Category Archives: analytics

So, what does the “agency of the future” look like?

Posted on Tuesday 16 August 2011 | 2 Comments

The news a couple of weeks back, that DraftFCB has lost their SC Johnson business after fifty-eight years prompted a pretty damning commentary from Campaign that Thursday in which Claire Beale condemned Interpublic’s promise to deliver “the agency of the future” with their amalgamation of Draft and FCB as a damp squib.  But do Interpublic even have the components to create the agency of the future.  Come to think of it, what does the agency of the future look like anyway?

If you’ve been watching this space you’ll have heard me point out many times that the single most important difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one is efficiency.  You’ll also know that the world has moved on from the times when an unsuccessful business could still chug along (I’ve seen plenty of walking dead over the years).  These days you are either ticking like a Swiss watch or you are dead.  That’s the new economy for you. You don’t even get points for being efficient in some areas of your business if you are inefficient in others – you are only as strong as your weakest link.

When it comes to marketing, efficiency is more than just tackling all the issues that influence the success of your business or learning to use a wider range of tools and disciplines.  It’s about eliminating inconsistencies between different messages, campaign elements or between strategic and tactical facets of your Campaign and taking full advantage of the synergy afforded by imaginative combinations of elements of your marketing initiatives.  Synergy and consistency have always been the major benefits of integrated marketing. The only thing that has changed is that these things are no longer merely nice to have, but essential.

On it’s simplest level efficiency is doing the things that deliver the greatest benefit and avoiding those further down the effectiveness table.  Long gone are the days when advertising people could hide behind our inability to measure the effectiveness of much of what they did.  In the digital age we can and must measure the effect of anything.

And therein lies the formula for the agency of the future.  In fact, forget the future, today’s agency has to be able to deliver an integrated solution (and that means integrated marketing, not just the integrated communications that everyone seems to think is the real thing) with data collection and analysis built into every element.

For an agency to pull this off is no small feat.  Firstly it means bringing together a diversity of expertise that very few marketing services firms anywhere in the world can muster.  Then there’s the question of culture clashes.  The people and culture of a data management consultancy is the antithesis of a creative agency as those who have sought to combine the two have discovered.  I worked with Experian a few years ago to help them create a hybrid consulting model that I called Optimarketing, but it never really gained traction because of the issues associated with sitting hundreds of data specialists and analysts who insisted in a silent working environment and who lacked creative instincts in the same space as gregarious, creative advertising people and expecting them to work together.  However, Experian were ahead of the game in recognising that this the way to go, closely followed by Sapient, who adopted the strategy of acquiring creative instinct rather than trying to grow it at home, by buying Chris Clarke’s Nitro group.  While I’ve not seen evidence of a quantifiable model emerging from this marriage, there are others playing with the same idea.  One of the more exciting new partnerships being Harte-Hanks who have taken in the UK agency Mason Zimbler, themselves already accustomed to the digital world that might just provide the cultural bridge to the numbers people.

As a company looking for a marketing services provider you’ll need either extremely broad skills and experience in your marketing team and at least one person with the overview to coordinate numerous specialist suppliers or an agency that can deliver the full package.  As my readers will have detected from my earlier piece on the dumbing down of marketing, I believe the problem is that people with the expertise to fill the modern-day coordinating (or Marketing Director) role are as rare as hen’s teeth, so in the absence of a one-stop shop, I’m hoping folks like me and the Full Effect Company will come into our own.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in agency management, agency of the future, analytics, data, data analysis, data management, DraftFCB, Experian, FCB, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Harte-Hanks, integrated marketing, integration, Interpublic, Mason Zimbler, phil darby, Sapient, The Full Effect Company

Your future is bright young things. So invest in your brand community.

Posted on Wednesday 16 June 2010 | Leave a comment

I hate to be repetitive, but for the second time this week I find myself shouting “hear, hear!” to a piece by Graeme Codrington.  This time he’s talking on the subject of employee relations.  In particular the challenge of holding on to the bright young things that represent the future for all of us.  But, while I agree with what Graeme says, I see this from another perspective – the perspective of “brand community”.

Graeme, as usual, is right (don’t you just hate folks who are always right?).  Too few organisations focus on creating an environment where employees feel they really belong – a community.  In this article he talks about the old days of outback mining companies that established towns and provided all the facilities their employees needed to live with their families, because they knew that without this infrastructure they simply wouldn’t have any employees.  He also points to the fact that initiatives like these were early victims of the bean-counters, looking through distorted spectacles for ways of squeezing more profit from a business.

