agency innovation – invented Up North?
There’s been an awful lot of thinking recently from respected Big Thinkers in the Planning world about what the agency of the future might and/or will have to look like.
Neil recently wrote about the need to hire T-shaped people (who possess a strong vertical skill, but also have a broad empathy toward other skills and disciplines encountered in the business).
Amelia wrote back in January about her ‘agency and friends’ model (building a loose network of partners, developers and producers who can work alongside the core agency hub).
And a Major Planner posted something fairly recently about smarter, faster, more agile and responsive Planning that I commented on at the time but seems to have since gone AWOL.
My comment on the Major Planner’s post wasn’t received very warmly. It was something along the lines that all these ideas are very relevant for where we’re all…but to my mind they’re all also a new take on (and a new name for) stuff that’s been happening (at least round me) for quite a while.
I gained my Planning spurs at a series of Regional Integrated Agencies. They were largish by Outside London standards (up to 175 staff in one office) and did pretty much everything. Most started out years ago as pure advertising agencies but quickly added specialisms like DM and PR in order to survive.
So Planners trained Up North have always been able to plan for multi-channel campaigns. It was expected that you knew about promotional insurance, newshare, PR press days, why silver print was expensive and what CMS was.
You were also expected to be a decent qualitative researcher and an insightful and strategic Planner. In other words, you had to be T-shaped, with strong core planning skills while having a broad understanding of what everyone else in the agency did for a living and why.
The newer, smaller agencies up here mostly tried to do Integrated too, as (until very recently) that’s what many clients were interested in buying. So a lively freelance market of trusted ex agency employees and specialist suppliers sprung up to support the core agency teams.
And with quiet, Northern confidence, some of the agencies that did decide to stick to one thing behaved as if size was no barrier to greatness. In the 2000’s, some quite significant pieces of big brand multi million pound business were being run from agencies round here with a head count under 30.
But most agencies Up North rarely had massive budgets to play with – and rarely much time to work with either. Not for us the three month pitch or million pound production budget. So Planning had to be good, cheap and fast. I know it’s hard to manage more than two out of that three, but we tried our hardest.
It seems that up here, Up North they had the right idea. The agency of the future is undoubtedly going to consist of a tight core of smart, agile, strategic, T-shaped people who work in real time and rely on trusted partners to help them get the job done.
So what I suppose I’m saying is that there’s probably no such thing as an entirely new idea…but there are certainly some great, fresh angles on old ideas flying about at the moment.
is the Range Rover Evoque a designer handbag?
I was wondering round Leeds the other week when I saw the new baby Range Rover Evoque on display in the middle of an upmarket shopping arcade.
Of course I had a nosey – I’m always on the lookout for my motoring holy grail, an automatic that’s good on the motorway, is small enough to park easily and can get down a 1in3 snow covered track in one piece.
Unfortunately, it also has to come in under budget, which I quickly realised ruled out the Evoque. It’s still on my list should my premium bonds come up next month, but it nearly lost it’s place when I saw this:
So it would seem Range Rover are not going after a target market like me. More like footballers wives, Essex girls and drug dealers. It suddenly feels like owning one of these cars would be like owning a particularly garish designer handbag.
Oh well, in my more affluent fantasy life I suppose I could always get it debadged…
TV ad in actual behaviour change shocker
I put Winter Tyres on the car last week (it’s rear wheel drive, I got stuck three times last Winter). There’s a badly shot but concise video explanation of the benefits of switching here.
I asked the nice bloke at Kwik Fit how many people he thought would be doing the same as me this year. Based on sales so far, he thought 40% of cars would have Winter Tyres on in a couple of months.
Forty percent.
Up to last year, proper Winter Tyres (they have a snowflake symbol on them) were thought to account for just 0.5% of total annual tyre sales.
So what’s changed? Well obviously we had a harsh Winter in the UK last year and many people like me will have decided not to risk normal tyres again. But my Kwik Fit bloke also thought it was partly down to the recent advertising push from the big tyre manufacturers like Continental.
The interesting thing it, my tyre prophet didn’t suggest that his customers were asking for tyres by brand name. They mostly just wanted ‘Winter Tyres’ generally, suggesting that ads like the one above have done a good job for the category generally in terms of behaviour change rather than benefitting their specific brand (although of course as the market grows, so should the comparative sales of brands in that market).
But it strikes me that when presented with a range of Winter Tyres to choose from, most people will go for something in their budget range, from a brand they’re heard of. Which might well be the brand they saw on TV last week.
So my hypothesis is that these ads are doing double duty – changing behaviour across the category and boosting promoted brand recall at the point of purchase. Which is pretty impressive for a 20 second ad.
the *other* facebook marketplace
My facebook newsfeed has recently turned into a virtual version of exchange & mart (or even, say, ebay).
