Monday 10 May 2010

Converse - still taking risks, rocking it and relevant

Thanks Ben and the folks at threebillion.com for this - pure branding using google adwords?! Not for everyone but if you are converse, everyone is your target audience and you want to drive people through interesting content AND tie them back to your home page....why not?

Converse Domaination from Ross Martin on Vimeo.

Thursday 6 May 2010

Growing Pains

What sort of team do you need to really drive the marketing agenda with clients these days? It's easy to make advertising with an art director and copywriter but these ads aren't going to achieve much if they don't inspire the user to do something with it

I firmly believe that technology is taking over the world. However I don't care a hoot if the Kindle app for the iPhone will be the Kindle killer or if there another 100 new reasons to love the iPad. What genuinely interests me is that people want stuff they can re-purpose and make their own and then tell other people about it and let them make it their own. Isn't that what made You-Tube such a sensation? How do we tap into that?

If that is what we are striving for; and I am not sure there is a business in that but we can figure it out later; then I think we need to change our mentalities and change our team structures in agencies to meet that challenge. I think the cool thing about having a blog is the fact that I don't have to worry whether our clients agree or not (hey they are their brands we are playing with after all, again we can trial it and see what they say

When I think about changing mentality I mean we have to getting out of asking ourselves 'What do we need to say to the consumer' to 'What can we create for the consumer so they say say something about us'. Over here at Mindshare we call it 'ideas you love to share'.

What is interesting about this for me is that we quickly get into some sort of iterative marketing approaches, you pick a small community of people, give them something you think they will find as valuable, see what they do with it, get their feedback and then send them something else based on that feedback. Oh yes and also get the feedback from the people they shared a version of it with. Or just steal one of those versions and recycle it

The other thing that I am wrestling with right now is cultural change in the agency and how the teams operate. If you buy into the above you need the planner (voice of the consumer), the technology futurist (the art of the possible),the social media guru (how to hit send) and the analyst (feedback collector - iterator) all working together. It's quite important that the planner doesn't think that they take the inputs and build the strategy. The strategy is co-created by this team. I would say today there are no generalists....just dinosaurs, the world is moving too quickly