The Kaiser Edition

This is Bowser. Bowser belongs to Nintendo.

So this is the last post in the series “if I were a client today” and wanted to get online stuff right. Basically, over the course of the last couple of posts I’ve indicated that if I were a client today I would be so disappointed by the way agencies work that I would negate them all together. That I would build an internal team of internet specialists and outsource visual execution and design not to an agency but to a design company.

I would pull the whole thing into the organisation where real passion, love and fascination for the brand and products can be found. I would negate all of the agency lip service, the jibber-jabber, and the pathetic attempts to use digital to try and get their hands on the above-the-line budget – and I’d do it myself.

Yes, that’s what I’d do if I was a client today – and I’d be wrong.

It all sounds like it makes perfect sense, and for a client it probably is very tempting to go down this route. If the industry that was traditionally responsible for helping you do this sort of thing is so confused, so “old-fashioned” and so full of itself that it resorts to professional spin in the financial times to sell it’s own wears then you’d be forgiven for having a bash yourself.

The thing is, it doesn’t really work. You can own certain parts of the process and yes, you can develop a cracking strategy full of insight and cleverness but you’ll never, ever manage to keep it all fresh. You’ll never have the time to do it all properly and you’ll always be a slave to the organisational-chart, six sigma, legal and procurement policies of the company that you work for.

You need a little outside on the inside.

So, if I really were a client today I’d be looking for an agency that felt like it was on the inside and I’d probably fight for a joint venture with that agency. I’d transfer some of my own people and skills into the joint venture and expect the agency to do the same. If the advertising industry is incapable of creating what I need as a client then I need to help the industry (or an agency) create what I need. Of course, it’s totally bespoke – it belongs to me and to my brand and products, but that’s what I need and that’s what the advertising industry has been selling for years – but it’s selling a lie.

If I were a client today I would have to accept that bemoaning the state of the advertising industry and its poor performance on digital doesn’t actually help my brand. Standing in front of my agency saying “why aren’t we doing stuff like this?” is neither helpful nor is it responsible. My responsibility is to my brand, the company I work for and the people who buy my stuff and if I need an agency and the advertising industry then maybe, just maybe it’s in my own interests to help them out.

If I were a client today I would start rebuilding the advertising industry.

This is Shy Guy. He belongs to Nintendo.

The final list of agencies had been drawn up. Four in total – three of which you will all know and one you may of heard of, especially if you live and work in Canada. Four agencies that specialised in digital – which is useful when you’re planning to do something really rather special on the interent.

On a bright cold day, and one after, the other representatives of the agencies came to our offices and we took them through the brief. They all asked some questions, nodded in the right places and all agreed that the brief was robust and that they understood what we wanted to do.

And the brief was robust. It gave then enough insight into our business, set out goals and gave them enough room to think. We made it very clear that we were open, would support an agency and that this project had the support of the whole organisation. But more importantly we made it very clear what we were expectiting from them at pitch. We explained that we did not want to see any creative work, were not interested in the technology but that we really wanted to get an understanding for how the agency would develop ideas that would benefit the people who bought our products and have a positive impact an our business. We wanted them to excite us with ideas.

It’s interesting to see what happens when you deny a digital agency access to pretty pictures and talk of all things technical. Firstly it saves you having to listen to stuff like this:

1. This is what it could look like …
2. …and if you don’t like the look of that then here’s version 2
3. If you roll over this button this happens!
4. We’d design the front end in flash, use action scripts, java applicants etc to link up the the back end.
5. This is how the server configuration would look

You get the picture. But what is more interesting (and this is what sparked then series off) is that by taking this stuff away from them (and let’s face it, we’ve only taken away the executional side) three out of the four world class agencies had nothing to say. When faced with a client that says you have our support, be active, come to us and tell us what you would do – tell us what we should do – they had nothing to say at all. So they did what they did best and told us that “this is version 1 and if we didn’t like it we could look at version 2” and one agency talk for an 30 minutes about servers.

Only one agency (and it was the agency that went on to win the business and as far as I’m concerned they did a fantastic job) was able to pick up the brief, and run with it. They had loads of ideas each of which had both a business and a communication component. They were excited by what they had come up with. “Some of it”, they told us “may not even be possible” but most of it, as it turned out, was.

I was hugely disappointed with the three other agencies. I’d expected more. I’d hoped for the level of professionality, creativity and interestingness that you would expect from agencies with their kind of credentials. They had been good at being good at the briefing but when we had asked them to excite us, pull out all of the stops and come up with the best ideas possible they couldn’t because we had taken away a crucial frame of reference for them. We’d allowed them to be good at being good at the briefing but we’d taken away the formality of being good at being good at pitching.

