Digital Natives, ah! a term I had long forgotten in the advertising world....

Making an Agency Digital to the Core

Why Digital Natives Are an Essential Ingredient

Posted by Phil Johnson on 03.12.10 @ 01:36 PM

Phil Johnson

I continue to be fascinated by how agencies change and how extraordinarily hard this can be to accomplish. Regardless of the difficulty, it's an essential agency survival skill. Great agencies learn how to continually reinvent themselves to the core, while merely good agencies often only change their outward structure. In some ways this pursuit of change, particularly as agencies define their relevance in the digital world, has been the great advertising drama of the last two years.

Hard to believe, but two years ago people were debating the merits between traditional and digital agencies, as if they had to choose between blue states and red states. Jump ahead to today, and most small agencies have carved out their own path. They have found a way to be true to their roots and have also made huge strides in their commitment to digital marketing. Digital vs. traditional no longer seems like a religious war.

PJA Advertising has made this journey along with the rest, and what I've learned is that change does not come from one defining choice. You need a commitment from the top. You need to redefine processes and roles. You need to bring in new resources and talent. More than anything, if you want to make changes that go beneath the surface to the core, you need to introduce a foreign agent that will chemically alter the composition of the agency. In our case, we didn't experience this degree of change until we opened our doors to the new breed of "digital natives" and gave them the freedom to introduce their digital DNA into the agency.

Specifically, digital natives are people who have spent their entire lives using the internet as an extension of themselves, and there are some good descriptions of the attributes that these people possess. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a nice post about digital natives on his blog, Web Strategy. Without the influence of these native speakers, most of us are doomed to clumsily translate conventional ideas into a digital format, rather than creating original ideas unique to the digital medium. We may master the outward forms but not the soul of the digital world.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating hiring some kid that spends 80 hours a week leveling his "World of Warcraft" character. I'm talking about a specific set of traits and insights that help transform an agency into an innovative digital marketing organization. Here's why every agency needs these people on staff.

They understand what happens under the digital hood. They see beneath the user interface to the underlying technologies. This gives them the ability to assess the true capabilities of a tool or platform and often manipulate it to their own purposes. They can define the digital experience on their own terms and not let it define them.

Digital natives have the skills to conduct their digital lives across many digital platforms with the ease with which an international traveler moves across continents. They can jump from platform to platform depending on its utility. This means that when planning marketing campaigns they can leave the beaten path to create more highly customized online experiences for consumers.

Digital natives treat their identity in the physical world and online as one entity. This makes their online personalities multidimensional and gives them better communications skills than the occasional visitor to Facebook and Twitter.

Because they conduct so much of their lives online, digital natives have a rich collection of experiences with brands in the digital world and a solid understanding about what kinds of communications are effective. With this fluency, they can expand an agency's vision for what is possible when developing strategies and campaigns.

Above all, digital natives get gaming. It's in their blood. As advertising and marketing agencies continue to adopt more of the principles and psychology of online gaming, all of us will need digital natives to help lead us through the maze of opportunities.

Agencies don't just need digital natives working in technical functions. We need them working throughout the agency in planning, media, account, and creative. They need to be allowed to experiment and explore and not be forced to work within old job titles and structures. If you're really serious about a digital transformation, these are the people who can shake up the organizational structure and push senior management to see the world in a fresh way. We're in a business that encourages clients to take big risks on change. We should be willing to do the same for ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Johnson is CEO of PJA Advertising & Marketing with offices in Cambridge and San Francisco. He's as irritated as everybody else that the iPad won't support Flash. Follow Phil on Twitter: @philjohnson

via adage.com

An art director, a flash artist or HTML person doesn't a digital make....when will agencies learn to go core! Maybe they never will with all the traditional foilks at the helm.

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

Social media's a party, but you gotta keep it low!

Social media as Google rightly puts it is a giant party; and to put it lightly it’s turning out to be a wankfest of immense proportions.

So called social media agencies and fad hunters are creating a state of near paranoia in pushing for growth by numbers. Hey hold on! Is social media about large numbers? Or is it about the likeminded coming together to communicate, share, work for a shared passion and create something in its wake?

I would tend to agree with Seth Godin’s of the world (read his take on social groups in his book Tribes), that it’s the latter. And the key to any social group is communication, so to that effect how can communication channels work when it starts emulating broadcast media formats of one ->many?

