These were my notes for a presentation I gave to the Social Media Club tonight.  The theme was Facebook marketing with presenters from Facebook, Wag the Dog and 2 Degrees.  My current pet topic is integrated planning, so I took the opportunity to try and convince a few more people that working in silos is a thing of the past.  And it's not just digital, the communication tools at our disposal are many and varied and while there will always be a need for expert practitioners, we need to be thinking collaboratively and acting in unison - to a plan.  This was supposed to be a 10 minute talk which you'll soon see I was rather over-prepared for.  Apologies for having to rush through it on the night.

Anyway, here were my thoughts...

When Nicholas called me last week about this event, I got a teeny bit nervous.  I mean it's one thing talking to clients and exposing this stuff gently, and quite another to talk to people who are active and vocal participants in the space.  I guessed early on that rolling out tired old statements like  "brands joining in the conversation", and it's "all about engagement" was probably not going to cut it, which of course meant I had to think a little harder.

My challenge was to fill up my 10 minute slot with something you would hopefully find interesting, but which might also inspire you to do something a bit different tomorrow, take a closer look at things you might be taking for granted and give them a bit of your undivided attention.

But I’m going to start out with something that 's a little bit controversial, and more than a little ironic coming from the head of digital guy but here we go...

Digital Strategy is Dead

That rather provocative statement comes from the very real fact that there's no longer any difference between our digital lives and our real lives - they are absolutely the same place.  How that transition actually occurred over time is interesting in its own right but for the purpose of today's session we're going to move quickly past that statement so that we don't immediately end up in a debate and take a look at its slightly more sophisticated cousin. 

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Digital consumers are rapidly assimilating technology into their lives and we're now at the point where it is becoming invisible, or perhaps more accurately – taken for granted.  From a marketing perspective and not just digital, that is forcing a re-think.  And that re-think is driving the industry back towards an Integrated Planning paradigm.

But first a little back-story.  At the beginning of this year, we were looking for a digital strategist.  It felt like there was a gap in our service offering and we wanted to make sure we were investing strategically in our future which was clearly digital.  We got a pretty good response in terms of the calibre and seniority of the people interested but perhaps not surprisingly, no one came through the door looking exactly like the answer to our problem.

The issue was primarily their background.  Many people in the digital world kind of fell into our careers at some point, probably by making an effort to understand and champion something shiny and new, and eventually became the "digital guy", or the "social media guy" or whatever.  Hope my stereotyping's not too far ranging but I don't think many of us actively managed our careers into the positions we currently hold and as such our pre digital backgrounds are quite diverse.

And unfortunately this time around we were looking for someone a little bit different.  I remember thinking at the time that the person I thought would really be able to extend us would probably be a senior planner from the advertising world who already had a very full marketing toolbox at their disposal but who had developed a personal fascination with emerging media and was keen to explore its application in conjunction with the bunch of digital specialists that exist in my team.  As it happened, this was a pretty frustrating exercise - I gave up after a few months deciding that person didn't exist, or at least we couldn't find them.

So without that magical hire to solve all my strategic planning problems in one go, we were back to the drawing board.  We still had what felt like a gap in planning, some kind of glue that helped us bring everything together right up front so that we could absolutely get onto the front foot with insight driven, multi-platform campaigns and digital ecosystems.

Breaking down the barriers

Now we're pretty fortunate to have a great bunch of smart people in our office, working across pretty much every discipline and while there's never any drama approaching anyone for a steer or advise, it didn't feel like we were actually getting the full effect of the intellectual horsepower wandering the halls in their chucks everyday.

So a few of us talked, and agreed to working together in a less structured way as a kind of shakeout test with objective being to create a feeling of cohesion in the planning process that for whatever reason felt missing.  We committed to taking the project from cradle to grave, again to make sure we identified gaps or issues and then took steps to remedy them.

Over the past few years we had become accustomed to solving problems using our individual specialisms.  This does work of course, albeit inefficiently and to be fair I think most of us felt it was time to try something new.