If I were a client today I’d probably be disapointed and in the final post tomorrow, the final post of this series, I’ll tell you what I’d do about it.

It’s time for an Interlude in the “if I were a client today” series. A little one. I’d thought I’d share something with you that is really rather old (I was shown it around May 2001). It still fits into the series, in fact it fits into the final two posts really rather well (they’ll be up on Monday and Tuesday next week).

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Kr0T9R67kf4]

If you’re new to the series here’s a recap:

If I were a client today (Prelude: A client, their agency and the internet)
If I were a client today #1 (Setting up your internet department)
If I were a client today #2 (I wouldn’t use an agency)

This is Waluigi. He belongs to Nintendo.

This is the second post in the series “if I were a client today”. Yesterday I told you what we were like as a client, and how we set up the Internet department. As I mentioned yesterday the internet department at the company where I used to work us in the Product Research and Development department and that both the company and the core team were focused, excited and knew exactly what they wanted to do. If you haven’t read it (and the comments) you should, otherwise the stuff that follows makes little sense.

This series was sparked by a little story I heard and by this post by Ben. The basic premise of the series is that regardless of all the things we’ve learnt over the last six years and regardless of the advances in technology nothing has changed and that agencies still pay lip service to all things “digital”.

Ben doesn’t work for an agency, he’s a founding partner of a design company called “The Design Conspiracy” and his post helps us move on from where we left off yesterday. In it he says:

There’s a lot of talk about Web 2.0, to the extent that companies ring up and say, “Hello, can we have some Web 2.0 please?” We get asked a lot for “X, Y and Z and can it have a social networking element?”

Because of the way we set up our department, with a core team of who really knew what they were doing, we could never have made a call like that. This may surprise you but we did actually feel obliged to be the best client we possibly could. When we finally went to market to find an agency we wanted to be ready.

But what we didn’t know was that it would protect us during a two months phase where I slowly but surely lost my faith and my respect for an industry that had previously been my professional home. You see, Ben quotes a client, but you could take that query, turn it on its head and it would have been pretty much the kind of call we, as the client would get, from agencies.

As soon as the news broke that we were planning something and looking for an agency that’s when the trouble started.

Now Paul Colman used to be a client too, and way back in May 2006, whilst still at Yakult he covered this and put together a rather useful list for hopeless Business Development Directors. Read it.

If you’ve set up your department as I outlined yesterday and you’re completely clear about what you want to do than you probably have a pretty idea of the kind of agency you want to work for. We’d drawn up a list of about 10 possible agencies which we reduced to 4 before finally approaching them. That’s the kind of stuff clients do. Getting on that list is hard and if you’re going to cold call a client (have you read Paul’s list – no? read it) then you should at least be interesting and use language that the client can understand.

I think if we had not taken the time to sort ourselves out before looking at agencies, the “cold call period” would have become hell. It would have confused us, caused distraction within the team and probably bloated the agency list. As it was, we were, independent if each other, in a position to field the calls.

Not one agency asked the simple question, “is there a list and how do we get on it?” and when we asked the caller why we should consider working with them (it’s a simple question – differentiate yourself from the competition please) we received the following responses:

1. We have global reach – we are a member of network X, Y or Z
2. We’ve got the best technical team in the business (we’re good at programming stuff)
3. We did campaign X,Y or Z (99% of which was above the line)
4. We’re cool, bright, young smart and fast.
5. We’re good at flash (I’m not lying – 2 of the industry’s biggest names actually said this to me).
6. We have Mr (add name, rank and knighthood) on our board of directors.
7. Digital now makes up x% of are annual turnover – so you can see how seriously we take the online world
8. We can make your brand “top of mind”, with “sticky” components that will encourage “sneezers” to spread “idea viruses” thus creating “communication ripples” throughout a community that we would manage and control (you know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourself).
9. What’s your media spend?

There was more, but I’m sure you get the picture. Sound familiar? Not happening today? Well have a look at this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG-6ebJc93o&eurl=http://verge.ogilvy.co.uk/frontPage.do?nextDiaryId=1]

Nothing has changed. Web 2.0 is nothing more than an upgrade in terminology. You see, what was apparent back in 2001 was that most (in fact nearly all agencies) weren’t sure what they were going to do with digital. They didn’t understand what it was, what you could do with it, how you excite and engage people with it and, more importantly for them, they didn’t know how to make money out of it.

Now, if you’re a client and you’re not sure about these things, and you’re agency isn’t really sure about these things then you’re doomed.

