really is an opportunity to use the changes the new technologies are bringing to the table to leverage total system and DNA changes in organizations.

Despite the opportunities, you get the feeling a lot of agencies won’t be holding their breaths for a sea change in human nature and corporate behaviour. As one agency CEO pointedly said as they waited for the Carlu elevator at the end of the day, the old saw is true: clients really do get the agencies they deserve. Based on evidence to date, the CEO implied, the best the industry can hope for is a wave of early retirements at the C-suit level -including among CMOs- so that a new generation of more digitally savvy marketing people can get at the challenge as soon as possible.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 7:57 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 1 October 2008 10:00 AM EDT

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Word of mouth or viral marketing has always been with us, although it clearly has been given a massive boost in the Web era. When everyone can tell everyone about anything instantly, the ability of an organization to hide from –or ignore- word of mouth (WOM) is greatly reduced. On the plus side, the opportunities to amplify positive buzz are also enormous. Either way, it all means the best way to operate now is to be pretty darn good, and empower everyone in the organization to put their best foot forward.

WestJet VP of Culture and Communications Richard Bartrem crystalized this for me at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Mass to Grass World of Mouth Marketing Conference at Ontario Place last month. In his talk, “Caring Owners: Driving Word of Mouth through Employee Empowerment and Engagement” Bartrem came off like a West Wing character: one of those handsome and fast talking, but witty and smart, people dedicated to doing good in a tough, but ultimately collegial environment filled with other fast talking, smart, caring people.

Okay, I admit I’ve been spending too much time with the full season box sets of Aaron Sorkin’s great TV series about life in the White House lately (it truly is a great primer on public policy, politics and issues management-and still relevant nine years after the first episodes aired). By even making the comparison here I’m playing into Bartrem’s and WestJet’s evil WOM propaganda plan. But if the shoe fits... The talk rang true with my perception of the WestJet culture, and there’s no question that it really set the tone for the whole Mass-to-Grass day - not a presenter or panelist on after him that I saw didn’t reference his comments glowingly.

The key to successful manufacturing positive WOM Bartrem said is to distinguish yourself to be a story worth telling. Logistics and channels etc. are all secondary to having something to say. “We can’t make you speak, but we hope we’ll make you want to speak.”

And Bartrem and WestJet clearly believe that stories worth telling happen when front line staff is “empowered to do things beyond expectations.” That might include having staff dressed up as Elvis greeting passengers on the first day of service to Los Vegas, giving check-in employees the discretion to waive excess baggage fees when they see fit to regularly allowing “guests” to propose over the in-flight intercom (432 engagements on planes as of June 11).  

It doesn’t hurt that WestJet has as its primary competitor a company that consumers have extremely low expectations of (expectations that are regularly confirmed). But WestJet does have an obviously funky, informal culture. Bartrem characterized it as being simultaneously “loose and tight:” tight on take off and safety procedures, but loose on the other stuff.

One area WestJet pays careful attention to is language. Staff are “Westjetters” not “employees.” It has “team leaders” rather than “supervisors,” “passengers” are “guests” (and definitely not depersonalized acronyms like “PAX” or “COWS” as is common with U.S. carriers) and instead of “polices” the company has “promises. (This might be called corporate speak, as per my last post, but it is notable-and I think laudable- that this approach to language is about jettisoning jargon for clearer, simpler –and yes kinder and gentler- verbiage.)

But WOM all comes down to having stories to tell. At Mass-to-grass Bartrem told the story of the autistic kid who got kicked off an Air Canada flight out of Moncton but who WestJet found a way to accommodate to illustrate the bottom-up “promises” vs. the top-down “polices” approaches to employee engagement.

The child was upset and nervous and apparently couldn’t be calmed down. After a short time Air Canada made the call that the child wouldn’t be able to take the flight. The mother walked over to the WestJet gate, explained the story and the airline immediately started to work to find a way to make it happen. The child and parent were boarded first and given more than a half hour to acclimatize to the plane, which included getting to spend some time in the cockpit. It ultimately meant a 45-minute delay in take off, but all the passengers were told why. Naturally, the incident made it to the press –and naturally, WestJet came off looking better than Air Canada.

