Jenny spoke at Ad:tech New York on “How is digital experience design + innovation changing branding? Check out her presentation here.

A new discipline of design is emerging from the needs and forms of communication in the “networked” economy.

Experience Design is a discipline created by the reality of marketing today, when no point of contact has a simple beginning and end, and all points of contact must have meaning embedded in them.

Competitive businesses need to rethink and reshape their brand strategies to achieve success in today’s constantly changing and unpredictable markets.

Digital Experience Design imposes a new way of thinking and working that can transform companies into innovative and commercially successful organizations, but professionals and business goals have been slow to embrace and adapt.

The ability to deliver innovation is what will define success in our market for years to come, but how do we begin to bridge that gap?

Perhaps one of the most interesting trends we have seen is that the battle lines seem to have been drawn between the internet and TV.

In March of this year, Nielson netratings announced their findings of the 90% of the Australian population who are now online, the number of media hours we are spending on the internet is more than we are spending watching TV.  In addition, PVR’s (e.g. Foxtel IQ or Tivo) are increasingly becoming part of the standard family entertainment package.  Studies have shown that households that own a PVR timeshift their viewing about 40% of the time and when watching pre-recorded shows, skip the ads about 70% of the time (OMD research).

A few years ago, TV networks actually banned an LG ad because it promoted adskipping capabilities of their TV.  Late last year Free TV Australia (the industry body representing Free to air Television) tried to further resist the impact of adskipping by writing a letter to the Australian Digital Suppliers Industry Forum (ADSIF), which represents PVR makers, saying “broadcasters are not authorising the use of the programs listing data in PVRs where ‘ad-skip’ functionality goes beyond a maximum fast forward speed of x60″.

All this is really only forestalling the inevitable. We read recently in the Australian (September 18, 2008) that the TV advertising industry is facing “carnage” as advertisers are shifting increasing percentages of their marketing budgets into digital.

Conversely, video advertising online has started to evolve significantly and may well offer more opportunities for both the growth in the display market and the sustainability of TV production companies.  While the progression of this medium has been a little slower than anticipated, it is starting to come of age. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released  “Digital Video In-Stream Ad Format Guidelines.” mid year in the US and while it is yet to be announced in the Australian market this is a good indicator of the maturity of the market.
In September, eMarketer released a report “Video Advertising Growth Factors” that looks at the market from a global perspective and predicts that video advertising will be reaching four out of five users by 2012. The report indicated that already 67% of all Internet users view some form of video advertising at least once a month

Farifax Digital are clearly hoping to cashing on this trend with their launch of FDTV which has been described by some as “a direct assault on TV revenues”.  The publisher is predicting growth rates of more than 60 per cent a year until 2012 when they hope it will be a $184 million category in Australia

Of course currently we are still dealing with the same “format” of ad (15 secs preroll o post roll).  If we make the broad assumption that TV ads as we know them will continue to decline in reach and effectiveness, this leads to an interesting discussion about the future of the advertising form as well as the media through which it is transmitted.  Will this lead to more interesting forms of long form advertising posted on youtube and other social network sites, are we going to see even more spots showing up in video banners or will the entire advertising industry need to evolve radically to gear up to a new future?

In addition to the faceoff with TV, we have also witnessed even more phenomenal growth in social networking.  If facebook and myspace. were countries, they would be amongst the largest 20 countries in the world.

This year we saw facebook overtake myspace in popularity in Australia however we are also seeing some backlash against the monetisation strategies of these networks ranging from criticism of the level of advertising, invasion of privacy and the necessity to invite friends before you can download applications which has a protest group numbering in excess of a million users.

But they are not the only social network in town anymore.  The new guy on the block this year would definitely have to be twitter.  While Twitter first emerged in 2007, it growth was fairly slow in Australia initially.  The total twitter audiance, it has now surpassed 3 million, and the growth continues at an exponential rate. If the same trend continues, they will be at 5 million by Christmas.  At the beginning of this year there were only a few thousand Australian users, now there are over 10,000.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Twitter is the ecosystem of  other websites and technology that has grown up around it. Elements of this ecosystem include authoring tools, mobile phone tools, twitter specific search engines.  In addition there are a wide variety of mashups such as twittervision, twitterphone.

