6/30/2010
Posted by Soraya Eltomey, Corporate Communications Associate, Draftfcb
Draftfcb today announced the launch of its Institute of Decision Making. What’s this all about exactly? Well it has to do with understanding the instinctual triggers that influence consumer decisions and applying that expertise to attract new business and build better brand value for clients.
To find out more about what’s to come from this global group and its academic partners at Stanford and Berkeley, check out the video below from the Institute’s director, Draftfcb San Francisco Director of Strategic Planning Matthew Willcox.
MW
Also, see today’s New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/media/30adco.html) and the Institute’s POV on neuroscience marketing (http://www.draftfcb.com/content/engage/pdf/Engage_Neuromarketing.pdf) for further insights. 5/21/2010Posted by Jamie Shuttleworth, EVP, Chief Strategic Officer, Draftfcb Chicago
This week at our Global Managers Meeting, we had the pleasure of hearing Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company and author of Mavericks at Work, speak on innovation and what he said inspired us.
Little did we know that we would end up inspiring him a bit too.
At the meeting we distributed a workbook called Getting to What Matters that he ran across in his welcome pack. In this workbook we get into the potential power of the 6.5 Seconds That Matter as an operating system and how to get to a brief. It’s littered with inspiration, instruction and a few warnings and is intended to inspire all of us to move creativity and innovation upstream into our strategic work. It clearly struck a cord with him.
More important than the book, however, was how truly inspired he was by our company, our positioning and most of all, our very unique way of turning data into Empirical Inspiration. As you read his post, you will clearly feel the passion he has for what we are doing. It's a good read; I hope you enjoy it.
Special thanks to Karl Turnbull and Ross McLean for helping make the Getting to What Matters happen, and the countless others that inspired and supported it. Super special thanks to everyone involved with the creation of 6.5STM, too many to list and you know who you are.
Have a great weekend.
5/7/2010
Posted by Christiane Bunnenberg, Senior Strategic Planner at Draftfcb Hamburg
I am writing this with my German hat on, so please apologize for being biased: One thing I observed over the last weeks is the different approach to challenges that I found while being here in USA. What strikes me is the pragmatic, energetic and active way to solve assignments. It feels pretty much like “roll up the sleeves and go.” Personally, I like that a lot since it keeps you lively and alert. The downside to this: Once you realize something needs to be fixed, you can only do so while keep going. This may be one reason for us Germans to start from a different angle: We think a lot before we actually start doing: We discuss, question things, question things again, rephrase, share, ask for approval and than – after a time that feels intense and brain heating – we are ready to bring some action to the project. Sometimes that will safe you trouble later on. But sometimes this takes way to much energy out of the project and while so much talking, discussion and thinking you feel a bit exhausted and sometimes less excited.
I find that interesting for two reasons:
1. Like often in life, the truth lies probably somewhere in between. So let’s (sorry for that) stop for a minute and rethink our style of working and maybe adopt a bit.
2. In a world that is so strong globally connected, fierce competition will force us not only to be faster but also be able to take in different global thinking to spark better ideas. I wonder what Asia can teach us on that!
OK, time to finish.
As always, I am wondering about your perspective. Please get active and give me bits of your thinking… I am curious to hear.
Oh, and next time, I will wear another hat. Promised! 5/6/2010Janet Barker-Evans, EVP, Group Creative Director, Draftfcb Chicago
"A well-constructed brief will allow for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge."
- Tim Brown, "Change By Design." |
| I can't remember the last time anyone went on and on about a well-written brief, but without them, creative minds are not properly fed. Perhaps the unsung hero of the agency world, well-concepted and passionately-created briefs are the output of only the most talented of strategists. Those who truly dig into the problem to be solved, embrace the consumer to be addressed, to find true insights and real fodder from which the creative team can take flight.
On the contrary, you hear mostly about the bad ones. Epic fisherman's tales of the worst briefs ever seen, and their inevitable outcomes. Ask any creative to talk about bad briefs and they will begin by settling back in their chair like a grandfather about to tell incredible tales of childhood, famine and far away places. It's an easy yarn, to be sure.
But Brown has hit the nail on the head. When done right, a good brief provides just the right balance of constraint and freedom, of kite and string. Allowing not only the false starts of first flight, but also the exuberance of altitude that can only be achieved with both wind and tether.
As I head into several long weeks of creative development, I think perhaps I need to be more outwardly appreciative of my strategy partners who so beautifully allow for my own capricious whims of fate, and hold us all aloft so we can soar. 4/29/2010Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
I just started reading the book “The lords of strategy” by Walter Kiechel, who is the former Editorial Director of the Harvard Business Review. I have not yet finished the book but it’s a worthwhile read. Kiechel explains the origins of business strategy and the increasing importance of strategy in most corporations over the last 50 years. One can dislike the book’ strong focus on business consultants and their ever changing strategy memes (From “Just-in-time” to “Re-engineering”) but companies have significantly increased their strategic intelligence over the last years. And yes, business consultancies like BCG or McKinsey were critical to enable this positive change.