“This where stories happen,” he said and “136 people on the plane can tell the story.”

And Bartrem can also tell it -again and again- at industry conferences.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 2:23 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 7 July 2008 2:29 PM EDT

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I moderated a roundtable discussion at the Institute of Communications and Advertising’s Future Flash conference last spring in which we had more than a dozen of Canada’s leading ad agency heads speaking on questions like what were the biggest changes they’ve seen in the marketing industry, what were the big opportunities and challenges these days, what was keeping them awake at night, etc., etc.

In our pre-event e-mail exchanges one participant, Taxi chair Paul Lavoie, turned the tables on me, and put some big picture questions right back at me:
“Think of the year 1983 and then think of today. From your unique perspective and experience, what are some of the biggest changes. What remains the same?

“What are some of the biggest HYPED up crap you’ve witnessed, reported on over these years?
Paul”

I’ve been meaning to clean up my quick e-mail back to Paul as a post since I started this blog (in fact I meant for it to be my debut post, but got sidetracked). I finally got around to it this week. So here are my thoughts on how the marketing and media world has changed, and hasn’t, in the past quarter century since Michael Jackson reigned on the pop charts, Return of the Jedi ruled the box office, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pierre Trudeau strode the earth like giants and Microsoft released the first version of Word:

Biggest changes:
Where to start?
1) Global, publicly traded agency networks didn’t really exist, and certainly dominate to the today’s degree, back in ’83. I think that was the year Saatchi bought it’s first holdings in Canada, kicking off an almost decade long run of big deal after big deal. Think of all the domestic agencies that have been rolled into FCB alone over the years (Ronalds Reynolds, Herrod & Merlin to name just two shops).
2) Ditto the consolidation and globalization of clients.
3) I do think the best ad creative is in fact better and more relevant now than 25 years ago (although I’m sure we’ll find today’s messaging quaint and clunky when we look back from 2033).
4) Unbundled media planning and buying (and everything else). What a concept. Still radical in Canada until the late 80s, and in the U.S. until the mid-90s, now it’s the norm.
5) The Web is now the driver of everything (as the folks at trendwatching.com call it, “online oxygen”)… and it didn’t really exist as we know it until about 10 years ago.
6) The pace of everything is sooo much faster. Remember when we’d FAX important documents back and forth overnight, and we all thought that was fast.
7) Consumers really do have the upper hand now in the relationship with marketers and agencies.

Things that haven’t changed?
1) Consumers always really have had the upper hand in the relationship. We just can see the impact almost instantly now. There’s no more hiding from that reality or just giving it lip service. The things that succeed still have to meet real wants and desires of consumers. They must give them real value.
2) Big ideas still rule (even if the tools we use and the pace of implementation have changed dramatically).
3) The “next great thing” always changes the game, and usually grows the pie. And when it comes to media, no medium has ever truly disappeared. Specialty TV, the Web, free commuter newspapers, digital signage… sure things become more competitive for the established players every time something new arrives, but in the end the well never goes dry.
4) You still can’t cut and shrink your way to success. There might be a short-term boost in those tactics, but long term you’ve got to deliver real value (see # 1) sometimes you have to make some risky bets.

The biggest hype?
Honestly, there’ve been so many exaggerations –usually with small stakes: useless product claims, hollow boasts of world firsts that don’t stand to scrutiny, - over the years, nothing stands out as over the top.
Maybe “media convergence…” The idea that owning both the pipes and cables and a multiplicity of media properties can lead to effective cross pollination and will add up to more than the sum of their parts just never seems to have borne fruit. Yes, there are some very impressive collections of assets concentrated in a few hands, and there have been some synergistic successes, but no full portfolio running like a well-oiled machine.
Two more “hypes” that I didn’t jot down last spring: The revolutionary clout of the baby boomers and the unrecognized power of women in the marketplace.
Not a week has gone by in my career when someone hasn’t issued a release or pitched a story based on the startling fact that the “baby boomers are aging…” and that product or service X is poised to cash in on their extraordinary new life stage habits. Now that they are becoming seniors, we’re hearing yet again –this time from the likes of Moses Znaimer, in his latest venture - that the boomers are an underestimated market.
Ditto, every few years since the turn of the 20th century (forget 1983) someone, usually a consultant or pundit or media vendor with a related service or product offering, rediscovers the fact that women control roughly 80% of consumer spending, and yet marketing efforts directed at them never come close to that kind of per cent of spend.
There, as I wrote to Paul at the time: “that’s a start on my first book ;)”

