Today’s Ad Industry Innovator is Jake McKee from Ant’s Eye View.  Talk about a niche, these guys get customer engagement like Picasso gets painting.

The founders have very diverse backgrounds: Jake McKee built his reputation playing with Legos and Sean O’Driscoll in a company you may have heard of in Redmond, WA called Microsoft. These guys are bright.  They’re insightful.  Ant’s Eye View occupies a place in marketing that’s not only unique, but 5 years ago, wasn’t even talked about–now every company needs to be listening.  The voice of your Customer demands to be heard.

Ant’s Eye View recognizes that as companies grow, often they unintentionally detach from the customer relationship and miss out on crucial conversations happening about their brand.   Through grassroots, online and offline collaborative processes, Ant’s Eye View helps companies engage with those customers by developing strategies that identify, address and leverage those conversations.

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”

Actually we’ve developed our company specifically around the aha moment! Our team has been doing customer engagement work for a combined total of something like 40 years. We get that this customer engagement stuff is the path to amazing business success and customer loyalty. When Sean O’Driscoll left Microsoft and when I left LEGO, it was because we saw that so many of those companies and agencies talking about this stuff had never been on the frontlines of customer engagement and we thought this “in the trenches” understanding was important to share.

What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

Well, selfishly, I just got my first copy of the 10^th anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, where I had the extreme honor of being asked to write the afterword. On top of that, I just got a review copy of Angela Connor’s 18 Rules of Community Engagement. It’s an exciting to book to have gotten in the mail: small, tactical, and smart.

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

One of my favorite examples, an example that makes me just giddy with excitement is the new and much written about Skittles.com. I once had someone ask me “how do we create community and social media for a particular soda pop?” At its core, the question was really about an agency trying to understand how to pitch “social” to clients. But the problem with the question is that soda pop in itself doesn’t have much inherent social interest. Marketers can work hard to create some type of inherent value, but what Skittles realized is that it would be smarter to simply highlight the conversations, interest, and inherent value already being created by their customers. Replacing nearly their entire Web site with a floating nav item that links to Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, and a Twitter search. Brilliant. It’s the most compelling CPG Web site I’ve seen to date. If I meet the person that sold this into the organization, I’m buying them a drink for work well done.

We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

I do agree that the pitch/RFP process is broken in today’s marketing climate, but not for the reason so many agency people talk about. The agency focused argument is one that goes back years, well before the rise of the Social Web: pitches are little more than free spec work that allows clients to get far too much for free and agencies to deal with too much risk.

From my perspective, the problem is that the pitch/RFP process work happens almost entirely void of true strategy development activity. When developing strategy, and certainly strategy work around social engagement immersed marketing, you want to have a better understanding of your customers by first engaging. Listen first, generate ideas second. But a pitch to get business is inherently based in ideas. Certainly agencies are doing research, often expensive research, but that misses a great many opportunities for the client. My work at LEGO had me listening for 6 months to adult fans who were angry that the company had ignored them for decades. After joining fans in basements, classrooms and restaurants to hear their concerns, not only did I learn, but I proved to them that the company was honestly interested in knowing more about how to serve and work with them.

How can that happen if your ideas are being largely generated as a means to first win the business?

What does the agency of the future look like?

I don’t know what it looks like, but I know it has to have a new billing model. In my opinion, traditional marketing agencies will only be able to move to a place where they can more effectively help their customers understand and plan for a more social customer experience once they figure out how to charge for the time that that takes to do. We’re not talking about limited, specific campaigns anymore. Or at least not those alone. But agencies are setup to bill against that model, and it’s nearly impossible for them to effectively teach rather than implement.

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

An agency that is happy, both in approach and in billing model, to train their clients to not need them after a reasonable period of time. Today’s marketing and agency culture is based on the fundamental principle that the bigger check the brand writes, the less work the brand’s marketing person has to do in the daily grind work. When headcount is a core metric of a division’s success, writing checks, even big checks is easy but hiring is not. Unfortunately that simply doesn’t work in today’s environment. When I talk to one of my favorite brands, I don’t want to talk to their agency, I want to talk to the employees of the brand. Agencies have traditionally existed to take the load off the shoulders of their clients, but today they have to be switching to helping their clients learn techniques and tactics for being able to better engage, to scale that engagement, and to support the daily grind in a way that helps build internal competency.

I’m not suggesting that agencies don’t have or shouldn’t have long-term clients. My suggestion is that agencies large and small should be working with their clients “teach, learn, own” model. Once the client owns the project, the (hopefully and expected) success will drive a more complex project that will start the process over.

