Influx Insights Weblog

breathrough ideas and practicality

Influx Insights — 2010-02-10T08:38:06Z

The pressure on communication agencies is intense, clients are constantly hoping for breakthrough ideas that are powerful enough to transcend the typically narrow media window and make it into popular culture.

As agencies work on these ideas they are increasingly looking for ever more promising hooks that are able to get the news media's attention, advertising as PR, as an example, Crispin looks at much of its work through the lens of a press release.

While this is great and a valuable awareness builder, do these efforts suffer because they are so focused on the news media as the target vs. the real audience?

SF Eater recently posted a graphic which they took apart Denny's recent Grand Slam breakfast promotion from the perspective of the end user and came up with a nice piece of math to quantify the opportunity cost of free.

While this is extreme and I am sure the Denny's promotion was a huge success on all fronts, it pays for planners and the media folk to work out whether these big ideas can really do all that's promised.

Of course this should all be in the brief, but if it is not, perhaps we need to employ some kind of bullshit filter to see if the proposed "big PR idea" has legs with consumers.

Posted by Ed Cotton

green & black's founder believes kraft will look after his child

Influx Insights — 2010-02-01T09:59:00Z

Green & Black's built its reputation by pioneering Fair Trade chocolate, it successfully managed to maintain this despite being acquired by Cadbury.

G&B managed to "infect" Cadbury and got it to incorporate a lot of their ethical smarts into their own brand. Now with Cadbury being purchased by Kraft, many are questioning if the American company has what it takes to maintain the progress made by these two brands.

In a recent article in The Guardian, one of the founder's of Green & Black's was somewhat optimistic about the prospects. On a side note, it's interesting, he points his finger at consumers for not demanding organic and Fair Trade from brands, of course, this is a little chicken and egg because it often takes a company to lead consumers, as we've seen with Wal-Mart.

"A brand is like a child. It is born into this world, fragile and in great need of parental care and attention. Eventually you send it off to school and university, entrusting it to the care of others. Then it embarks on its career. Green & Black's, to follow the analogy, was nurtured to maturity and eventually got a good job at a big multinational.

It's still our baby. The fact that it can now look forward to continuing its career development with another multinational with a different name (and most of the same shareholders) is not a great cause for concern.

If Kraft screwed up with Green & Black's it would damage their reputation and cast a shadow over their competence. But there is no reason to expect them to goof. They have converted US household names like Oreos and Ritz crackers to organic and even do an organic macaroni-and-cheese dinner.

Every successful organic product represents another welcome step forward in the vital process, whereby the GM dependent climate-destructive industrial farming model gives way to sustainable, organic and fair ways of producing food. Successful corporations identify and follow these deeper underlying trends and would be betraying their shareholders' interest in trying to reverse them.

Frankly, it's the consumers who don't buy organic and fair products that upset me the most. Consumers have a choice, companies don't, they only sell what customers buy. Kraft and Cadbury are on the right track and I am confident the new entity will continue to pursue this.

I have no idea if Kraft will ask me to stay on as president, but if they don't that could be your canary in the coal mine."

Kraft's indirect purchase of Green & Black's follows a familiar pattern of ethical companies falling into their hands of giant corporations- Ben and Jerry's at Unilever, Howies at Timberland and The Body Shop at L'Oreal.

Many of the ethical companies start out with the belief that it's possible to change the world and when purchased may still harbor idealistic notions of this dream because of scale. However, for the acquring company to radically change it's operations, brands etc to all be in-line with the ethical company, is highly unlikely because it's just simply too hard to do.

What's more likely is a token response where the ethical brands sit in limbo and nothing really changes. They can grow because they can distribution muscle, but beyond that, they can't do much.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the migration away from control- facebook is the new url

Influx Insights — 2010-01-28T10:44:04Z

BBH has a new campaign out in the UK for Barclaycard touting ease and convenience of payment, but what struck me most was the URL they use at the end of the spot, where instead of the corporate dot com address, there's a Facebook url.

This is a clear sign of the move away from corporate web destinations in favor of the locations where consumers are spending most of their time. This is a big shift and one that must be quite a challenge for companies to get their heads around, but it reflects the new reality.