Twitter really seems to come into its own when we look at the participation at conferences and events were participants are live blogging their opinions and engaging in multi person debates.  This feedback is then consolidated through the backchannel using hashtags and can be viewed by the twitter universe at large.

The other area of growth has been in the emergence of niche networks. White label social network site Ning now has 230,000 ning nets (white label social networks created by individuals and companies around niche and general areas of interest) they range from groups of just a few members to groups or over 100,000 members.
Ning are estimating that by 2010, it will host some 4 million social networks serving up billions of page views daily.

The growth and importance of social networking generally is reflected in their use as a standard part of most marketing plans.  Unfortunately, many applications are still basic . Brands often set up pages, accumulate a mass of “friends” then do nothing .  No posts, no updates, few user comments.  They are quickly forgotten by their fans and even worse, provide a poor reflection on the brand over time.

Interactions in this environment require sustained management and in 2009, we will probably see this reflected in both the types of agencies that emerge to service this need and the remuneration agreements around managing digital platforms

With the users developing more and more complex social network interactions, the volume of information they need to manage has increased.  In response to this need, we have seen the rise in personal aggregator tools such as Netvibes, Plaxo, Freindfeed and Pageflakes which enable various forms of aggregation from numerous social network sites into a single dashboard of social interactions.

Additionally, as our digital identities become more distributed, we have also seen the emergence of tools such as Gravetar (which enables you to manage you avatar/icon across multiple sites/applications). As this trend continues, we will need to assess the impact on brands to create and manage their own digital identity as well as how their messaging and imagery is represented in environments over which they have no control.

Talking to people in the industry however, the one theme that re-occurs is that 2009 will be the “year of the mobile”.  The launch of the iphone in Australia has certainly brought with it a renewed interest in the opportunities that mobile presents.

There have been numerous reports that have found that iphone data usage well exceeds that of other devices and no wonder, given the ease of use and the quality of the interaction.  While data rates in Australia still pose a significant barrier, the hope would definitely be that the marketing industry will finally move beyond the basic SMS campaigns and into more sophisticated applications that can deliver brand value in the mobile environment

With nearly 100% penetration of mobiles in Australia, and the growing number of 3G handsets as operators phase out their non-3G offerings it is highly likely that this will become a more mature advertising channel very quickly.

While there are many other trends worth mentioning like the continued growth is search and the evolution of more sophisticated online experience design, 2009 promises to be an interesting year for the digital environment

The second key theme was of course to the potential impact of the economic crisis on our industry.  It seems from talking to people here, that they are already experiencing some slowdown and the enormity of the crisis is certainly far more in your face than it is back home.  Overall the view is still that digital marketing will suffer less than many other industries however, the need for more accountability even within this most measureable of disciplines is clearly of paramount concern.

I attended a number of sessions and will pull together summaries of each of them over the next few days but the overarching take out I have was that the Australian digital industry is not really all that far behind the States in terms of our focus and the topics that people want to discuss.  From an executional perspective however, we have a bit of catching up to do particularly in the media/publisher arena as well as in the area of behavioural targeting.  When it comes to mobile though, we are really holding our own (at least we don’t call it an emerging market).

“Hi Phil
I’d like to again thank you for your participation in EMSA 2008 … your input to the event was of significant value and certainly had a lot of people reevaluating both their understanding of Direct Marketing and their future marketing strategies. A long overdue wake up call.”

Role of email in the conversational age

Behavioural Marketing

All too often Telstra gets bagged for its service levels (or lack thereof) so I feel compelled to document my experiences today (28 October 2008) with the Big T.

Today loomed as one full of angst and fear – we needed to call Telstra and get a phone line connected for a new office.

Anyone we spoke to told us that it’d be at least 2 weeks and a lot of false starts.  So, when the calls were made, the phone was answered and the service delivered – by lunchtime – we thought we were on Easy Street.

Oh how wrong we were!  The next call was for a request to transfer a BigPond account from one destination to another – and to upgrade the plan to ADSL 2+ and the 25GB usage package.

