Real-Time Marketing

I was asked to give a talk earlier this year on Real-Time Marketing. It is definitely a valid concern for many marketers, but I think it is more of a characteristic of the space rather than something to really strategize around. That said, it is an important consideration and can be cut up into many frames of thinking.

Real-Time Marketing from Bea Atienza

State of the Agency Market

"Of the world's five largest digital networks, only one is owned by an established agency company: No. 5 Wunderman, owned by WPP.
IBM Corp.'s IBM Interactive Experience ranks as the biggest digital network, followed by Deloitte Consulting's Deloitte Digital, Accenture's Accenture Interactive and Alliance Data Systems Corp.'s Epsilon."

via AdAge

mad life crosses my life

Mad Men hasn't always painted an accurate picture of the agency world. Of course that isn't all the show is about. But once in awhile they reference something that is poignantly true to ad life.

I've lagged in the last year and a half and am only now catching up on Seasons 6. Car brands have been a focus since the fifth season, and an industry tennet was established - that you aren't a bona fide ad shop until you have a car brand. When they launched anew in season five, Sterling Cooper Draper Price struggled to build a stable client roster. Finding a car brand seemed to be a quick strategy to establishing their foothold on Madison Avenue. They are given the opportunity to pitch for Jaguar and go to rather extreme lengths to secure the account. They end up (minor spoiler) retiring them this season and are almost immediately given the opportunity to go after a massive and truly iconic American car brand - Chevy.

In Episode 6.7 Don and his team walk through the GM offices ready to present work. In that moment Don's TV life crosses my advertising life squarely. There are heritage brands that are woven into our industry's heritage and I'm proud to have had my fingertips on one baton even just for awhile. 

(Season Seven paints a painfully brusque, goonish picture of the clients, which is I'm sure an exaggeration, but it makes for painfully good TV. And private jokes with agency colleagues. JUST KIDDING. Because they don't watch Mad Men. Joke. Joke. Joke.)  

The next marketing supercontinent

The Pangea Theory tells us that all land used to be consolidated in one giant mass. Over centuries different pieces broke off and shifted into what are now the disparate continents. Some scientists believe that in time all land could join back up and form a sort of Pangea 2.0, or supercontinent.

The same trend seems to be happening in advertising.

As media behavior evolved into disparate channels so did agency offerings - digital, CRM, activation, PR disbundled from traditional creative and were, in many multinational cases, given their own brand or company names. But as clients discovered new agencies in each discipline they began to split billings and revenues.

This has become a critical issue for mainstream agencies, as marketing budgets are slowly but surely shifting to digital and other non-traditional channels. In certain categories (B2B ones for example) it is possible to skip TV altogether and focus completely on digital and PR. As non-traditional momentum grows, agencies must watch the back door and ensure that budgets are secure even if priorities shift out of ATL channels.

The answer seems to be the industry's latest buzzword: Integration. 

This idea is not new. Media agencies and marketing plans have been "360" for several decades. Our discipline itself is often called Integrated Marketing Communications. Several marketing books, including one I recently revisited, talked about Integration of mainstream advertising with digital as early as in 2003. Yet in the Philippines and even across Asia, silos are still the norm.

It seems inevitable that agency offerings will shift to accommodate the entire consumer journey in order to retain end-to-end client business. Is the next wave of ad agency organizational development going to lead us to Marketing Pangea 2.0?

As this happens agencies must figure out as a starting point -What exactly must be integrated?

Three potential models:

• PEOPLE:  Everybody in the agency (planning, account, creative) knows enough about each discipline to be able to do the work for any channel.
  My take: Not realistic - are there enough people like this to fill an agency?
• PROCESS:  Different disciplines, different specialists, who work all together, all the time, on every project, to collaboratively create complementary pieces of the final output.
  My take: Maybe not the most efficient model.
• PRODUCT:  May be led by any discipline but output represents a holistic consumer experience, ideally moving beyond "same idea across touchpoints" to pre-idea vector planning.
  My take: My preference. Probably because I'm specialist-biased. More on this in another entry because it would take an entire other entry.

It will be exciting to track these developments and see what exactly the advertising integrated supercontinent will shape up to become. The game is changing and the agency that figures this out first could end up winner of the Integration land rush. And who's to say this won't end up a non-traditional agency?

Whose line is it anyway?

Turns out, the Line belongs to the CFO.

The ad industry still refers to media as "above-" or "below-the-line". But what are these terms based on? Is it media types, with certain channels forever tagged as "above" and others "below"? Or is it based on media usage, delineating between which channels are "traditional" and "non-traditional"?

It turns out that the origin of the advertising "line" belongs to finance, and separates the services that generated profit from those given away for free. The birth of advertising agencies began with media agencies that made huge commissions on placement buys. In time they started offering creative services to assist clients in coming up with content to fill up their bought ad space. The commissions used to be so substantial that agencies eventually gave away an entire slew of support services - PR, Direct marketing, etc. (Source: "The Future of Advertising". Joe Cappo. 2003.) 

Evolution of the line... Where did it go?