This is just the start because it forces the agencies hand to work out how best to Facebook and looking at the Barclaycard example there are certainly some challenges.

Interestingly, the experience seems just like a corporate web site and not the organic, fluid experience you expect on Facebook.

While it's smart understand where your customers are, getting the experience right is critical .

Posted by Ed Cotton

when brand equity gets shattered

Influx Insights — 2010-01-28T10:09:07Z

It takes decades to create a reputation and only a few days to destroy it, Toyota is the latest brand to be falling into the death spiral with a massive erosion in its equity.

Something that it's key competitors can only be extremely happy about, especially when a number of the players including- GM, Ford and the the emerging Korean brands have made such strides in this space.

The problem is especially acute for Toyota because quality has been such an integral part of the company, management books have been written about it and the whole DNA of the organization is structured around it.

It's been suggested that T oyota's push for growth has been the cause of all these problems . It was so fixated with overtaking GM to become the biggest automaker in the world, that corners were cut and compromises made.

Pushing hard for growth has been the undoing of many a great brand.

Toyota's problem seems to a show a lack of understanding of how to scale their production to achieve optimal quality and not thinking hard enough about the impact of potential failure on the brand.

Starbucks is another brand who expanded way to fast and ended up diluting their equity.

In both these cases, while it certainly true that they built amazingly powerful brands, they failed to treat them with respect and didn't use tools to help them to understand the resulting impact of over-expansion on their most valuable assets.

Quite simply, their brands were important, but not important enough to be front and center of the CFO and CEOs agenda.

Posted by Ed Cotton

agency finally recognizes it has social responsiblity

Influx Insights — 2010-01-26T11:58:48Z

Good news coming out of London this week, Ogilvy has been inspired by the efforts of all the out of work architects and designers who've set-up pop-up stores and stands to sell their wares, now the giant ad agency is doing the same with a social twist.

The enlightened folks at Ogilvy decided that small, local businesses in the Brixton areas of London could benefit from some of company's strategic and creative thinking. It's a cool PR coop, but it's also a great idea and something more agencies should pay attention to.

Agencies exist in physical locations and probably should kind of responsibility to contribute to their neighborhoods and broader community. Obviously, many think that their pro-bono efforts are probably good enough, but perhaps these contributions need to be smaller, more focused, truly connected to their communities and less interested in the potential of creative awards.

Posted by Ed Cotton

advertising as art- for Europe only?

Influx Insights — 2010-01-22T07:15:50Z

It's could be a dream assignment- The British Museum and The BBC join forces to create a radio series about 100 objects the museum has in its collection.

Fallon gets the brief and the chance to elevate the often mundane world of advertising into an art form.

However, we all know how hard it can be with one client, how about two public institutions? They must have done some great selling and/or had great clients because the result is pretty close to art, judging by this one spot.

This is a very artful ad aimed at a highly cultured and educated audience who can appreciate the idea and the story, this is not for a target called "everyone".

Looking at from the US perspective it would be hard to find a client to brave enough to do this type of work and you can imagine when presenting the script getting questions about how slow it is and how long it takes to get to the main message- "would people have the patience to stay the course?"

Could this you see this advertising running in the US? Why and why not? imagine The Smithsonian and NPR creating type of initiative

Posted by Ed Cotton

do clients need social media agencies?

Influx Insights — 2010-01-21T10:55:45Z

According to Campaign, VW is looking for a social media agency in the UK.

This will add another partner to the company's already expansive communications roster, add incremental fees and mean there's more to manage and co-ordinate. In a an environment where budgets and resources are being challenged, it seems counter-intuitive.

However, the media has done a good job, Influx Insights included, in hyping the social media space to such a point that client's probably believe the need a specialist to help them in this complex and challenging environment.

On the surface, at a moment in time when the CMO and his or her bosses seem fixated on the thrills of Facebook and Twitter, holding a review and hiring a specialist seems like a problem solved.

In reality, it might be more trouble that it's worth. If you take a step back and look at how social media breaks down and what's needed, it's pretty basic.

1. Someone has to listen and respond- probably best for the in-house customer service team to work on this.

2. Posting relevant content to get conversation-likely to be split between PR and advertising who both play a role in getting content out to the crowd. Good companies in these fields are already up-to-speed and know the world of social media.

