Why Do Websites Contain Information?

When working on Guinness, I remember hearing someone ask the question “Why should a beer company have a website in the first place?” And I remember it blowing my mind.

Like most people, and certainly most clients, I assumed that all brands had to have a website. But ask yourself: why do you go to a brand’s website? Let’s assume: shopping. But if it’s not an e-comm (e.g. a beer or alcohol site), what are you going there for? Information? 

If I’m looking for information about a brand, I will likely look for a somewhat less biased, more objective, third-party source: e.g. Wikipedia. So making a website to host your story is a redundant wasted opportunity.

Brands used to create websites because clients didn’t want to be the luddites who didn’t have one. (Same thing for apps, but that’s another story.) But the truth is that branded websites are total missed opportunities.

Several years after the emergence of the branded website, many brands made great use of the new medium of the web to create interactive Microsites that contained Ideas and Experiences, as opposed to Information. This was the hay-day of the digital agency, but those days are over because everyone got the order of operations wrong: they put Information on the website where their traffic went organically and Experiences on the microsite to which they had to drive people with media money.

So what if we leave the job of presenting the Information about a company to Wikipedia? (Or maybe a microsite?) And we use a company’s .com to put forward Ideas and Experiences?

What Working Abroad Teaches You About Trusting Your Creatives

There’s nothing like working with Englishmen on a project for German clients in a German market to show you that there are things that are funny in some places that just aren’t funny elsewhere.

So when launching Google Assistant across Europe, we hired creatives from each of our key markets. And when those teams said that something was funny, that it played off of a situation that everyone in their country experiences or that it touched upon a conversation that was currently on the lips of everyone at the local café, pub or biergarten, you have no choice but to defer to their superior knowledge. And this is to say nothing of working with creative teams who work in markets where they speak languages that you don’t understand.

In both cases, you have no choice but to trust your teams. You’re there to push them, to get them to articulate why it works and then encourage them to make that aspect of the idea the sharpest they can make it. To help them to help themselves - NOT to do the work yourself. And while you are forced to do it this way when you’re working outside of your home market, this way of working applies to all creative direction, even when it’s in your own language.

So maybe all CD’s should have to work in a market that’s not their own for at least one project. Because working abroad forces you to trust your creatives. Something many CD’s would do well to learn.

Content Beyond the Social Calendar

“Content” is one of those blanket terms that is misunderstood almost as often as it is used - and it is used a lot. Technically, the word “content” refers to anything that fills a container, which is not a particularly helpful definition. But it is actually rather telling; the term we use suggests that many marketers think of this integral aspect of the contemporary media landscape as filler, something simply taking up space in a predetermined receptacle – in most cases, a Facebook post.

But content needn’t be a Facebook post (though it can be). It needn’t be on Facebook at all. It needn’t give me the opportunity to use the expression “needn’t” but it just did - twice! But back to the matter at hand: Content can be rich, high-impact, multimedia storytelling that changes how our industry views itself and how real people view our industry.

So let’s take a look at some of the most common misconceptions about content, and then let’s open our minds to the myriad formats and potential impact of content when it is understood not as “filler”, but as “essential viewing”.

Many brands (and agencies) think that content is defined by fact or “documentary” or “editorial”, as opposed to fiction – fiction and storytelling typically being the purview of good old fashioned ads. But content can, in fact, be fictional; just look at the greatest piece of branded content in recent years The Lego Movie (and to a lesser extent The Lego Movie 2). So while I will admit that content often takes the form of a documentary or editorial, it isn’t necessarily so, which means that this definition doesn’t hold water and actually limits the thinking of people engaged in creating content.

Others think that the definition of content has to do with high volume and low impact. In these gentle people’s minds, if there’s lots of it, then it’s content. It’s “always on”. It’s a “slow burn”. But content doesn’t have to be high volume. And it sure as hell doesn’t need to be low impact. Here’s a good general rule of thumb that applies particularly well to content: If you’ve intentionally set out to do something that is easy for people to ignore, then you could have spent your money better elsewhere. Nothing you do should be low impact (maybe high frequency banners that subliminally drive familiarity, but that’s another story) because low impact means low value for the audience and for the brand. To put it bluntly: if it’s there simply to be there, then it’s not content, it’s landfill – and Lord knows there’s enough of that out there already.

