Saint Blog

Nike have challenged a bunch of designers to challenge the function of their shoes.

Below is W+K’s effort…

Check the site for more information – Nike 78

The Internet of Things is a fascinating concept. The idea that all the data that we’re collecting and generating online, having a real world impact in our day to day lives, and vice versa.

IBM created this short video by way of an explanation earlier in the year:

Just came across a blog by Dutch agency Boorieland regarding Meta Products, the development of ideas for physical products that utilise the web for their data. There’s something fantastically exciting about the opportunities surrounding this matrixing of complex services.

We’re proud to announce that we’ve just hired two new planning wizards to join Saint.  Paul O’Neill joins from AKQA where he just won the Grand Prix for Fiat’s Eco-Drive campaign at this year’s Cannes. And he’s just been planning for Nike working on all sorts of funky stuff. Jerome Courtial (aka blog name digicynic) joins from Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam. Jerome’s career began at Glue before leaving to BBH and then to W+K to lead the global planning on Nokia.

Something I wrote for September’s edition of Admap…

In April 2009 one third of the UK’s leisure time was spent online, browsing, researching, reading, sharing, watching, communicating etc. And history has taught us that wherever consumers go media companies will follow, assembling all sorts of attractive advertising packages guaranteeing buyers a profitable and measurable return on their investment. It is no surprise therefore that online advertising spend has grown 48% year on year since 2003, climbing from least deployed advertising medium to third most employed medium, behind TV & Press.

So, on the surface it would appear that the majority of companies are getting digital. Yet 90% of this new digital spend is being invested into largely promotionally driven advertising activities; most switched on companies are still experiencing the fear because they know that they are merely scratching the surface of what online can really do for (and to) their brands. Why? The internet was not designed for brands to continue their one-way interruptive advertising model. The opposite is true, the internet is a place where every TV campaign claim can be blogged to death, torture-tested, discussed, accepted and rejected without your sign-off or knowledge.

So treating ‘digital’ like yet another advertising channel totally misses the point. In a vast and expanding universe where real people work, rest and play, 220 million websites and 70 million blogs exist and over 120,000 are being added every day. The new opportunity for brands is to understand their consumers better than ever before, the types of technologies they use to live out their lives and to invent ways that brands can enhance those technological experiences.

Imagine what you could do for a brand, online, with £37m. That is the average marketing budget of a UK top 100 company. For a start, you would have enough to make the brand’s very own versions of not just YouTube, but also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and eBay – including all the marketing and advertising needed to make them famous worldwide.

Nike is a company that is consistently ahead of the curve and has mastered the art of self-promotion via the most powerful media channel on the planet, word-of-mouth. Today Nike spends 90% of its marketing budget supporting not new product launches or price promotions, but a continuous stream of content that entertains, involves and empowers its consumers all year round. And ‘digital’ plays a central role both as hub and generator of content.

From a brand planning point of view, this is a classic example of a brand building advocacy online (in a way traditional advertising cannot) via experiences that allow consumers to live out the brand’s promise for themselves. But less obviously perhaps, this is an example of a company that knows how to manage agency talent and promote the type of culture where digital thinking and creativity can infect the entire marketing mix.

So, for everyone else not quite like Nike, what gets in the way? No company (in their right mind) is questioning the need to exploit the full powers of ‘digital’, but I do believe that the successful brands of the future will be those who know, not why, but how to harness that power. Successful brands of the future will go beyond advertising online and build a working culture that thinks and does the following:

1. Enables their digital talent to have an impact

Is your digital talent empowered to make the necessary in-roads into your communications planning cycle? Getting the right people with the right digital experience into your business is only half the battle. Creating a reporting structure that empowers your digital thinking to influence the heart of your communications mix is essential. So who’s reporting to whom? Is your digital person reporting into a totally non-digital person and, if so, is this preventing them from giving them the maximum opportunity to input and affect change?

2. Puts their money where their mouth is

Do your online budgets measure up to your ambition? Because the digital world is changing so fast it is hard to know which new breakthrough technology, trend or community will emerge as a winner and therefore worthy of your investment. Given that most online builds, be it an application, micro-site or blog, will take time and be costly, knowing what to back and when is key. I think it is often this that can leave companies frozen in the headlights and force the non-advertising based digital activities to be smaller and more experimental.

3. Defines success in terms of quality not quantity

If we continue to judge ‘digital effectiveness’ in same way as we do all media channels i.e. in terms of reach and frequency, then digital will continue to be relegated to advertising only because most non-advertising digital activities do not reach huge populations, instead they reach smaller discrete groups or grow in size and influence gradually. The iconic brands of the future will no longer sit on a pedestal, borne out of years of (at best) consistent one-way advertising. Because media fragmentation has long arrived and because we can no longer control who listens to our messages – on average Sky+ viewers forward 97% of the ad break. The iconic brands of the future will build status & credibility by humanizing themselves and engaging with consumers in a meaningful and personal way, for instance via real dialogue. And it will be the quality of these interactions that will define success or failure. 10,000 happy customers online (who go on to become powerful advocates of your brand) is better than advertising to 1,000,000 of whom only 40% listen, 10% of those are interested and then 10% of those actually do something about it.