It seems that some people are more comfortable buying and selling with friends-of-friends than from random strangers who have positive feedback from other random people (cough, ebay). So my network are merrily flogging second hand cars and horse rugs (hundreds of rugs, the local riding club fb wall looks like Rugs R Us at the moment).
pic from here (randomly, just as I found this image I got a text from a mate inviting me on a trip to this very shop)
I suppose it’s an organic development of the whole social shopping thing, but these people aren’t doing it via facebook marketplace. They’re selling only to their network (with face to face payment and delivery) and in doing so are effectively trading outside the system.
I checked and there isn’t a single horse rug for sale on fb marketplace within 10 miles of me. Just sayin…
Does heel height need a rethink?
I own a pair of shoes, specifically purchased ‘for work’, that I can barely walk in.
This wouldn’t have happened to me when I started work twelve plus years ago. Back then, Smart Work Shoes for Women could be divided neatly up into four categories:
Flats – in the pre ballet shoe era, we’re mainly talking loafers
Kitten heels – for women who hadn’t quite mastered major heel height or had a lot of dashing about to do
2 inch heels – standard work height and sturdy enough to run for trains, up the stairs etc.
Anything over 3 inches was strictly reserved for Going Out and 4 inches plus was left to pop stars and drag queens.
The reason I’ve ended up with 90s-drag-queen-height work heels is that in contrast to everything else in the shop, they looked quite practical. Someone in charge seems to have decided that in the case of heels, bigger is better (especially if you add a platform sole for extra oomph). But the women of Britain (at least the ones for whom smart footwear is a necessity for at least part of the working week) are hobbling around in unsuitable, unsupportive footwear that they can barely walk in.
photo from here
As the fabulous Caitlin Moran puts it in How To Be a Woman, she merely wants shoes that a) she can dance in and b) will allow her to run away from a murderer, should one suddenly decide to give chase.
Of course, the higher the heel, the thinner you’re supposed to look. But I’m not sure that looking thin, while wobbling around and wincing from pain is really an impressive look for the boardroom…
Update, same day (should really have remembered this before posting) – in last weekend’s Sunday Times, high heel king Christian Louboutin plays off the discomfort of high heels against the empowerment and awareness that comes from holding your body differently. Well, I can’t be the only Planner to have popped on a fierce pair of heels before a particularly tricky client meeting.
perhaps someone needs a hand with their packaging design?
Take a look at these handcreams (collected from around my house). Which is the odd one out?
It’s the Dove, front right. Because it’s not actually a handcream.
I’ve been using it for the last couple of nights and had gone from thinking that it was a funny consistency, to thinking it didn’t smell like other handcreams, to absentmindedly looking closer at the packaging…and realising rather belatedly that it wasn’t a handcream at all and I’d been merrily rubbing hair conditioner into my hands.
But most of the blame for my oversight has to lie with the packaging designers. It looks like a handcream, it’s made by people who make handcreams…the fact that it says ‘hair’ at the very bottom of the label in a tiny font isn’t really enough to override our internal computer’s (see Blink) recognition and categorisation process.
The slightly worrying thing is that I can’t imagine why I’d ever knowingly buy a small tube of Dove hair conditioner…so whoever stacked it on the Superdrug ‘hand care’ shelf must have made the same mistake too.
if owned online spaces are a house party, most brands should be out on the town
I had an, erm, lively conversation with a client recently when they suggested connecting with their target audience by “doing something with our facebook page”. Since I’d just spent the preceding ninety minutes telling them that the majority of their customers really wern’t that bothered about or engaged with their brand and mostly bought it mainly because it tastes quite nice, I felt a ‘build it and they will come’ approach to online marketing was perhaps a bit flawed.
I think brand owners as a whole currently are having trouble getting their head around the idea that most of their customers and broader target audience won’t want to have a relationship with their brand. They just don’t want to engage. They’re not interested and are busy doing other stuff.
Think about it, how many brands do you buy or consume on a weekly basis? Are you likely to make an effort to interact with each and every one of them?
There’s probably half a dozen brands you feel a real connection to and another dozen you’d Like on facebook but that’s it. For the majority of brands, concentrating on doing online stuff in your brand’s ‘owned’ online spaces is like throwing a house party and expecting every bloke you’ve ever fancied to turn up.
The challenge for brands with low engagement audiences is to provide interesting, helpful and relevant stuff in an environment their customers are already hanging out at. That’s why the NHS does stop smoking roadshows at supermarkets and why O2 Gurus was a good idea. Translating this to online still means working with partners, they just might be bloggers, media partners or entertainment brands.