The more surprising is that it seems that most advertising agencies don’t pursue consistently a strategy of their own. It seems a lot of agencies live in a strategic vacuum that manifests itself in three different organizational life forms with different levels of strategic blindness:
- Service clients and make them happy. These agencies don’t see the need for their own strategic plan. Their belief is the satisfaction of their clients is sufficient for long term survival
- Satisfy the visionary ego of the key agency leader. These agencies don’t have a strategic outline beyond the eye sight of the charismatic company leader. A well researched and defined company plan with a three to five year horizon would assume that the leader does not intuitively understand and accordingly change the company’s structure for long-term success. Surely, he or she does not, but no one dares to tell him or her.
- Deliver profit to the agency’s holding company. While the ultimate goal of any business organization is to deliver profit for its shareholder and benefits for its stakeholder, a lot of people confuse the result of making profit with a strategically defined plan and purpose. Generating long-term profit is the outcome of a well design strategy, not a strategy by itself.
Not surprisingly I believe that agencies that ignore the importance of strategic intelligence and the benefits of a well designed strategic plan will have only a short window of success. The need for strategic planning for any agency should answer at minimum the following questions:
- How is your serviced market changing over the next three to five years? What are the key implications for your current business model and competitive positioning?
- How would you describe the current and the desired state of your organization?
- What are the key strategic bets that your company will focus on to get you to your desired organizational capabilities and offerings?
- How are you going to measure your progress against the strategic plan?
Business strategy is a much less complex field than most marketers believe. It just requires a good understanding of the key market trends, the analytical and intuitive understanding of the core and essence of the own organization, and the courage to put down a stake for the future. And it can be as insightful, creative, and entertaining as creating a 30 seconds TV spot or a iPad application. 10/21/2009Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
We always knew that Credit Card Companies were very sophisticated in utilizing consumer data to be smart in new card member acquisition and monetizing them as ongoing members. But even I was surprised to read in the latest Fortune magazine that Ken Chenault, CEO of American Express, mentioned the utilization of card member data as one of their most promising revenue streams in the near future:
“Another area that we feel strongly about is that we have information we can use in very effective ways for a range of partners. So, for example, what might be surprising is that the Darden restaurant (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and other brands) relies on us to help with site selection for its restaurants. We believe that our information, which h we use in our own business and marketing, can be used by retailers, restaurateurs, and other corporations to improve their business, and that’s an increasing focus for us.”
Most interesting is that companies like Amex are not just utilizing their own data to improve their own business but that they are more and more experimenting in building an incremental revenue source. Over the next few years, most companies with data volume that is representative enough to draw meaningful conclusions will attempt to monetize their data intelligence.
Data Intelligence becomes a vehicle for revenue growth by selling smart intelligence to other parties. Quite a few retailers tried to pursue a similar path by packaging intelligence from their frequent shopper programs and attempting to sell it to manufacturers. There are some success stories (e.g. Tesco), and some stories of failure with such an approach (e.g. Safeway). The three most likely industries to pursue such a path are:
- Retailers (selling intelligence to manufacturers)
- Financial players (selling intelligence to card issuers and merchants)
- Travel companies (selling intelligence to non- competitive travel partners).
Everyone playing in this field of building an incremental revenue stream by utilizing proprietary consumer data will be smart in analyzing the up- and downsides of such a move. A retailer might be more interested in leveraging consumer intelligence in attracting incremental trade dollars from the manufactures instead of attempting to sell data driven marketing programs. The pay-back could be much larger.
9/8/2009
Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
Any marketer faces daily the same question over and over: “What is your opinion on X?” My unscientific observational research over the last months leads me to the conclusion that everyone has always an opinion on everything. I rarely experience the moment of silence when the asked marketer pauses for a few seconds and says quietly but confident: “I don’t know, I don’t have an opinion.” I call this phenomenon of constant and never ending opinions “The dictatorship of opinion.”
It has all the symptoms of a dictatorship:
- There is a clear behavioral norm. When asked for your opinion, you better have one, independent if you have any knowledge, insight, or anything meaningful to utter.
- There are clear sanctions for refusing to follow the norm: Marketers who don’t have a lot of opinions will be slowly excluded from any meaningful discourse, any important discussion or any executive position. The definition of an executive marketer includes the capability of expressing endless opinions with a emotional mood continuum from presidential to passionate. Most important is the sole utterance of opinions, the quality of the expressed opinion is secondary.
- Expressing opinions is a self feeding mechanism: Every expressed opinion as part of a marketing discussion will generate up to 10 additional opinions. It is less relevant if these uttered opinions bare any connection to the first mentioned opinion, it is all about feeding the monster that can get reignited with the simple question: “And you, what is your opinion?”
