Posts Tagged ‘digital agency’

Customer experience evolves into Co-experience

Posted: November 10, 2011 in Co-experience, customer experience
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Most companies define customer experience as bi-directional brand interactions; the prospect reacting to an ad, a first time buyer, or a customer interacting with customer service. With the advent of social networks, the proliferation of mobile devices and fundamental shifts in the purchase process, traditional customer experience is being replaced by co-experience.

Consumers engage with your brand every day without any direct interaction. When a fan Tweets about a celebrity and their followers re-Tweet the same message, they are having a customer experience with your brand even if there is no direct interaction. Ratings and reviews take place more and more on websites like Amazon and Yelp. People “Like” products or brands on a 3rd party pages or websites. And word of mouth is between consumers and communities, whether it’s happening across the back fence, on a social network or via an eCommerce site.

The sum total of all customer experiences with a brand defines co-experience. Companies and brands have to understand all permutations of consumer relationships across media and channels, how they relate and interact with each other and ultimately how a company can participate in the co-experiences with relevant, contextual content and engagement that produce the most engaging and relevant customer experiences.

Can CMOs and CIOs become good partners

Posted: March 16, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Let’s start with understanding the problem. It’s not that CMOs and CIOs speak different languages, it’s that they fundamentally approach problem solving differently. Most CMOs come out of the advertising and creative world of the “big idea.” At the end of the day, they are dealing with abstraction, creating emotional ties to an ephemeral concept, known as the brand. While they can measure success from outcomes, they can never conduct QA testing to see if the solution works or not. Whereas most CIOs come from an IT background where at there is ultimately a “right” answer or solution to a given problem and it is easily measured b whether it works or not. And the outcome of working is out of scope.

At our company, Blab, I’m lucky that our CTO Joseph and I have a strong working partnership. It comes mutual respect (very common at C level), shared goals (common if business focused) and most importantly, because we spend a lot of time together talking through ways to solve problems.

I’ve learned some of the lingo of technology. I have a rudimentary understanding of database schema and at least don’t cringe when I hear the terms php, ruby on rails and lamp stack. I recognize they are development languages. But what is more important is that I understand that they are critical to my being able to effectively and efficient communicate with my customers across multiple channels.

Joseph, on the other hand, has not spent his entire career managing IT infrastructure. He can write code himself, actually thinking its fun and is excited about solving challenging problems. He’s learned something about frequency and reach and the abbreviations, cpc, seo, sem and crm don’t make his eyes glaze either.

But the real key to our mutual success is sitting down together in front of a whiteboard and sometimes over a beer, talking about the big picture issues we both face. Are we keeping up with our customers? Do we understand the problems they have? Are we equipped with the ability to listen to our customers, analyze what they’re saying and acting on the insight before it’s too late.

Joseph’s mind certainly works differently than mine. He often comes up with a completely different perspective on the issue and as often as not, his logical rational mind is as perceptive as the most gifted and creative brain. And then he tells me how he can build whatever it takes to bring the idea to life.

A new advertising agency model?

Posted: December 17, 2010 in New Agency Model
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Current advertising agencies make revenue based on a service model charged by number of employees it takes to deliver an agreed scope of work. All IP, thinking and work an agency does on behalf of its clients belong to those clients. Agency long term value is based on reputation, a portfolio of clients’ work and knowledge residing in individuals who might or might not leave.

There is no current ability to build massive data storage populated with agency owned data regarding what’s important to people, how they interact and make decisions. There is no ability to break down the FTE heavy structure and process inherent in making money to action campaigns in 72 hours or less. There is no ability to scale beyond tens of clients. There is no ability to use data collection to normalize between channels and determine a predictability regarding where and how to best spend marketing funds.

Agencies today develop client rosters based on cultural fit, revenue limitations, geographic limitations, reputation. Agencies don’t identify specific categories and set out to become experts in these categories as a cable broadcaster might, because there is no way of amassing long category term IP.

Agencies do not build and curate influencer communities within specific categories with the purpose of creating a category network that is ripe to consume and proliferate publishing.

….. but what if an agency were to throw the rule books out, starting with the business model and organizational structure

Launching the Rainier Advisory Group

Posted: September 7, 2010 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, online marketing suite, Rainier Advisory Group, SDMA, Strategy, web marketing
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After nearly 5 years, I’m leaving Ascentium and starting my own consultancy, Rainier Advisory Group specializing in helping companies navigate the complexity of the marketing technology landscape.

I’m very proud of the success I’ve had growing Ascentium from a small technology consulting firm into the 5th largest independent digital agency according to AdAge and being called out with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the country by Forrester Research in their 2009 Forrester Wave® of Top Interactive Agencies.

