Agencies seek to move beyond tech to strategy

By Brian Morrissey

While digital shops have fared better than their traditional counterparts in recent years, a hot-button question points to their still-debated status: Can these agencies move beyond their primary role of tech jockeys to become leaders of brand strategy?

In the past two weeks, AKQA and R/GA, two of the industry’s top digital shops, have attacked this question head on by winning lead agency assignments from brands. Design software company Autodesk tapped AKQA for digital and traditional work; and Ameriprise Financial hired R/GA as its lead shop.

Such assignments are still the exception to the rule. Yet the general expectation is that the number of these jobs will increase, particularly as digital initiatives become core not only as marketing channels, but as internal drivers of innovation.

“We’re all waiting for this big moment when a bunch of interactive agencies take over from the traditional guys,” said Sean Corcoran, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It’s a slow evolution.”

Ameriprise, for instance, was won over in a review that included shops like Publicis & Hal Riney by R/GA’s plan to create a brand platform that moved beyond communications. While its digital approach helped it stand out, said Kim Sharan, Ameriprise’s CMO, the shop will also handle TV, print and other traditional duties.

“We didn’t see any skill gap,” she said. “They really brought a fresh perspective.”

Autodesk rep Pam Pollace said AKQA’s roots in digital gave it a “different perspective. A large part of what we do is digital. That’s really where we’d like to have that expertise.”

Some digital agencies are retooling to get in position to lead assignments. That means playing up their integrated marketing capabilities and sometimes soft-pedaling their history as interactive specialists. Omnicom Group shop Organic, for instance, now emphasizes its ability to build relationships, rather than its Web-site building heritage.

“It’s important for us to get upstream or we’ll be back where we were three years ago, matching luggage,” said Conor Brady, CCO at Organic, referring to the typical task of making Web sites that mimic the offline campaign.

Moving up the chain is on the minds of execs at most digital shops. Razorfish fights the perception it’s “just interactive,” said Bob Lord, Razorfish CEO. The shop is currently in a pitch at a hotel chain for a through-the-line account and has added direct-mail work to its Mercedes interactive business.

Agency.com, San Francisco, has seen some success as an integrated agency. Ask.com recently gave it lead agency duties to launch its Ask Deals product, with Agency.com doing TV spots that drives viewers to the Web. Jordan Warren, president of Agency.com San Francisco, said the shop’s digital heritage is a plus in how it approaches traditional channels. “Our programs begin online and extend to the offline world,” he said.

For all the progress they’ve made, digital agencies face numerous obstacles in becoming brand stewards. For one, they must gain client trust. Too often, digital agencies get lost in the tech details and the latest-and-greatest platforms, according to Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer at TBWA. “Long-term success is based on being able to protect and guide a CMO through the marketplace and through their own organization,” she said. “Understanding a medium will quickly lose ground to understanding marketing.”

Clients are now more open to including digital shops in pitches for lead assignments, said Ken Robinson of Ark Advisors. He advises agencies to not underestimate the importance of account service and planning. “A lot of digital shops … are caught up in programs and platforms,” he said. “Digital shops should be looking more macro at clients’ businesses.”

According to a recent Forrester Research survey of interactive marketers, over 75 percent said their digital shop is “not ready to lead my brand.” The reticence, according to Forrester’s Corcoran, is due to traditional agencies being “embedded at the senior levels.”

Sapient has experienced this first hand. In June, the interactive shop acquired Nitro in a bid to combine its tech acumen with an agency lauded for its creative and strategic prowess. What Sapient has found, according to Gaston Legorburu, its worldwide CCO, is much more success getting digital duties from Nitro clients than convincing Sapient’s digital clients to give it brand duties.

“It’s amazing how many really complacent and bad agencies stick around because they have the relationship,” said Legorburu.

