I started chatting with David Deal of Razorfish after reading their brilliant 2009 Digital Outlook Report, which has been quoted many times on this blog.  

To say Razorfish is tops in the agency world is an understatment.  I’ve always been impressed by the powerhouse that they are in the marketplace–the braintrust they bring to the industry.  They’ve helped reshape marketing conversations by leading public, transparent discussions on how digital touches all aspects of the marketing enterprise.  They demonstrate this position every day in their work and on twitter, employee blogs, Slideshare, Vimeo and YouTube–a public sharing of information that inspires everyone to reach higher.

Razorfish has raised the industry standard for what’s acceptable and what digital marketing can and should be.

I think you’ll like David’s point-of-view, and hey, you gotta love a guy who lists Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page among his inspirations.  

David says of Razorfish:

[We use] digital to help companies build their businesses.  Sometimes building a business means repositioning a brand for a new audience, like what we’ve done with Mattel for the Barbie brand and for Intel with its Core i7 microprocessor.  Sometimes building a business means strengthening a brand’s digital presence, as we’ve done through with CNN through the redesign of CNN.com.  Or we might help a company create a digital presence altogether, as we did with Postopia.  Razorfish combines thought leadership and full services globally.”

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

The aha moment for me occurred in 2006, when a Razorfish colleague asked me to help her improve her employee blog.  I realized that Razorfish needed to inject Social Influence Marketing into our marketing and communications outreach.  I also understood that marketing at Razorfish needed to involve the diverse voices of our employees more effectively – including my own. Not long after that experience, I helped create the Razorfish employee blogging program, which was a team effort involving some passionate and dedicated employees like Shiv Singh, Lauren Nguyen, Amy Vickers, and Ray Velez.  I also became a more active participant in the social world by launching my own blog, Superhypeblog.com, among other activities.  We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time.  I like how Razorfish is using Twitter as a means to disseminate thought leadership and to be responsive to the marketplace.  But we have a lot of work to do. 

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

My nightstand includes Endgame, 1945 by David Stafford; The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers; Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller; and a Hardy Boys book that my daughter and I are reading together, The Secret Warning.  (By the way, I think marketers should frequently read books written for children. Seeing the world through the eyes of children is humbling, energizing, and eye opening.)  I regularly follow Razorfish blogs like FEED: The Digital Design Blog, and insights from the industry like Guy Kawasaki’s blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang, and Andrew Frank’s Gartner blog.  I’m also a sucker for Perez Hilton.  Because I blog myself, I look across the blogosphere for diverse ideas, especially content that doesn’t conveniently fit my job description.  I also gain inspiration from music.  To that end, I think the Facebook wall posts by Mikal Gilmore are better than anything I’ve seen in the blogosphere.

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

I think the Barbie 50^th Anniversary celebration is outstanding because Mattel is taking advantage of the interactive and social nature of digital.  Mattel’s business challenge is to reposition the Barbie brand to grown-up women while celebrating Barbie’s 50^th.  Instead of investing into TV, Mattel has created a digital lifestyle for Barbie that taps into our cultural affinity for Barbie and recasts her as a fashion icon.  For instance, a YouTube channel features Barbie’s show from the Mercedes-Benz fashion week, among other content.  Through the YouTube channel, a microsite, Twitter account, popular Facebook page, display advertising, paid search, and a blog written in Barbie’s own voice, Mattel has worked with Razorfish to connect with women across the entire digital world.  I also like this example because it shows how you can embrace Social Influence Marketing in a strategic way – it’s not just about creating a Facebook page but stitching together several touch points in context of a larger digital marketing effort.

4.   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?

The RFP process will always be demanding.  Making a decision to partner with an agency takes careful consideration.  I think the bigger issue is making sure clients and agencies ensure they are the best fit for each other beyond the RFP process.  Agencies should differentiate themselves more clearly, which makes it easier for buyers to choose among alternatives.  Agencies should also talk less about themselves and more about their clients’ business problems.  For their part, potential clients can increase their chances of finding the right agency partner by ensuring that the senior-most decision maker owns and leads the selection process.     

