Adventures In Digital Marketing

At my place of work, which I very rarely blog about here - I don’t know why not, I know a lot of bloggers who do talk directly about their work but for me it feels wrong some how.  I know if it were an actual company blog then that would be different, but this is my own professional opinion blog and I like to keep it seperate from my work as much as I can - except this time.  Anyway, we’re rebuilding our agency website.

Anyone who has ever been involved in rebuilding their own company website will, I should think, immediately empathise with me and the whole team involved.  They’re often interesting projects, to say the least.  But fun, of course.  Honest guys.

We’ve been asked to answer three simple questions to show us what we’re like as real people.  These aren’t new questions - you’ll have seen them or very similar ones to them, before.  But we’re not reinventing the wheel here.

So, here’s my answers:

Q1
“The reason I come to work every morning is…”
I come to work because I love digital.  OK, that’s a cop out?  Maybe, but I know one thing.  I am a geek marketer.  And I’m proud of it.  I realise I have been ever since I got over my fear of building stupidly complex JavaScript websites to sell people trainers that cost them two weeks wages (I still blame you Raj Chavda for that lost weekend with the All Blacks!) .  I don’t know how many times a day you hear something along the lines of “the future of marketing is digital” but it’s something I truly believe, and I spend as much time as I can getting away with telling anyone and everyone.  So, I guess I come to work so I can tell some more people; co-workers, clients or consumers - I’m not fussy.  I’ll tell you all.

Q2
“The best idea I’ve seen recently is…”
The Age of Conversation - a single book on a single topic, conversation, written by over 100 different people.  In this age of blogging, many established (and some not so) authors are placing extacts of their upcoming or new books online, increasingly to tap into the collective review process of a thousand devoted digitally enabled fans.  This book, edited by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan, moves the wiki style working process into a new gear by creating a single work that’s made up of 100+ different pieces.  All proceeds go to charity, and edition two (topic: Why don’t people get it?) is just kicking off.

Q3
“If I were a client tomorrow I’d…”
Stop buying newspapers, turn off the TV and walk to work blindfolded so I don’t see any billboards (although that could prove to be a bit of a challenge).  That way, I’d get a deeper understanding into the way consumers are starting to treat so called traditional ad formats - i.e. they’re ignoring them - so that I have to look at new ways to reach my target audience.  I’d also stop speaking on my mobile (& snd txt msgz insted), stop sending emails (and switch to IM) and only read facebook on my iPhone (63% of mobile web traffic goes to social networks).  Not only is the traditional marketing world changing, the new one is changing with it.  If you don’t stop and look around, you might miss it.

So, that’s me.  What I want to know is, what are your answers?

Q1 - the reason I come to work every morning is…
Q2 - the best idea i’ve seen recently is…
Q3 - if i were a client tomorrow I’d…

Comments, or emails to howard DOT scott AT gmail DOT com, really appreciated.  And, if you could pass it on to two of your bestest mates that’d be swell - just tag anything you post with “3simplequestions”.

Thanks

I know this isn’t digital, but has anyone else seen the really short, perhaps 15 second, un-branded ads on TV?  There was one on last night, and this one said something like “live TV ad in 7 days”.

I’ve got a feeling I read somewhere that this is a Honda campaign.  It’s about doing things only being worth doing if their difficult, or something like that.

Anyway, I guess they’re doing a live TV ad in 7 days time.

Should be interesting.

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Some truly great points in this presentation by Paul Isakson.  It’s well worth your while taking five mins to watch it.

I’ve seen the phrase “Geek marketers” a few places online recently - Steve Rubel’s a big fan of it (did you come up with it even Steve?) and thinks that it’s a big trend for the future of digital. Jim Kukral likes it as a title as well.

I like it too.

I think I am it probably.

I think a lot of people I know are it as well.

I’m proud of that.

Howard

It seems that digital outsourcing of production continues to be the conversation on everyone’s lips right now in London. I see Iain Tait blogging about it over on crackunit. I’ve also seen more and more articles in the print press about it. Obviously something is going on - not quite sure what it is and why it’s so in focus right now, but it surely is.

