Iterative marketing and ecosystems

The annual festival of creativity is an indicator for the state of the global economy and the state of marketing communications

The annual Cannes festival of creativity is a significant indicator for two issues that concern us all: the state of the global economy; and the state of the marketing communications business.

On the first metric, the global economy has bounced back. The 2011 awards contests received a record number of entries and the number of registered delegates was almost 9,500, close to the all-time high of 10,000 in 2008.

Seminars were packed. You had to get there early for Google, or you could forget about seeing Eric Schmidt. Latecomers would be in the balcony of the overflow theatre watching the live video feed.

But what about the marketing communications business? The top creative awards went to an interesting mix of traditional advertising from ‘new’ markets, such as Romania, China and South Africa; and innovative, technology-driven work from established markets including the US and Korea. And that’s a pretty fair reflection of the business today.

But behind – and beyond – the parties and the prizes, what was being talked about and what did we all learn?

Last year compared with this year

The talk in Cannes in 2010 was all about the ‘what’. What is the industry doing? What is the role of brands? And, most of all, what should companies stand for?

This year was all about the ‘how’. In an interconnected, interactive, collaborative, mobile world, the key challenge is how to engage with consumers in a creative and original way.

Essentially we heard three schools of thought.

1 The intuitive approach

Fortunately, there are still some renegade geniuses to remind us that creativity is unpredictable and does not arrive through logical distillation of facts.

John Hegarty gave his great speech about zagging when others zig, illustrated by famous BBH TV commercials. Everyone else plays the full 30 seconds – or the 90-second directors’ cut, or the three-minute video explanation of why the idea is creative. Hegarty plays only the first six or seven seconds, because everyone immediately recognises and remembers them. Arrogant, but awesome.

Chuck Porter and his team from Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB) talked about ‘method advertising’. Like Stanislavsky’s ‘method acting’, this means getting fully into character by using the products and brands you’re working on, before allowing your intuition to create stories about them.

CPB walked the talk by throwing out all their Macs when they won the Microsoft account. The FedEx-style order-tracking system they developed for Domino’s pizza has to be one of the greatest creative uses of technology, and you have the feeling it probably didn’t come out of a focus group.

2 The process-driven approach

Ogilvy invited Sir Ken Robinson, an author of several books, to give a commemorative lecture to mark David Ogilvy’s centenary.

Robinson defines creativity as ‘the process of having original ideas that have value’. If you think creativity is a process, forget BBH and CPB, Ogilvy is the agency for you.

Ogilvy, like many WPP companies, has bet big on data. The CEOs of large corporate clients keep their jobs by predicting their quarterly earnings accurately, which means they hate uncertainty. Data appeals, as it reduces uncertainty.

Also, data is now far more widely and deeply available than ever before, thanks to the internet. It’s a natural preserve of the media companies that control most of the cash flow in the marketing communications industry (such as Universal McCann and its clients, which devoted its seminar to glorifying data).

The problem is that many marketing companies still use data reactively. They look at what the consumer did last month, or last year, to predict what they will do next. The problem is not just that things move faster today – although, of course, they do – but that the nature of data has changed. Traditional research is simply being sidelined. Today’s metrics are YouTube views and Facebook ‘Likes’.

3 The iterative approach

Of all the topics raised at Cannes 2011, this was the big one. For ‘iterative’ read: carry on until you get it right, and then make it better. And it profoundly impacts the nature of marketing creativity today.

The artists of the European Renaissance instigated a new view of the world: a world of perfectly composed stasis, seen from a defined and unmoving perspective. Jazz, cubism and other movements in the fine arts moved this on many years ago, but advertising and data stayed put.

‘Snapshot’ research fixed the consumer in a point of time, allowing advertisers the time to craft a perfect message. Remember when it routinely took a year to create a new campaign? A lot of people would be more comfortable if our industry still worked this way, but it doesn’t.

Creativity – indeed, marketing itself – is now iterative, and many of the best seminar speeches discussed this. Jonah Lehrer put it succinctly: the recipe for success today is to ‘fail fast and fix it’.

Some people view this as a source of concern. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, feels that the industry is ‘like a deer in the headlights’, not knowing where the next trend will be. He is buying time by doing away with quarterly results announcements (hooray!) and hedging bets by shifting the marketing balance from ‘one-Unileverglobal’, to more local activity. Keith Weed, his CMO, said ‘we want to be the most local of the global players’, but his acknowledgement of ‘the challenges of managing complexity’ was refreshingly candid.

Some people sit on the fence: the 70/20/10 model seems to be the new norm, where 70% of the marketing budget goes to what you know all about, 20% goes to promising new initiatives, and 10% is devoted to things you know nothing about, but which sound interesting and trendy. Amazing and revealing to hear more than one of the world’s leading marketers confess to this.

Other people were more positive. Malcolm Gladwell put forward the view that the world belongs to the ‘tweakers’. This means not only the Chinese, adapting and exploiting western ideas, but also people such as Steve Jobs, adapting and modifying the PC, and the inventors of Google improving on the early search engines like Alta Vista.

Coca-Cola’s concept of ‘liquid and linked creativity’, discussed elsewhere in this issue (page 35), makes the same point from a different perspective.

For example, Google tried its advertising on YouTube before risking it on television in the Super Bowl. CEO Eric Schmidt said: ‘Successful business models are iterative… if we want to change our website, we test it on 10% of users. When we make a change, we leave 10% of users with the old version.’

it’s all about platforms – or is it?

If marketing is iterative, then the future belongs to the flexible platforms. Of course, it helps if you own the platform. In that case, you let others do the work while you collect the money – as Facebook does with Zynga, another frequently quoted example.

To reference Schmidt again: Facebook, Apple, Amazon and, of course, Google are all platforms. So is Unilever’s ice-cream vending machine that recognises smiles and starts a relationship with consumers. (Thanks to SapientNitro for that one.)

And so too is Nike. Bob Greenberg of R/GA explained how he had helped the company to move beyond the Nike + platform to a ‘functional ecosystem’. This was done by incorporating GPS into the kit, so runners know where their friends actually are, not simply that they are getting fit.

If you really want to know where our business is going, the best idea is usually to pitch up and listen to Bob. And this year, again, his speech was the best. It’s a shame that he hasn’t agreed for it to be posted on the Cannes Lions website, as most speakers have.

Basically, as Bob sees it, the world of marketing communications first moved from horizontal integration (global campaigns) to vertical integration (co-ordinated campaigns) and is now about to move forward again, to functional integration.

Essentially, this means moving from platforms – already yesterday, for Bob, just when the rest of us had started to work them out – to ecosystems, where product, brand, company, technology and consumer are all crucial participants. As agencies become skilled in technology as well as creativity, they will become more than agencies – they will become business consultants.

Their role will be to help marketing companies develop brands that ‘create value for consumers, like Google; rather than simply enjoyment, like Coca-Cola’ (his words, not mine).

So, circle back for a moment: enjoyment comes and goes, but value continuously develops. In today’s marketing, there is no ‘establishment’. The future belongs to the people who keep moving.

Julian Boulding is president of thenetworkone.

[email protected]

In an interactive, mobile world, the challenge is how to engage with consumers in a creative way If marketing is iterative, the future belongs to flexible platforms. Of course, it helps if you own the platform