Barry Wacksman, chief growth officer at R/GA, believes this will change, particularly as marketers take less of a “command-and-control” approach to their marketing partners, a legacy of the “analog age” in his estimation. In R/GA’s view, collaboration will be the new paradigm, he said, with R/GA often transcending marketing-centric assignments to work with other areas of a client organization to innovate digitally. He pointed to recent work R/GA did with Barnes & Noble that involved crafting its strategy for the existential threat e-book readers posed, which led to R/GA’s creation of the Nook e-reader brand.

“We don’t think of R/GA as a digital agency,” he said. “We’re an agency for the digital age. We’ve built an agency model around all these problems clients have where digital tech has disrupted their business.”

Will Its Big Local Play Help the Technology Take Off?

By Allison Mooney 

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Google is making some big moves in local advertising lately.

A couple weeks back the search giant added a mobile couponing option to its Google Local Business Center listing. This means that when a mobile web search lands you on a business’s “Place Page,” you can get a coupon that is redeemable straight from your phone (no need for printing).

Now, Google has launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps.

They’re calling these businesses the “Favorite Places on Google” and you’ll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states. You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places in 20 of the largest U.S. cities at google.com/favoriteplaces.

Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR code that you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business’s Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you’ll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.

So just as businesses display a Zagat or Michelin sticker as a badge of honor, the Google sticker could come to be a more organic quality indicator as well as a link to a lot more information about a place. Creating links to Google in the real world is something they’ve also attempted with their Google Maps markers. The stickers seems a lot less obtrusive.

Citysearch pilot-tested a similar program in San Francisco back in March of 2008. In that trial, 500 businesses reviewed by Citysearch placed printed Scanbuy’s brand of bar codes in their windows. Scanning the photo with Scanbuy’s software would send you to the business’ corresponding Citysearch page where you can read reviews and other information.

Around the same time, QVC and Case Western University did some trials in which students could scan QR codes on outdoor print signage. These codes let users get campus bus arrival times, order magazines, enter sweepstakes and get text alerts from USA Today, among other applications.

As Ad Age reported, Google also dabbled with QR codes in newspapers last year: “Google has already seen results from a recent test campaign conducted in three markets with jewelry retailer Blue Nile. Each ad contained a QR code and a response tag, and was tested against the same ads without the tags. The code-enhanced ads ended up driving 6.5 times more revenue than the ads without.”

Despite these tests, QR codes have decidedly not caught on so far in the U.S. While a more concerted effort by Google could change this, they need to try harder than they did with newspapers. One good thing is you can use any QR reader to decipher their codes.

They are also giving away 40,000 Quickmark QR Code Reader apps for the iPhone, which normally cost $1.99 apiece, to promote it.

John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local, told Techcrunch that Google Maps on mobile phones will also start including businesses as points of interest. (You may have started to see this already and wondered why certain business were featured.) Google calls these “smart maps,” and they are based on a business’s PlaceRank, which tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.

Google has nothing to lose by trying this, and they know that both local and mobile are their future. Typing into a little search box is annoying on a mobile phone, and new “mobile paths” like shortcodes, QR codes and image recognition may soon replace text-entry search altogether. By helping businesses add these new calls-to-action that lead to Google’s Place Pages — as well as beef up their mobile presences with mobile coupons — they are attempting to own this emerging space.

Overall, this is good news for the mobile industry — Google can help push adoption of these technologies — but there is still the barrier of cost. QR decoding requires data, which requires money. Will people be willing to pay money (albeit tiny amounts) to read what is ostensibly an ad? Or will Place Pages provide enough value (through information, maps, reviews and now coupons) that people won’t even think twice about it?

Awesome Visualization of Social Media Usage Around the Globe [Infographic]

Posted using ShareThis

They Understand the Technology, the Speed of Iteration and Analytics

By Jacques-Herve Roubert 

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Jacques-Herve Roubert

Over the past 18 months, a great debate has consumed our industry: Are digital agencies poised to sit at the head of the advertising table? Depending on whom you ask and what you read, the answer seems to flip flop — with a majority of people still having reservations and making claims that digital agencies aren’t ready to lead.

