Today’s Ad Industry Innovator comes from New Marketing Labs, which you may know better if I tell you the name of its founder, Chris Brogan. Chris is the author of the NYT best seller Trust Agents and he’s in the top 3 on AdAge’s Power150. Being some of the most recognizable social media marketers, these guys have a nice niche. Awesome alliteration, ay?
It’s fun to profile a group like New Marketing Labs because they represent those specialists who have stepped in to challenge the traditional agency model and offer unique and much needed services to brands. Anyway, Hanes, Sony, Citrix, Comcast, Molson Coors, PepsiCo, AMD and Microsoft seem to think so.
This is not Brogan!
I spoke to New Marketing Labs’ General Manager, Justin Levy about what makes their firm stand out in the marketplace. Besides his many duties keeping everyone rowing in the same direction, he is the co-organizer of their Inbound Marketing Summit and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp. Prior to joining Brogan’s group Justin was Managing Director at an SEO public relations firm and President of Talent Network. His answer to question # 7 practically had me weeping. In all, it was a pleasure to get the perspective of such a well-rounded gent.
1. What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?
New Marketing Labs didn’t go through that period because we were founded to help medium and large businesses either figure out that aha moment or navigate their way through it . We assist our clients with using these online tools to move the needles that are important to them. We help them to enhance their communications, marketing, customer service and PR plans by using these new media tools to reach their prospects, customers and fans.
2. What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?
I am an avid reader and information junkie. At any given time I am subscribed to a few hundred RSS feeds, read a few books per month and read the Washington Post, Boston Globe, NY Times and Wall St. Journal on a daily basis. I love the consumption of information!
Right now I have about 15 books waiting to be read but I am currently reading the following books:
The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam
You’ll usually find me reading about marketing, business, lifestyle design, politics, productivity or food related books.
3. Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.
Dell has been doing an excellent job at using online tools to help them market to, learn from and listen to their prospects and customers. From generating $2 million dollars with just one of their Twitter accounts, to IdeaStorm, a website where Dell allows their customers to generate new ideas for the company and then vote those ideas up and down, to how Dell uses the listening and monitoring company, Radian6, to help them be involved in conversations taking place around the web. Dell has also done a great job at showing that they’re human. Dell uses both corporate accounts (e.g. DellLatitude) and personal Twitter accounts with their staff (e.g. RichardatDell). Using the employee name in the Twitter account helps to show the human side of the company and in turn, that makes stronger bonds with their customer base.
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 pitch/RFP process still serves a purpose in that it provides structure and the ability for the prospective client to walk down a check list to compare potential agencies who they’re interested in working with. Where the pitch and RFP process suffer is that they don’t usually showcase the human side of both the agency and prospective client. We have a natural tendency to want to do business with friends. Therefore, I think agencies need to take opportunities to develop relationships with the people who make up the corporations. Try being helpful to them in some way or connecting with them by sending a hand written note.
5. What does the agency of the future look like?
The agency of the future is more of a partner with the company that they’re working with instead of a typical agency/client relationship. The agency of the future will need to ensure that they’re delivering value to their clients and will need to provide hard data to quantify and prove that data. That’s not to suggest that agencies currently aren’t providing value to their clients. But, with budgets continuing to tighten, companies are looking at what hard value they’re receiving from their vendors and agencies. There is a difference in using new media tools that can provide hard data versus data that suggests that an approximate audience size probably saw your message.
6. What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?
Marketers need data that will help show them the value of what they’re investing their time and budget in. Marketers need an agency that understands the complexities of their responsibilities, their department, their company and their industry and have the tools available to help navigate through it all. Marketers want agencies that provide education, both internally and externally to help them and their staff to grow.
7. Who do you admire and why?
I admire a variety of people from many different industries and for different reasons. If I had to choose one person though, I would choose my mom. Unfortunately my mother lost a long battle with Lupus during my senior year in high school. For the better part of my life my mother struggled to deal with a disabling disease. Lupus, as well as some other factors, closed many doors for my mom at an early age. Even while struggling with a disease that was constantly kicking her while she was down, she did everything in her power to see that her son, me, had everything I could ever need to help position me to be successful now. Whether it was hand-written math books to work on over the Summer, pressuring me to apply myself in school, teaching me how to deal with hardship at a young age, or any of the may other life lessons she taught me.
Today we’re taking to Wexley’s Brian Marr. He works there. I have no idea what he actually does.
Wexley’s clients include Microsoft, the Seattle Sounders FC, WACOM, Copper Mountain and Bacon Salt. Founded in 2003 by Ian Cohen and Cal McAllister, Wexley’s goal: use non-traditional thinking to solve communication challenges in the ever-evolving new media landscape. And a look at their work proves they’ve stuck to that vision. Like the time they hung Sounders scarves all over Seattle to create buzz about the new team.