So here’s an updated definition of content for us: Content is anything that people would pay to see, rather than something you have to pay for them to see. This doesn’t mean you can’t put media behind it – Hollywood spends billions a year promoting its essential viewing – but if it’s the thing they want to watch, and not the thing between them and the thing they want to watch, then let’s call it Content.

As such, content can take as many forms as there are entertainment media. It can be a podcast, an audiobook, a guidebook, a comic book, a children’s book or a recipe book. Hell, it could take the form of a novel! (If somebody beats me to that, I’m gonna be pissed!) It could be a physical magazine, a webzine, a blog, a vlog, a web series, a TV series or a full length feature film. I could go on, but you get the idea.

All of these stories, points of view and guides can (and should) be impactful as hell. They should add the kind of value to a person’s life that they’d be willing to pay for. They should get people talking and ideally, they should become part of popular culture.

And here’s the crazy bit: this kind of thinking – “pull” thinking rather than “push”/ “interruptive”/ ”captive audience” thinking – can be applied to other kinds of marketing too. Including… wait for it: ads! Imagine if all interruptive ads weren’t just messages wrapped in charm to make them go down easier, but they were genuinely enjoyable interludes. What a world that would be.

That’s why a better understanding of content beyond the content calendar is important: because thinking that content is filler for Facebook posts will limit us at best and demoralize us at worst. Conversely, understanding that marketers can and do create things that people genuinely love watching can infect the whole business and invigorate the creative community to everyone’s benefit.

Nike’s Cultural Storytelling Devices

Here’s an interesting thing that’s easy to forget about Nike’s consistently excellent anthemic brand films: they always feature the exact same content - people playing sports. And, as many brands out there trying (and failing) to out-Nike Nike with their own anthemic montages of sports can tell you, sport footage alone does not an anthem make.

So how does Nike take the same basic content, and make it not just fresh but talkworthy, time after time after time? The answer is simple but extremely difficult: cultural resonance. Here’s a look at a handful of anthems done for local markets, along with the insights that drive them, which should show you what I mean by cultural resonance and might act as inspiration for anyone who wants to (or has to) tell a story using overused content: e.g. people using the brand’s product or participating in the brand’s main activity.

Songs
These are the most obvious of the bunch.
In Japan, they took a Japanese school pledge and twisted it: Just Do It Japan
In Russia, they took a classic Russian children’s song and twisted that: What are girls made of?
In India, they created an original song and made a music video with a Bollywood vibe: Dada Ding

Sayings
These are smarter.
In the Middle East, they twisted a phrase that every Arab girl has apparently heard a thousand times growing up: What will they say about you?
In China, Nike realised that because of the one child policy, kids were being treated like they were made of glass and called “Precious”, so they did this: Don’t Call Me Precious

Intangibles
This one takes the cake. (And it drives me crazy because I was working on this same project at R/GA while W+K was smashing this out of the park.) The insight that Londoners can’t be stopped is solid. But it’s the narrative device that makes this a work of art. First of all, it’s done in-camera which already makes it ten times better than straight VO. But more importantly, the mechanism they use to drive the story forward gets deep under the skin of a city’s youth culture - not just the content, but the storytelling device itself.

There are two things that characterise specifically young Londoners more than anything else: arrogant one-upmanship and “having a whinge” (complaining). They took those two defining characteristics - things every young Londoner would recognise in their friends and themselves - and turned them into this: Nothing Beats a Londoner.

When taken altogether, these spots for local markets teach a valuable lesson about how to choose a storytelling device: not just because it’s cute or clever, but because it will resonate with a particular culture. This may seem obvious but, honestly: when’s the last time you asked yourself if your storytelling device - not the content, but the narrative structure itself - would resonate with your audience more than another?

Nike v. Google: How two opposite organisations woo the world

They are two of the most iconic brands on the planet, both beloved by billions and loathed my millions. But as anyone who has worked with both the “Swoosh” (people really do call it that) and the “Googs” (nobody calls it that) can tell you, they could not be more different. There are things to be learned from each of them, so for anyone interested in how hugely successful brands work, here’s a single person’s experience – 5 years working on Nike, 2 years working with Google – of how the two organisations operate.