So, what has an outback mining community to do with a modern business?  Well, it’s not as different as you may think because whether they are rock-face workers or the smart graduates that an international business needs to build its future on, when there’s a shortage, there’s a shortage, and belive me, there are definitely not enough bright young things to go around.  If you doubt that, just give a thought to the last time you marvelled at some meaningless procedure a business that you were dealing with insisted on taking you through – smart people don’t waste your time (or theirs) with stuff like this!

Graeme talks about investing in the things that make work a great place to be.  A while back, I visited an organisation whose offices were so much better and more comfortable that the homes where the employees lived, that they socialised there too.  In fact it was sometimes difficult to persuade them to go home at all!  However, it isn’t quite as simple as office bars, sofas and a few pot-plants.  My real interest in this subject comes from my passion for brands and my belief that while, as Graeme says, there’s a cost involved in making yourself the employer of choice for smart people, it doesn’t have to be as big an investment as many might think.  I see this as a part of the marketing function and in most organisations there a budget for this and, if you do it right, it is guaranteed to bring a handsome reward.  What’s more I know that with the technology we have at our fingertips today, you can measure anything and that includes the return you get on investment in your “brand community”, so the proof that this kind of investment pays-back is there.

In fact, one of the founding principles of my Full Effect Marketing is that a small proportion of your total marketing investment re-directed to internal marketing will bring a disproportionately high return.  And, have no doubt, what we are talking about here is “marketing”; specifically building a brand community where all stakeholders (investors, partners, suppliers, customers AND employees) feel a sense of belonging and ownership.  It works like this:  great brand community = happy and dedicated employees = consistency over time because they stick around = improved return on training investment = better decisions = smarter (and more efficient) execution = happy customers = job satisfaction … you get the idea.  Its called “Brandship” and yes, you have individual Brandships with every one of your “stakeholders” (I hate the word “stakeholder” too so let’s just talk about “community”).

The chance of you being a lighthouse organisation in the future (or even being around at all, given the competition we are all going to face) is very much based on the desirability of your “Brand Community”, not just for customers, but for employees.  But there’s another aspect to this.  A brand community isn’t something that’s dictated from the boardroom.  Employees aren’t going to respond to a community that YOU think they should like.  It has to be a place where they genuinely feel “at home”.  A place that they have created.  In fact, the organisation doesn’t even own the brand community.  You just get to be caretaker or janitor.  A powerful brand community is a product of and owned by its members so if you want to create the real thing (and I suggest this should be your objective) you are going to have to engage another Full Effect Marketing idea, which is that all your communications should be two-way, because you are only going to get it right by listening.

Who has come across a large organisation where all the employees get a free pair of Replay jeans?  I have, because we did it at Oskar Mobile in the Czech Republic that not only became the world’s most successful third operator ever, but, against awesome odds, were nominated World’s Best Mobile Operator; success that was driven entirely by their brand community.  This and many other initiatives like it were prompted by employees themselves, who also made a movie themselves about what a great place Oskar was to work.  The movie in turn was distributed to recruiters and shown at conferences and job fairs as well as posted in the Internet and as a result they were getting thousands of unsolicited job applications every week.  The original Saatchi & Saatchi was a community that worked and played together and it was this that drove our international growth.  I remember walking into a recently acquired agency in Helsinki and being bombarded with questions from everyone about the people and happenings in our London Charlotte Street offices.  Our London softball team had shirt with “Official softball team of the biggest advertising agency in the world” printed across the back and people in our offices around the world wore it with pride.

This is what I mean when I talk about Brand Communities and it’s why I created my Brand Discovery programme.  Every day the idea of the central role of “brand” in any business is gaining more credence.  If you aren’t focussing on this already you should be.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in analytics, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, change management, communications, community, data analysis, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Bridging the gap between insights and action

Posted on Monday 1 February 2010 | Leave a comment

A while ago I sat through a credentials presentation by the MD of one of the leading international data management consultancies.  At one point in the process a slide came up and the presenter went into a series of claims saying that they had shown so-and-so organisation how to save twenty million pounds and another client how to save thirty million etc.  Now, I’ve been in these situations before and even if I hadn’t, I would have been sensitive to the weasel, so I asked the obvious question.  “So, you showed them how to save all this money, what did they actually save?”  – Stunned silence.

It quickly became clear that the consultancy didn’t know how much some of the organisations in question had saved, or even if they had saved anything at all, because their proposals often weren’t acted upon.  In other cases the saving was minimal or nothing.  This isn’t unusual of course.  The ideas that the consultancy had offered were probably quite sound, but the problem that all these people have is that their clients are rarely capable of introducing the changes to processes or programmes that the data identifies as necessary and they themselves are not equipped to help beyond the point, at best, of identifying the kind of action required.