Oh, and to be clear, I’m talking about marketing agencies, not advertising agencies. There is a often forgotten difference between the two and sadly they’ve gotten mixed up into one concept when we talk about this stuff.

Who do you admire and why?

Easy to explain, hard to name. I really respect and enjoy meeting the practitioners at brands that are doing this social stuff every day, toiling away in relative obscurity. You may know the “social media experts” who blog and twitter and speak constantly, but do you know the folks at H&R Block who are convincing a company working in a highly regulated industry to get involved in Second Life? Do you know who convinced Skittles.com to give up thousands of dollars of Flash development and replace it with Social Web content? Do you know who at Alaska Airlines is the face behind the official twitter stream? If not, you should find out. Those are the true experts, the experts you can learn from.

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Imagination is the last legal means of gaining an unfair advantage over the competition.”

From Juicing the Orange:

-Pat Fallon and Fred Senn, Founders, Fallon Worldwide

ESPN recently premiered Spike Lee’s new film Kobe: Doin Work, which was a day in the life of Kobe Bryant.  If you don’t know the name, Kobe is the guard for the L.A. Lakers, currently the best team in the NBA.

One of my favorite lines in the film was what Kobe’s high school coach told him years ago and he’s still tapping into the knowledge:

“You don’t build a house without blueprints.  You gotta know what you’re doing coming in”

The Lakers win championships because they know what they’re up against.  They study their opponents obsessively.  They know what they’re gonna do before the game starts because they know what their opponents are (most likely) going to do, and they play accordingly.

You could argue that The Lakers are pros, that they’re just plain better than most people when they pick up the round ball, but Kobe puts that myth to bed.  He makes a telling and simple statement in the voice over as he’s watching himself in a scene showing a particularly tight drive to the basket:

“A lot of this comes from film study because you know (from study) where the guy is gonna be .”

This is a basketball lesson from the best, but it’s also a business lesson and a life lesson, even if you’ve never knocked down a 3 pointer:  Study.  Be a little obsessive.  Know how your opponent is going to react.  Have a plan.  Know your goal is before you start to build.

Who’s studying your moves?  Whose moves are you studying?  Sometimes this attention to detail is the strategic edge you need to win.

Ad Industry Innovator # 10 is GamePlan, an experiential marketing firm with offices in New York and Austin.  It’s a special day for me because  I got the guy who inspired the series and it’s kind of like having Buddy Rich on to talk about drumming.

Tim Hayden’s firm was my own personal a-ha moment.  GamePlan proved to me that there were agencies out there who defied categorization and who were figuring out how to pull (rather than push) consumers and engage them effectively for marketers who wanted to participate in existing conversations.  What they were doing was more than permission based marketing it was involvement marketing.

In one of our conversations Tim suggested we come to Austin to attend SXSW this past March, in fact, I believe he said: you need to be here– he was right.  On the flight down the Southwest in flight magazine featured GamePlan in a story about how they were engaging audiences for marketers in ways traditional marketing had not been able to–and I learned a bit more about the unique position of GamePlan in the marketplace.  While in Austin Tim and I had a chance to talk shop and I was convinced again, that his was a firm that was changing the game and what it means to be a marketer.

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”

In 2006, Dell hired us to execute its sponsorship of Justin Timberlake’s FutureSexLoveSounds 2007 tour. We were to execute an integrated campaign that touched fans outside the arena (street teams + SMS), at an arena concourse demo kiosk and engage fans within the “Dell Lounge,” an SRO-only area surrounding the performance stage…all to drive traffic to an online sweepstakes.

We learned early in the tour to build more excitement by “upgrading” fans by giving those in the nosebleed seats a chance to sit down by the stage (Verizon held the radio-promo ticket “drop” rights), and then engaging fans online by tracking “Dell” tagged user-generated photos and video that could have only originated from mobile phone cameras (no cameras allowed per tour policy). Manually, we identified thousands of image uploads with tags such as, “Katy and me in the Dell Lounge with Justin,” and we were successful with near 60% of those we invited to experience http://www.delllounge.com.

While these tactics proved to us again that guerrilla tactics induce and amplify buzz around a brand during an event, also opened were our eyes to the coming potential of mobile technology and social media.  A year later, we coined the “Live – Mobile – Online” engagement model as the key approach to driving offline experiences into online conversation, and vice versa.