Or when they created National Snow Day and even made it snow in Austin to promote Copper Mountain.
Since the first day of school, Wexley has grown to 26 employees over 6+ years. They admit the first few years were tough. The guys were getting offers to do traditional work and took a few jobs that weren’t true to the agency vision just to stay afloat. As the non-traditional and media agnostic approach started catching on with clients and agencies, Wexley has been been fortunate to be at the forefront, while others talk the game and try to work out the rules.
What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”
We’ve never really had the aha moment as Wexley, but each of us had something in previous roles that made us think we wanted to try approaching things differently. Cal and Ian refer to the ideas they presented at their past agencies as Second Year ideas. They’d pitch them and everyone would agree it was a great solution to the customer’s business problem, but there was always a media buy that needed to be filled first so “maybe we can do those next year since this year’s media budget is already allocated.” There was good creative, just no creativity in the execution. They believed they were onto something so they decided to start Wexley and worked to define a new model for advertising.
What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?
The books I read at home are mostly just entertaining and borderline embarrassing. At work, we like people to focus on individual thought first and foremost. I once tried to stay on top of everything the industry reads but I’m a few thousand posts behind. I’m just reading about something called a “Tipping Point,” which I think is going to be HUGE!
Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.
I think the owners and marketing staff at the Seahawks/Sounders are brilliant. I’m biased because we work with them, but credit should be given where it’s due. The Sounders FC set out from the beginning to build something entertaining. From the choices they made with their product (including the players they hired, the choice of a scarf as the season ticket) to how they’ve rolled it out by turning the team over to the fans, everything has been methodical and highly effective. It’s a perfect example of the product becoming the marketing.
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?
RFPs are a necessity in subjective business. Someone is paying you to do a service for them that will be unique in each situation if we’re all doing our jobs right. They want to be assured that an agency understands their business and can handle the challenge.
As an agency, it’s easy to feel like you should be able to show some similar work to win the business. I was client-side for 10 years and can tell you from experience that your client really doesn’t care too much about what you did for <insert flashy brand name here>. You might get a few points that allow you to sit down with them and have a conversation, but that’s it. In our industry, you’re only as good as your last campaign. In your client’s eyes, you’re only as good as what you can do for them. They just want to know if you can hack it.
Regarding the broken process, I think agencies have brought a lot of it on themselves since the discussion inevitably boils down to cost/expense. We had a recent $10M opportunity and our first question internally was “can we afford to do this?” because we knew the competition would probably invest a ridiculous amount of money for a 1 in 12 shot of winning the business. As a client, I always saw things like staged out rooms and highly produced videos as overcompensation for the work not being there.
All of that said there are some bad situations out there. We have all seen poorly thought out RFPs, people who don’t actually have a budget asking you to pitch, the issue of idea ownership, clients requesting fully produced creative and more. Those aren’t problems with the RFP; they’re a problem with reasonable expectations at the client. We have our parameters for success set up and only pitch when it’s in our best interest.
What does the agency of the future look like?
I think things will continue to be interesting for the next few years. The networks will eventually hit stride again, but not before the overhead associated with the shift to digital forces them to rethink their media departments. They’ll need to re-organize themselves and package their services differently. In a digital, on-demand age, clients are going to be looking for things like rapid iteration and innovation across all areas. Smaller agencies can deliver on these more quickly than larger places, but will lack the breadth that the networks can provide. To overcome that, I think we’ll see independent agency co-ops on the rise.
We’ll also see far more digital focus, obviously. When you look at the numbers it’s surprising how little is sold today. These aren’t precise stats, but ~30% of eyeballs are online and it’s still only about 5% of the media mix for big brands. Why is that? My guess: it’s insanely more time consuming/expensive to do a multi-touch digital campaign than it is to do traditional. It’s only time before savvy clients are going to start demanding more digital in their mix than media departments are selling them.
What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?
Marketers desperately need integration across their campaigns, which now involve more customer touch-points than ever. Internally, most marketers are still trying to determine the best way to align themselves organizationally to be most effective – they likely have a new social media team, an experiential team, grassroots team, digital media team and more. Between those groups and the preexisting ATL and BTL teams there is a going to be overlap. At the same time as clients staking out territory in the disciplines they care about, agencies are involved in a crazy land grab. It will settle with time, but for a while agencies will need to focus on playing nice to help make campaigns as integrated and effective as they have the potential to be.
Who do you admire and why?
I’m a huge fan or Pixar’s approach. They’re master story-tellers and have a unique process that enables consistent creativity and innovation. The result is a set of investors, employees and fans who can count on something great coming from them. I’d love to be a fly on the wall there for a day or two. I think we would learn a lot.