Social media is another channel that must be a part of the communication mix, but fragmenting responsibility, while it seems like a sound plan, might make a marketers life a lot more complicated.

It would be great to get people's thoughts on this topic.

Posted by Ed Cotton

being talked about simply isn't enough

Influx Insights — 2009-12-16T17:15:37Z

Twitter just released its list of leading trending topics for 2009.

Taking a look at the technology list and its surprising to see Google Wave topping the list and the Palm Pre come in at no6.

While both these products generated conversation, they can hardly be called massive successes. It goes to show that although we are trying to get our brands talked about and that's the goal of communication, that alone is no guarantee of success.

Google Wave has the potential to be very interesting, but it has a number of hurdles to overcome. People don't really know how to use it and there don't seem to be many folks with accounts. Perhaps if it becomes integrated into Gmail, it will have more success. When the team demoed the product it looked very exciting, but people were let down by the real experience because they didn't know how to use it and none of their friends had accounts.

The Palm Pre got out of the gate fast, but never built on the early momentum. This was mainly due to the stiff competition from Apple and more recently various Android offerings.

Net- Volume of conversation isn't a bad thing, it's just no guarantee of success. The product has to transcend the hype and deliver something that is highly competitive and differentiating. It suggests there's a need for finesse and nuance when planning these resulting conversations.

What do you want people to talk about? How you encouraging them to do that? Where are they doing it? How can you learn and refine as you go-making sure you guide the conversation.

Posted by Ed Cotton

customer complaints- there's an app for that

Influx Insights — 2009-12-14T11:16:07Z

The world about mobile application is all about entertainment and utility; either they are great for killing time or they do something useful.

AT&T has decide to build an application for something that not many brands might be thinking about, complaints.

Everyone is familiar with the the brand's network problems and while the solve is probably north of several billion dollars, so the brand badly needs to show it cares. It's short-term solution is an iPhone application that allows users to voice their complaints.

AT&T is demonstrating that it knows its got a problem and is using its crowd of users to help them solve. This is a great move for the brand and really useful for the company, if people contribute. It would be great if they consider making the dataset available to customers and to follow-up by showing how they plan to improve service.

It would also be interesting to think of other brands who could use an application to collect complaints; cable companies?

Posted by Ed Cotton

smoothies, banks and the trust gap

Influx Insights — 2009-12-10T12:27:39Z

Everyone knows that many banks are still in trouble and most people have a clear idea where the blame lies, with the banks themselves. Quite simply, there's no love lost between bank customers and the executives who are seen as part of a financial establishment that's taken advantage of exploitable opportunities, often at the expense of the customer and taxpayer.

A bank should only go begging to its customers for understanding if there was a well of support and a high degree of respect for the brand and the category. Anything short of a stellar reputation and it's going to end badly. Now is not the time for such a plea.

However, Westpac in Australia seem oblivious to current sentiment. The bank sent out an email film to its customers explaining in the most patronizing way how the financial system worked and why bank rates where heading higher.

Given what people have been through with banks and the endless press on bonuses and the stratospheric pay packages of banking's top level, it's impossible to understand how Westpac's customer base could be sympathetic to the plight of a bank who now faces higher costs for borrowing money.

One can just imagine how this film came to be, harried marketing executives believing that if only the ignorant public could understand the reasons why money now cost more, things could be better, taking this thought to their ad agency and getting them to make an "educational film". The problem here is that the voice is all wrong, there's no empathy, understanding or even a recognition of some intelligence on the part of their customers. The fact this made it though the system shows an institution with a very low EQ and one that fill find its little exercise in education ends up losing it a ton of valuable customers.

Banking still has a lot to learn from how to respond to the current crisis. It does not seem like any of them get it, most don't want to acknowledge the realities of a changed context and a changed relationship. Most of the recent marketing efforts fall short, they show a lack of an insight and an inherent desire to turn the clock back to the days of old.

Recent research data from Bloomberg shows that Americans are pretty angry with bankers.

