Alex Steer

1026 words | ~5 min

Once upon a time, there were full-service ad agencies. They didn't call themselves that, of course. They just called themselves ad agencies. But they did all sorts of things like media and research, as well as creative work.

Then one day - okay, one decade - they gave away those 'marketing services' functions. Media and market research went off to become entirely separate industries. The creative agency function remained boutique and special. Media and research went off and chased scale and efficiency.

At around that time, the people who did marketing realised that the web was going to be a bit useful, maybe. And the kids who made stuff for the internet realised that marketers would pay them. The kids set up their own companies to build internet stuff for marketers, and the marketers - who were getting used to paying separate agencies to do creative, media and research - were more or less happy to ad these 'digital' agencies to their lists. They never expected the internet kids to join ad agencies.

So we ended up with a world in which marketing services companies and creative agencies found themselves competing for the time, attention and love of marketers. For a long time creative agencies got most of the love - they did powerful, beautiful, interesting work; the marketing services firms were the useful, efficient drudges. As for the internet kids, they occupied an odd middle ground. Some looked more like marketing services firms, others acted more like ad agencies. Anyway, we broadly ended up with two cultures:  one tidy, scalable and efficient; one elegant, interesting, deeply connected to what people were thinking and feeling.

I think we all know how this fairy tale ends.

One day, the economy fell apart. Marketers tended to look at the slightly devil-may-care attitudes of the agencies and got a bit nervous. Big bets, leaps of faith... these things started to look dangerous rather than daring. Over on the other side, the media and research firms were testing, measuring, proving. That suddenly looked a lot more appealing.

So the marketing services people started to take the upper hand - more love, more attention, more say in how money was spent. The agencies found themselves backed into a trendily-designed corner. And as this happened, the marketing services firms realised they had a secret weapon.

The internet kids, stuck in the middle.

Technology and data could make things more robust, more measurable, easier to prove and improve. And in the meantime, the internet kids had grown up. The ones who hadn't been acting like agencies had got suits and a bit of money. They'd become technology consulting firms, and some of them had been absorbed into the big professional services firms who had moved a bit faster than some of the marketing services guys.

So the marketing services firms started doing deals, partnering with the tech consultancies, and hiring people in. After a while the line between media companies and technology companies (and even to some extent research companies) began to blur. Media became technology-driven. But more than that, it became highly technical, full of really good models of what worked, and some really smart ways of building pictures of the audiences for marketing: who they were, where they want, what they did, what they liked.

And here we are. The marketers are spending a lot of time talking to the marketing services firms (the media guys, the tech guys, the research guys), because those guys talk sense. As for the agencies, they've hired enough of the internet kids that they can talk a good game about social media and built some whizzy applications that other agencies love. But it all still feels a little bit... precious.

Not surprising, then, that you hear a lot of people saying that the marketing services firms have won the battle for love and attention. They've got the money, the evidence, the scale, the buzz...

Just one problem with that story.

The agencies still understand how to move people. And the marketing services firms don't.

If you're a marketer, the experience of working with marketing services firms on consumer marketing problems is, by and large, horrific. They've got the tech, the metrics, the models, the smarts, the money... But do one in a hundred of them have the sheer creative problem-solving ability that you need to build a strong brand, change a perception, change a behaviour?

The agencies still have it, and have it in spades. The best planners, the best creatives, are still in agencies, creating ideas that motivate people and drive growth.

And that means agencies can still win.

That's 'can', not 'will'. In the short term there's a very good chance that agencies will lose. If they keep ignoring technology, they'll lose. If they keep playing fast and loose with data, they'll lose. If they keep only using the web to be interesting and fancy, without finding ways to become the experts in what kinds of digital activity drive changes in behaviour, they'll lose. And if the marketing services firms invest hard in creating environments that smart strategists and brilliant creatives can do great work in, the stand-alone creative agency model is dead.

But that hasn't happened yet, whatever the promotional literature says. So if agencies become the experts in effectiveness again, they'll win. If they become serious strategic business partners for their clients, they'll win. If they become the specialists in building the right technology and media mix to generate change and growth, not just reach and frequency, they'll win.