4. Develops an ‘enduring’ digital marketing strategy

Even though the digital world is changing so fast there are some emerging strategic principles that companies would do well to adopt which may in turn help them to plan and invest in longer term initiatives.  For instance, to accompany the 4Ps of classical marketing, marketers would do well to instill the digital 4Cs around Conversation, Culture, Collaboration & Compensation. Go to http://blog.saintlondon.co.uk to find out more.

5. Thinks outside the normal campaign cycle

Don’t always think about ‘digital’ as another box to be ticked to bring your campaign thought to life. Linking digital to your campaign cycles will prevent you from thinking about powerful ongoing activities that can give you brand presence all year round, for example developing the right online strategic partnerships or the right influencer outreach programme.

6. Reverses the traditional production to media cost ratio

Even in 2000, the acclaimed BMW films were a great example of a brand that decided that instead of sinking its ad budget into media-buy, at the expense of production values, it would reverse the equation spending Hollywood money for Hollywood talent to make big-budget Hollywood commercials, and screen them online, where distribution costs next to nothing. 10 million viewers downloaded these BMW films spending more time with the BMW brand than media money could ever afford.

7. Brings the best out of their digital agency

Hiring the best specialist agencies in town is irrelevant if you cannot get the best out of them. The classic ‘not invented here syndrome’ often means that agencies will not co-operate, share ideas let alone actually execute an idea that is not theirs. But inter-agency collaboration is essential because, despite the media neutral rhetoric of the last decade, most creative agencies still cannot execute beyond the channels they are most used to. Clients must create a culture of trust by establishing clear expectations, objectives amongst a team of agencies that know they are going to be paid fairly i.e. a guaranteed fee & production budget. This way your digital agency has every chance of being able to make their mark.

  Champions ideas not executions

The last example is from less ‘cool’ but equally advanced Lloyds TSB in the shape of their Savvy Saver campaign [3] with digital at its heart. Lloydstsbsavvysaver.com housed a tool enabling people to prepare their own savings plan based on their own personal goals and encouraged them to pledge to save money and succeed thanks to ongoing advice & support.  The ‘Are you savvy?’ tool-meets-quiz enabled visitors to calculate how savvy they were in comparison to the rest of the nation.  The destination micro-site was promoted through display and rich media advertising online as well as via traditional channels such as TV, press and outdoor.

9) Selects a lead agency partner can think digitally, instinctively
Most advertising agencies have a creative director and a few producers to make sure they can execute digitally, if need be. This tends to cultivate the attitude that the digital team is a bit like the TV production department, i.e. another media channel. This is a very different model to one that builds a digitally expert capability that can feed the entire strategic and creative development process. Make sure that your lead communications partner has true native digital capability. It is easier said than done – most digital talent will not work for a ‘traditional agency’ because they don’t believe their ‘skills’ will be respected or championed.

10) Insists their digital agency demystifies new technologies
Digital agencies need to demystify their worlds. It is their responsibility, as people who live it, to explain it. If they want to be taken more seriously by you, they should be less concerned with gimmicky, technological firsts and more interested in forging closer emotional ties between your brand and your consumer.

11) Encourages their digital agency to get emotional
It is easier to imagine the impact of a big, expensive TV campaign than a big, digital one because we have been schooled for decades in the alchemy and emotional value of TV (with the bonus of guaranteed reach and frequency). If digital agencies described the emotional ambitions of their ideas (as well as the commercial value of them), they might be able to earn a larger slice of your pie. Brand owners can help too, by granting agencies greater artistic license and being willing to take the same creative leap of faith they allow their above-the-line partners.

12) Builds tools to help ‘influence’ their consumers
Digital agencies constantly remind their clients that they can no longer control what is being communicated about their brands. Rather than challenge this, companies would do well to accept that in today’s world, where serious ‘lack of consumer trust’ exists, the right digital infrastructure can allow companies to respond to every single tweet or blog post i.e. engage in real life, powerful one-to-one conversation. And mystarbucksidea.com is a great example of a large company humanizing itself by creating a forum for its customers to air their gripes and affections and, at the same time, contribute to new product & service ideas which are ranked in terms of popularity and actually executed.

 13) Sees failure as constant improvement

When you combine the cost of creative development, research, production and media, an unsuccessful broadcast campaign can become an incredibly risky investment. Testing and collaborating are ingrained in online culture, so companies have the advantage of being able to monitor accurately and optimize their activities. What you do online need not be perfect, by showing you are listening and acting, you can turn the very people who criticize you into your biggest advocates.