Brand Experience Agency - Groove 11 - GrooveLab

Lessons Learned at Ad:Tech 2010

Mike McGinty and I went to Ad Tech last week to see what we could see. We spent 2.5 days immersed in all things digital at Moscone Center. As usual the rooms were cold, the food was soggy. But the gadgets were hot. For example there was a great twitter wall supplied by Dedo Inc. and a recharging station where you could drop off your phone. (LOVED THAT!)

But who cares? We went to see, and learn and be inspired. And at times we were.

The Volkswagen Real Racing Game  from Firemint is a free IPhone app that puts you in driver’s seat of a Special Edition GTI. It has all the bells and whistles of an integrated social campaign. Results can be tweeted, facebooked or you can rip a video of your race and post it to You Tube. It’s a phenomenon with 4 million + downloads world-wide. Better still, it drives those highly targeted 18-35 year old males to a take the keys. Integrating mapping into the application encourages players to test drive the real thing at their local showroom. They track everything.Test drives are up something like 56% as a direct result of the game. Not bad for an

IPhone

app. 

  
Levi Strauss is doing something really cool with their multi-channel Go-Forth campaign. They are showing some deep pockets (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) in creativity and innovation.

Jaime Cohen-Szulc, chief marketing officer of Levi’s brand and senior vice president at Levi Strauss & Co, presented the case study. He talked a lot about how the convergence of technology and user experience is creating a new frontier for brands and consumers. (I ripped some of his quotes from Mobile Marketer. Their recorder was on, mine was not).

Jaime Cohen-Szulc reminded us that “Everybody has the sense that their business is going to change, but most people don’t know how.” 

He tied it to the rapid changes we are all experiencing by noting “Important trends that are driving change include faster product lifecycles and challenging macro-economics, as well as the increasingly complex marketing mix. The reason why the Internet and digital channels [such as mobile] are so important, is they touch the core of human values—the need to connect, the need to feel loved and the need to feel productive, which can be really difficult to do in real life.”

He captured the impact of both the Levi and the VW campaigns by telling us “If you enact changes for the people, they will carry your brand,” he said. “It’s about moving from loyalty to advocacy."

He underscored the power of this by saying “Brand loyalty is very passive, but brand advocacy is about being active, not passive.”

Over and over again this was reinforced by case studies. When we went to the expo floor, where we saw the technologies and platforms (architectures in Groove speak) needed to advance  these changes.

Our big take away: you have to give up control to gain advantage. This is a bit scary, but it is also extremely exciting. I don’t remember another time in history when innovation was so democratized. We are just a keystroke away from …

Getting Schooled in Branding

Rex Whismen recently wrote http://www.brandchannel.com/brand_speak.asp that universities must move away from Mad Men marketing/advertising and begin to teach branding. Branding that emphasizes building a sustainable brand based on values and a core mission. I agree. I feel uniquely suited to comment. At Groove 11 we work with clients to do just that; define the core essence of their brand and build sustainable relationships with their customers. In addition, I have the privilege of lecturing at San Francisco Bay Area universities on marketing and branding. In this role, I get an up-close look at how universities teach marketing and branding in the 21^st century. It’s not pretty.

Universities continue to emphasize awareness above all else and splashy (and expensive) 30-second spots. They’re preaching integrated marketing minus digital, and heavy on interruptive methods. Universities live in a “push” media world, when in fact it’s now a “pull” digital world. Creating consideration for a product or service is not nearly as important as it once was, due to the access we all have (via the web) to learn and comment on just about anything we desire. The consumer creates their own consideration set.

What matters now is different. It’s about your brand’s place in the world. It’s about the relationship your brand occupies in the consumer's mind and life. It’s about the values your brand lives by. Transparency and word-of-mouth are not a nice-to-have, they are the new reality. In this world, what you do, how you act, and what you believe is more important than any feature set. Your brand's #1 job is to build sustainable relationships that matter. You must be an experience brand. What does that mean?Here are two examples.