 Let’s take a look at our own social habits. It’s great to add new friends grow numbers and engage in fruitful communication with a group of likeminded people. But all this changes after we cross a threshold limit, 100’s for some 1000’s for others; somehow the communication channel begins to crumble beyond a size, the intimacy is lost and we find it difficult to keep track of the diverse set of comments, member movements, activities etc. While there are celebrities do have lists that runs into millions ( Shahrukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra etc) but you really have to ask yourself if they are really creating cohesive groups or using the social tools to broadcast? Can you imagine SRK responding to your critical analysis of his last movie and explaining his stance?

So here’s my plea to number hunters, get off those blinkers, take a step back and re-visit your strategy. Delve a little in the amazing world of obscurity in existence across the multitude of b/boards that are as old as the internet and definitely much older than the social fad. Maybe you will find your answers, I for one have always believed in my closed groups, its time you do too!

Posted via email from An idea, a day!

Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder

via blogs.forrester.com

This is an interesting trend. Now we have a new group of conversationalists. This nicely slots the twitter and FB status update population into the technographics ladder. While the data is US specific but the trend can easily be applied in Indian scenario, though cluster population will differ, but the projected hierarchy is still relevant.

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

Google Phone...This lays to rest the iPhone killer debate, cause Googlephone falls short of being the best andriod phone only!

Early reviews seem to suggest..this is the best Android device at best! 

What the web is saying:
ZDNET.com: Nexus One has some neat features — animated wallpapers, neat weather widgets and other items — but do those items qualify as “super.” Perhaps the Nexus One is just a “really smartphone.”
CNET News: Of course, the Google store-only purchase model marks a change in how cell phones are sold in this country. More devices will be added to the Google Store. The store will also expand to more countries and more carriers, including Verizon, which will join the program. What’s more, Verizon will sell a CDMA version of the Nexus One in the future.
Mobile Gazette: For some reason, the Google Nexus One seems to be a big deal with the media. The fact is that the phone itself is just an evolutionary upgrade to existing HTC phones, with another evolutionary upgrade to the software. From the point of view of the actual device itself, the Nexus One is hardly a revolution.
O’Reilly Radar: We’re moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.
The Globe and Mail: Instead of revolutionizing the market for handsets, as Google has done to other markets such as online web searches and online advertising, the introduction of the so-called “Googlephone” simply seems a way for Google to cement its role in web searches on mobile devices. Wall Street, consequently, has been relatively indifferent to both rumours and realities of the phone.

Posted via email from An idea, a day!

This must be the worst new year message I ever received

JWT has turned a dementor this Holiday Season. Their Holiday Season greetions seem to spread more gloom than happiness….the first 90 secs of the video focus on the gloom and 10 secs only dedicated to optimisim. This has to powered by Dark Lord himself….

Posted via email from An idea, a day!

Creatives: Are You OK With Collaboration, Measurement and Failure? - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

Creatives: Are You OK With Collaboration, Measurement and Failure?

Welcome to the New Creative Sensibility

Posted by Conor Brady on 12.23.09 @ 04:00 PM

Conor Brady

--> This just in: Creative is no longer larger than life. This is a bold statement coming from a life-long designer and creative director and the chief creative officer of a major digital agency.

The truth is that the battered economy, the ascent of technology, the need for marketing intelligence and, overall, the ability to better connect with customers on their terms have conspired to end "big creative's" chokehold on the advertising agency. Don't get me wrong, the Big Idea is still critical but in this new era ideas come from a myriad of sources, not least technology, and the days of creative for creative's sake -- the "trust me, I know what I am doing" attitude -- is done.

What we are seeing now is a new era of creative, one that I like to call the age of creative sensibility. Adhering to a creative sensibility means the creative director isn't the only creative voice within the agency. Creative directors may hold the status as the leader of ideas but their outlook on the process has evolved as they begin to embrace collaboration.

Collaboration
The willingness to collaborate not only with their colleagues outside their discipline but also with other agency partners and clients is not a quality that most would associate with the creative director of yesteryear. What we are seeing today is the emergence of a new breed who acknowledge that great ideas come from everywhere -- a member of the agency's technology team, the person manning the phones at the front desk or your partner agency. And it increasingly takes a whole team of often unrelated folks to get it done.