Now is the time to move on and focus on my real passion of mastering cross-channel customer experiences through the integration of the technologies that are helping transform the marketing landscape from search to analytics, lead management to CRM and everything in between. With the maturation of cloud-based services, today’s marketer is faced with a myriad of choices and almost no one to help navigate not only the applications and services themselves, but how they fit into an integrated cross-channel strategy, Forrester calls Digital Brand Orchestration.

I believe that my combination of executive experience on the client side for Lufthansa, T-Mobile and Gateway, agency consulting experience working with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Lexus, and Ford as well as start ups like Marketfish, Quasar, and Surveyanalytics as well as my thought leadership and speaking engagements for organizations like Forrester Research, the DMA, Digital Hollywood, Mirren New Business, The Integrated Marketing Conference and MarketMix, position me well to provide the strategic consulting services needed by leading companies, marketing service providers and advertising agencies.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like more information or if you know of any firm in need of my services.
I will also be devoting time to my commitment to our industry in my capacity as past president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, incoming president of the Pacific Northwest Business Marketing Association chapter as well as lecturing on digital marketing at local institutes of higher learning.

Most of my contact information remains unchanged, with the exception that I can now be reached at john@rainierag.com or jkottcamp@gmail.com . Today I have also launched my new company website, www.rainierag.com . Farewells are always sad, but new beginnings are even more exciting. I continue to wish everyone at Ascentium continued success and I look forward to sharing new stories with each of you in the near future.

It’s Hard to digest everything I heard at BMA Engage, but I think it’s all about Authenticity

Posted: June 8, 2010 in CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, social media
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Flying home last Friday from the BMA Engage conference in Chicago, I was taken by the fact that my head was reeling from so many great keynote presentations. I attend and speak at a lot of conferences and while most have a lot of good content and networking opportunities, it’s rare that I find a set of keynote addresses that impress me, move me and most importantly, give me something I can act on when I get back to the office that will make my business better.

Several good cyber-journalists have already done a good job at recapping the entire event. Check out Barrett Sydnor’s “Top Ten Things I learned (or relearned) at BMA Engage 2010” or Sima Dahl’s “Personal Engagement: Bringing It Home” as well as exploring all the great content available on the conference site, www.bmaengage.com.

But at risk of contradicting my own first paragraph, it really wasn’t any individual keynote speaker or presentation that struck me, it was the underlying theme that permeated the entire event. From the body of work presented by Tom Stein of Stein Rogan & Partners, who won the B2 Agency of the Year award and Eduardo Conrado and David Srere’s “Engaging with Purpose” all the way through to Chris Brogan’s “Trust Advisor” and Jeffrey Hayzlett’s “Emotional Technology”, the single clear message I heard was that companies, brands and all the people who tell their stories, have to be honest, authentic and set the bar as high as possible in order to survive, succeed and prosper.

Eduardo Conrado, Motorola’s CMO, told us to throw out the mission and vision statements and get down to the heart of the matter that concerns both customers and employees, purpose. What is the purpose of the company? Why do they do what they do? This was echoed clearly by Jeffrey Hayzlett, the CMO at Kodak, who clearly stated that Kodak’s purpose is not to sell film (whose sales have dropped from $15B to $200m in the last 5 years), but to create memories. He showed videos of customers who said that in the case of a home fire the one thing they’d run back into the house for, would be family photos.

The highlight of the conference for me was Chris Brogan’s presentation from his book, Trust Advisor. His next to last slide was a simple illustration on the back of a blank sheet that says “Human Business”. To be successful, you need to focus of building the relationship first, “be there before the sale” and my favorite line of the entire conference, “bring wine to the picnic.” What could be more authentic than that?

It’s getting harder to be an independent agency

Posted: April 27, 2010 in Uncategorized
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AdAge magazine just released its 2009 annual agency report today, ranking all the top agencies by revenue and grouping them according to what may be dying distinctions like advertising, direct, media, digital, search and PR. Overall agency revenues were down 7.5%, “the sharpest revenue decline in the 66 years Ad Age has produced the Agency Report.” Although digital agencies overall faired a bit better, statistically gaining 0.5% over the previous year.

But what I find more interesting than anything else is that digital agencies, once considered the mavericks, the outsiders are now about as mainstream as possible if for no other reason than almost all of the top twenty agencies are owned by much larger agency holding companies. The true independents are becoming rare indeed. It started a couple of years ago with Publicis gobbling up Digitas. They have since acquired Razorfish as well. Blast Radius is a part of WPP and the #3 digital agency is IBM Interactive and we know nothing speaks independent more than being a part of IBM.