"Two-thirds of Americans say they have an unfavorable view of financial executives. More than half say big financial companies, which are expected to pay record yearend bonuses, are out only to enrich themselves and also should not have received government aid. "

The incumbents failure to get it right, could leave the door open to a smart opportunist who gets exactly what the consumer is looking for now, doesn't show the same patronizing attitude of old and finds a way to provide superior services at a much lower cost.

Posted by Ed Cotton

consumers getting rid of credit at an alarming pace

Influx Insights — 2009-12-09T09:50:28Z

If you look at the data on credit, it's clear there's a massive shift underway. Consumers have become fanatical about cutting back on debt. October credit fell by $3.5 billion (-1.7% year over year). September's decline was dramatic, $8.7 billion. October marked the ninth month of declines, a trend that has not been seen in 66 years. This is unlikely to change until consumers feel more confident about the economy and their own personal situation. It remains unclear if the recession is well and truly over, although indicators suggest unemployment has peaked, it's likely consumers remain unconvinced.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the rise of the ghost store

Influx Insights — 2009-12-07T12:25:02Z

In an increasingly digital world, physical spaces are evolving to cope with the times. We continue to see the rise of the pop up store as a way for brands to connect physically with audiences. While this is not a new story, we've seen a bunch of unexpected brands like Gucci and EA move into this space.

However, there are new demands on big digital players to think about the physical in a new way. Tesco, the UK grocery chain, plan to open one "Dark Store" a year.

Here's the definition is such a store.

"The supermarkets, which are laid out in the same manner as normal stores, will be used exclusively by staff doing virtual shopping for online customers.

Instead of the public browsing up and down the aisles, teams of Tesco workers will push their own trolleys around as they complete more than 1,000 shopping lists every day"

There are also rumors of Amazon planning something in London by creating a space where consumers can order and pick up merchandise.

Clearly, as the digital revolution continues at a pace we will continue to see a blurring of the lines between physical and virtual. While it's well understand of the experiential advantages of physical space, these two initiatives from Tesco and Amazon show that there might also be considerable business advantages that physical destinations can provide for e-commerce players.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the unbranded brand- uniqlo

Influx Insights — 2009-12-02T12:12:37Z

It takes a lot of guts to show restraint and at a time of incredible pressure on the bottom line to have the discipline to stand back and allow your brand to play a recessive role. To do this in the world of fashion where loud and brash are the norms, is even more surprising, but this is exactly what Uniqlo has done.

Somehow the stars have collided for Uniqlo and it seems to be the brand of the moment. A company that understands things have changed for consumers and is giving them exactly what they want.

Business of Fashion has a very thoughtful piece on the brand pointing to the zeitgeist that's driven Uniqlo's success.

"For young Japanese consumers in particular, Uniqlo’s ‘blank slate’ approach may be its greatest strength. Indeed, the days of Japanese consumers creating and expressing identity through brand identification is over. Judging by their embrace of Uniqlo, Japanese consumers are definitely not becoming ‘individual’ in a Western sense — wanting to only buy things no one else has. But they no longer want to be pigeon-holed by consuming a fashion brand that has an overly strong or defining identity.

Uniqlo’s widespread success means it’s a socially-acceptable brand (a huge concern for Japanese consumers), but other than that, the clothes say almost nothing: no logos, no design flourishes, no distinguishing marks. Uniqlo’s advertising rarely tries to inject a particular statement or identity into the brand, unlike the hipster sex of American Apparel or the “classic” preppie vibe of The Gap. Uniqlo is basically a Pantone-hued commodity, making it a perfect fit for both highly sophisticated and completely disengaged fashion consumers."

Uniqlo has created a template for the brand and provided some cues, but left it up to people to define the brand in their terms. This flexible template is attractive because it can be molded and shaped. Many brands could learn a lot from Uniqlo in how to let the customer in to play and shape. In many respects, it pays homage to it compatriot Muji, who played exactly the same game a few years back

The critical part of Uniqlo's success in NYC has been in finding a way to make its Japanness cool and relevant, much of this has been built around great collaborations and brilliant communication, but you can't overlook the product, there's something they've got right with product design, something that The Gap hasn't yet mastered.