The calls made to BigPond were answered with a recorded message with a statement similar to … due to the large number of calls we can’t attend to your enquiry…, and then simply hanging up!  I knew they were cutting staff but not in the sales and service area surely?

This happened repeatedly throughout the morning. Finally the message was replaced with a ringing tone and we commenced the on hold wait. Progress! After what seemed an eternity – but was likely 10 minutes – the phone was answered and a very efficient staff member commenced with our request.  On hold a few times whilst enquiries were made, and then “Yes that’s done, in 4 days you will have access, we’re just having some technical……” and then she was gone.

An hour and fifteen minutes of back and forth, gone.

And surprisingly – or not – no call back. There’s never a call back from a drop out and you can never find the same person again. We tried to call back to complete the process only to get the recorded message and hang-up again. And again.

Enter Twitter.

I had read about the Telstra BigPond team having a presence on Twitter so I thought I’d give that a go.  My message of angst was responded to inside of 15 minutes from “Ben” asking me to direct message him with what the problem was and some account details.  Over the course of 8 direct messages from me and 7 from Ben – who identified for me that nothing had been done as a result of 1:15 hour phone call earlier – my problem was resolved.

And this was all inside 140 characters per message!

I know that Twitter isn’t necessarily a channel to be used for service enquiries – but being a lifetime Telstra customer (who spends way too much on internet, mobiles, PayTV and the terrestrial phone) this is something I haven’t experienced.  It didn’t happen on the phone. Wouldn’t have happened as quickly and efficiently on email – too many words available to  be used!

I am glad that @BigPondTeam only has 225 following, and 202 followers, as I’m not sure how they’d deal with this getting out.  For now let’s keep it our little secret…..

A big hat tip to Ben. A big hat tip to Telstra for supporting this channel to deliver a service experience.

It raises the question however – as it evolves its role in customer engagement and experience – does this mean Twitter is becoming mainstream?

At the heart of this problem is the concept, or role, of ‘the big idea’.

David Oglivy once said “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.”

In the “good ol’ days” this concept was central because the secret to great advertising was cracking that ever-elusive “big idea” and this concept is still regarded as the panacea for many marketing decisions, both within the agency and with customers.

It is little wonder that many advertising creatives see their role as having to give birth to a purple cow! However, in the ‘new media age’, there is a conflict developing in the definition of “the big idea”.

Traditionally, the ‘idea’ is narrowly defined, often limited to the creative input in the development of the message, a message that was broadcasted and often one that was trying to convey a brand ‘idea’ that was ‘ideal’ to everyone.

Typically this is manifested in a tagline and frequently, it is associated with a single campaign which runs for three months – by the end of which, we hope everyone is happily humming the jingle and buying the clients products.

Increasingly our clients have evolved beyond this idea of a brand concept, with a focus in developing long-term and active relationships with consumers and the customer.

So the concept of scattering a few BIG IDEAS throughout the year is a bit like the guy who takes his wife away for a few great holidays (of his choosing) then spends the rest of the year as a couch potato watching sport! Whereas the wife wants … no … she demands … ENGAGEMENT!

When you think about the traditional role of the big idea in building relationships, it posses an interesting challenge. Relationships build and mature over time, it is about earning and growing a sense of mutual trust and respect. It is about understanding and meeting specific needs.

Direct marketing was perhaps the first advertising discipline that began to merge the creative idea with information/data about the customer (the understanding) to allow a narrower targeting and delivery of creative ideas (meeting specific needs). This is content that is ‘in context’ with the audience.

In a digital environment however, the ‘idea’ has to evolve several steps beyond this thinking. The campaign still needs exceptional creative but now the message needs to inspire a two way conversation – which then raises the question:

How do we respond when people talk back?

A good example of this has been Bigpond’s recent foray into the twitter space and watching their machinations at developing an ‘idea’ that would allow effective communications with this audience. As soon as Bigpond launched, they came under fierce attack from the twitterati. Not only was it an ‘idea’ that not did work, the audience considered it inappropriate use of the channel. However Bigpond was able to respond through their site nowweretalking.com.au which enabled  effective dialogue between Bigpond and their critics, thus the conversation began

This example raises several interesting expansions to the ‘idea’ of ‘the big idea’. Firstly the extra creative consideration that is required in understanding the needs and cultural nuances of the (micro)audience. Secondly: the speed required by marketers to respond and tune the campaign. The new consumer is no longer a couch potatoe, they have teeth, and they bite!