I started getting to know HL2 in a recent ad agency search I conducted for a client in the Pacific Northwest. Their clients include HTC, SBC, Microsoft, HR Block, ATT Wireless, Hotels.com
There were a few different long chats with Don Low, one of the founding partners which gave me a lot of insight into this group of 70 creative professionals, but I really started to get HL2 watching the pieces in the 4th chamber–more so than seeing their work.
I’d like to hang out at a Fat Burger or shoot hoops with them (I think I could stuff the TaxCut box) –but apparently they’re also pretty good at that marketing thing. Founded in 1994, they’re more fun than most 15 year olds you know–and they won’t talk back or steal your car. OK, they won’t steal your car.
What was the aha moment when you realized “Our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?
My business partner, Tom Horton says, “Only through suffering do we become wise”. While we love new business wins, it usually takes a major loss for us to get pissed off and make dramatic changes. Two years ago we lost a major pitch and in the ‘loser’ call we heard, “We loved HL2 but the other agency just had a stronger analytics methodology”. We now have an analytics group of 8 and every campaign in the office has accompanying KPI’s with a corresponding dashboard for reporting. It’s transformed our business and the new business effort has never been stronger.
What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?
Soldier of the Great War by Helprin, A Distant Mirror by Tuchman and biographies of Mark Twain and Einstein. My personal reading takes precedent when I get home. But I’m also working through a book called Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. At work I spend time with a few key blogs – Seth Godin, the Dachis Group, Ad age and the Web Analytics blog.
Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why?
Sprint is giving it a good go. Coke media is extremely focused and disciplined. I like the traction that Bing is getting as a start up brand. The Nike+ Join the Race campaign is experiential and inspirational. Each of these brands has deployed a multi-disciplined approach that spans TV to event promotion and social media.
We’ve all read that the agency RFP process is broken. Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches. Do you see an alternative to the process?
I actually believe that, for many companies, the RFP levels the playing field and brings new agencies to the table. I believe you win the work you deserve. Either you’re digging deep, investing and setting up your agency to win or your coasting. The RFP process has allowed HL2 access to clients we never would have met on our own.
However, all clients don’t need to go through this formal process (especially the clients we’re currently pitching). Meet with 4-6 select agencies, get to know their culture, see their work, learn how they think and narrow to two. Then ask for proposals and presentations. While this is more legwork for the client initially, the long-term relationship is more likely to stick. It makes no sense to sit in a room and review 20 written proposals in today’s marketing world.
What does the ad agency of the future look like?
Lean, mean, smart, resourceful, marketing saavy, focused on the numbers, uber-creative.
Yes. That about sums it up. With a really cool space and an interest in the client that goes beyond billable work.
The agency of the future will need to spend more time looking for ways to tell stories and exploit technology to deliver great experiences, participate in the conversation and bring real value to consumer.
What do marketers need that ad agencies are not giving them?
Love. They’re not giving them love. Unconditional, immutable love. I’m-waking-up-in-the-morning-thinking-about-your-business kind of love. As agencies are working to wean their business model away from large media commissions and making their nut on fees, they are squeezed for talent–creative, account, planning, production, analytics talent. Larger agencies are no longer able to over-service accounts like they used to because there just isn’t enough money there. Clients stop feeling the love. Today’s agency is learning to be more nimble and is working to create a culture where the every employee is working to deliver superior strategy, creative and service.
Whom do you admire and why?
Winston Churchill. Primarily because he is proof that you can lead when you get old…. (Many historians now think he was suffering from pre-senile dementia while he was the PM. I think Winston; either drunk or affected was better than the rest of us with all our wits). Churchill is history’s portrait of resilience. A drive that never quit, unwillingness to compromise and foresight that saved the world.
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 10th 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.
Seattle takes its rightful place in the ad world thanks in part to Publicis in the West who won the National Addy Awards 2009 Best in Show. Publicis also will also be displaying 2 Silver ADDY Awards for their T-Mobile and UNICEF work. This is not it.
Congratulations also to Creature, for their Gold ADDY on the “Pepper Roulette” campaign Pacifico. DDB Seattle Gold ADDY for Postcards direct mail done for Amtrak Cascades. Von Piglet Productions grabbed a Silver ADDY for “Life Takes Visa” Internet commercials for Visa and Wunderman snagged a Silver for Interactive work done for Daddy Microsoft.
Apsirin all around–surely they’re still sleeping off the hangovers. Three cheers for the Emerald City!
Today’s Ad Industry Innovator is Jake McKee from Ant’s Eye View. Talk about a niche, these guys get 
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