ROUND 1: Nike speaks to athletes*. Google speaks to everyone.

Before I worked on Nike, I thought that “preaching to the choir” in marketing was a negative thing. But nobody speaks to the converted more than Nike and I have realised that it is one of the keys to their success.

You probably noticed that cheeky little asterisk up there beside “athletes” and if you’ve ever seen a Nike deck, you’ll see athletes* everywhere. That’s because when they say athletes*, they mean every person on the planet because, to quote Nike co-founder and legendary athletics coach/shoe design pioneer Bill Bowerman “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” But this version of “everyone” isn’t the same as the inclusive, democratic, ubiquitous, global “everyone” that Google speaks to. A better way of putting it is: Nike speaks to the athlete in everyone.

If you’ve ever competed in any kind of sport, you understand the mindset, the energy, the pressure of an athlete. That’s who Nike’s speaking to: the competitive, hungry, striving version of you. Nike uses the rich authentic language that comes out of the different sports to speak to the participants of each of them but over and above that, Nike’s voice has an active imperative energy that speaks to all athletes. The line “Yesterday you said tomorrow.” doesn’t just speak to every athlete who has ever set their alarm for 5am, but it speaks to every human being who strives to be a bit better tomorrow than they are today.

Google speaks to everyone. And they mean that: their target is humanity. So whereas Nike is willing to accept that some people don’t speak their language or share their point of view, Google seeks to be palatable for every woman, man and child on Earth. It’s a noble goal. It guides them toward inclusivity, diversity and accessibility in everything they do. But it blunts the edge of what can be said in marketing messages and pushes their communications work toward the lowest common denominator.

So, in case you can’t tell, this round goes to Nike.

What should you learn from this: Unless you’re selling something that can legitimately be useful for every single human being on the planet (Search, Maps, etc.), then don’t try to speak to everyone. Speak to the X in everyone: the artist, the fashionista, the professional, etc.

ROUND 2: Google hires nerds. Nike hires jocks.

This is a brutal oversimplification but as a rule Google hires nice, smart, extremely well-educated people. They treat their partners and agencies with respect and they have a very solid culture of collaboration that runs through their organisation. Every year they host an annual “Agency Academy” wherein all of the agencies in its extensive roster come together for a full day of workshops with Google clients to discuss their values, their aspirations, work they love, how their internal structures work, etc. Because they know that better relationships with their agencies result in better work. This inherent appreciation for collaboration might stem from its digital background in which no single person can build an entire system by themselves, whereas the competitive individualism thing going on at Nike might stem from its athletics background in which a single athlete can win the whole event.

Nike hires athletes. To give you an example: at one point, the newest Nike intern to join the German marketing team was introduced to me as “the fastest Women’s Under-21 10K runner in Germany”. When I asked what her marketing qualifications were, I was told again: “She’s the fastest Women’s Under-21 10K runner in Germany.” And while this may sound like a damning condemnation of Nike’s hiring policies, it is not.

Nike hires people who have spent years, if not decades learning the language and the culture of athletes before they’ve even started their careers. Its marketers have been in the locker rooms, the practices, the pitch and the court performing their hearts out at every level and so they know what their audience is going through and they know what they need. These things can’t be learned, even in the most expensive colleges.

So Round 2 goes to Nike too.

What you should learn from this: having people who genuinely understand your audience makes it possible for you to speak authentically about your product and the culture that it inhabits in the language currently being spoken there. That’s not to say you shouldn’t hire smart people or people with fancy degrees. Or that you can’t hire people who haven’t been living and breathing your category for years. It’s to say that audiences can spot inauthenticity from a mile away, so be true to the culture that you’re trying to contribute to and staff up accordingly.

ROUND 3: Google makes informed decisions. Nike goes with its gut.

Not surprisingly, Google is a big fan of data even when it comes to marketing. For the most part, they don’t do creative testing, but they want to make decisions, even creative ones, based on facts. So when they select scenarios for stories, they want numbers to back up their selection: e.g. “You want to show someone doing antigravity yoga? Bring me the numbers on how popular antigravity yoga is in France.” This approach makes sense and actually forces creatives to dig deeper into real things that are going on in culture, as opposed to what they think is going on. But this approach makes it hard to take creative leaps of faith, especially when it comes to comedy. It’s hard to find data to explain why a Burmese mountain dog farting while draped over George Clooney’s ex-wife is funny - it just is.