What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

My wife often starts that question with “when are you gonna read all of those…?”  in the stack now are (good friend) Richard Laermer’s 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade, Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good and Harlan Coben’s There Will be No Second Chance (my first Coben read sans Myron Bolitar, who has wasted many a day away with me on a beach on South Padre Island or in Tamarindo, Costa Rica).  I also always have the latest editions of Inc., Men’s Journal and Conde Nast’s Portfolio in the queue (or lou-side, ahem).

As for blogs:

http://conversationagent.com/ – I’ve read Valeria every day for the past 18 months…the longest of any blogger.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ – I read his post through http://otherinbox.com or click the posts he relays through Twitter.  Chris seems to post 1-3 times/day, and I always enjoy the way he reports his live experiences…proving live-mobile-online every day!

http://brainsonfire.com/blog/ – found it when tracking a stat that 90%+ of all WOM occurs OFFLINE.  Since then, I check in at least 1-2X/week.

http://adomatica.blogspot.com/ – run by my buddy, Robert Gilbreath, who pulled off the Enfartico online stunt.  There’s no better source for gossip/real scoop on the Austin ad world than can be found here.

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

I often talk with fellow marketers about “holistic” experiential/social marketing.  Hands down, I see Southwest Airlines as the best example of a brand that holistically markets (and exudes) a brand experience.

At every audience touch point (website – ticket counter – gate – seat – pilot’s/crew’s voice and smile…) a positive attitude and engaging brand experience seems to be present.  There is evidence of innovating that I experience each time I fly with them, because Southwest makes it a point to engage and educate each passenger on new developments, procedures and promotions that seem to be all about me, the passenger.

There is no other brand I’ve experienced that is as successful as Southwest with its culture and the warmth it delivers to a customer…and that’s the way it has been for more than 37 years. “Brilliant” is an understatement.

We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

Over the past three years, we have produced several “experimental” or “pilot” campaigns for brands combining events with mobile and social media.  I believe that this is a new way to sell confidence within a client, including both new client business and organic new business from an existing client.  Confidence is something we all must earn, and I do not believe we can redeem it with a sexy pitch or stating we have a certain experience or a global sphere of resources.  Certainly it earns a few points to demonstrate a strong network and happy past clients…I just know that “proof of concept” will rule the foreseeable future.

What does the agency of the future look like?

The agency of the future will be smaller in size, enabling it to be more agile and more responsive to client needs that change near daily.  And, for all I see BIG today as fallible, I also see challenges with the proliferation of the smaller, independent agency.  I’m seeing a ton of “snake oil” being sold today across all media types (OOH, social, mobile, traditional…) and marketing services (SEO, SEM, direct mail…), and I don’t know how we might safeguard against wasted investments in such.  Buyer beware…make us prove we can successfully execute that which we claim.

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

I believe we must all see our service to clients as a partnership solution, no longer just as a program or campaign.  For this solution to be successful, I see three requisite ingredients:

a. Accountability: It should never be about the agency portfolio or the stable of ADDYs behind the receptionist’s desk.  Who cares if our peers judge us as “creative”?  Are we putting measurable (and qualified?!) numbers up in terms of traffic and sales, and/or are we truly delivering a net-positive solution to the client? And, while executing this solution, are we ready to address the miscues and then switch gears to go an extra mile in ensuring the solution is ultimately successful?

b. Innovation: Even within an existing client, no two marketing challenges are the same.  Agencies must acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers while learning about and incorporating advanced media, methodology and technology into each new solution.  At GamePlan, we have never executed the same exact solution for a client more than once, and we constantly scrutinize new technology and media that may we identify as emerging in relevancy to online conversation and offline experiences

c. Collaboration:  For too long, agencies have allowed (and embraced) “media” to define what channels can or cannot be leveraged to reach an audience.  As engagement (the “impression” is dying, dying…dead) is now the ultimate goal of that reach, agencies must look beyond in-house competencies to engage and involve partners.  If an agency has confidence built with a client, there is no reason why we cannot bring partners to the table as part of the total integrated solution…with disclosure and transparency being key.

Who do you admire and why?

My Grandad, Art Hayden, who is 93 years young this year, has survived polio, cancer and he can recall the names of/stories about every person he has ever met/place he has been here on Planet Earth.  I can only hope to one day emulate his disposition, sense of humor and appreciation for life.  Also, too many entrepreneurs to list.  Mark Cuban: because he pursued his passion, basketball, became a successful technopreneur and…you know the rest of the story; Michael Dell, because building computers in his dorm room bathroom is a beautiful story of hope; and too many more who’ve Sinatra-like “done it [their] way.”

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