So why does the debate continue? Does offline or online really matter to an oblivious consumer who’s only interested in “no-line” communications? Are we spending too much time focusing on who should lead and not enough asking: What’s next?

Ana Andjelic’s DigitalNext post, provocatively titled “Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead,” mentions several reasons why digital agencies aren’t ready to lead, one of which was their lack of experience in the business (as compared with the “decades of experience” that traditional agencies are known for). I’m sure there are instances where decades of experience can directly translate into success, but there are certainly instances (uh, Lehman Brothers?) where deep roots had no bearing on their ability to produce — and produce well. Furthermore, a certain percentage of the individuals now working and thriving in digital agencies came from traditional agencies.

Additionally, most of the world’s most ingenious inventions were not created overnight, but took years of hard work, research, observation, trial and error, and collaboration to fine tune. The digital ecosystem has required much of the same exploration — and, in most cases, into technologies that are new to all of us. As James March himself said, “Exploration involves being an amateur for a while, but only as a step on the way to being a professional.”

And while the structure of an interactive agency may often mimic “one big crazy family” (by the way: Whose family isn’t crazy?), how could making sure everyone’s opinion is heard be a bad thing? Most interactive agencies subscribe to the notion that you never know where the big idea or concept will come from. Sometimes the big idea can come from the exploration of a new technology or method that enhances consumer connection.

Here’s why:

• That was then, this is now. Like it or not, the days of the ingenious, 30-second TV spot are over. Today’s creative ingenuity lies within the idea, the technology, the concept, the innovation and, perhaps most important, the Holy Grail: consumer connection. Word of mouth is more prevalent than ever and interactive communities have an increasingly louder and more influential voice and are stronger (and sometimes the only) sources of breaking news stories. No one understands this better — nor is better equipped to handle the swift demands required — than the digital agency.

   

• Teaching an old dog new tricks. The “new trick” is immediacy. It’s about faster response times and the concept of immediacy. E-mail, IM, Twitter, Facebook, cellphones — all of these technologies set the stage for consumers wanting and expecting immediate responses, not to mention, immediate access to products and services. Traditional advertising agencies are not adapting to this mentality because they are still working with processes and organizational structures that were developed in a time when the internet and the concept of immediacy simply did not exist.Digital agencies understand that brands are being held to higher-than-ever consumer expectations. The plethora of data we can garner from a $50,000 media buy can leave traditional agencies’ heads spinning with insight and analysis. The truth of the matter is: Interactive agencies are forcing traditional agencies to integrate with digital media to better track and measure campaign results through custom URLs, short codes, etc.

   

• Kickin’ it old school. Not only are the days of the 30-second TV spot gone, so too are the traditional advertising agency gurus like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach. Today, those figures have been replaced, instead, by financially backed entities. Rather than exploration and exploitation, digital agencies need their own gurus and legends that can lead by example.

Five or 10 years ago, I might agree with the argument that digital agencies weren’t ready to lead, but after sitting at the table with other agencies for the past decade — traditional, branding, public relations, marketing — it’s clear that digital agencies have proven their value, not to mention their ability to innovate, inspire, and create the big idea.

Perhaps the synergy and balance between exploitation and exploration is off kilter for digital agencies, but more and more we’re starting to see the agency structure itself change with new hires in technology and social media. And marketers are noticing:

• According to Media magazine, AKQA was named the lead agency for Nike India earlier this year.
• Precor named Ascentium its agency of record in October 2009. According to Forrester’s Q2 2009 Interactive Agency Wave, Ascentium “received the highest client satisfaction scores in this year’s review.” The assignment with Precor includes strategic planning and execution of all offline and online campaigns.
• McAfee hiring Tribal DDB as its agency of record in 2008. This assignment included all TV, print, outdoor, and digital.

The balance may not be there today, tomorrow or next month. The truth of the matter is digital agencies have earned their right to sit at the head of the table because they’ve brought what consumers and marketers are looking for: new innovations in measurement; flexibility and nimbleness; and, most importantly, ideas that bring what a magazine spread or 30-second TV spot cannot.