To stretch the analogy, if you’re on the lookout for a boyfriend, you’re more likely to find one by venturing out to a bar or friend’s dinner party than if you invite your mates round again to watch X Factor.
X Factor finds a whole new use for iTunes
The main topic of conversation yesterday morning at the agency I was working in was, perhaps inevitably, X Factor. As we merrily critiqued last weekend’s performances I remembered that at the end of every act a message appeared on screen directing you to the X Factor website (and then iTunes) to download the track you had just listened to.
Based on past experience (when the original versions of songs covered by the competitors immediately re-entered the charts), I expected to see the finalists sitting in the iTunes chart alongside the cast of Glee and the boy band offof the Yeo Valley ad. But they weren’t there.
It looks like X Factor have some kind of arrangement with iTunes to keep the finalists out of the chart (or as they might put it, ‘protect the integrity of the competition’) – and I can see why. Publication of chart positions would be a bit of a giveaway as to the popularity of individual finalists. But putting the tracks up for sale makes a lot of sense – not only from a financial point of view but also as a useful guide for the production company Syco.
How handy would it be to know exactly how the record buying public are reacting to an artist – before they are even officially signed? Not only that, Syco can presumably ‘enhance’ the progress of top sellers though the competition with preferential treatment in terms of songs, styling and PR.
Well, it’s what I’d do anyway…
All Bran’s sampling is all wrong
Just after I’d finished the previous post (I often write posts the day before to avoid that whole post-in-haste-and-then-it’s-stuck-on-the-interwebs-forever thing) I popped out to go to the post office and found this outside the front door:
I guessed it was a sample. A smallish 8 servings sized box of All Bran Golden Crunch. The clue was that it was in a clear, rainproof, plastic bag – which the last time I checked isn’t how cereal is sold in Tesco.
But there was no note. No helpful branded leaflet explaining that this was a free sample box of a tasty new product now available from my local supermarket. And I’d been home all day report writing so I know no one had rung the doorbell to deliver a few key brand messages and hand the sample over in person with a smile. It was just sitting there.
I had a quick look in my neighbours driveways and couldn’t see any other boxes, but perhaps they were sampling to a specific house type or ACORN profile (although a bit of googling reveals that the product is one of those ‘sluggish digestion’ solutions so god knows how they’d work out which houses to leave a sample at…). Perhaps our house looked too scary to hang around and ring the bell. Perhaps they simply forgot to leave a note.
Or perhaps somewhere between the brand, the sampling agency and the actual people delivering the samples no-one thought that a random box of cereal appearing on the doorstep might need some kind of context and explanation in order to encourage the recipient to try and hopefully buy it?
Most of my neighbours would not react to finding random foodstuffs on their doorstop with the curiosity I did. They’d probably chuck it in the bin to be on the safe side. Ooops.
PM or SP, it’s all about quality
I’ve started wading through the transcripts of last week’s focus groups*. The groups were for a food brand and when I asked respondents about promotions and in store sampling one lady piped up:
My friend does it. Yeah she promotes things like that, she did cheese last time. I got quite a few cheese vouchers.
I imagine the cheese brand in question did not spend a large amount of money on some kind of sampling activity in order for their sampling staff to hand out the vouchers to their mates. When instore sampling is done well (like the engaging lady sampling for Walkers I met earlier this year) it can help brand awareness, deliver key messages and drive trial. When sampling is done badly (like in the case of McVities), the brand manager might as well stand in the supermarket aisle tearing up fifty pound notes.
It all comes down (yet again) to how the brand is delivered on the frontline. Which means that promotional activity isn’t something that should be bought on a cost-per-sample or cost-per-engagement basis. Because it seems that you really do get what you pay for and trained, engaged, motivated promotional staff (and the agencies that supply them) don’t come cheap.
There are always going to be times when brands can’t control who delivers their brand messages – for example I understand that if you want to do instore sampling sessions in the actual aisle (or Mabel-with-a-Table as one SP bloke I used to know called it) of one supermarket you have to use their preferred inhouse supplier to execute it.
So then the communications challenge becomes marketing to the marketeers. Whether that’s giving the promotional team the best possible briefing, using mystery shops to police and reward quality or just ensuring that your brand logo is plastered across every table and staff t-shirt, brands need to think not just about projected reach, but about how to maximise the quality of that reach.
Because, ultimately, it all comes down to effectiveness. And effective promotional activity should in the end have an effect on the brand’s bottom line.
*I’ve worked out it’s actually cheaper for my clients to pay for group tapes to be transcribed professionally vs. hours of me laboriously typing highlights at 30wpm and constantly rewinding the tape. I use PageSix.