Take a Bank of America campaign called "Morris on Campus" that we worked on at Organic. The financial-awareness campaign was designed to educate and empower students to take control of their finances and bank with confidence in the new academic year. A critical component to the success was the team's ability to successfully collaborate with our Omnicom partners, each of which brought with them a very specific specialty to the table that was essential to the campaign's success.

Analytics
Perhaps just a surprising as the creative director's embrace of collaboration is the admission of measurement's role in driving campaign success. For years, the creative team and measurement gurus drew on opposite sides of the white board. Now the smart creative director, one who doesn't hide from marketing intelligence behind their big ideas, is embracing strategy and craving analytics and research capable of providing a deeper understanding of the consumer.

What many are finding out is that knowing how consumers prefer to be marketed to before forming a campaign is far more effective than simply cramming what you think is cool down their throats. They are also discovering that the customers themselves can serve as the catalyst of inspiration which in turn results in a winning campaign capable of propelling the brand towards its goals.

AKQA provides a tremendous example of this with its Eco:Drive campaign designed to link drivers with in-car diagnostics in order to improve fuel efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions. The effort represents a tremendous example of analytics (i.e. driving data) serving as the genesis of a campaign (rather than in a more reactionary role where it is measuring its performance, post launch) and can then "fuel" a winning creative effort that "drives" meaningful results.

OK to be wrong
Creative directors that embrace collaboration and intelligence will find that the end result to this mindset shift are campaigns that are in-line with the wants and needs of the customers. However, in the event of a misfire, a key third component of the creative sensibility becomes essential: It's OK to be wrong.

There is a sense of knowing when to admit you're wrong, and when to embrace the mistakes of the past in driving the creative of the future. The reality is that most campaigns are in a constant beta mode and it's safe to expect some bumps in the road. The key is to admit defeat, quickly make the needed adjustments and steer the campaign towards success.

The age of creative sensibility marks a dramatic shift from the "big agency" practices of the past and the ideas presented above are really just the tip of the iceberg. In future columns I look forward to expanding these themes and laying out the full creative sensibility doctrine. What you will come to find is that we are in the midst of a massive philosophy change in the advertising industry and success is only possible if the creative director is ready to embrace it.

~ ~ ~
Conor Brady is chief creative officer at Organic, an Omnicom agency.

via adage.com

When the whole world is going collaborative and analytical insights are driving the rise of next google...creative forces can really gain a lot from Collaboration And Measurement.
I personally always felt traditional agencies and the so called silos will not work in the new order.

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

is busy reconstructi

is busy reconstructing schizo encounters

On the other hand...

On the other hand... you have different fingers

You're never too old

You're never too old to learn something stupid.

ஃ I rest my case�

ஃ I rest my case‼

if everything is so

if everything is so urgent...I demand a classification ->urgent, urgenter, urgentest....urgented (was urgent now not needed :-))

seeks a few days of

seeks a few days of solitude...just like now

Sleeping off on couc

Sleeping off on couch watching TV is not at all good for the morning after

Rains are in; need t

Rains are in; need the rum, fried fish and adda session...

Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?

Team Castrol zindabad!

What’s a happy blog?

Nothing? 

What! 

Yes nothing!

Happiness is not a lasting emotion, happiness is superficial, and happiness is what we want to be and not who we are. But true emotions are born from a tinge of pain.

Would I ever been happier for how my life has turned out to be without recounting all those moments of failure?

Would I be true to myself and all of you reading this boring blog ;-) without having opened a small window to my world?

Think again what’s the happiest you been? I am guessing it was in the moment when you pushed forward when your back could sense that wall!

I am happy to share; and am happy that I can :-)

This is my Happiness blog ;-)

What next?

Is next tomorrow? Is next the time we realize our mistakes or is it after the point of committing that fatal mistake?

I know; been there and done that, but that does not make me a better man. I retain my good being and hence know my mistakes….but what next? What if I loose my being good in this world so filled with greed and selfdom? Would I know I have erred? Would I know when I have crossed the line…when the line is a dot?

Searching my next!

Mumbai records 43.52 per cent polling!

Now I really want to meet these so called Mumbaikars, the ones that take out the candle vigil after terror attacks, demand a lot from government authorities, the so called SoBo’s who are worried about their nails ( as one of my friends pointed out).

The so called boundaries of Mumbai according to the SoBo’s ends at Mahim and yes right you are really the true citizens of Mumbai…go get a life guys, wankers all of you!