In fact of the top 20 digital agencies, only 5 are not owned by a much larger company. And of those, Sapient has merged with Nitro, Rosetta bought Brulant and iCrossing appears to become a part of the Hearst empire.

What does all this mean for independent agencies, for marketers and for consumers? Well, sitting in one of the top five remaining independent agencies, Ascentium, makes me feel like I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back and I’m waiting to hear the M&A types pounding at my door. And perhaps that might not be a bad thing from a financial point of view.

Although for many us who have done both the big agency and the startup, we know why we went for the small option. It’s more fun, we get to work the way we want to and it frees up our creative juices. Frankly we produce better work because we feel like it. That’s the reason a lot of corporate marketers are turning more and more to independent and specialty shops; that’s where the ideas, the new technologies and the partnership mentality come from.

And finally, what about the consumer, do they care where marketing campaigns and experiences come from? Maybe not, but according to the latest from Forrester, watching advertising ranks lowest among consumers as a measure of influence, purchase intent and loyalty. And it’s the big guys who still make most of their money from these forms of traditional push advertising. So go figure.

I’m proud that Ascentium has made it to the #5 position among independent digital agencies this year. And I hope that demonstrates both our preference for going it alone and for our clients’ preference to work with an agency who considers their clients their partners, not their holding company.

CMOs Need Technology and need our help

Posted: April 21, 2010 in Uncategorized
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Increasingly CMO’s are being brought into the technology buying process as technology is becoming even more intertwined with today’s multi-channel, multi-device world of marketing. And it’s up to us in the agency world who call ourselves trusted advisors to come to their aid.

It’s impossible to be a successful chief marketing officer (CMO) without becoming engaged in the understanding and decision making regarding technology. In a recent Forrester Research study, “The CMO’s Role in Technology Decisions”, David Cooperstein states that while “traditionally, marketing leaders treated IT as a foreign land that had a native language they didn’t speak… today’s marketers can’t afford to be lost in translation because digital channel embed technology in everything, marketing and the multi-channel customer experience are inextricably linked and fewer resources require strapped marketers to use technology to scale.” In other words, CMOs don’t really have a choice, either they need to learn the language of technology or they will not be able to compete in today’s digitalized, mobilized and socialized world of the interactive, integrated customer experience.

So who can help CMO’s learn the language of technology? Most (55%) look to their own IT departments , even though “strained” was the most common word to describe the typical relationship between CMOs and CIOs . And in smaller numbers, they look to their traditional agencies (21%) and management consultants (17%) for support. But almost half are looking towards their interactive agencies (49%) and their marketing services providers (44%) . And it is this audience that I believe has the responsibility to take the lead in helping CMOs navigate and make the smart business decisions that make the difference between leadership and falling behind.

But even within the worlds of the interactive agency or the marketing service providers, there are still large gaps in understanding what technology means for marketing and how to make the most of limited resources and the rapidly changing world of the customer experience. Most interactive agencies are either focused on online advertising or the increasing diversity of rich applications for platforms like Facebook or smartphones. While marketing service providers continue to concentrate on the silos of their own product’s capabilities despite the expansion of technology communities like Salesforce.com’s Appexchange or Omniture’s Genesis program.

At the risk of drawing the ire of my agency colleagues, I see the greatest opportunity in the hands of the emerging marketing practices of marketing consultancies like Accenture Interactive or McKinsey or the consulting arms of research organizations like Forrester or eMarketer. If CMOs have to be able to understand how technology will help them in the achievement of their business goals, then they need help from someone who first understands their business, their customers and how the complexity of the customer experience across all touch points can be influenced, optimized and in the end monetized.
And so it’s up to all of us in the agency world to embrace new roles as not just stewards of the brand, but as, business consultants who look equally to the worlds of creative, big ideas and technology as the best way to add values to our clients, the CMO. Because if we don’t step up to the challenge, someone else will.

1 Forrester Research, June 2009 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey
2 Forrester Research, 2008 Partnering for Success: The CMO-CIO Relationship
3 Forrester Research, June 2009 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey

The Future of Agency Relationships needs everyone’s participation

Posted: April 7, 2010 in Uncategorized
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The other week, a new report came out of Forrester Research, entitled, The Future of Agency Relationships by three analysts, Sean Corcoran, Dave Frankland and Vidya Drego. First, I highly recommend reading the full report if you have Forrester access. You can also check out Sean’s blog post, Marketers Must Lead Agency Change or read Michael Bush’s article in AdAge, Memo to Marketers: It’s Your Fault if Your Shop Flounders.