I also believe there's a huge strategic upside in scarcity- having just one store in NYC and no online presence is very smart. It makes these potentially commodity products, special and exclusive. The chaos that the launch of the Jill Sander line created was all good PR for the brand and proved that discipline and restraint can pay dividends.

In the end, there's something uniquely Japanese at work here in the business culture, because you can't imagine a US corporation with shareholders of new company backed by private equity showing the same kind of discipline. In US hands, by now, Uniqlo could easily have 400 stores across the country.

Posted by Ed Cotton

brand nirvana is mass cool- the secret- particpation and the right conversation

Influx Insights — 2009-12-02T15:28:25Z

This is from a Brian Eno article that appeared in Propsect Magazine (thanks Colin Nagy)

"We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas."

It provides a lot of food for thought for those who are in the business of trying to make things cool. Although Eno is referring to music and art initially in this piece, he expands it to include cultural ideas.

So what about brands?

Follow Eno's line of argument and all brands can be cool to someone. There's no such thing as an uncool brand, everything is now accessible and acceptable because there are no real arbiters of taste and style.

If you take Eno's thinking and mash it up with The Economist's recent piece on media which described a world made up of big hits, successful micro-fragments and a place where being stuck in the middle is not where you want to be.

Perhaps, Eno is half right, because although everyone has the potential to be cool to someone, there's uneven distributuon of this cool, it's really a landscape where there's mass cool, a sea of nothingness (a no man's land where most brands are blahh) and niche cool. Going for the middle is pure compromise and the kiss of death, so either find your niche and be cool or go mass cool.

Every big brand in America wants to be mass cool which is about "now relevance" which simply means.

a) Participating in the now- a huge shift away from campaigns to conversations

b) Being clued into the dominant themes of the now- where are you in culture?

This demands that clients fully engage in participating in the now conversation, but do it in a way that is relevant to the dominant cultural themes. As we've been told by countless social media experts, it's great to converse, but I would suggest that's not enough, you need talk about what matters to people and explain how your brand connects to those themes.

So while you might be spending loads of time understanding the what's and why's of social media, it's almost more important to understand the dominant cultural conversations in your world or category and to see how you brand connects to them. If you get this perhaps you can create conversations that connect the two together.

Posted by Ed Cotton

how can you tell if an idea is good?

Influx Insights — 2009-12-02T11:45:46Z

In the world of advertising, it's always been pretty easy to tell if a script has the potential to turn into a good TV, but even in this relatively straightforward space, there's a lot of stuff beyond the script that might impact the outcome significantly.

A great case is the recent BBH work for Johnnie Walker which might have looked very flat when it was presented in script form, but when you overlay production and acting talent, it takes on a whole new dimension.

However, as we move beyond advertising into creating utilities and applications it becomes harder to tell if these ideas are going to work. While it certainly helps to understand unmet consumer needs, so you can develop something that might be useful, there are layers of nuance around experience that are hard to present and articulate. In this new world, it gets harder to see if it's any good or not.

Once the idea is developed, we have an advantage because in the digital space is that we can fast track refinements and make it better fit user needs- you are seeing this constantly with iPhone applications, for example.

Presenting ideas has always been a challenge, but when they become layered with different levels and types of experiences and nuance, it's simply getting too hard for people to guess if something is going to work.

Clive Thompson points this out in his recent piece in Wired on start-ups.

"It’s not that the truly revolutionary businesses aren’t already here — we just don’t realize how game-changing they are. Remember: People sniffed at Google because they thought AltaVista and Infoseek had already “solved” search. Microsoft, too, was seen as a joke: Real men built hardware, not software. And as for eBay — dude, who’s gonna buy someone else’s cast-off Weebles? Twitter is the most recent idea that seems “big,” but at first it was soundly mocked — until the State Department asked CEO Evan Williams to keep the servers running during the Iranian revolt.

Why is true tech innovation so hard to recognize? Because a revolutionary new tool makes life permanently different, and we have trouble imagining change."

As planners, we all have a new responsibility to help our teams bring these ideas to life and to convince our clients that they are the right thing to do, but we need to acknowledge that this is tougher than it has ever been.

Here's Steve Ballmer telling everyone in 2007 that he thinks the iPhone is a joke.

Posted by Ed Cotton