The winners will be the businesses where the smartest people want to work, proving they're solving the most interesting problems in the most powerful ways. Those people will be writers, artists, editors, designers, strategists, project managers, engineers, statisticians, planners, buyers, researchers... Together. Because I don't believe marketers want to spend their time persuading different types of people to work together without fighting. They want organisations that care about relationships and results in equal measure.

Less pitching. Less bitching. More work.

1257 words | ~6 min

As we get into the New Year, I seem to have read about a hundred blog posts that all say the same thing. There's lots of hype about big data - but just having data isn't enough; it's what you do with it that counts.

To which my reply is: yes, well, obviously. That would also be true of any marketing asset, from a website to a tracking research study to some media space. Merely noting that people are excited about something, and some people will use it badly, is a lazy way to try to sound smart.

So I'm going to sound perverse instead. I think, despite all these blog posts, that big data is being undersold to marketers. Here's why.

There's a gap between the hype and the sales pitch

There's a difference between hype and sales. Hype is a precursor to sales, but sales are the closer. Having lots of people excited about something (be it big data, subprime mortgages or Dutch tulips) is a precursor to making a killing when you go round and persuade them to pay for it.

But whereas sellers of snake-oil or South Sea shares tend to be more excited than the wary customers to whom they're flogging their wares, the people selling big data services - getting the SOWs signed, agreeing the terms of contract, receiving the purchase orders - seem curiously less enthused by its potential than their would-be clients.

There's an odd gap, in other words, between the hype surrounding big data, and the things big data providers are selling.

The dismal quadrant

There are a lot of technology companies springing up to serve the marketing industry, as this diagram from the Chief Marketing Technologist blog shows. But broadly, I find you can cluster them into four big blocks, based on the answers to two questions:

1. Do they sell raw data, or services informed by data?
2. Do they promise to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of marketing activity?

Based on that, the landscape breaks down something like this:

Three of these quadrants are pretty straightforward.

1. Greater efficiency for raw data. The world of data management platforms and cloud-based storage.
2. Greater efficiency for digital services. The world of digital delivery and asset management platforms.
3. Greater effectiveness from raw data. The world of syndicated research and heavy-duty analytics.

All three are sold quite well by the people who sell them. But when marketers get excited about big data, they're not talking about any of these three. They're talking about the promise of the fourth quadrant: Greater effectiveness from digital services. To put it another way: Can data-driven services make my digital marketing better?

And by 'better' they don't mean more efficient. They mean more interesting, more powerful, more pulse-racingly good. The kind of 'better' that wins awards and makes clients famous and changes people's minds for the long term. The kind of 'better' that makes good people want to work in this industry in the first place.

That's what they're asking us for. And our answer?

Targeting.

Thomas Carlyle called economics 'the dismal science'. Targeting may be its successor - accurate, useful, but not exciting. Clients want services that realise the hype around big data - full of surprising truths, powerful insights, previously unseen revelations and ways of working that are completely unlike the often frustrating reality of trying to look after the brands by which large businesses grow and thrive. And we give them the ability to swap one banner ad for another based on some fairly simple rules.

Putting the 'big' back

We're selling big data with small ambitions, and that needs to change. In large part, it happens because the people rushing into the sector aren't marketers. To steal from Tom Morton's outstanding recent presentation, many of them 'haven't a brand strategy or creative bone in their body'.

This is the territory that agencies should be occupying, and for the most part they're stubbornly refusing to. When was the last time you heard an agency describe its main aim as making digital communications with more impact, instead of some dismal old rubbish about conversations? Instead of competing on unachievable claims about creativity - which, let's face it, should be table stakes for a creative agency - agencies should be running headlong towards this empty, underserved but incredibly important quadrant. Instead, it's populated with companies that think that marketing effectiveness boils down to nothing more than optimisation after the fact.

It's time to stop acting as if every call for greater focus on effectiveness is an attempt to hammer nails into the coffin of creativity. It isn't, because the two go hand-in-hand and you can't be serious about one without the other. But clients need to be demanding to work with partners that are equally serious about both: not agencies that go 'la-la-la' every time questions of analytics and scalability are mentioned; and not tweakers-at-the-margins who see the content of marketing creations as largely irrelevant.