The new creative challenge is in creating sustainability and growth throughout the entire the campaign – not just in creating a tagline. The digital channel is always ‘on’ it runs 24/7. Therefore one can’t develop a digital creative strategy that is simply campaign based. Turning the ‘love’ on and off only serves to damage the relationship and alienate the end customer.

For a digital strategy to work, you must have an underlying platform of engagement that you are both wiling and able to support.  Beyond this, you need to develop a deeper understanding of the different and new (micro)segments that you are targeting in order to develop creative strategy that inspires conversation and engagement.
This may require new forms of contractual arrangement between the agency and the client which allows the campaign to grow and nurtures the relationship with consumers. It is only by growing a rewarding experience with the consumers, that will allow the continued growth of the brand. Getting the ‘idea’ wrong in this environment runs the risk of consumers playing an active role in brand erosion.

This new concept of the Big Idea requires innovation that extends far outside of the ‘traditional’ creative department, to be lead by a much wider and embracive definition. Without this we will continue to see under performing campaigns like: bogus blogs (with few posts and even fewer comments), Facebook groups launch with little or no ongoing content. User Generated content sites with a superficial entries, branded social networks with no community managers and an inactive user bases. These campaigns do NOT serve our customers needs and does little to justify their massive investment – and only serve to demonstrates an industry that is faltering at the gate.

Leo Burnett once said: “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.”

This curiosity must now extended to the conversations that are taking place between the consumer and ‘their’ brand. The creatives behind the concept must evolve their thinking in order to remain relevant in an era of fast moving and ever changing customer needs.

Normally, we would get a bunch of industry experts in a room and hash out what content we think the industry most wants to hear about at ad:tech.  for many years this has worked well however this year, we decided it would be interesting, rather than engaging 10 peoples ideas, why not involve the whole industry in generating ideas.

So we want you to tell us what topics in the digital marketing area are important to you

The brain works like this:

• There are two sections Ad:tech voice – this is where I will post about stuff that I am hearing about through the network Twitter (#ATBRAIN) linkedin and our facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/pages/AdTech-Brain/27485779419).  As these posts go up, tell us what you think, expand on the ideas, recommend experts discuss potential angles or tell us that this topic is so last year you would rather not waste the time.

• The second section is the Voice of the industry.  This section is where we are inviting guest bloggers to participate.  Post an idea, a topic or just start a conversation.  Again, we are looking for the community to comment on these and tell us whether you think they are valuable.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that a conference has handed over the programming to the audience, This will only work with your participation so get in there and tell us what you think.

We only have a few weeks to draft the initial program structure so time is of the essence.  After that, we will be looking for your help to put meat on the bones of this structure and help us identify the best speakers on the topics.

Ideagarden, founded by Jenny Williams – a board member of ADMA and previously Managing Director of Tribal DDB – has added former OgilvyOne national Managing Director Phil Smith, and Y&R Brands Interactive Creative Director Tom Hutton, as shareholders and Managing Partners.

With over 20 years experience working in agencies across three continents, Williams started Ideagarden at the beginning of this year. The company has successfully been providing strategic leadership and training to organisations wishing to deepen and evolve customer engagement via digital channels.

Smith has spent the past 7 years with Singleton Ogilvy & Mather Group as Managing Director of Singleton OgilvyOne and Singleton OgilvyInteractive, Australia’s largest direct and digital operation. He was also a member of the OgilvyOne Asia Pacific Regional Council and Global Management team.

An experienced customer management practitioner and a passionate believer in the area of “Experience Management”, Smith’s focus is on linking the burgeoning digital area with the fundamentals of direct marketing.