Nike on the other hand is not interested in the “data”. It is proudly allergic to creative testing, which is excellent. But sometimes they simply cannot be convinced of things, even when all of the facts and figures in the world back up your argument. They go with their guts. Which is rash, bold, daring risk-taking behaviour which, we all must admit, is cool.

So I’m calling this Round a draw.

THE DECISION: The fight goes to the Swoosh.

It’s not really a competition but framing it as such makes this post more interesting to read, I hope. There are many other differences that I could list: (E.g. Google has one brand book. Nike has dozens. Which makes sense given that Google puts out a new mega product every couple of years and Nike drops at least four products a year for many of its categories.) But the ones above are the ones that come to mind off the cuff.

THE COMMON THREAD: Both understand emotion, culture and humanity.

I’ve been contrasting Nike and Google in the hopes that you would glean something useful from reading about two totally different ways to run comms departments, market products and build brands. But you may also benefit from what they have in common. And that is an appreciation for emotion, culture and humanity.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Nike is second to none in human truth, contemporary culture and emotional storytelling. The much more surprising achievement is the fact that a global tech behemoth like Google can achieve the level of cuddliness that it has. Google excels at all things human-centered, be it in its design, its products or its marketing. The products they launch tend to be technical innovations that require a certain amount of demonstration in their communications, but they have always understood that those demonstrations need to be grounded in human truth, contemporary culture and emotional storytelling. These two approaches to emotional storytelling are both worthy of their own posts. So maybe I’ll do that next.

Digital is Dead. Long live Systematic.

Two days ago, I attended a Canadian ad industry award show. What I noticed is that a large portion of the submissions for Digital AOY were made-for-Facebook “viral” stunts or fake apps with clever names that not a single human being has ever used.

This suggests that the term "Digital" has taken such a beating over the years that it is no longer understood and therefore no longer useful. Accordingly, I have heard it suggested that we abandon the category entirely and collapse it into other categories, namely Advertising and PR. 

But that would be to ignore the fact that the world of bits has made a whole new form of marketing possible. And so Canadian marketers need a category that rewards the likes of Nike+ (which reinvented the relationship people can have with brands), Beats Music (which resulted in a $2 billion buyout and became Apple Music) or Taskforce (which reinvented insurance by lowering premiums for people who take preventative measures) because these things don’t just change behaviours, they change cultures. And they don't just build sales for clients, they build factories.

There is no doubt in my mind that there are Canadian agencies innovating with technology and building sophisticated original systems that consistently deliver significant value to human beings over the long term on behalf of brands, thus dragging the industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I know because, as of very recently, I work at one of them. 

So we need to reward this kind of work in order to incentivise Canadian agencies to keep making it. 

And so, I propose we acknowledge that there is a difference between 1) Systematic Work 2) PR Stunts (that may or may not use technology) and 3) Advertising (that may or may not be on digital channels). And I propose we introduce a new term for the category of work that doesn't fit into PR or Advertising categories. You guessed it: “Systematic”. 

Let's take a moment to outline two very simple criteria by which to judge the work that would be entered into a category called "Systematic":

1. IS IT DIGITAL? Does it involve the rearrangement of the digits 1 and 0? Does it depend on software for its very existence? Did the people behind it write a single fucking line of code? If the answer is "no", then it ain't Systematic (and BTW it sure as shit isn't Digital). The following shouldn't require clarification but, just because this drives me crazy: videos that are essentially Just For Laughs Gags for the cause du jour that tweens Like on Facebook are Advertising at best and Dog Walkers at worst, but in neither case are they Digital (or Systematic, for that matter).

2. IS IT USEFUL? This one might be more contentious, but for the sake of carving out a clear distinction between the Systematic category and the PR category, let's say that people have to use it, or else it's not Systematic, it's PR. Rule of thumb: If it's not what you made that's great, it's the fact that you made it, then it's PR. Now that’s not to say it’s not good. Or indeed, to say that it’s not actually better - Talking Points often achieve objectives that Utilities cannot. But it is simply to say that it's not a system, it's a story.