And it's time to reassert the distinction between strategy and tactics. As I review the kinds of supposedly strategic advice a lot of clients are getting from the technology sector, I see little more than a set of tactics backed up by case studies of their previous effectiveness, with little reference to the context in which those effects were generated. That's the model-based way of selling technology consulting services at its worst: use technology, ???, profit. The best strategic organisations - be they consultancies, ad agencies or tech companies - know that strategy is based on a need and a theory of change, and leads to a set of actions that make a business's marketing output make more sense - sense for the business, and sense to its would-be customers.

So in short, yes, I think we are underselling big data by using that term to describe some very small, tactical solutions to problems that we're not defining well enough. Clients should be asking partners to use big data to solve big, specific, thorny problems, and not be satisfied with any solution that isn't both empirically grounded and rooted in a proper understanding of behaviour.

It may be that we need to rip up some organisational models to do this - the distinction between ad agency and tech company, for example. That won't be easy, but it will be worth it, and it's what clients should be asking for this year.

211 words | ~1 min

Okay, bit of a plug, but I wanted to say a huge 'well done' to Fabric and our clients at KFC for picking up a gold Cristal Festival award for best use of data in a campaign (It Doesn't Count If...).

Here's our case study. I'm biased, but I think it's a great example of what happens when you get a really true insight, a brave client and an agency that's committed  to using data to do what's right, not just what's easy to measure. It also offers a look under the hood at the kinds of tools we build for our clients to help them use data to do amazing work.

If you want to use your data to do more magic instead of more maths, get in touch: hello@fabricww.com.

Fabric Worldwide/KFC: 'It Doesn't Count If' - Data case study from Fabric Worldwide on Vimeo.

542 words | ~3 min

It's December, which means everyone in the advertising, marketing and technology world is publishing lists of '2013 trends and predictions'. These vary, as usual, from the insightful to the deeply suspect.

Instead of adding to the pile (yet), I've decided to start making a list of all these lists, with the aim of doing a bit of a meta-analysis later on. If you know of any others, leave a comment or email me and I'll add it.

So, in no particular order:

• Millward Brown
• Landor
• The Futures Company
• Contagious
• PSFK
• Fast Company (tech)
• Fast Company (digital services)
• Trendwatching
• JWT
• Mashable
• Branding Strategy Insider
• Hootsuite (via, you guessed it, Fast Company)
• Digitas
• Acquisio
• Sense Networks
• Business Zone
• Content Marketing Institute
• HubSpot
• ExactTarget
• B2B Marketing Insider
• Gartner
• Social Media Today (several lists in one)
• IDG Connect
• ReadWrite

318 words | ~2 min

Just seen this for the first time. This is the US version (same creative, different voiceover artist):

I love the opening line - we're the people with the smile on the box - and the thought behind it. It's got a charm and humility that throws you, and changes how you feel about a corporation that most of us think of as giant and reliable mail-order service - from ubiquitous to familiar.

Sadly, what I love less is the thought that they've chosen to govern the whole ad: We're reinventing normal, again.

See, if you're going up against Apple, don't do what they did.

But worse, it's a tone that even Apple shouldn't have taken, the first time round. It said: we're massive, everything we do is epic, and all our new products are ipso facto revolutionary.

In other words, all the things we secretly suspect Apple thinks about itself. The brand's worst side.

The switch in the Amazon ad takes us from the best side of the brand to the worst side of pretty much every big company, and the worst side of advertising. It's pushy, arrogant and entitled. Here's a new thing, it says. We expect you to respect it.

Go with the first thought, Amazon. It's the best by a mile.

If you needed proof, here's the Post Office's new spot. It's a bit weepy and worthy, but the thought - part of everyone's story - is a cracker.

577 words | ~3 min

Today I remembered something I'd forgotten about the early years of Facebook. The rule that status updates had to start with the word 'is'.