All the coverage does a good job of summarizing the changes to the way agencies should provide value to their marketing clients and more importantly to their clients’ customers, be they consumer or businesses. Forrester has identified three fundamental services they feel agencies must provide: Ideas, Interaction and Intelligence. They call it adaptive marketing. And they are sending a clear message to marketers that the burden is in their court to demand these services of their agencies.

I agree with the logic. Ideas will always be central, but if and only if, the ideas can be developed and converted into real, meaningful and engaging experiences for customers. As Forrester say, “Experiences become more prominent than campaigns.” Interaction is the process of converting ideas into experiences. And in general the process for interaction is what is changing most radically. Interaction used to be the consumption of messaging, mostly through traditional channels like broadcast and print. But today with the explosion of channels, devices and emerging media, interaction is highly dependent on technology to bring the “big idea” to life. And this is one of those areas where it’s the agency that needs to change more than the marketer.

Agencies can no longer hide behind the big idea or the visually arresting creative treatment alone. If they cannot provide experiences that they, together with the marketer, and most likely the client’s IT department as well, can build, execute, support and track, they will not be successful in a highly digitalized world.

And this leads to Forrester’s third “I”, intelligence. Customer intelligence is, or should be, at the core of every action, experience and program agencies promote, marketers adopt and businesses demand. While much of the process of coming up with the “Big idea” is still a very right brain, creative exercise, which demands talent, experience and the ability to communicate, it is the question of who do you communicate with, how, when and with what message that is at the heart of customer intelligence, or left brain marketing. Any agency that does not understand and value the role of data, research and measurement will not be able to deliver success to their clients. And any marketer who does not demand measureable success from their agencies will not be able to translate those marketing metrics into the business metrics that drive a company’s “C-Suite” and that will reward marketers with budgets, respect and a seat at the business table, which is definitely where a CMO should sit.

So, go check out the Forrester report and think about how it should impact your business, whether you are a corporate marketer, an agency or a marketing services provider.

I just read a really stupid article in AdAge

Posted: March 19, 2010 in CMO, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Strategy
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I don’t ever like being critical of any of my peers, but sometimes, I just have to call a spade a spade. I just finished reading an article in Adage, entitled, “Our Biggest Brands can no longer be managed by nerds” by Tom Hinkes. His basic premise is that using data to inform marketing decisions somehow is responsible for the loss or the demise of CPG brands.

While I agree that “brand marketing is not a science, it requires analysis, discipline and detail. Even more, it requires intuition, flair and vision,” what I disagree with is the confusion between data and “numbers”. Using advances in market research, analytics and more recent social monitoring to listen to your customers, gain a greater understanding of what motivates them and responding to their needs/desires is not being a “bean counter”.

What made Starbucks a success was not that Howard Schultz ignored the research and went with his gut; it was that he was able to see the real needs/desires of his audience. They weren’t interested in coffee or soft drinks; they were interested in human interaction and a place where that could happen. And that type of insight is exactly what data and the successful understanding of data can bring about.

So I would counter that it’s some traditional brand managers who can’t see the forest for the trees and it takes a new more strategic business focused approach to be successful in today’s marketplace. So instead of being afraid of nerds, learn to listen and then apply the intuition, flair and vision that makes brand marketing as much art as science.

Ascentium Names first Chief Client Officer

Posted: March 3, 2010 in Ascentium, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy
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I am proud to welcome the newest addition to Ascentium’s ranks, David Blum who has joined in the newly created role of chief client officer. David has joined Ascentium after leading interactive for Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, the Bay area advertising agency, named small agency of the decade by Adweek.
Not only does David bring tremendous talent, energy and experience to the job, but what is more important is what it represents to an agency like Ascentium.

Over the last few years, Ascentium has been steadily building a reputation as one of the nation’s leading digital agencies, producing great work for client’s like Microsoft, T-Mobile, Cisco, Precor and Samsonite. But being the best digital agency is only a milestone on the road to helping redefine what agencies should look like in the future.

At our core, we are an experience agency. We meld passion for big ideas with an obsession for performance that produces engaging experiences, not just on the Web, but across multiple platforms, channels and devices. And to do that, we need to take from what traditional advertising agencies do best; own the “big idea” and manage account relationships and fuse that together with what digital agencies are known for; innovation leveraging emerging channels, technologies and customer behavior.

David Blum’s arrival at Ascentium will help us do that. His experience at BSSP helping to win major AOR accounts like Priceline, Allstate, Greyhound, Columbia Sportswear, Chipotle, Epson and Radio Shack coupled with the work he did managing Razorfish’s web development group in Seattle. Give testimony to Ascentium’s commitment to going beyond digital and leading the evolution into a true Experience agency.

Check out the article in today’s Adweek online about David, www.adweek.com.

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