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 11:48 PM EST

Updated: Thursday, 10 January 2008 11:52 PM EST

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Some final thoughts on the CMA Digital Marketing Conference. Yes, it wrapped up almost two weeks ago now, and yes there were as usual at this kind of event a few weak brag-and-boast sales pitches (come on down Facebook and Heavy), but some of the sessions are still reverberating in my mind.

The clear buzz generator of the conference had to be the keynote, titled “Innovation in action,” from RBC‘s Dr. Anita Sands. I didn’t speak to anyone who was not excited by it. I suspect the reason is her refreshing real-world view of and advice on how to drive innovation in environments that are not Google or Cirque du Soliel-i.e. where most of us mortals have to get by day to day.

Dr. Sands knows of what she speaks. As “Vice-President, Head of Innovation & Process Design, Global Technology and Operations” –now there’s a mouthful- at the country’s biggest bank, her mandate is “to ensure that innovation is core to everything at the organization – from new product development to the introduction of new technologies and business processes.” Easier said than done in an organization with 70,000 employees operating in the highly conservative, highly bureaucratic and highly regulated financial services industry.

Dr. Sands is not a marketer. She is, as she matter-of-factly put it, “a rocket scientist.” (No kidding: Her bio says she earned a Ph.D. in Atomic and Molecular Physics from Queen's University of Belfast; and she’s got a host of other science, math and management and public policy credentials too). Frankly at times, her talk made my brain hurt. But it was definitely stimulating and challenging… and in the end pushed a very simple message.

Essentially it was this: the most useful innovations are most often the small and incremental ones. Innovation and invention are often confused. Marginal improvements that add real value to an organization, and ultimately its customers, are more realistic to implement and can mean more to the bottom-line than more ambitious (and costly and risky) totally new and transformational innovations. (OneDegree has posted a short video interview with Dr. Sands taken right after her talk that sums this up nicely.)

One simple example of this “power of small improvements” world-view in action: Heinz‘s move a couple of years ago to turn its catsup bottles upside down. It made the product more useful to the customer and pumped sales volumes up with just a small change to the package that cost next to nothing to implement.

In the case of RBC, Sands says, the bank is trying to drive its “client/customer first” positioning through every aspect of the organization. So when it comes to any innovation, it is looked at through the prism of “how does it add value for the customer.”

For someone who professes not to be a marketer, Sands does speak the language. Communications, customer empowerment, transparency are all among the tools to developing an innovation culture she says.

The biggest key to getting an innovation culture rolling, especially in large organizations, is building cross-functional communications. Sands notes RBC is trying things like wikkis, peer-to-peer intranets, internal blogging and videocasting to get staff in different silos communicating and cross-pollinating ideas. It’s a big job. Sands admits that RBC is still only taking baby steps on most of those fronts. But that fits with the “do-learn-do” model of continuous incremental improvements on the fringes she champions.

Sands argued that getting lots of new ideas isn’t –or shouldn’t be- the challenge. It’s actually implementing them and then measuring their impact that is really hard. RBC has set up an “Innovation Lab” under her direction where every major innovation idea, whether proposed internally or externally, is tested and explored on two fronts: will it work, not just anywhere, but within the RBC environment and; can a real business case be made for implementing. In that sense, she defines the essence of her role, and innovation itself, as the “art and science to connecting what’s possible to what’s valuable to the customer.”

The ultimate benefit of an innovation driven culture, argues Sands, may well be in attracting and retaining talent. A bank, for instance, needs to be able to “execute flawlessly” and you need good people to be able to do that. A culture that empowers and encourages its people to be innovative in all they do is definitely going to have an edge over a closed command and control culture.

Innovation does not happen by accident, Sands said at one point. It is hard slogging. But really I think her evangelical enthusiasm for the almost Sisyphean challenge of instilling innovation into the DNA of a company like RBC was what was most engaging and inspiring about her talk.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 12:02 PM EST

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