This was phased out in November 2007, around the time that Facebook reached 50 million users. It was a huge win for thousands of users who had signed petitions to ditch the verb, and who (rightly) saw it as unnecessarily restrictive, a hanger-on from an early assumption that statuses were for broadcasting where you were, or what you were doing. Rather than, say, your thoughts or feelings. (Is it a cheap shot to make a joke about the inner lives of software engineers? Probably.)

I'd forgotten all about it. And when I remembered, I did a quick bit of calculating. Facebook has 955 million users (FB stats, 30 Sept 2012). That means that 95% of Facebook users don't remember the 'is'.

That means they were never burdened with the 'is' constraint. But it also means they don't remember the bizarre sub-genre of deliberately grammatically mangled status updates that it spawned. The Wired post nodded to this at the time:

Many people ignore it, choosing instead to commit grammatical atrocities such as "Sarah is likes to dance."

That's a rather tame example. There was some rare brilliance there - from 'James is pub' to 'Jenny is WHY DISTRICT LINE WHY???' The is-busting was deliberate and perverse and gleeful. Like putting stupid things in your 'Interests' and 'Political Beliefs' (before Facebook made it harder to enter free text in these fields), it was a way of playing with the conventions of the platform.

In that sense the loss of the 'is' feels like a slight shame, because it destroyed a kind of creativity that thrived under the constraint. But then, that's the same argument that turns minority cultures into museum pieces, or that insists that dying languages should be kept on life-support. So do I wish we still had to start our status updates with 'is'? No, but I think we need a better way of recording some of these fleeting online social phenomena - given that by definition digital activity should be recordable. Just as field linguistics has arisen in response to the need to keep records of dying languages and their stores of knowledge and cultural practice, without insisting that we should all still be speaking those languages, so it's worth having a way of capturing these behaviours before we move on, without insisting that we don't move on.

There's more to say on this, but the tricky part is finding the resources and will to do it. The actors involved in studying and responding to trends as they emerge (businesses, creatives, etc.) are not the same as the ones needed to step in as they decline (historians, archivists, anthropologists). And the incentives are, of course, very different. You'd struggle to make a living advising people on dying trends - or telling them to keep everything in case it comes in useful one day. But since I suspect the need for long-term storage is going to become a sore point in the adoption of big data technology, the relationship between innovation and archiving is going to need to be worked out.

385 words | ~2 min

I enjoyed this from Dave Trott on lateral thinking, but it shows the dangers of getting your sums wrong when you're trying to prove the effectiveness of advertising.

The post tells the story of how Play-Doh went from being a generic wallpaper-cleaning putty to a branded children's toy. It signs off (my emphasis):

In the years since, Play-Doh has sold over 2 BILLION cans. Even now, every year it sells 100 million cans in 75 countries. The original wallpaper-cleaning putty sold for 34 cents a can. Marketed as Play-Doh, the virtually identical product sells for $1.50 a can. That’s an extra $1.16 a can (a 300% increase) that can’t be attributed to anything but marketing and advertising

Yep. Except inflation, of course.

There's a good historical price inflation calculator here. Play-Doh went on sale under that name in 1956 - the latest possible date (and the most generous) to which we can assign the 34 cents price for the wallpaper putty.

If a can of wallpaper putty cost 34 cents in 1956, then we'd expect the equivalent product to cost around $2.70 today. If Play-Doh sells for $1.50 a can (actually a bit less, as three tubs cost $2.99 on Hasbro's website), then it's lost about 44% of its value.

That's not a surprise if you think about it. Wallpaper-cleaning putty was a much-needed household product, and Play-Doh is an inexpensive children's toy. Admittedly, you could be more optimistic about the value of Play-Doh if you added up all the sales of the product in the years since we all stopped needing wallpaper-cleaning putty. In that sense the brand has probably netted its makers millions - but then you'd have to compare that to sales of other children's modelling clay brands, and ideally make sure you were comparing like for like in terms of output, distribution, and other thrilling things like that.

Once you've done that, it's probably still worth a ton of money as a brand. But demonstrating that means proving it to non-believers (finance people, not ad-men), and that means getting your sums right.

Maths, eh?

928 words | ~5 min

This might get a little bit technical. But hopefully not too much.