We eventually invited 4 agencies to a pitch briefing (I should point out that the agency that eventually won the business was excellent) and I’ll cover what happened there tomorrow.

But…

If I were a client today I would, in terms of strategic services, completely negate an agency. I wouldn’t use one. Knowing what I know now, I would battle for an increase in headcount for my department pulling in some of the smarter people from the agency world. There are smart people out there working in agencies (both big and small) but the agencies they work for aren’t smart. If my department is focused, has clear goals and a team of extremely smart people that have access to fantastic content, and understand the medium then the only thing I need an agency for is execute how our customers interact with us visually. So I don’t really need an agency at all. I need a design consultancy.

Tomorrow, you’ll see why.

 
This is Toad. Toad belongs to Nintendo.

So this is the first part in the series “if I were a client today” and in it I’ll briefly touch on what it is like being a client, what we were like as a client and how the internet department came into being (I should point out that I really did use to be a client).

First up, I would like to set the scene for the company that I used to work for, the company that makes games and consoles. This is important as what follows builds upon the fact that we, as a client, were very clear about what we wanted to do, communicated it clearly and were open and genuinely excited about what we wanted to achieve together with an agency. We were not an easy client but we were a good client.

I joined the company in the first quarter of 2001 after two rounds of interviews and a final meeting with the European CEO. What impressed me most was how focused they were on what they needed for their team. They were looking for someone with a digital background, who understood the technology but also understood the dynamics of brands and communications. More importantly, although I really didn’t know it at the time, they were looking for someone who had experience in building what we called back then “communities”. Remember them? They had a plan and they were completely focused on who they needed to make that plan happen.

Back in 2001, nobody really knew where to put an Internet department. Sounds odd doesn’t it? I found out later that there had been plans to put the internet into the IT department, Marketing Department and Customer Service. In light of the way we look at the Internet from a marketing and brand communications perspective they eventually made a rather innovative, and in my opinion extremely important decision to put the Internet into the Product Research and Development Department.

The Product Research and Development Department was the focal point of the company. It was the secret department that had special security measures to get to it. We had all the new kit in there, all the new games and all of the prototypes for things to come. You didn’t come to visit us, we came to visit you. It also meant that, in terms of communications, we had better content. We had information and content that no one else within the organisation could get their hands on and because the internet department was buried into this we had information from our customers that we could feed directly into product development. Back then we called this “feed back” today it’s called a conversation.

The plan was quite simple. Product Research and Development would liaise with Marketing, sales and Customer Service to create a pan European platform. Product Research and Development were responsible for content, co-ordination of the six key European markets and a community/conversation component. Marketing were responsible for brand communications. The core team would work together, to build the ultimate platform for all of our “fans” (we called them fans and not consumers), across Europe.

As a team we were extremely focused and very clear about what we wanted to do. We quickly won over most of internal clients (you have clients you need to win within the company you work for), although it did take some time to get some of the European subsidiaries on board. We had the full backing of the European CEO, guaranteed support from our colleagues in the US and constant access to the legal department (and believe me that’s no easy thing). If we needed anything we got it. People were interested and excited by the project. Colleagues wanted to help and get involved.

When we had all this in place – we went to look for a partner to help make it happen. We went looking for an agency.

If I were a client today, and I was seriously thinking about getting it right online I would base it on the way we did it back then. I’d set up a core team of people who really know what they’re doing, and I’d put them either along side or in the Research and Development team. I’d be doing a lot of internal leg work and getting everybody excited about what it is we want to do. I’d do this all before we go looking for an agency.

Tomorrow, you’ll see why.

This is Wario. He belongs to Nintendo.

Good morning, hello. How are you all, well I hope? Good. Now I know I’m supposed to be in my autumn break but I heard a story over the weekend that made me very sad. It made me sad and very angry. I can’t really go into any details but it’s a story about a client, their agency and the Internet.

Some of you may know that I used to be a client. I used to look after online things for a rather large company that make games and consoles. I loved that company then and I love them still. And the story I heard reminded me of my time as a client all those years ago – which is why the story makes me so very sad and angry.

What I find so sad about this story is that it basically proves that nothing has changed at all. It proves that most agencies pay lip service to all things “digital” and it proves that they simply don’t understand the potential that the Internet can offer. It also means that they’re not doing their job properly.

So, over the course of the next couple of days I’ll posting a series of posts called “if I were a client today”, based on a large Pan-European online project from back then and the way we look at and use the Internet today.

If one person, from one agency, learns anything from this stuff, I’ll be happy.

I’m back. I’m angry. Good day to you.