Hutton has recently left his role of Creative Director of Y&R Brands Interactive, having previously held senior digital creative and management roles with MRM – in Australia and Asia – and Amnesia. A digital designer since the early 90s, Hutton has also had to play a number of other roles as the industry has evolved – from coder to creative director, from project manager to strategist, from media planner to general manager.

In the constantly changing world of customer management, digital and direct marketing, Ideagarden delivers a sought after strategic capability that helps clients, agencies and media companies evolve, adapt and innovate.

Williams said “I am excited that industry leaders of Phil and Tom’s calibre are coming into the business, they bring a unique breadth of capability not readily accessible in this market.  Collectively we have run some of Australia’s largest and most successful direct and digital operations and have worked with market leading businesses domestically and globally.”

Smith added “as a group we have a breadth of skills that senior clients have been very positive about – we are actively engaged in a range of projects with direct clients and agencies alike.  Also the demand for results focussed activities and measurable media solutions in the current climate puts us in a unique position to deal with the range of challenges and opportunities facing marketers.”

The business launches with a number of clients and will focus on strategic consulting, experience design and education.

Many talked about “turning around a dinosaur”, getting the dregs of the budget that was left over after the above the line money was allocated and the issues they faced with not even being allowed to view their own facebook applications in the office.  Perhaps my favourite quote was the one from relayed by the head of NextDigital of a client who said he wanted to get on “facespace”
It is sometimes hard for those of us who immerse ourselves in the digital space to realise there are still a lot of marketers out there who don’t understand how to use it.

I gave a presentation on the second day about managing the transformation into digital from a clients perspective.  It’s posted up on slideshare and below:

You can also follow the twitter stream from the conference at:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23imed08 or by searching for the tag #imed08

View the summary on the Imedia site >>

Now that we are done with that event, it’s time to move on to planning the ad:tech 2009 event content. I have been working with the adtech guys in Australia to develop some ideas on how to engage the industry more broadly in the content that is most interesting for Adtech 2009 in Sydney.  The really cool thing about this is that we will be doing this ONLINE…novel idea don’t you think?

Sorry, couldn’t resist the sarcasm but it is a bit of a leap forward in the conference industry.

To this end we are now working with a couple of agencies to help us put together some tools to enable us to collate the info and share it.  The pet name we have given the project is “the brain”.  The idea is that we collect all the ideas for content and based on how you guys tag your suggestions, we hope to be able to develop a tag cloud that will guide the team to determine the most important and interesting content.

Our partners on this project, Wanted Digital and The Population  are beavering away at their bits but in the mean time, anyone who is interested in giving their two cents worth to kick things off is welcome to leave me a comment, email me at jenny@ideagarden.com.au

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

• The digital landscape: http://www.slideshare.net/secret/3NLcZi0dMwWT0a
• The digital toolbox: http://www.slideshare.net/secret/KQ2smRO1IRboQ

The Department of State and Regional Development put on sessions like this for small businesses for free so it is well worth keeping your eye on upcoming events at their website

It was an interesting foray into regional NSW.  I end up in three amazingly different locations:

• The Fairfield city farm were I was surrounded by sheep and iguanas.  Someone did make the analogy here to how closely this is aligned to the media industry.
• Day two was the Mingara Country club, where is saw the most impressive collection of poker machines I have ever seen outside of a casino  Again, the analogy to the media business is hard to ignore.
• Day three was the Carrington Hotel in the Blue Mountains where I spoke in the grand ballroom complete with chandeliers and original gold leaf.  Perhaps the analogy here is the heritage of media and the contrast that exists  to a new media world.
• And finally, the Henry Parkes museum in Tenterfield where Henry first spoke about the federation of Australia.  Perhaps an apt place to evangelise about the future of our media landscape.

Equally impressive was the range of experience levels in the rooms.  I met people who commented that “they thought they might have Google on their computer” through to guys who were right up on search and grilled me on the intricacies of twitter.  I even came across an ex ADMA student who had set up the Aussie Olympics Twitter group and received a huge following in just a few days. I was using this example in my presentation so was thrilled to have her in the audience.

All in all, the feedback was great, I think there were about 300 people in total and I am hoping that the sessions gave them all a bit of confidence and inspiration to get more into digital marketing and really take their businesses to a new level online.