If you work anywhere near software developers or digital project managers you'll know about agile projects, and the Agile Manifesto that underlies this way of working. If not, in essence it defines a way of working designed to make projects less slow, unwieldy and painful. It values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Good things, I tend to think. Except the last one.

Okay, controversy time. I make plans for a living. I try to make them as painless as possible for the people who have to work with them. That's why I think good plans need to be single-minded and minimally complex. I won't say 'short'. Sometimes they're long. But they should be as short as possible.

I also work in an agile environment, and I'm learning a whole new set of ways of talking about projects - as are many planners, now that planning is increasingly happening in technology companies as well as communications agencies and marketing departments. For those interested in some of the implications of agile environments on the job of planning advertising, I recommend Neil Perkin's presentations on the subject - first this, then these. The single most important point (for me) in all of it is the idea that advertisers shouldn't be too hung up on structures, roles and processes, and that planners should pitch in whenever they can be helpful. Which in turn just suggests to me that you should hire smart, quick-thinking, adaptable people. (Though I can't really imagine anyone ever advocating the opposite.)

But in the terms of the Agile Manifesto, planners don't really have a place on the project team - because agile teams value responding to change over following a plan.

So at risk of heresy, here's why I think this part of the Manifesto is a bad thing.

When you establish a culture that sees following a plan as a bad thing, you damage that culture's ability to respond to change in an effective, considered manner. What matters to that culture is the speed and vitality of the response - not its quality. And when you do that, you end up with the continuous iteration of rubbish. Yes, you produce lots of rubbish, with an air-punching sense of urgency and at breakneck speed - but it's still rubbish.

Privileging iteration over quality means you lose all the other stuff that the Agile Manifesto values.  Individuals don't want to interact with what you make. What you make doesn't work. And you can't collaborate with your customers because you won't have any.

Following a plan is not the opposite of responding to change. Plan-making is a response to change, and good plans let you assess the quality of your responses too, by defining how you will know if you're on the right track.

What the Agile Manifesto really tells us is that plans need to start with objectives, people and capabilities. What do you want to do? (Here's a tip: keep asking 'why?' If you want to build a website - why? If you want to develop a new product - why? If you want your ads to be funnier - why? Until you hit a wall you can't break down - the basic objective of what your organisation does, which is probably to make money somehow, if you're a business.) And how are people and capabilities going to get you there? What do your people have? What do other people want? What capabilities do you have (or need) to get where you want to go?

Agile projects can get stuck in feedback loops. You can spend a lot of time iterating, making incremental improvements to features. Sometimes this is fine - if it's provides you with the capabilities you need to meet an objective, in a simple and minimally complex way. But if it doesn't, sometimes you just need to chuck stuff out and replace it. Sometimes you even need to chuck out the plan - which is why a good plan, as I said, has those 'is this working?' tests built in. (This is a bit Catch-22, obviously - sometimes a bad plan is so bad, it doesn't let you realise it's a bad plan.)

This stuff isn't hard - but it does require focus. I've started watching the Tour de France a lot more this year, and am amazed at Team Sky's performance, which feels to me like the definition of agile strategy in action: a single clear objective, years spent building the people and capabilities, and enough common agreement that they know how to vary the formula day by day as circumstances dictate.

So all that said, I like the agile way of working. But it's not done yet, and as it moves from pure software development into marketing and other areas of business, those of us who think plans are good things need to find ways to include them in the process, for the benefit of the people along the way, and at the end.

514 words | ~3 min

Back in 2010 I wrote here about the idea that in a world where digital technology is the norm, our ideas about information have to change. I referred to the concept of a 'greppable world' (after grep, the faithful old Unix text-searching utility):

In a greppable world, nothing that is made public can be buried in detail. Form and arrangement of texts can be remade on the fly. Tasks like concordancing, which used to take years, can be done in seconds using a script. And, of course, huge stacks of documents can be skimmed for salient details just as fast.

So it's interesting to see Mashable's take on Facebook's acquisition of face-recognition company Face.com:

Right now, Facebook’s facial-recognition software can sense who is in your pictures and make tagging suggestions, but what if the social network could further learn behaviors and preferences by reading the Gap sweatshirt you’re wearing and seeing that Coca-Cola can in your hand?