It was a surprise to discover this piece of advertising history as the industry seems to have arrived at a shared understanding of the terms, using them to refer to traditional or non-traditional media. But the profitability angle sheds light on why those characterized as "below-the-line" media have carried a stigma for being less important, more by-the-way and more tactical. The result has been the continued prioritization of ATL in the development process, almost always strategized and conceptualized before BTL guys ever get a crack at a client brief. (As if business problems are so single-minded that only one vector should represent the lion's share of a marketing solution.) As it often happens for us in digital, briefings are often cascades of the thinking and ideation that ATL guys have already done. The first thing that is developed is the TV spot, after which the "big idea" can be carried over into other mediums.

Developing campaigns and starting with an ATL-geared approach may have been all right in the mass media age where the single-minded ad message was enough to drive any and all campaigns. But with the fragmentation of viewers and proliferation of channels, messages (while still very, very important) are no longer enough to drive good advertising. Additional thinking must be done to figure out the roles channels play vs. each other so that they can be most relevant in a brand or advertising ecosystem.

Today people say marketing must be "through the line", which is perhaps correct as agencies now collect fees on all services rendered. But maybe the line has completely disappeared, not in its original sense of fees and profit but based on the more recent need to have to call out which media is the most traditional or essential. What should matter is to be able to understand how channels mix, the roles they play complementary to each other, and how to use and strategize the use of each medium in a context-relevant way.

Madison moment

It was a hot summer afternoon and I was excited just by being in New York for the first time. The city has this buzzy energy that was reverberating through me - from the noisy subway underground, the crowded newsstands and halal stalls on every corner, the busy people crossing as soon as the last car had passed even before the light turned green.

I found myself on Madison Avenue, famed as the birthplace of the modern ad agency. It was disappointing to discover that none of the big agencies hold office there anymore, but walking the street still gave me a little thrill.

I noticed a pair walking toward me, he in a sharp navy suit and hornrimmed glasses, her hair coiffed in a wavy updo matching her ruby red lips. Their fifties garb was out of place but strikingly attractive. He reached out and handed me a calling card that with a name that made me gasp: Sterling Cooper. "Season 2," he said.

How they could have guessed that a random Asian chick was not only a mad woman herself, but a Mad Men devotee, is beyond me. That one moment cemented my day-old love for New York, the first of many awesome surprises that the city has given me. But it was a demonstration of marketing brilliance - right context, right message, right experience. I still carry the card with me, as a reminder me of how our work can potentially excite people, and how our creative process still excites me.

It is an honor just to be nominated!

We found out today that MRM Manila has been awarded Philippines Digital Agency of the Year by Campaign Asia, already identified as GOLD winner from the first round of judging. AWESOMESAUCE!!!!! It is always awesome to win agency-wide awards because it acknowledges and celebrates the team spirit that drives MRM. It wasn't always like this but we have come a long way in two+ years and it is rewarding to see the fruits of the company we have built.

And as if that weren't enough, the individuals we entered in the awards were all shortlisted!

• Donald Lim is shortlisted for Agency Head of the Year
• Budjette Tan is shortlisted for Creative of the Year
• Me! Bea Atienza is shortlisted for Account Person of the Year  

This is amazeballs. Winners will be announced on December 10, but it is enough for me that our agency won and that all of us were even put on this list!

extracurricular activities

The case for continuing education


Our whole team is studying!
Beau, our Strategic Planner, is enrolled in Gamification on Coursera.com,
El, our associate, is reviewing Idea crafting on Skillshare.com, and 
I've just started graduate studies at The New School. 

Given our insane work schedules and frequent overtime, actually going back to school even just for one course at a time would be impossible. But because we're able to take classes virtually at the time and place of our choosing, we can keep studying.

I get a dorky kick out of how we're digital practitioners studying in such a digital way, but it really is exciting that it is now easier than ever to keep learning about practically any topic through self-initiated research and even formal study.

Being digital means constantly refreshing.

Ongoing learning is something I feel really strongly about, especially in the service of gaining fuel that will help us master our craft. And for people like me, there is joy even in the learning process alone :)

Throughout my career, connectivity helped me deepen my understanding of digital. Reading blogs and Twitter feeds keep me updated about marketing and tech developments. Online classes have allowed me to explore topics in-depth – HTML programming in 2008 to understand the building blocks of the web (on Sessions.edu), and a Certificate in Digital Media Marketing at New York University (partly in person and partly online) that exposed me to digital mechanics and "How"s of marketing in this space.

Now that I have people working with me on our digital team, I'm glad I can infuse their work paths with this same value. As strategic planners, we need to have a handle on new technologies and a working understanding of new behaviors created as a result of interaction in this space.

Digital is completely new and thus requires some amount of study and critical thinking - could be informal, could be at a school, but serious digital practitioners need to put the time in to understanding the space. And as things are constantly changing, we must study, re-tool and re-fresh continuously.

The Client-Agency relationship

All AEs have to nego with clients which can get a little... difficult.
This video shows a typical Client-Agency exchange, but real-world situations. How I wish...



Original post here.