As the team began working on the project and meeting regularly the first thing that we needed to agree on was the nature of our approach.  Yes we needed a plan.

Which quickly delivered up our first hurdle, albeit not particularly serious.  Advertising like many industries has its own lexicon of buzzwords, acronyms etc.  And then within the agency each department has a whole stack of language that is important to them but unintelligible elsewhere.

We quickly worked out that we weren't there to impress each other with our ability to regurgitate this stuff in rapidfire dialogue.  We were there to get a better understanding of each other's role in developing a multi-channel campaign, to cross-pollinate ideas and hopefully find that missing ingredient.

And to do it we went back to basics. Using a little tried and true marketing.101 we devised a structured approach that we could all buy into without descending into intricate detail.  

Quickly want to raise a flag here and clarify that we're not advocating a prescriptive or template approach to solving these issues.  Just that you need to agree on a useful set of tools up front - the ones that you think fit the particular job at hand.  No platform or methodology is perfect and you also want to make sure that whatever structure you use for your thinking has got at least enough room in it to break a few rules from time to time.  You don't want to miss those brilliant "change the game" moments that helps re-define things.

My specific agenda i.e. digital hat on, within these project is usually pretty straightforward.  The first thing I'm wanting is to make sure is that I have a crystal clear understanding of the role digital needs to perform and that we're given an opportunity to advise and recommend on channels early in the piece.  Secondly I'm constantly thinking about how I can ensure the digital creative team gets an open and clear shot at the opportunity.  They have to work a lot harder if we haven't exercised our creativity in an effort to inspire them.  No I'm not suggesting that strategy and the briefs that ultimately fall out of that process should be indicating a creative direction - just that they need to be written using whatever insights are available in a way that the teams can easily engage or relate with.  Too much information is commonly not helpful.  

More insight, less information = happy creative director.

The next session of the presentation contained a few process diagrams which are fairly self explanatory and talk to the specific approach used on a recent project and how we integrated Facebook into the mix, so I'll attach and leave my speach notes intact in case you're interested.

It's not just new systems, we need a different breed of people

One of the other things that’s becoming increasingly obvious is that not only do our systems need to change to meet the demands of a new media environment.  We also need new skills, some of which are probably going to seem a bit unusual – at least at first.

I was watching an interview with Alex Bogusky last week and he was talking to his senior planning executives (one of whom has just joined Ogilvy btw), and he was talking about the makeup of the planning department.  They’ve actually been recruiting sociologists and anthropologists into their team in recognition of the significant cultural changes that are occurring in the US and around the globe as a result of technology and more recently the social media phenomenon.  This kind of significant and rapid behavioural change is a wee bit uncomfortable for an industry which is built around understanding consumer norms  - at least for those who aren't making the effort to participate.  But CP&B's commitment to getting an edge is a pretty strong statement (to me at least).

Whilst we’re not quite going that far here at Ogilvy NZ, we are absolutely looking for people who not only “get” social media, but are genuinely active participants across multiple platforms.  And that’s not just in the digital teams – it’s agency wide because the skilling up issue is being driven by the hard to challenge belief that technology assimilation is only going to accelerate, it's now our future and that's the whole agency's problem.

The rise and rise of branded content

Along similar lines we're making sure we are thinking about new ways we can use our existing skills and facilities to remain relevant, competitive and continue to build strong partnerships with our customers, for example through the production of high quality long-form branded content; content that may never see the backlight of the traditional television set. But as we're seeing on a range of activity currently in the market, that content will absolutely be watched.  And calls to action definitely work, even harder when you give stuff away :)

We're currently shooting these type of segments for Progressive, Holden, L&P and one or two others which are delivering real results...real trackable sales, and that's great news - and really appropriate to thank those clients and a few others who have been courageous with these campaigns and with social media in general.

To wrap up, this industry's an infinitely more complicated place than it used to be, but that is now our reality.  It's up to us what kind of future we make of it.

See you out there.