And that's it. Two criteria. Pretty simple. 

Now I admit, there will be some grey area. 

Like, what if something is very useful but only a little bit digital? Personally I love ideas made possible by analogue tech. But, even though it uses technology, if it doesn't exist in the world of bits, let's say it isn't "Systematic". Truth is, it’s probably PR anyway: more about the fact that you did it, than what you did.

Or what if it's very digital and only a little bit useful? Well here's the rule of thumb: Did users get what they wanted out of it? Is there a demonstrable output? Was it an experience that delivered genuine value? Better yet: did people come back and use it a second, third, fourth, tenth, thousandth time?! Now THAT'S useful. 

To clarify for luddites who inexplicably take issue when anyone makes a case for any form of marketing that emerged post-Mad Men era: I don't think Systematic work is the solution to every problem. To the contrary, I am of the opinion that, for campaigns work, 9 times out of 10 it is better to do something very talkworthy (a story) rather than something very useful (a system) as I have outlined quite clearly here. 

But if award shows are the industry's way of communicating its value set to its members, and if there isn't a category that recognises great Systematic work, then we aren't incentivising agencies to build platforms that deliver the most impact in the form of demonstrable behaviour change, not to mention the most benefit to clients in terms of lifetime customer value. And we'll end up as a national industry known for its "viral videos" and fake apps instead of its bold innovations and useful systems. And that would suck.

Your move, award shows.

Tools, Toys, Trade and Talking Points: the 4 T’s of using technology in campaigns

This may not be an exhaustive list of all the ways that tech can be used in campaigns but they’re a damn good starting point. Plus, they all start with the letter T which is a bonus.

TOOLS: This one is obvious and old but actually the hardest to do. Make something genuinely useful. It used to be about making branded apps, but since people don’t want to download branded apps anymore these tools morphed into services that leverage existing platforms to perform some useful task on behalf of a brand (tools and services being different sides of the utility coin - I could have called this section “Utility” but then the title wouldn’t have been so catchy). To make a branded utility, think about what the company aspires to do and then do it by means other than the product they sell. It can help to ask yourself “What would this company do to deliver on their purpose if their product was banned?” And then think about how technology could accomplish that.

TOYS: This isn’t about utility, it’s about interactive entertainment. This is when you create something that is fun, distracting, engaging but not necessarily practical or useful. Think about any branded game like Gatorade’s Match Point or any Snap lens or any interactive installation or even a meme generator. They’re time-wasters that immerse you in the spirit of the brand or the tone of a campaign. Not surprisingly, toys tend to have a much shorter shelf life than tools. But they have the advantage of being centered on emotion and so they have more inherent talkability.

TRADE: This is a newer one. Think about this as e-comm innovation: can you sell or deliver your product in an innovative way? Can people scan a QR code in a metro station and have their groceries delivered to their home before they get there? Can customers buy a pair of shoes you’re selling via augmented reality? Can your burgers be delivered to people in their cars while they’re in traffic? This works particularly well when your product is highly desirable in the first place but new ways to shop and buy feel really futuristic and so people love to talk about it. Which is a good segue into the last of the four T’s.

TALKING POINTS: These are “tools” that aren’t as useful as they are PRable. Ford built a crib that worked like the Focus to show how smooth a ride it is or something like that. WestJet created a projector that could show when a family member’s flight would land. Lexus built a functioning hoverboard to show… I’m not actually sure what they were trying to show there but it was pretty damn cool. Nobody is going to buy or use any of these things, but the fact that they built them communicates the benefit of a product or the ethos of the brand.

And there you have it: Tools (utilities), Toys (games), Trade (e-comm) and Talking Points (PR stunts). The 4 T’s of using tech in campaigns. What an astute observer will notice is that they are conveniently on a spectrum of least talk-worthy to most talk-worthy. And since fame is the name of the campaigns game, aspire to include something surprising, topical, human and/or remarkable in whatever you come up with.

(This list does not cover ecosystems, websites, ad tech, content or media hacks. I’ll cover those in some other listicle.)