Strategizing for interactivity

The idea of communication as an interactive process is not new, but can change a lot the way things are done in the marketing industry. This simple notion changes the perspective from targeting messages to designing experiences in order to create engaging communication between the parts.

While some product and service brands are learning how to think with the interactive perspective, other “brands” are offering great lessons, like the ones from the entertainment industry (by the way, remember where transmedia storytelling started?).

Just experiment Radiohead’s 12 Cams, for example. This is an interactive piece that Radiohead did to communicate their In Rainbows World Tour in Japan. A simple and great idea that puts you in the position of a TV Director, or something like this, where you can edit the images of a stage performance using all the different 12 cams to create your own rainbow (see the concept?).

It’s crazy – simple, very attractive and something you would like to share with your friends.

What I like most about this idea is that it gives me the rich content of the band in its pure form and let me play with it. Fantastic, and a real good example of an idea that aims for a two-way (or more, if we consider it’s spreadable) communication.

Better than having one idea that aims this dynamic, is to have an strategy based on that. Which is what I get from all this Radiohead project. The premise of interactivity seems to be the seed for the whole strategy of In Rainbow launching, not just the 12 Cams idea. And this is what makes the whole thing even more beautiful.

As people responsible for the creative manifestation of brands, I believe we should look for this same seed in our strategies. To aim and pursue for a experiential path in which creativity could produce a two-way communication process resulting in better relationships and conversations.

After all, what do you think those guys were thinking when they decided for letting their fans chose what price to pay for the musics of the album?

Planning, interactions and experience

When I think about my future as a planner, or even the future of planning, I like to think that I’ll evolve from a discipline that happens through messages to one that happens through experiences.

When experiences take a major role, our mindset has to shift as a radar mapping great interaction opportunities.

In my mind, interactions presume both sides giving something valuable to each other. No part playing a passive role. Instead, an active exchange between two parts.

That’s how interactions turn into dialogues.

Creating rich dialogues, we will create richer conversations – that major topics and events existing in our culture, where brands happen.

Ok. I know that this thinking is not so clear, maybe just thrown away as things appear in my mind, but not so far from what Colin has wrote with great simplicity here:

Why the separation between planning and user experience design? As “planners”, we need to evolve our thinking to be interactions-based. Insights and strategy that drive brand interactions, retail interactions, product interactions, digital interactions. Brands create paths for people to follow.

As you can see, and I like to think, we have a very interesting path ahead of us. So, let’s contribute with it.

Platforms

I had to write a text about the use of multi-platforms to optimize creativity.

And that’s my opinion about the theme (under 25 lines).

Optimize the experience

I dare to say that the changes we lived in the media landscape in the last ten years were unique and exposed us, agencies, to communicate in new and unexpected ways. Mass media rapidly lost its reign to new channels and tools because people are in charge now.

Their demands are active and happen through lots of platforms because of a simple reason: they go after what is appealing and interesting to their eyes. And it doesn’t matter if this is on TV, on the internet or at a live event.

In this way, the concept of using multi-platforms to optimize creativity bothers me a little bit. Because it sounds to me as if we were still thinking on the message perspective and not thinking on how best use a mix of platforms to come up with a strategy/creativity able to make people engage and relate with an idea (be it an experience, a storytelling or a product, for instance). To make my point clearer, I’ll use the launching of Halo 3 to explain the difference.

Thinking about Halo 3, you could see that lots of platforms were used to articulate not only the advertising of a new game, but the experience of a mythical and heroic storytelling. The campaign wasn’t proposing a message, but an idea big and powerful that people could engage and participate. They did films, internet, live actions, promotions, PR and more, using the power of each platform, combining them to offer different experiences and opportunities for people to join the story.

This is opposed to the use of multi-platforms leveraging one single message. When it happens you are just reaching people by different touch-points, but it doesn’t mean you are engaging and connecting to them. What is, definitely, not an optimization.

Conferência de Planejamento do GP 2008

I’ve been away in the last couple of weeks. So much work, no time for anything. But now I’m spending some days at my hometown and I’ll try to write a few things. The first one is about the Brazilian Planning Conference that happened some weeks ago in Sao Paulo.

The theme was (guess what?) Conversation. A cool theme for an advertising marketplace that needs to really understand this concept and re-shape the structures to start to respond to this new culture.

It was a great day, with lots of inspiring people from the client side, journalism, design, pop nerd culture, research and planning. You can have a better sense of the day looking at these pics or at Gareth’s blog here.

Albeit all of the speakers have done a great job, I’ll stick to comment four presentations that best demonstrates the thinking behind the Conversation concept in my opinion.

The first is about Nike, represented by its head of marketing in Brazil, Tiago Pinto. Once more, the brand proved why it knows how to make things happen. Nike is all about connecting to the culture of each sport they are into. Plus, it really knows how people behave in each culture because the company participates running, playing and skateboarding with them in Brazil.

This is a brand that understands their folks are more interested in things that provide social currency for them to share and connect with their peers. So Nike provides what makes conversation. In two ways: between the brand and its consumers and between consumer-to-consumer. The usage of events, utility and content is the way to reach a broader goal of making the dialogue happens.

My second comment is about a nice surprise and a refreshingly voice coming from Fred Gelli, founder of Tatil Design. His approach on conversation was related to the ongoing thinking brands must have on a more eco-conscious and sustainable society. But his speech wasn’t an “eco-boring” thing, rather a very inspiring way of considering Bionic as a powerful learning for industry and brands. Besides, his stuff showed how designers have a different (and in many cases, a broader) mindset to brand thinking.