Its a few years ago that Jim Taylor in his book Space Race was lamenting the failure of advertising agencies to respond to their clients’ demands  for integrated solutions, but, sadly, things haven’t improved much.  The management consultancies as Jim prophesied, have taken the lead and the ad-agencies have just watched them disappear in a cloud of dust over the marketing horizon.  This is perhaps understandable when you consider that advertising agencies have for decades sat at the head of their clients’ marketing support roster, but things move on and today the traditional advertising role is revealed for what it is – just a very small corner of the bigger picture.  Sure, its a tough pill to swallow when you are used to being king of the hill, but I find it disappointing that even today the majority of advertising people I come across continue to describe what they do as “integrated marketing” which only illustrates how far they are away from understanding the wider landscape or the role they could play in it.  In fact, there are significant new opportunities for advertising agencies in the world of new model marketing that, if they just gave up trying to persuade us that they are still running the show, they could adjust to and solve the problem of their dwindling revenues.  I know, I’ve introduced a few agencies to these new opportunities and helped them add tens of millions of dollars in incremental billings as a result.

What clients need is an end-to-end seamless process for delivering truly integrated strategies and if the marketing services sector doesn’t come up with a model that works clients have no other option, but to take control, assemble narrowly focused marketing services specialists into project teams and make them work to eye-wateringly constrictive briefs.  I’ve helped a few clients of mine put teams like these together.  They are not for everybody, but they work well once you have all the resources.

The biggest impediment to achieving the single-source, end-to-end solution is culture.  At one end of the process sit the data nerds whose lives are written in binary code.  At the other are the creative advertising folks.  They don’t make good neighbours at the best of times, but trying to get them to agree on a single business model is a little like introducing George Dubya to a MENSA convention.  The reason that the management consultancies, as Jim Taylor predicted, are doing so well out of this, is that they sit with their structures and practices perspective, somewhere in the middle.  They aren’t great at data or creative, but manage a sort of average attempt at a solution that’s acceptable, in a businesslike sort of way, to a lot of half-arsed client organisations.

It seems to me that the people to watch right now, even though they probably have further to travel than any of the other players, are the aformentioned data folks.  Sapient and Experian appear to be leading the field, but are taking different routes to the same conclusion.  Experian, or rather those very smart folks at Clarity Blue, who they acquired a couple of years back, seem to be building out from their established base in the direction of the objective, adding new skills and resources that understandably, because of their parentage, appear rather more functional that creative as yet.  Meanwhile Sapient dropped an advance party by helicopter, right at the objective, by acquiring one of my current favourite advertising agency networks, Nitro last year and are now have the task of working backwards to set up a supply line.  They probab;ly stand an equal chance of creating the necessary end-to-end process, but I’ve always seen the “big idea” as a vital component in any marketing strategy so my money is on Sapient’s Nito approach being first to deliver the goods.  Watch this space!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in advertising, agency management, analytics, Big Idea, business strategy, change management, communications, consulting, creativity, data, data analysis, efficiency, Experian, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, innovation, integrated marketing, integration, phil darby, Sapient, strategy, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Hang the data, get the basics right!

Posted on Friday 20 February 2009 | Leave a comment

abcI’ve lost count of the number of times over the years that I’ve come across businesses that have allowed data and analysis to get in the way of their business development, but in the last few weeks I’ve come across two. 

Don’t get me wrong, data is my friend, but I have a great deal of experience too, which, if the data should tell me to jump of a high building, will warn me that it will hurt!  Way back when I started in this business a wise old advertising sage introduced me to the principles of research with the words “This is a light to guide your way, not a lamppost to lean on”.  He was right and the same applies to any form of data, yet I’m increasingly finding people who won’t take a pee unless the data tells them to.

There are simple reasons for this of course.  The stakes are often high and there’s big money and jobs on the line, so its easy to see why we have become risk-averse.  Its made worse though, by inexperienced managers, both in SMEs and in the large corporates.  Its a fact that today’s managers are younger and less experienced than they were twenty years ago, and experience is the key to success.  To make things worse, there’s even more to know now.  Its no wonder managers look for data to support their decisions.  But supporting decisions is fine, its when it makes the decisions you are in trouble!

I liken it to the debate over teaching schoolkids basic skills like how to do sums and write.  The purists argue that they’ll need this stuff when … wait for it … we don’t have computers anymore!  Now there’s thought!

