Two specific topics came up again and again - what is our planning currency, and what is our measurement currency? Clearly better business cases and sharper understanding of ROI is getting more important. Everybody talked about that. Not one of the attendees put a hand up to ’spending more’ in 2009. In fact, it’s how to spend less, but get more. And this is where we need to think more clearly as an industry on what we do and how we do it, in order to decide and price our value. I worry that we measure ourselves often on how we do things rather than the absolute value of what we do. (we delivered the project on time - great. But what was it for, who was it for, why is it good, how many consumers does it influence, does it change behaviour?

if the role of marketing is to determine the market the brand will compete in and to manage the incremental growth or defence of share - what does the interactive activity do to support that? Ask yourselves the question. Let me know what you think.

I recall a few years back working with one interactive media course at a well known college helping introduce a module on information architecture. We also ran a competition where we gave students a tin of Quality Street (my agency at the time had the account) and setting a task to present an interactive competition for consumers about the brand. It was good fun, and perhaps not all that well thought out as a ‘brief for the nation’, but it remains a great example of legitimate relationship between the commercial and academic worlds to produce a result meaningful to both.

They wanted to know what skills we needed, and we wanted to know what they were teaching students who had expressed a sufficient interest in multimedia. I wonder if we have cracked this sufficiently in our sector. We all bleat about skills shortages, and about how there aren’t enough experienced people around. Let’s do something about that. Write to your MP. Write to me. Get involved. Stop complaining. Start doing.

And tell us if you feel your new employees can spell as well as code Silverlight.

The answer lies somewhere in the combination of ‘advertising’ thinking - building the case for a brand based on values and communicating those values through a series of tightly controlled advertisements to a theoretically specific audience - and ‘utility’ thinking - where you create a series of environments that provide functionality that helps the consumer in some way, through experiencing the context of the brand and what it stands for. For those of you who have been involved in interactive experience for many years, you may think isn’t that what we’ve been doing? Indeed it is, but now the ad people are involved, interaction has been rebranded ‘brand utility’. Neat, huh?

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One small problem though, is that it’s not quite so easy to create relevant and useful brand utility as the video above demonstrates. Like many terms of trend, it’s great to talk about, hard to do. I get the privileged view of both advertiser and web developer, as my organisation holds both ends of the stick. (Or both ends of the candle, depending on your point of view!)

Measurement is a good baseline for discussion - what it’s for,  who is it for, why in earth would anyone want to spend even a nanosecond doing whatever it is you’ve dreamed up - these are good things to set objectives around. Technology is another. Nothing works if you can’t make it happen, no matter what the idea is, and the role of the technologist is oft underplayed and undervalued by the agencies seeping into the discussion through what one Client recently described to me as the digital land grab.

Tech people are just as important as creative people in the new world. They should not be treated as production slaves, althoug it’s all too easy to let that happen. A case in point - not many big agencies (by which I mean the ones who would prefer to be making TV commercials) at the Future of Web Apps event recently, I noticed. Rachel from my place went, and she liked it so much she wrote about it on the participation marketing blog. Another case in point - the five nomination we’ve got for the BIMA awards all had technology at their heart, were complex tech projects as well as insightful and clever ideas with top results. This tech centricity is to be celebrated. I wonder how many agency people really get that.

I was prompted by the post below to remind you that we still need to think about the skills sets across the board in our industry. Even tougher economic conditions do not mean that suddenly, the skills shortage will miraculously disappear. We need more clever people who can invent, manage, develop, code and articulate the value of what all our businesses do. We need to make sure that the experiences gained in our companies provide better quality opinion and capability for the next project. We continue to need leadership and a sense of belonging to an industry that is still, let’s not forget, around ten years old. Simply being digital doesn’t mean you’re good. You have to have benchmarks as well as belief. Many of the multinationals will train their talent over time with the ‘learnings’ (as they say in Unilever world) you are bringing to bear now. Because whilst consumers have adopted digital behaviours, the world of marketing remains unclear about how best to organise to deliver the promise of digital.

Who has the right answers? That depends on who you were before you thought digital was important. There’s an old Irish joke about directions which goes something like ‘to get there, I wouldn’t be starting from here’. If you were a direct marketer, you claim it’s all about results and responses and contact strategies and accountability, and the web makes it easier to do all that. The reality is that it actually makes it rather harder since it exposes (on occasion) the minimal effectiveness of previous campaigns, and (on occasion) the difficulty of finding a common measurement metric across all areas of the marketing mix.  These two things may be, unsurprisingly, related.