His first point has to do with cycles: how nature doesn’t throw energy away and how it designs for the long-term perspective. The opposite of the industrial consumerism thinking that has the short-term perspective and lots of wastefulness problems. His second point was on how Bionic leads to new solutions. To make that closer for the planners in the room, he made a brilliant correlation of flowers as the most successful nature’s brand experience. Because flowers changed, optimized and romanticized nature’s procreation process. Than he showed some slides with similarities on brand experiences and flowers. Beautiful and sensitive stuff.

As sensitive are the two planners who spoke over there. Two of the guys who are trying hard on the quest to move planning forward: Adrian Ho and Gareth Kay. Of course they have a similar view on the planning issue, but it was very interesting to hear how one is trying to change not just planning, but his whole agency and how the other had to quit the ad business to start doing things instead of advising in the conversation reality.

Gareth’s main point is that planning needs planning. It means that this discipline needs to re-evaluate itself and must be radical in terms of attitude and approach on doing that. It starts by the comprehension that the business we operate in is culture and not communication or branding. Then it evolves to the notion that we need to translate the other way back, bringing social grammar into the commercial world and not keeping the translation of commercial into social. Where, finally, brand is measured by its energy and not by some static attributes like awareness.

Gareth defends that energy is what drives conversations. Something that makes lots of sense to me if we think this is the leading indicator of usage and preference, something essential to a friend endorsement, for instance. So, planning outcome naturally shifts for brands to: have a social/cultural point of view, be additive and not interruptive, to interact not just integrate (I would say lots of agencies really have to learn this one) and do stuff, lots of them.

Underlying his main point is the fact that in today conversation world messaging is gone. And this may be the great issue of this whole industry we are part of. Digital and design are free from it, for instance. Messaging isn’t part of these discipline’s roots, just part of advertising roots. I’m the one saying that, but Adrian presented his case of liberating from the messaging paradigm.

Zeus Jones came from two “personal failures”, as Adrian put. Based on personal experiences, they (he and his partners) sow that advertising (massaging) was limiting the power of their strategy. Even if they had a brilliant insight and a deeper strategy concerning product and other touch-points of the brand experience, at the end of the day, they were stuck in the ad pieces square. Not accidentally, Zeus Jones is focused on doing things not saying things. Their belief is that marketing only exist as service and that there is not as important as the experience of using the product.

Personally, it was a great opportunity I had to listen to some guys and brands I already was an admirer. Professionally, I’ll continue to support the conversation idea. It’s essential that Brazilian advertising understands this shift for our own sake. Conversation requires more strategy, new approaches and renewal minds on agency and client sides. Just as a last thing, look why Crispin as Creativity’s agency of the year has everything to do with the conversation age.

People first

 

courtesy of JesseWarren from Flickr

Mike Follett is a great British guy who works at Tribal DDB. When I was in NYC we had a quick chat at an ING Direct store drinking a coffee and sharing ideas about our planning activity. I was curious to know more about his work once he moved from account planning to digital planning and how he experienced it.

Instead of talking about the relationship between people and technology, he talked about people and brands and people and their interests. His perspective about the experience was and is rich and I’ll put it in two terms: first, the thing is about people; second, it’s about creating value for them.

People do not divide the lines. Their interests and needs are the driving force behind how they behave concerning technology. Understanding people is the currency for the planner, be it on analog or digital space. This is how Mike adds in the process, for instance, not just throwing his insights, but knowing and predicting what kind of ideas connects to people’s interests on the digital space.

What leads to the second idea, about giving people something that will make part of their natural activities. And I’m not (as he wasn’t) talking about huge digital platforms or huge big ideas, but anything that could mean something to a specific group of consumers.

To exemplify that, Mike told me about a project they did in which the client had to connect to teen girls and they created a series of messenger gimmicks for them to use on their daily chats. Big idea? No. Meaningful idea? Hell yes.

I would say that these two points made by Mike are part of a conversational approach. One in which people has to be put as the main part so brands could really participate in.

More like comms planners

These days, I found a very interesting article from Campaign in which an account planner, David Hackworthy, and a communications planner, Ivan Pollard, respond to a question of the magazine: if one could do the other’s job.

This was the spark to put myself thinking on a subject that I usually tend to think: the role of the account planning in today’s landscape of brand communications. I’m an account planner, I’m still guided by its principles on daily activities and this is my background since I’ve started my career, but I really think that we should learn some good things with comms planners.

Ivan Pollard’s words not just enlightened the question for me, but also confirmed some thoughts that I have. I think the essence resides in this quote: “the journey is as important as the destination”.

What I see is that for a long time the account planner job’s mission was to find the best destination for brands, to find a place where the brand could be positioned based on a powerful insight and that could differentiate it from its competitors. To position a brand, the planner could count on time to construct that and on an environment without so much “noise”.

But, as we all know, things have changed. To find these destination spaces are not just so easy; the dynamic to construct brands requires messages on multiple levels (and please, not just messages), we have no time to base a brand on one proposition with the same message to repeat it in just one perspective; and, not to mention, the new demand patterns of consumers.

So, when the destinations get crowded and surrounded by too much noise, the quality of the means that you use to communicate your main idea is as important as the idea itself. That’s why I think that we, account planners, should think and try to pursuit things more like comms planners even more.

We have to change our idea that our ultimate client is the creative team. It’s broader! I’ll put that even the comms planners should be our client as well, because, at the end of the day, we will just be capable of constructing something if we make people participate on the stories we aim to create or if we make people move for and through the worlds we develop as big brand ideas.

It’s in this sense that I think that account planners’ role will have to change or evolve. The creation of big brand ideas is, or soon it will be, not enough. We will need to make it big since the beginning, by the quality of the interactions (be it products, concepts, ads, social interactions, etc) of the things we will propose to consumers for them to participate within our brand worlds.

Finally, I feel that within our role, we need to claim for more responsibility of making things happen – getting out of our sage position and going to the warrior one.