Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

In their article Does Social Media Change Your Agency Relationships? I think the author missed the point.

The article (but more specifically several comments to the article) opines that marketers might need to bring aspects of social media marketing in-house because the agency’s role is to ’spin a marketing message’.

Really?  How old-fashioned is that?  Is this the 50’s?  Is this Mad Men?

I’d agree that the emergence of social media changes relationships, but to say it’s about whether or not your Advertising Agency is involved is to miss the larger change.  Wouldn’t we have to agree as an industry that social media has changed how COMPANIES can/should/must operate?  Not just Agencies, not just Brand Marketers, not just Customer Care and not just PR folks. Ultimately, the smartest marketers and agencies understand that Social is not a channel or even just a strategy, but a reality about how humans live their lives, and sometimes that reality includes Brands. That’s not to say that Brands have to participate in conversations - they don’t.  But realistically the conversation may happen with or without the Brand being a part of it, and therefore a chance missed to make a connection that is fundamentally different from a TV spot.  Social conversation is building relationships and co-creating with consumers, and, for better or worse, it’s a central experience for consumers now.

Brands need more than a strategy and process for what they want to do in Social.  They need partners to bring their values and benefits to life in the space, and processes built by students of Human Behavior to monitor, moderate, and participate in ways that grow and deepen relationships that people have with the Brands that they love.

But don’t get me wrong - the Brand Marketer (or the agency for that matter) that thinks they don’t have to change as well is in for a long, tough road.  In order for successful engagement to be built, the processes of vetting, judging, guiding and responding require commitment and organizational change from both sides of the Marketer-Agency relationship. For one thing, the old model of “take a few weeks to nail the statement and then we’ll run it by legal” doesn’t work when you have to react in real-time.  For another, the demands of an active community can seem like a new call center just opened up for Customer Service folks - it’s always on and they have a lot of questions!

I see it as 5 steps, with mostly shared activities:

1.  Agency(s) and Brand set the strategy, including input from all concerned parties like PR, Consumer Affairs Brand and Senior Management.

2.  The right channel, tools and voice(s) are chosen for each aspect to be participated in, and content creation loops are realized. Smart partner selection rounds out this step.

3.  Guidelines are set that push for flawless execution through whatever delivery channels.

4.  Metrics are implemented to ensure responsible and efficient use of resources (proving out the business case for the investment).

5.  Partners are leveraged to keep up with new opportunities, changes and innovations as they emerge.

The strain on Marketer’s organizations to deal with Social Media is enough without telling them to go it alone.  Why not share the load with your partners?

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Recently, say over the last years or so, planning and strategy has gained sex appeal. Lots of clients are all about “insights” these days and seem to have developed quite a hankering for that one inspirational bit of information that can transform business ideas, product ideas, marketing innovation ideas. Oh.. and, I almost forgot: communication ideas. Meanwhile, the agency landscape seems to be filling up with a formerly less commonly heard title: Chief Strategy Officer.

So, understandably, the trade press comes out with articles entitled “Is strategy the new creative?”.

But what does this really mean? I believe a headline like this is a great eyecatcher. But really, it is written that way to make you look. Strategy is not the new creative. It’s simply that the definition of strategy and creative and how both have to work together has changed.

However, what the headline really does, too, is to ignite a conversation. And conversations, or rather making sure that people talk about your brand and brands themselves are part of those conversations is what is actually behind the fact that the definition of strategy and creative has changed.

In a communications landscape where marketers have begun understanding that people aren’t interested in your messages  obviously the old form of creative product, i.e. the delivery of ads, is losing importance. Or, at a minimum, ads need to be complemented with different creative products that provide context-relevant experiences, content and participatory elements alongside before they can be effective again.

Arguably, before strategy and creative were seperated, creative directors or account people did the strategy. Now it looks like everyone has to do strategy and creative. Why?

Having moved from the brand era to the people era has not only increased the need for agencies to offer a different or extended creative product, it also forces agencies to change the way they work to achieve the delivery of idea platforms that work channel-agnostically. Agencies have been offering full-service for decades, but in siloes and all services and creative executions tied back to the might big brand idea.

The most apparent differences of doing creative work now vs before is what happened to team structure and process: the traditional art director / copywriter duo who was responsible for “the big idea,” and represented the creative fulcrum of the agency, now has to live with the fact that the team responsible for creative output just got bigger. In order to deliver idea platforms that work in all channels, it does not suffice to come up with a “communication idea” and then adapt it into channels. You have to have ideas about experiences, content, functionalities, technologies and the brand’s product or service itself. Also, to be creative for those kinds of deliverables you need to do more than call your brand planner for some “consumer insights” about people’s attitudes: you need behavioral insights, channel insights, technology insights, experience insights. As a result, you need more people adept at a lot of different things to get the job done. And yet another result is that you need to completely step away from the linear process of research -> creative -> production. Your process needs to iterative and co-creative, from writing the brief to coming up with little ideas that tie into one idea platform instead of just one big-ass communication idea.

So, in order to accomplish all the above, you need someone to keep provide a bigger sandbox for everyone to play in. And guess who stepped up to the plate for that one? Strategists. Being that “sandbox provider” means that the traditional research and briefing job of a strategist has become much more about actually staging the discovery experience of the whole team and making that experience visceral. In a way, the frame in which an entire team of art directors, copywriters, concept developers, content strategists, social media strategists, interface designers, technologists, motion designers, experience planners, and brand planners tries to solve for a communication-, brand-, business- or product issue has to be staged and stewarded. To me, this doesn’t mean the strategist also has the creative ideas, but it means he provides the environment in which it happens. This means that strategist can’t sit in their office and pump out a creative brief anymore and that’s it. It means that they have to become a part of the creative process itself. And vice versa, creatives being part of the discovery mean they have to think a lot more about insights, as well.

So it doesn’t just look like everyone has to do strategy and creative. This is the way it has to be. In fact, if you do things right, you could also ask “Is creative the new strategy?”

To me it looks like after a long hiatus, you have to get ready for strategy and creative to move in together again. Just don’t let the strategist pick the furniture.

A little clip here on how strategy (and to me creative) has to move beyond the world of communications).

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