Its important to recognise that the law of diminishing returns applies to any investment in data and analysis.  The more you do, the greater the investment required and the fewer point-gains you’ll get from it.  If you are Proctor and Gamble or Unilever the optimal point is much higher up the investment scale than it would be for your local corner shop.  That’s simply because 0.001% improvement on a gazillion dollars turnover will pay for the investment (probably a few times over) while if your turnover is that of the vast majority of businesses, that kind of improvement wouldn’t buy you a decent lunch, so there’s no point.

While large and unwieldy organisations tend to lose the advantage that data (potentially) gives them when the time comes to turn insights into action, at the small and medium enterprise (SME) end of the scale, there is no shortage of modest, easily implementable initiatives you can introduce to great effect without data and analysis, if you have experience.  But that’s a problem too, because, by definition, SMEs have less experience and a narrower skills base.   While someone like me will help a larger concern to interpret data and plan appropriate responses, when I am consulting for SMEs is more likely to involve filling in the gaps in their basic skills and experience.

When I first started my business, as an introductory offer, I promised any prospect a bottle of champagne if I couldn’t find ten ways to increase their ROI, but I never had to make that trip to the off-license.  Every business makes mistakes and its too easy for someone with broad enough experience to spot them and come up with a remedy.  I guarantee I can make significant improvements to the performance of any enterprise, large or small, and in the case of SMEs, usually without spending months wading through data and setting up programmes and analysis processes.  All that comes later and will undoubtedly help magnify the results, but the gearing is such that if you are running on three cylinders, getting the fourth to fire makes a hell of a lot of difference.  The introduction of simple sound practice, based on experience and observation, can bring a significant improvement in the bottom line for most SMEs in no time at all.  The expense is in the fine-tuning that’ll have you humming like a Ferrari. 

I have developed Full Effect Marketing to the point where any business, of any size, in any sector, anywhere in the world can plug in and play it.  I purposely stripped away the mystique that some of the big consultancies seem to like, so that it makes perfect sense to anybody and before somebody from a big organisation says, if its designed for SMEs (which it isn’t) its too basic for them – bollocks!  Marketing is basic, Full Effect Marketing just strips away the frills that have been added over the years by insecure marketing people who have thought that by dressing it up, it’ll appear that they are extra smart!

The two examples I encountered recently were both businesses sitting on the recession time bomb.  As I have said before, the game now is all about survival of the fittest – Business Darwinism – and if you aren’t fit you won’t survive.  Neither of these businesses had the basics right, yet they were fixated on data and research and locked into a kind of commercial catalepsy, waiting for the data to tell them what to do.  The answer was obvious to anybody with the right experience.  I don’t blame them for not knowing, it wasn’t their area of expertise, but what was frustrating was when they had the answers they still couldn’t bring themselves to take action, because they were stuck in the data-habit and didn’t have any to support the actions.  As a result, the one has sadly and quite avoidably, bitten the dust already, simply because it didn’t move quickly enough and other is teetering.

Maybe the fact that I have seen two such cases so close together is a symptom of the current business climate.  As I said, things right now, happen fast to businesses that aren’t in shape and there are a lot of them around.  Why is this?  Well apart from the experience quotient (which if you read the research is lower these days than twenty years ago because managers are younger) its because increased entrepreneurship and a boom market have resulted in a lot of businesses getting this far even though they were half-cocked.  Its just a build-up of failures waiting to happen.

I can’t pretend to be sorry to see a few businesses disappear – recession is cathartic, but I still think that there are tremendous opportunities in this recession for smaller businesses and challenger brands and I’m really excited at the prospect of seeing new names and ideas emerge.  Most of all, I’m looking forward to working with businesses that are made of the right stuff, getting the basics right, making things happen and then adding the data analysis that will scale those things.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in analytics, business development, business strategy, communications, consulting, data, data analysis, decision, decision-making, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, indecision, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Data, strategy and tactics

Posted on Friday 29 February 2008 | Leave a comment

We’re all very hot on strategy these days.  It seems everyone is suddenly a strategist.  There’s also a lot of talk about data collection.  However, a problem I find on my travels around organisations is that too few organisations put the two concepts together. 

Every business needs a data strategy, if you don’t have one you’ll be wasting time and money.  The spectrum of data abusing businesses that I come across ranges from those that are drowning under a deluge of data that they can’t organise or analyse (trying to drink from the fire hose) or those which have big holes in their insights where they forgot to ask some of the key questions. 