Nike + http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/en_US/

W Hotels http://www.brandchannel.com/features_webwatch.asp

Nike + added value to an important sports segment, runners. By becoming part of their everyday lives with something they didn’t even know they needed, Nike built brand loyalty. The brand elevated the entire experience of running. Once you buy in to Nike + and begin to track your stats and share them via the Nike-owned website w/ a community of runners, your brand loyalty is cemented.

W Hotels is not about filling rooms. It’s about giving their customers an experience. From the first touchpoint on the website, you know W Hotels is different. They’ve created an oasis. Their hotels have a distinct personality. The consumer knows what that personality is and is willing to pay a premium for it. They’re an experience brand.

Hopefully universities will begin to prepare students to create brands that add value and build sustainable relationships instead of splashy advertising. I'm doing my part.

NAB Convention in the Desert

I’ve just spent two days at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Convention, the annual gathering of all things video and I think it’s safe to predict the next wave of technology to consume us all is 3-D. Every major vendor and a lot of smaller ones are making a major push into 3-D.

Walking the floors of the convention it's hard to believe that movies ever existed before 3-D. I’ve seen the future and it has 2 more dimensions than Sarah Palin.

Sony showcased a 40-foot tall LED monitor playing live sports that was stunning. JVC, Canon, Panasonic and the other major players all had a major 3-D presence and it’s easy to understand why they’ve staked so much on the new trend. The technology is impressive and the imagery is beautiful. The effect, when produced properly, is truly immersive. I think we’re beyond the gimmickry of the 1960s when actors threw spears at the camera. 3-D works best when you have a multi-layered, richly textured setting, producing an immersive environment that places the viewer inside the world they’re watching.

For example, the Masters Golf tournament, broadcast in 3-D was fantastic. Deep focus video of the beautiful Augusta National golf course, with its crowds moving in the foreground and background coupled with the ball coming straight at you produces a viewing experience unlike one you’ve seen before.

Besides sports I think the early adopters will be corporate clients. I can see how a client would love to embrace this immersive technology into their next live event. It’s a complicated process: double the size of your production crew, two focus pullers, two ADs, data wranglers, etc., and the post-production workflow can be very intense. But the end-result is well worth it.

Other highlights from NAB: Adobe’s new CS5 has some very cool features. Autodesk’s new Smoke for Mac is fantastic. And walking by the Microsoft booth I heard several announcements, each introducing the product that will kill the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Google, TiVo, Firefox, iTunes, DVDs and whooping cough. I think I saw a demo that “…promises to kill Betamax as a format once and for all.”

The other big trend was the love affair that the world has with Digital SLR cameras, specifically Canon’s 5D, 7D, and the new 1D. Great digital cameras that can capture full HD video. And with the full size sensor on the 5D it delivers the shallow depth-of-field and low-light sensitivity that video cameras have been chasing for years. At an entry-level price of $800 for the 1D and $2,800 for the 5D, the new DSLR is a game changer.

At the end of the day they’re all promising the same thing, new ways to capture pretty pictures. They’re big promises but it still comes back to creating pictures that are interesting enough to capture and ones that tell the story that needs to be told.

Technology changes but the basic needs remain steadfast – what’s the story, and how do we tell it? I wish they had an app for that. Maybe next year. 

The Subject is...

Looking over my email box this week it seems I can save a ton of money, be better dressed and win a trip to DC. Not to mention learn 5 reasons why digital agencies will fail and download Turbo Tax.  Oh and I forgot, Jenny is out sick today and my boss wants a creative brief on his desk by 5:00. 

If my email box is anything like yours, it is a mash-up of my work, my interests, and my shopping history. The noise, if you will. As a marketer how do you cut through it? By creating a subject line that resonates. How do you know what resonates? By testing many subject lines and seeing what performs best.

This week the concept of subject line testing came up in a big way for one of my clients. They hosted a webinar aimed at the healthcare industry and although we had 175 people attend the live event the client felt the response was not as good as an event they did last year about this time. When we analyzed the outreach experience we quickly saw why.