Different agencies claim to have the answers. We obviously, have them all at mrm worldwide :-)  but credit is due to the efforts clients that actually need business results have made in pulling together a better balance of investment between search, display, and affiliates for example. There is a structural problem in the industry, in that the supply chain has pulled media planning and creative planning apart. Ironically, the digital marketing community is pushing hardest for that bridge to be crossed as everyone with a degree of experience understands that better work comes about as a result, in online campaigns at least. This is a specific detail that, in ‘normal digital’ campaign working, the advice of experts is sought, and requires specialism to deliver.

Where is it all going? I look forward to seeing the BIMA awards results, which I am sure some of the readers of this blog were busily putting to bed over the weekend. I do applaud the efforts to reshape these awards to celebrate the complexity of what we do, since it is enormously complex to make digital normal. And sometimes, we need to celebrate the work that isn’t ordinary along the way.

As a control test, I searched for ‘minimise-me’, MRM Worldwide UK’s latest work for Windows Live Messenger, and the URL www.minimise-me.com is number 1 link, as indeed are all the following links (on Google). I was amazed to find that minimise-me and the personalisable emoticons dominated the top 100 search listings - literally, 90+ of the top 100.

Both these campaigns broke around the same time, with probably very different budgets and indeed objectives. If getting online ‘buzz’ was an objective for both campaigns (quite possible), I’d have to say Windows Live Messenger is winning by a country mile. You can see pictures at www.participationmarketing.co.uk. So which is the more clever campaign?

It’s relevant to the BIMA community since the space is shaping up into a very interesting landscape from an advertising, monetisation and application development perspective, and BIMA members (likely to have some knowledge here) are well placed to benefit.

We make online advertising (in fact a lot of online advertising as Interpublic Group’s largest digital agency here in the UK, as I was reminded recently) in order to deliver as many messages as we can to targeted audiences to get them to remember the brand name or to click on to be more engaged and buy something.

We also develop communities, often by association with passions, football, tennis, online gaming, web developers, no less, and this is where the world of social computing is so challenging. Which is better - to run a campaign of x impressions that gets 0.02 click through (say 300 people) or to write a widget that is downloaded by 300 people. The answer is probably both are relevant, but do a different job. If the end game is engagement, time spent with the brand, or memorability, what’s your vote?

Think about it. Write about it. It’s a good debate.

I’m far more interested in the Forrester comment reflecting the change in consumer behaviour. The digital officers worth their grain of salt should also be talking about that. The internet is the serious medium of attention for the consumer. Just look at the number of insurance policies researched, reviewed, renewed and sold online. Or the number of holidays, cars, books, CDs, even chocolate bars, and sickness diagnoses make the frequency list. Last night, just before midnight, I ordered a rabbit hutch (don’t ask), a new CD player and a bunch of wiring (anyone with kids/rabbit will understand). That experience sums it up for me - convenient, simple, and a lingering household chore done. The concept of brand utility has become fashionable, but the concepts of usability and user experience still kind of stick, don’t they?

Small technical point about the big shift in Client budgets to digital - it isn’t always reflected in a big shift of fees to digital agencies and search represents a huge proportion. Still, there’s enough prediction that internet expenditure in the UK is soon to outstrip that of TV to challenge the complex agency supply chain to reorganise and restructure, as that’s not happening in quite the same timescale either.

But the basics of decent functionality solving my problem and brands online letting me take the brand experience where I want it are moving much faster than perhaps even we, the experts, realise.

See you at the Breakfast Bites on Tuesday.

Five thousand four hundred people turn up, and I was lucky enough to share a ‘power session panel’ (try saying that with six San Miguels inside you) with blog Gods Shel Israel and Jeremiah Owyang training about 600 Intel people about new media marketing technique. Shel co-authored the book Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble and is good opinionated company, and Jeremiah is Forrester’s top commentator on social media. He’s also pretty handy with the cam as you can see here.

Enough name dropping already (there were plenty of other super people to meet and Paul of course twitters with Shel tous les temps) - the gist of the sessions was healthy debate about whether social media is relevant to a firm like Intel. My take on it is simple. Social media helps you do two very important things. 1. Listen to customers. Those that don’t are dying and those that won’t will die. And 2. Listen to yourselves. If it doesn’t sound credible to you, how can you expect them to believe it?

Luv

A