The sobering thought is, if you are in the drowning category you will have paid for data that you can’t use.  If you have holes you’ll have paid for half the picture when the full picture would usually have cost you the same – either way, its inefficient and as we all know, these days you are either efficient or on the slippery slope to the trash bin.  Yet many organisation still just collect data piecemeal, as and when they feel they can, with no particular rhyme or reason.

There’s a third category of data abusers too, which is probably the biggest in terms their data use and that’s businesses that have data and have managed to turn it into insights, but are unable to act upon them.  Mostly this is because organisations that are heavily into data, like financial services groups, are using it for direct marketing and a lot of that is systematised and/or automated to such a degree that their structures and even their culture is bound up in the system.  Once you have a system like this its hard to change.  The bottom line there is that your scope for improvemrent is confined to, as a well-known data marketer friend of mine is renown for repeating, “polishing turds”.

Next time you get a presentation from a data management consultancy or analyst, stop them at the slide that lists the savings that they claim they helped their clients achieve.  There is always a slide like this and the wording if they are honest at all is a dead give-away.  Usually its something like “we showed so-and-so how they could save £20million on their DM investment”.  The weasels there are “showed” and “could” because the bane of most data consultancies lives is the fact that very little of the potential savings that they identify are ever achieved.

I spent a good part of last year working with one of our biggest data management consultancies to develop an end-to-end process for collecting analysing and acting on data and I can assure you that data takes on almost magical properties if its managed like this.  Rather than “polish turds”, or to put it more elegantly “refine tactical activity”, we created a model that applied carefully gathered and analysed data at both strategic and tactical level.  The end result was a data driven approach to marketing where marketing was where it should be, firmly in the driving seat of the business and the entire business was built around a brand community with a heart that beat in time to that of its customers.  The data drove the brand development, which in turn drove the internal marketing and therefore the “promise” delivery (including product and offer development), right through to the tactical communications and promotional initiatives.  And this is the way it works, from the top not as the in the case of the tactical application model, with the tail wagging the dog!

This kind of thing is only possible when you start with a clear vision of what you need to know, how data will contribute to that knowledge and how you are going to get that data - in other words a data strategy.  You’ll need the right tools for the job too of course.  I still see quite large firms who keep their data on an Excel spread sheet – it doesn’t work, get real!  You’ll also need to get used to the idea that you should collect data at every touch-point, which is perfectly feasible if you apply a little ingenuity.  Once you get your head around that things get a bit easier.  Then all you have to do is convince your marketing services partners that their initiatives need to contribute to data collection and that the data they collect will in turn influence their future initiatives (or as one agency bright-spark put it “anything it says may be used against them!”).  Too bloody right and about time I say!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in advertising, analytics, brand, brands, consulting, data, data analysis, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, media, phil darby, strategy, tactical, Uncategorized

Making Optimisation work

Posted on Tuesday 11 December 2007 | Leave a comment

datawarehouseedit.jpgThere’s not a business in existence that wouldn’t claim to be working to improve efficiency.  After all, it’s been many years since the last penny dropped in the final boardroom and every one accepted that business success is measured in degrees of efficiency.

However, the one area of business where attempts to improve efficiency have been late coming is marketing.  The reasons for this are far too many to go into here, but I’m happy to discuss them at another time.  The point however is that because marketing is now the biggest element of pretty much any business model it’s a situation that can’t be allowed to continue.

Recognising this, organisations everywhere are introducing measures to increase their marketing efficiency.  We have fortunes being invested in market modelling, similar sums dedicated to brand development and communications spends sliding quickly below the line where cause and effect are more readily measured, but we are still not seeing the kind of efficiency we’re going to need as we move through the twenty-first century.

The reason for this is straightforward enough and although nobody would say it was a simple matter to put it right, fix it we must.  The fact is that marketing optimisation can’t be addressed solely at the marketing communications end of the marketing process. This may be where most organisations focus their attempts, but at best it’s papering over the cracks.  Optimisation requires that a number of organisational and cultural issues, marketing communications (both message and medium) being just one of them, are addressed at once and for most organisations that has been just a bridge too far – until now that is.

With the tools and resources at our disposal we can piece together an end-to-end, all-embracing marketing solution that any organisation can buy into and which will deliver the ROI that we always knew was possible, but were never able to realise. What’s more we can combine that with a process that fixes the internal issues and improves front line performance at the same time, so it’s a faster and more meaningful solution.

This is the principle of optimisation working on a tangible level.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in analytics, consulting, data, data analysis, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, optimisation, optimization, phil darby, strategy, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized