11/22/2010 08:04:05 AM 
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A recent post on Influx about agency labs generated a lot of conversation and debate, so it’s only fair that I sum up the discussion and try to make sense of it.
At its heart it’s all about innovation in agency land and who takes responsibility for it.
There were a number of comments highlighting the danger of agency skunk works that are isolated from their main units and can often be ineffective.
Bud Caddell summed these thoughts up nicely.
“Agencies don't need labs. Agencies need to become labs. From an evolutionary biology perspective, the agency ecosystem is in turbulence, and these organisms (the agencies) need to adapt as quickly as possible to achieve fitness in the new landscape. While having a lab may seem to satisfy that condition - by integrating mutation, crossover, and ultimately novelty into the larger organism, the challenge of spreading the lab's practices and success to the larger organization is a huge hurdle - one that organizations almost always fail at.”
However, there were a couple of thoughts that were supportive of labs for different reasons.
Matt Albiniak the justification for labs was based on the need for deep technological understanding.
“Unfortunately, it's rare to find people that understand guts of an API spec and can apply that to a brand identity, or map it consumer behavior. Labs are absolutely necessary. They always have been. They've just never worked because not everyone knows how to share the information in meaningful and useful ways. I've seen a couple agencies figure it out, but it's mostly due to finding those rare people that a) understand the technology and b) have the people skills to share it.”
For Robin Lanahan the need for a lab was based on the lack of bandwidth and dedication to the topic.
“The big agencies have big clients and big daily challenges and are often housed in big spaces not providing the right conditions for innovation. Having worked in the agencies that acted like labs in the early days (Wieden and Crispin), I know it's possible. But in this day, commitment to innovation requires resources and people that can be dedicated.”
Mel Exon of BBH Labs took on the challenge of the lack of influence and accountability directly.
The difference with Labs is that experimentation and the transfer of learning IS the day job, it's all we do. The role of Labs here boils down to two things, I think - 1. Reducing complexity (new stuff can look and feel labyrinthine at the outset, it helps to have a few scouts) and 2. Accelerating the transfer of knowledge (to extend the metaphor, the scouts need to carry a ball of wool). What this hopefully sheds light on is the fact that we have enough fluidity and external focus to bring new approaches to bear, but that our relationship with the rest of the agency is a close, symbiotic one. To be successful, it has to be.
Based on these comments and the debate overall, it’s clear what agencies need to do.
No one is debating the need for innovation; it seems like a perquisite for the times, the only debate is how it’s done.
To embrace innovation, agencies need to do three things
1. Encourage and incentivize their employees to think and be innovative. This will need to be defined and made clear, but if breakthrough is the requirement, everyone needs to step up and take responsibility to help make it happen.
2. Hire technologists and add them to creative teams. No one can understand and the keep up with the complexities of evolving technology as a night job. There’s a need for someone who’s dedicated to doing this full time. This isn’t about someone who understands how to design and create user-experiences digitally, but a person who knows how an API or what’s inside the guts of a phone. Big digital agencies have them, their more traditional counterparts, don’t.
3. Set up a lab. These can scale from employees who are given a small % of their time to be the “lab” to a fully dedicated unit. Obviously, these options have different investment levels. The important thing about a “lab” is that it has a mission which is all about thinking two steps ahead of everyone else and it transfers this knowledge effectively throughout the agency.
If anyone is interested in turning this discussion into a live debate- maybe one evening in NYC with beers, etc- please let me know...
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/21/2010 11:23:51 AM
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/21/2010 10:06:18 AM
If you take the big theme in corporate boardrooms- ROI, add onto it the possibility of brilliant data viz and then think about the iPad as the device of choice for high flying CMOs, with this you have to think that the Excel spreadsheet is going the way of the dodo as a measurement tool and interface,
Instead you are going to have a real-time live feed that looks glorious and tells you everything you need to to know at a touch of a button. There will be no need to wait for this week's numbers, the hourly numbers will be right in front of you and not only that, they will be correlated and comparable with your media investments, your daily brand performance and your social media stats.
Data is the new gold and those who find ways to make it more user-friendly and relevant are going to be onto something big.
Everyone knows the social media measurement industry has expanded to the point where there are now a variety of options and choice, further evidence of the maturity of this business is that we are now seeing services develop for specific verticals.
One nice example, comes from Next Big Sound, you can see their key dashboard visuals at the top of this post.
They describe what they do as follows:
We believe in the power of data to transform the music industry.
The listening, discovery, and purchase decisions of millions of consumers has moved online and the pace of this transition is only accelerating.
Next Big Sound provides a centralized place to monitor all the behavior and activity happening for artists both online and off.
This is just an example that shows one piece of the puzzle heading down a very vertical avenue. We are likely to see more of this because industries will want to benchmark their performance against category rivals.
We are still a long ways from the single real-time dashboard, but when this arrives, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens. Marketing teams are going to have the data to make informed decisions like never before and this new future offers both promise and peril for those in the communication business, depending on how clients to choose to use it.
There's going to be a real broad need for disciplined data teaching, learning and transfer of best practices with clients and inside communication agencies.
Data Analytics will have to move from the back office to the front of the house.
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/21/2010 08:47:34 AM
Peter Meholz of Adaptive Path wrote a blog post a couple of days back which slammed agencies for operating a business devoid of user understanding. It contained so many quotable gems that it was impossible to ignore and and of course, generated a flurry of coverage on blogs and Twitter.
The gems included:
"When criticizing ad agencies, you have to begin at the core — advertising, as it is widely practiced, is an inherently unethical and, frankly, poisonous endeavor that sees people as sheep to be manipulated, that vaunts style over substance, and deems success to be winning awards."
"Such poor treatment of staff is a big part of the reason that ad agencies end up dissatisfying their clients. Clients are sold a shiny flashy bill of goods by slick senior folks who are then never to be seen again. In their place are squads of junior and mid-level designers, working across multiple projects, with little chance to reflect and improve their skills."
"One thing I haven’t yet touched on is the legacy ad agency practice where the art director and copywriter are the voices that matter, and the rest of the team exists to serve their bidding. This might be fine in communications work, but in user experience, where utility is king, this means that the people who best understand user engagement are often the least empowered to do anything about it, while those who have little true understanding of the medium are put in charge. In user experience, design teams need to recognize that great ideas can come from anywhere, and are not just the purview of a creative director."
I found Peter's comments a little strong and somewhat wide of the mark especially in our case, we've had frequent conversations with Adaptive Path about working together and ended up doing a considerable amount of work on user understanding with one of the founders of the company.
Anyway, here's was the response I wrote as a comment on Peter's blog.
These are confusing times.
It's harder than ever to define terms like, "user", "consumer", "creative" and "agency".
In the chaos of this confusion, it's very easy to be convinced that the world is bi-polar with the user advocates and deep experience creators at one end and the traditional "Mad Av" ad creative teams at the other..
This polarized world is fast becoming a dated concept, the smartest agencies get that this isn't a zero sum game with one winner, but instead the goal is often for a hybrid "best in breed" approach.
User understanding is vital and important, but it's just the start of a conversation on top of which creative flair has to be added. The marriage of deep user understanding with leading edge creative talent is for now and the future, but the switch isn't going to flip over just like that.
There will be a gradual shift- television and television advertising hasn’t and isn’t going away- in-fact- various research studies confirm that both TV viewing (on all formats) and appreciation of television advertising are on the increase.
Without advertising- who is going to discover the great user experiences? As any app developer will tell you, it's hard to get discovered, even if you have a great experience.
Advertising in some form will be required to capture people's imaginations and attention. What form it takes will change, but the audio-visual message has tremendous power- despite the digital revolution- no communication format in the digital world has ever come close and clients know it.
Ad agencies as the pure entities you’ve defined- might die out, but this is unlikely as their skills will still be required, but perhaps to a lesser degree than we see today.
However, you have to consider giant agency holding companies are already firmly playing in the digital experience field. At the top, they are smart enough to know where the world is heading and they are covering their bases. Quite simply, they have enough people who “get it”.
In summary, the best ad agencies out there embrace or will soon embrace the “hybrid” model where multiple skill sets create a multitude of different, but relevant experiences for users- some of these will feel like advertising and others more like deep user experiences.
Great user communication and connection is now and will be all doing about both, not substituting one for the other.
11/15/2010 08:42:17 AM (1)
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Jim Wexler of Brand Games, one of the speakers at our "Meet the Makers" event, recently pointed me to an interesting idea of of the University of Utrecht called Game Seeds. Basically, it's a way to inspire game designers to think differently about game design by forcing them to think about the actions of the character first, rather than the user.
As they explain..
"Game design usually starts off by defining the actions of the player(s). Christophe Berg at Metagama wondered if the reverse would be possible, and created a new and innovative game where the design of the characters (and their behaviour patterns) is the first step.
The result is a playful card game that confronts players with certain constraints (e.g. they don’t create a character from scratch) in order to foster their creativity, and pushing them out of their comfort zone by having to make do with the given elements.
Each Game Seeds card contains attributes and an action verb. By choosing some actions, the players start to define their characters behaviour… and by doing so create the range of actions that would be available to the end-user."
It's another reference to the importance of character in the creation of compelling content, a topic both Frank Rose and Gary Hirsch will be talking about at Influx's "Meet the Makers" (a "lab for a day") taking place at Milk Studios in NYC on December 3rd.
Information about the event can be found here.
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/12/2024 01:40:43 PM (1)
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In a recent interview for NPR, Mr. Eno gave an interesting example of how he inspires the creativity of others. An example of his creative brief and how an illustration of how "rules" and "boundaries" create better work than blank sheets of paper.
"I imagine that we are living 20 years from now or 50 years from now and we're reading a review. I often write the review of a concert that we're supposed to have seen or has happened where we've seen 25 North African Arabic musicians who have a Japanese bandleader. And they're playing a new kind of music called neagata(ph) machine techno, which appeared in the suburbs of Tokyo in the year 2020. And then I make a description of what that music is like and then we try to make it."
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/12/2024 10:21:01 AM
While planners are tasked with spending a lot of time in the field understanding consumers, they might need to spend a little more time studying the psyches of the creative people they have to work with.
Recently, Cornell University did a study on narcissists and creativity and they found a couple of really interesting findings.
1. Their (that's the narcissists) selling is often better than their ideas- they are so passionate and convincing that they can sell people on ideas, but the researchers found that their ideas weren't really any better than the non-narcissists.
2. They create an energy field that generates better work. When the researchers put the narcissists into groups and forced them to work with others, they helped make everyone better. However, they warned that putting too many in a group can be dangerous!
So-creative departments really do need a few of them, to sell those ideas to clients and to help others raise their game.
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/12/2024 12:33:33 AM
These are reactions to a radical new book design from Visual Editions, a UK based publisher with a new take on the reading experience. The book is "Tree of Codes" and it's author Jonathan Safran Foer's experiment to cut-in, using die-cuts to his favorite book, "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schultz.
An amazing company, Die Keure in Belgium made it happen.
Here's a page from the book.
11/11/2024 02:24:32 PM
Restaurant experiences can be amazing, but you are often just one of quite a few "covers" being served that night, you have very little connection and feedback from the chef and you are distanced and not interacting with any of the other guests.
As people increasingly crave special and unique experiences, there are pioneers looking for new ways to deliver these experience and transcend the typical restaurant experience.
Nuno Mendes and Clairse Faira at The Loft Project in London are two such pioneers who invite leading up and coming chefs to cook in an intimate setting and have their guests seated at a single communal table.
Obviously, there are are tremendous number of ways in to providing new experiences for dinners, Outstanding in the Field, is another great example. Restaurants should think carefully about how they might twist the familiar into something unexpected and fresh, their audience is looking out for it.
Via We Heart
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/10/2024 09:15:18 AM
Urban Outfitters is a very disciplined brand, that's stuck to what it does well and weathered the storm that's knocked many a retailer, backwards.
They know who they are, who their audience is and make sure they are always in touch.
The image above shows the site of a new store being developed by UO, interestingly it's not across the road from a college campus, but in one of the most prestigious shopping streets in the world, New York's 5th Avenue.
This is further confirmation that the brand has truly arrived as a retail powerhouse.
What they plan for the store remains to be seen, but you can imagine a flagship concept being very different from regular stores, with a lot more opportunity for creative interaction.
Posted by Ed Cotton