Would love to hear peoples ideas on why this is such a hot topic right now - are we all deciding to outsource our development? all of it? part of it? none of it?

And don’t lie - I KNOW for a fact a lot of you out there in both “integrated” and “pure play” worlds are doing it already - so who’s doing it and why?

Howard

ps - yes, I know I just used an under construction logo - been so long I couldn’t resist

Just a quick update to say that, as you can no doubt see, we’ve made a few changes to Adventures In Digital.

First, we’ve switched from Typepad to Wordpress.  Rightly or wrongly, and there are advocates for both, we decided to switch from a hosted platform on Typepad, where we had been for the past two years, into an open source and effectively free environment of Wordpress.  This was for more than just the monthly fee - we also have more control over what we do on WP as we’ve got hold of the actual server.  Now there are some changes between TP and WP, and they mainly revolve around permlinks - so there is a chance some of the old ones are now broken - hopefully this isn’t the case as we updated the link format in WP to be the same as TP but you never know.  The other thing is images - Typepad make it practically impossible to export your images out of their system en-masse, meaning that for us to migrate all of the images we’ve used on adventuresdm.com for the past two years would have taken days and days of manual graft - so we decided not to do this.  Instead, we’re going to keep the TP account live for about six months in an hope that old images and articles by that point aren’t visited as much (longtail be damned!) - after that we’ll turn off the typepad account and, with it, all those images will probably break.  can’t be helped I am afraid unless Typepad get real and give users a bulk export tool for images (they have a bulk import tool already!).

Secondly, domain name.  In order to smoothly (well, smooth-ish) manage the migration to Wordpress we setup adventuresdm.co.uk and are now pointing the .com address at the .co.uk address.  Everything should work fine and you shouldn’t notice any change, but again, with this internet thang you never know.

Third and finally, we updated the design to be something a bit more contemporary and interesting.  It’s based on an open source Wordpress theme we found on a themes site, and we adjusted it slightly.  For those of you interested in what it is the link is in the ABOUT US section.

So, hopefully it’s all good and you like?  well, if not, let us know either way and we’ll ignore your comments :)  just kidding, but, hopefully it’s been a smooth transition over to a more open source, friendly and flexible (bulk image export typepad come on!) transition.

Howard

Spotted over on the always good (as long as you’re really into HTPCs) TheGreenButton.com media center blog by Chris Lanier, it seems that Microsoft are introducing "interactive ads" to it’s Media Center platform, through the currently USA only "Internet TV" plug-in.

This is very interesting.  Why?  Well, because in the UK we’ve had so called "Red-Button" services for some time in advertising, providing interactive ads for viewers of digital satellite and OTA TV - but it’s not worked well, and the reactions from the audience have been poor ot say the least.  So much so that one of the main OTA TV channel, Channel Five, has decided to quit offering it as a service for prospective advertisers.

So, what’s interesting is that MS now start to implement what looks to be a more advanced, but very similar  in some ways, interactive ad platform to it’s Media Center environment (US only so I can’t test it annoyingly).

It may be that the environment and audience types that you get in a media center are more open to this kind of placement, certainly right now in an early-adopter and I am guessing mainly male, way, but I wonder if MS know something that the TV channels over here in the UK don’t with regard to interactive "want to know more?" style ads?  Perhaps they will work better in an environment that feels more like a PC than a TV?  Who knows - but it’s a brave move for something which hasn’t worked well at all so far.

Howard
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cross-posted from a comment on Chris Lanier’s blog

A recent Campaign article which asked the question "Should agencies outsource digital?", in which Kate Nettleton discussed the differing points-of-view within the industry regarding the outsourcing of the so called “techy” end of digital creativity, has promoted me to put down a few thoughts of my own on the subject.

I’ve actually discussed the outsourcing of production with quite a few people over the years and in fact it’s a model I’ve worked with in varying degrees for quite some time now, from right back in the late 90’s at TDPL/Leagas Delaney through to the present day.