What is it that's new and alarming about this concept? It's not the ability of Facebook to see the contents of your photos and make judgements about you. One reason we wear Gap sweatshirts or drink Coca-Cola is to make statements about our preferences. As the owners of the platform where you're hosting your pics, we know that Facebook could always have gone through your photos and used the information in them to target you. It's just that there are over 140 billion photos on Facebook, so it would have taken them a long time. Now (or at least soon), it could be done automatically, and much faster.

The arguments that we've seen about text mining over the last few years can now convincingly be applied to image mining too. As with the ability to hunt out text (impossible with books, then possible with documents and filesystems, now possible with huge unstructured data sets), we can argue about whether or not its applications are desirable, harmful, or intrusive. Those who disagree with the Mashable piece above can, I think fairly, point out that if you're that concerned about people not judging you for the content of your photos, you shouldn't put them online.

What's clear, though, is that rising processing power has privacy implications, because it changes the practical limits on information processing. Tasks that could be done slowly by people (like going through all your photos) can now be done quickly by algorithms. This does not mean they should be regulated - but they should be discussed. People should know that the time-and-effort cost of gathering and analysing information is falling fast; and this should change how they approach their personal privacy, their roles as citizens, and even what they expect from products and services. A faster world is a less private world by default, in practice if not in theory, and thought about privacy and openness needs to take this into account.

601 words | ~3 min

The Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions have been awarded - and the judges were pretty harsh on the standard of evidence in the entries, as AdAge reports:

Said Mr. Jones: "It's incredible how ever-impressed people get by their own social-media statistics," noting that one company's 500 likes could be another's 5 million likes. They were down on the lack of context, too, provided for some of the metrics. For example, saying that website traffic jumped 20%, but not providing a time frame of when that happened, and how it was directly linked to the advertising campaign.

Ouch.

Attribution in advertising is going through a bit of an odd phase at the moment. There are a few reasons for this. Clients are asking for more proof that their money is being well spent. New media are introducing stacks of new metrics that need to be learned and tested. And the current interest in social and integrated campaigns mean there is a lot more to measure. Suddenly, measurement and attribution is the thing to be talking about.

One side-effect of this is that a lot of people who like to say smart things about advertising are trying to out-do each other in the conversation around metrics that matter. Social channels have become a gold-mine for these sorts of arguments. You'll have heard the kind of thing. Is sharing important? Do 'likes' matter? Should you build fans? Does online video get results? And so 0n, all of them with many contradictory answers.

Obviously, the only answer that matters is: 'It depends.'

Do fans matter? Well, it depends what you're trying to achieve. If you're aiming to convert people to a sale as fast as possible, maybe not (though maybe). If you're trying to build a regular audience for communication over the medium term, then maybe (though maybe not). Does online video get results? Well, it depends on the objective. Like all advertising - actually, like all spending. Whether something is worth paying for depends on what you want it for and what you'll get out of having it.

So far, so simple - but it's amazing how many conversations about this sort of thing seem to be motivated by people wanting to have a flat-packed smart answer, rather than saying, each time: 'I don't know yet. Let's take a step back. It depends.'

But back to attribution. In a world where marketers say 'it depends' more readily (good thing), they also need to say what it depends on more often. When your 'it depends' becomes an 'it's impossible to say', you're in trouble. Then you get desperate, and start attributing any positive result to your activity. Then the Cannes judges will shout at you.

So do your clients a favour and start testing hypotheses. Start keeping records - baselines of what people are saying about your brands or products; traffic to your sites; how fast your fans grow; sales; things you don't know if you'll need or not. Learn to watch for patterns.  Learn about correlations and how to measure significant change in trends. Understand variables, build ranges of estimates, plan for different outcomes. Count things. Tell stories with numbers.

That way, when someone asks you how well a campaign is expected to perform, you can avoid either an awkward silence or an impossible prediction. 'It depends' won't win you any blogging awards, but it'll mean you're giving better advice. Which is what you're here for, after all.