Last year they partnered with a publisher to promote a webinar to the healthcare industry. This year, same publisher, same outreach. The "from" line was the same, a trusted source of this community. The topic was similar access to patient medical information via  Electronic Health Records (EHR).

The subject line used was:
Be Ready to Implement EHR – A Success Story From One of America's Best Hospitals
The results….over 1500 clicks and 850 people registered.

This year the subject line was:
Learn to transform healthcare IT with XYZ (insert technology solution here)

This one drew half the number of clicks and only 25% of the registrations. What went wrong?

When you only have 50 characters and a few seconds to capture someone's attention, it can be difficult to know: timing? Topic?Urgency? Or was it just the words we used?

What is interesting is the “Be Ready" subject line broke rule #1. By all standards it was too long, with 88 characters. You could argue that the hyphenation created the illusion of brevity and quickly demonstrated value. “Be Ready” set a tone of urgency as well. (Get more email best practices here)

In our second instance, we opened with “Learn,” I see "Learn" used a lot. Learn vs Be Ready would be an interesting test. Luckily we get another chance to test our subject lines as the archive of the webinar is now ready for promotion. I will let you know what we learn.

A Funny Thing

Humor is a funny thing: literally and figuratively. We just finished a video for Cisco's Physical Security team and it's one of those (too) rare times when everyone walks away satisfied with the final product. But directing a video with comedy is always tricky. The message is the most important thing so we can't trample or overshadow the content. But we also want to engage the audience, and hope they forward the link to a colleague or two.

And because humor is so subjective we can't be too silly. Or sophisticated. Or esoteric. A layperson should understand what you're talking about but the video has to talk to the audience. But don't be too "inside baseball." And did we mention that this is an international audience so no colloquialisms? That's slang for you and I.

Discussing why a joke does or doesn't work is always dicey. Dissecting comedy, as they say, is like dissecting a frog. No one enjoys it. And the frog dies. At the end of the day it sometimes gets to a point where you have to look the client in the eye and say, "Trust me. It'll work." And when they do, and it does, it's a good day.

I was happy to work with an old friend Stephen Kearin, one of the funnier, more talented actors I've ever met. Working with Stephen I knew that I could dial him up or down as needed. "Not so silly…"” "No, too sophisticated" And the end result is a solid, funny, engaging video that lets the message come through nice and clear.

And the frog lived to hop another day.

See how Campus Security can be made funny.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/ps6712/improve_campus_safety.html

What Matters Now: Our First Submission

Photo: Kira Elischer

As some of you already know, Groove 11 has embarked on a new project called What Matters Now. The idea is to invite emerging artists to show at Groove HQ, bringing with them new ideas and in general just helping us to mix it up. We received our first submission last week and we are very excited about the direction things are taking.

Photographer Kira Elischer, whose lush work looks at poverty and what constitutes true or "relative" happiness outside of material affluence, is exactly the kind of thinking we're looking forward to sharing more of. The Happy Planet Index shows us that at a certain level of material security, a society's "happiness" number stabilizes and beyond a certain level, in some instances, may decrease. Kira's investigation is great visual evidence that functions as a kind of true emotional data visualization, supporting much current happiness research which recognizes connection, family, and purpose as the core of the good life.

We're looking forward to more soon.

Don’t give customers what they want…

...give them what they don’t know they want – yet.

Henry Ford is said to have replied to the question of market research like this: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.”

Meet the Millennials

Most managers of consumer brands have a neverending quest to reach the most influential consumers of the moment. In this moment, one group we are paying a great deal of attention to is the Millennials (aka Gen Y or Echo Boomer).

Millennials are one of the most refreshingly interesting and diverse groups. Their influence, values, and concerns are shaping our world and will continue to do so for decades to come. So whether you manage a consumer brand, a non-profit, a B2B, or just happen to know someone under 30, I suggest it is a moment well spent for better understanding Millennials.  