5.   What does the agency of the future look like?

The agency of the future is a hybrid consultancy and agency.  The agency of the future should challenge its clients with fresh ideas that improve the client’s business.  The agency of the future should also build experiences, not generate one-way messages.  The agency of the future also helps clients become more responsive to their customers through creative forms of marketing like Social Influence Marketing (or employing social influencers and media to meet one’s marketing and business needs). 

6.   What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Agencies need to do a better job providing their clients fresh insights into consumer behavior.  Focus groups need to give way to ethnographic research combined with measureable web-based analytics.   My Razorfish colleague Andrea Harrison recently introduced Social Influence Research, a new approach in which we study consumer purchasing decisions in context of their social relationships.  We’re all social beings, right?  So we need an approach to understand our clients’ customers in context of their social worlds.  With ideas like Social Influence Research, Razorfish seeks to address marketers’ unmet needs.   

7.   Who do you admire and why?

I admire George Harrison and C.S. Lewis because they expressed their spiritual journeys through their art.  I admire Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page because of their passion for innovation.  Their legacies transcend their guitar playing.  Jimi Hendrix was the movie equivalent of scriptwriter, actor, director, and producer.  He didn’t break rules; he made new ones.  And Jimmy Page figured out how to use the studio to create layers of sound that no one else has touched.  Whenever I’m collaborating with a group to try out new ideas, I draw upon them for inspiration.

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Since this post is part of the 24 Hours of Innovation, I thought it’d be appropriate to start with a quote from futurist Bob Johansen, President of the Institute of the Future from 1996-2004 In his book Get There  Early, Johansen asserts that “no one can predict the future.” By his definition, predictions are statements of what will happen—and they’re almost always wrong.  Futurists forecast what may happen and “a forecast doesn’t need to come true to be valuable.”  Forecasts are valuable when they “provoke new thought, new insights, new possible actions, or new ways of thinking about the present [and] you don’t need to agree with a forecast to find it useful.”

To that end, My Pep Talk for 2009 during the 24 Hours of Innovation is less a statement of fact about the future of marketing innovation and more an outline of real examples, rhetorical challenges and possible outcomes.

The marketing hard sell and cold call have given way to interactions where brands intersect a customer’s life and add to their experience, provide clarity or make the customer’s life easier.  But marketing strategies and tactics are not in line with this new role; it’s the basis of an identity crisis in marketing—the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Marketing’s identity crisis

Marketing has an identity crisis and to solve it, marketers need to innovate.  Innovation requires us to lead, experiment, and take risks with emerging technology as well as traditional channels.  It also requires clients to create a culture so this can happen.  But right now we face a clash of wills and expectations. To get past it, clients and their marketing partners need to create a new framework from which to operate.

Social media and the Always On, consumer-controlled marketing environment change the rules almost daily.

Technology emerges and changes, sometimes faster than it can be harnessed—making it nearly impossible for marketers to make proven recommendations to clients , especially as these same clients begin to require money back guarantees and assurances of ROI.  A recent example is the Coca Cola Company’s pay-for-performance plan, a model that, instead of fostering innovation, runs the risk of stifling it. 

So what’s an agency or CMO to do? To begin with, I believe marketers need to become futurists and first movers by utilizing emerging technologies for marketing.

Some marketers have stepped into uncharted areas with great success and support from progressive clients.  ComBlu harnesses the power of online communities for their clients.  The Advance Guard’s work in social media allows them to stand firm in the belief that as marketers “we simply set the stage and arrange the chairs for customer conversation to take place.”

These firms are products of an industry diametrically opposed to itself, in which agencies can no longer afford to be reactionary, but in many cases can’t afford to be risk-takers, either.  For agencies to innovate and lead they need to continually experiment. 