We all know that agencies employ freelancers – it’s so common place it’s never questioned as a business practice – but for agencies of a digital slant to completely outsource a whole chunk of what is often perceived as being a key business function is quite a recent phenomenon.  In the past, and particularly in the pure-play world, having a dedicated production (and by that we’re really saying programmers right?) team in-house was taken for granted.  But I don’t think it has to be that way personally, and I can see it becoming less common as we continue to understand how Digital Marketing and Advertising has to function as a business over time.

Kate points out in her article that a “new breed” of agencies are taking a note from the traditional world and outsourcing skills which don’t necessarily fit in with the overall creative business of an agency.  And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense – in fact I completely subscribe to it myself.  I love Martin Brooks’s comment that “digital agencies can’t take the strategic high ground if their business model relies on building banners in-house”.  It’s completely right.  How often do we hear the buzz-phrase of “we sell ideas” and yet never see it delivered because people are tied into a particular back-end system or delivery method?

In an ATL agency for example, where the majority of business may be focused on TV commercials – it’d be extremely unlikely that they’d have a load of directors, editors, sound experts and the like sitting around as permanent members of staff.  Those people, with highly technical and creative skills are brought in on a case-by-case basis as and when required – because it allows everyone else to focus on what they need to do – come up with great creative ideas. 

Why, then, do we (and I include myself in this to some degree) think that to do digital creative work in marketing and advertising we need to have programmers and other technical experts sitting around on the books full time, rather than get them in on a similar case-by-case basis.

The outsourcing of digital production makes perfect sense.

However, what I can’t stress strongly enough is that outsourcing your digital production or development does not, in any way, mean that as an agency you can forget about the technical side of the business, regarding it as “not your job” or unimportant.  When you remove technology from one side of the equation it has to be replaced elsewhere – and invariably what that means is that the people who you do have on a permanent basis in your agency need to pick up some of the knowledge to make your ideas work.  What that means is that it is essential that the creative teams, strategists, planners and account managers are more technically minded than perhaps you would normally have, and are able to understand what is and isn’t possible.  They wouldn’t normally be like that in an environment where programmers are sitting next to them. 

Allowing them to believe they don’t need to know that stuff because “they’re not technical” is not an option. Technology doesn’t disappear from your business because you’re outsourcing it – it just moves around a bit – but it is still present and is as important to the overall creative process and end deliverables that you provide as ever.

Bill Brock’s comment that by outsourcing digital you allow the agency to “be free to go for best-of-breed ideas, not end up selling website ideas because we had a website designer(s) free” is completely on the money and if you look at the other founding members you can see that together they can all help to provide that essential in-house technical knowledge that must be present.

Creative ideas should never be shoehorned into the technical solutions that your agency is capable of delivering in-house – they should be free to come from anywhere and delivered in any way you can think of that’s applicable.

Outsourcing production, to different 3rd-party partners who are expert in their specific fields allows agencies to mix-and-match what they need to answer a client’s brief and deliver on their objectives – and at the end of the day that’s what we are all trying to do.

It has made perfect sense in the offline and traditional world for the past few decades – are we not big enough now to admit that it makes perfect sense in our decade as well?

Howard

Gadget geeks and marketing geeks alike have been keeping an eye on Microsoft’s Surface technology for some time now to see what it can actually do and if it ends up being a real product.

Well, the wait will soon be over as MS announced it’ll be launching in a few select AT&T stores in the USA from the 17th April this year.

The video below shows off some of the technology the unit can do - all pretty impressive stuff (despite the terrible monotone voice over).

As a lot of us in this business probably have, I’ve got in touch with MS as I have several clients who have expressed an interest in the devices - but I guess not to be unexpected, MS are stacked with requests and they’ve not got back to me yet - I keep my fingers crossed.

Anyone state-side able to go to an AT&T store and get a first hand go with it?

Instore and real-world digital is really beginning to take off in a big way.  These are very exciting times for digital people, particularly those of us who’re working in a retail environment a lot of the time.

Howard
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