Sometimes we test the abilities of very talkative children to hold silence for five, ten, or fifteen minutes, just to demonstrate that silence can be a refreshing and meaningful space between human beings. What would I give for a group of marketers that would try not to express an opinion for a few hours? Yes, it could be a torturous experience for any marketer, me included.
8/18/2009Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Global Chief Strategy Officer
The slowly ending recession in North America can’t hide the fact that the last year has dramatically changed consumer’s behavior and therefore all marketing efforts by any marketing organizations. Any projection in regards to Marketing Spend in North America over the next few years assumes an overall spend decline which will hurt especially agencies very hard, independent of how fast the recovery is coming. Marketing Investments are a declining category in North America.
A declining category should always bring up the critical question: How much do we invest in R&D to steal market share in our declining category? Surprisingly, most marketing organizations don’t even enter this discussion. They are not used to be thinking about client non-specific R&D, very different from any software company that spends between 2 and 10% of their revenue against R&D, not to mention Drug companies who are spending on average 12% on R&D. Even large service organizations like IBM or Accenture have a separate R&D Budget by department that can reach close to 4% of overall fee revenue.
Why do marketing organizations don’t think R&D? A few reasons:
- Most marketers are living only by solving the problem right now in front of them. Probably more than 90% of marketing organizations don’t have a three year plan that would justify and explain the value of any R&D investments. The thinking and planning in every shorter time frames hurts any serious R&D discussion.
- Agencies are used to be working only on client specific challenges and tasks. It is a very foreign concept to invest against something that no client has asked for. The concept of scale and impact beyond one single client is a rather unusual one that most agencies are not able to understand. Similar, brand marketers in large organizations associate R&D with the product department, not with initiatives within the marketing team.
- The major advertising holding companies don’t ask for real innovation from their agencies, they demand a good profit. Some of the holding companies are trying to encourage R&D projects on a holding level but it is extremely difficult to develop something unique and competitively worthwhile for them, since the entities in the holding companies are often far away from a particular client need. And good R&D is always driven by attempting to solve a particular very well understood need that can be identified across multiple clients.
I believe the weakening of marketing organization will only be accelerated by not understanding the value of R&D projects. Any marketing executive should ask “Where are the key areas that we should put R&D projects against?” and “How much should we be spending on R&D?” Most likely we will never reach R&D investments in even single digit percentages of revenue but any marketing organization can define three to five projects that could pay significant dividend in case of a success.
Today’s young talent will demand such thinking, they are not interested in just executing against a narrowly defined work scope. A R&D budget is not just a bet onto the future to create a competitive advantage but it could be the best retention tool for outstanding talent, too.
7/22/2009
Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Worldwide Chief Strategy Officer
A few weeks of vacation in old Europe enabled to me to catch up with some non-marketing centric reading and thinking that was not solely driven by urgent client needs or very urgent New Business concepts. One thing that struck me as a result of my random reading behavior was the observation that so many disciplines have different “Schools” of thoughts, like in Design (e.g. Bauhaus), in psychology (e.g. the Freudian school), or in economics (e.g. the Chicago School). Additionally the visit to two outstanding exhibitions, the “Blaue Reiter” in Baden-Baden, Germany, and the amazing Van Gough landscape exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, strengthened this particular observation, since the group called “Blaue Reiter” had very specific beliefs and ideas, expressed in their famous manifesto “The Blue Rider Almanac” from 1911. Van Gough was drifting back and forth between different affiliations to various schools within expressionism before his mental state did not allow anymore for a constant commitment to a particular group or abstract concept of common beliefs.
Why is there a total lack of different “schools” in marketing, especially in the domain of marketing agencies and brand marketing departments? It seems that there are few reasons:
- Marketing service provider are too scared on missing out on client opportunities if they would adhere too strict to a particular set of paradigms that could be read in a manifesto. It’s easier to chameleon like adjust to particular clients needs and tell them “I will be what you want me to be.”
- Brand marketers most often don’t have the intellectual freedom and time to pursue the development of a particular school. It’s too hard to write down, improve, and practice strong beliefs in today’s time of daily pressure and sales goals. The brand for which the marketer works is the hero, not a potential school of thought.
- The academic community of marketers doesn’t seem to have the impact and influence of creating leading “School of thoughts” that people in the marketing practice would follow. It seems to be easier to work on more specialized topics, transformed into specific research papers, than defining a very broad point of view towards the marketing universe.
And still, I would not be surprised if we will see in the next five years a stronger effort of different groups, especially in the marketing agency and academic community to create a particular “school”, all with the goal of setting down principles and believes that can guide them and their followers. Today’s ever more complex marketing discourse screams for a holistic and simpler view of things, all expressed in a concise document. One needs a powerful Manifesto that generates strong following to create a “School of Marketing”. But the group “The Blue rider” has shown how a few strong personalities can create something permanent that is still considered a school almost hundred years after its creation. 7/13/2009
Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Worldwide Chief Strategy Officer
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