Snapshot of Millennials

•       Broadly defined as being born between 1979 and 1999 (1980 – 2000 for quick memory)

•       Number nearly 80 million 

•       Larger in size than Baby Boomers

•       Youngest are still in elementary school; vanguards 21-30 are just starting their careers

•       2007 global quantitative study of Millennials in 13 countries found the No. 1 attitude unifying the generation was: "I would fight for a cause I believe in."

10 Unifying Characteristics of Millennials

1. A generation that is the most diverse in history
2. A generation marked by social awareness and seeks to change the world
3. A generation that is connected and for whom social media plays an integral part in relationships
4. A generation that will surpass previous generations in influence, spending power, and wealth by virtue of their size and values
5. A generation so determined to excel that failure is not an option
6. A generation known by a mix of ambition and practicality with a solid underpinning of values
7. A generation that is comfortable with credit and knows money plays a crucial role in reaching goals
8. A generation for which technology plays a natural part of everyday life
9. A generation that believes in doing work that has an impact on the world
10. A generation that seeks authenticity and can see through imitators

For marketers, gaining insights into Millennial lifestyles, values, and concerns will help you engage and activate this audience – and ultimately build more compelling experiences and deeper relationships. Considering their influence, it is well worth it.

 

Millennial Experience

 

 

 

What Matters Now

As a brand experience agency with wall space, Groove 11 is embarking on a creative, art-ful journey we're really excited about. We're starting an ongoing 2D visual arts series right here in our San Rafael office called Twenty Ten: What Matters Now.

We see it as an opportunity for artists to share their ideas with us, our clients, our vendors, visitors and the general public – a vision and a viewpoint on the state of things [any thing]. It makes sense to do this since the Groove vision is to humanize the way businesses interact with people and our goal is always to inspire audiences to feel, learn, do, or be something. Art is an excellent way to do that. With What Matters Now we also intend to give emerging artists an opportunity to speak to a new/expanded audience and to create dialog in the greater creative community. Of course, it's also an opportunity for participating artists to sell their work.

For our part, we'll be holding that dialog right here on our blog, on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, and in the real world. This latter element will come in the form of Opening Night receptions for each show we mount. The first one will be held in a few months [details to come]. In the meantime, the call is out to artists via schools and organizations throughout the Bay Area.

So look for these artists' stories, pictures of their work, and their voices across Groove's social media presence in the coming months. We invite you to post comments and opinions, to join the conversation, and to celebrate artistic vision in all its forms. Get into it with us!

Groove sharing

Everyone is talking about “social media” as if the media is anything more than an enabler. It’s not. The media, and channels, are only as good as the people leveraging them to "share." Sharing requires two things: being a good listener and developing openness regarding your value. In business terms, it’s accepting the other person’s IP, offering your own, and sharing an experience. It’s a brave new world. Remember the generation of trade secrets. I remember clearly in the late 1990s when the National Football League was trying to get their trademarks off fan sites.

The sharing world seems to be made up of six kinds of people (according to Forrester): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and opt-outs. Within these groups there seem to be two personas: 1) those folks who get compensated (financially, spiritually or emotionally) to blog, tweet, re-tweet, comment, and critique all day, every day, even as they sleep, and; 2) those folks who have day jobs.

My organization, Groove 11, is full of the latter persona. We are busy – really busy some weeks – and often feel understaffed and underappreciated. It’s the nature of a services business. We are not publishers, by trade, and have never run a press room. Like most agencies we produce whitepapers and do speaking engagements, but this brave new world requires a much deeper commitment to sharing than we have experienced in our careers. So how, then, do we migrate ourselves and our clients into a mode of “sharing?” How do we build, or participate in, community? How do we infuse the new paradigm into our way of being? How do we view it as pleasurable and rewarding? How do we translate what we learn to our clients' businesses? How indeed.

Groove 11 is embarking on an experiment in sharing. I am going to capture the results here. Hopefully we’ll learn together how change management, passion, and discipline come together to help a culture adopt a "sharing way of being." It is a brave new world and many people with day jobs are having difficulty navigating it. We're going to walk the talk to help those folks along.