Web shops do this every day by developing unique solutions to problems that can’t be solved by off-the-shelf products.  iPhone app developers quickly create micro software for very specific problems.

Perhaps innovation requires marketers to have access to a budget line item in which unproven methods can be tried without being held hostage to guaranteed sales increases.  This will be familiar ground for any marketer whose agency has continually preached the benefits of brand marketing with the cautionary warning that not all dollars can be quantified.

Problems fuel innovation

Many a conundrum has fueled innovation in the past, although it could be argued that these innovations have not necessarily helped marketers.

In a well informed treatise, Joe Jaffe has forecast the death of the 30-second television spot because of the DV-R. In response to these threats, the DV-R has driven innovation around commercials, soon services like ZillionTV will allow spots to be grouped and customized to a viewer’s interests.  For example, in the near future you’ll be able to choose nothing but beer commercials as your preferred pitch.   This reframes the whole model from less of an interruption to more of a choice—by giving viewers control and an increased ability to filter and giving marketers what Zillion calls “zero-waste” media.

Another innovative service will interrupt viewers fast forwarding through commercials and they’ll see a static page containing an enticing message that compels them to stop and watch a spot.  A bikini clad woman may invite them to view a commercial for Jamaica tourism—letting them know what they’re missing by flying past commercials.

Similar circumstances have driven the innovation that created blogs, satellite radio, YouTube and many other tools.

The near future

So what’s to become of advertising and marketing in the future?  Are we becoming a digital world with no use for the physical?  Far from it.  A 2009 digital report by Razorfish forecast that online and physical experiences will continue to merge.  Mobile continues to gain traction as customers are less concerned if they use a PC, phone, or their feet to access a brand.  Without distinction, customers want brands to be there whenever and wherever they want them. 

The offline experience melts with online as the web becomes less reactive and more real time, a phenomenon that began with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and has increased exponentially as millions of online users flock to tools like Twitter and Facebook on their laptops and Blackberrys.

Technology dances with marketing

The Razorfish report shows distinct areas where technology has and will intersect with marketing.

RFID is an exciting innovation enabling companies like Target to become hyper efficient logistics machines.  By utilizing RF technology in their backrooms, the Target replenishment system allows shelves to stay stocked without over ordering, keeping inventory lean and responsive to customer’s purchasing habits.  

This same technology has been a marketing tool for years at Target.  They pioneered the development of their bridal and baby registry using RF technology.

In the near future, as barcode scanners become part of a Blackberry, for example, Target guests will be able to scan a product for instant information including user reviews, competitive price matching or suggested uses and accessories.

For years RF technology has been used for chip times in marathons, to find a lost dog in your neighborhood or to pay tolls via EZ Pass.  But when that same technology not only collects our money on the LA Freeway, but beams traffic information into our on-board navigation system and suggests alternative routes , then we’ll be starting to integrate and optimize this technology.

How many times have you found yourself in the grocery store line, with a full cart—and no credit card? But you’ve got your cell phone—because you didn’t want to miss that important client call.  Mobile wallet via your cell phone would allow you to bring home the bacon, literally—without running home for your billfold.

Reframing marketing

Are the above scenarios marketing?   Traditionalists would say no—not in the truest sense—they  are convenience and customer service on steroids.   Using Zappos as an example, one could certainly call their focus on customer service one hell of a marketing strategy.

So in conclusion, marketing innovation lies not entirely in positioning, public relations and ads, or even online communities, Twitter, and iPhone apps.  Innovation happens as a result of online and offline worlds merging, by reframing marketing’s role and developing tools and tactics that align all of the above.   

More importantly, if innovation is to be the savior of marketing, clients need to foster a culture that allows for experimentation and risk, and marketers need to offer a return on investment.  Two very different problems with different solutions; but in order to function, marketing must do both.

Thanks to Philippe De Ridder and the Board of Innovation for inviting me to participate!