Will charnock brazil_nov29notes
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19-Sep-2014 -
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Transcript of Will charnock brazil_nov29notes
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Good A'ernoon, I was asked to give a presenta1on about me! The transi2on from classically trained planner to being the head of strategy at arguably the biggest and most crea2ve digital agency in the world. As for Head of Strategy at R/GA well I’m not quite sure what I’m doing there but all I know is it’s one of the most interes1ng and exci1ng gigs i’ve ever had.. I called this presenta2on the unplannable journey…
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It’s a journey with a beginning and an end. While I’ve made this journey feel ra2onal and linear…it never felt like that It is only that way in hind sight. I’m not one of those 5 year planners. I never had a plan. I s2ll don’t think I have a plan. Maybe it’s because I’m not a philosopher planner. I’m a prac22oner. I’ve spent my career working on real projects, in the trenches doing real work for real clients and this is what interests me. Strategy for me is not about certainty or confidence. It’s not even about ideas. It’s about curiosity -‐ seeing what is interes2ng thinking what you can do next.
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So, Here’s what I want to share with you. 7 chapters, 7 different stages. All of them important to understanding how I got to where I am today. Not necessarily consistent or logical …but I’m happy with that. In fact I think consistency is much over rated. It’s bullshit to think we have to be one thing all the 2me. That we can’t be mul2ple things. We have to choose between ra2onal and emo2onal. Between logic and emo2on. Between analy2cal and crea2ve. We’ll i’ve never bought into that. I want to be good at both things. I’m both a dreamer and a realist.
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An maybe this is the reason for that.
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This is me and my iden2cal twin brother on holiday in England. As a twin I became very comfortable with the idea of seemingly similar things being totally contradictory. In fact, I’ve always been good at holding two contradictory ideas in my head at the same 2me. A trait I s2ll have and s2ll infuriates those around me. Actually, as an aside I showed this picture to a friend of mine just before I le' for Brazil and he said… …if you are showing that in Brazil you need to explain 2 things. First of all, that that the thing you are siZng on is in fact a beach, not a garbage heap -‐ they won’t recognize it as such in Brazil And second, in 1960’s England, that is what people wore on the beach.
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I wanted to be a rock star. But I couldn’t play an instrument or a sing. I wouldn’t be deterred so I taught myself the technical, geeky side….programming synthesizers, drum machines and ul2mately the mixing desk. (guess that’s where the love of technology first started) This is where I worked in my first job.. I got my first break working in the CBS studios in Whi`ield street, which was for me a dream come true.
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You see, It was the early 80’s and I’d grown up listening to the clash. This was the exact studio where much of London Calling was recorded. My plan was to be in the studio recording The Clash, Adam Ant, new wave bands of the early 80’s.
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But like many dreams the reality was very different . This is the band I ended up in the studio with. And this is one of the tracks that I helped them record….
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I gave up on that dream predy quickly having learned a very important lesson.
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Going to fast forward through university and my early career. Again not much of a plan but discovering new opportuni2es and leaping into new areas as I discovered them Telemarketer, through copytes2ng Qualita2ve researcher to direct marke2ng Planner.
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Which is really where this story starts
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Although I don’t really think of myself as a ‘classical’ planner…but I have come to acknowledge that this is how a lot of people see me.
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Perhaps because of my training at Ogilvy. Now, although I ended up at Ogilvy in New York I originally started at Ogilvy and mather direct marke2ng. A crazy bunch of people who believed that Direct marke2ng could be as crea2ve and strategic as their adver2sing counterparts. They were probably one of the most crea2ve and crea2vely awarded agencies in the UK at that 2me…and believed that planning was part of the process for achieving this -‐ I was spoiled. They pioneered a number of the classic marke2ng methodologies of the champion and challenger -‐ constantly trying to beat the last best performing idea. As part of the Ogilvy Loyalty center I define the customer ownership cycle and the rela2onship cycle which later became Ogilvy’s 360 degree branding. This was the classic training I received. But more than the theory, it was the people. When I first arrived in the office the planner before me had just moved up into the crea2ve department. He is s2ll one of my favorite crea2ve partners
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Not only was Rory a great crea2ve. He was an unconven2onal thinker. He taught me to find the real solu2ons to the real problems…not the apparent solu2on to an apparent problem.
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The first problem I was handed to own was IBM. Worked with them for 6 years both in London and later in NY. Now, you’ve got to remember at this 2me the IBM brand was in the toilet. They were thought of as the mainframe computer company. IBM came to Ogilvy they were seen as a dinosaur a brand of the past and the brief I was asked to work on was the brief to make them a brand of the future.
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A lot has been said about the campaign we created. A lot has been said in hindsight about the vision by people who were not there. A lot of people have touched this campaign since it’s incep2on but let me just correct a few of the mispercep2ons of the IBM e-‐business campaign. First, this lidle guy, the red e was scribbled on the back of a napkin by Peter Wood, an art director at Ogilvy at the 2me. We loved it. We knew it could be a symbol of this shi' that was happening in the technology business and while we hoped it might one day catch on, we had no idea it would go as far as it did. The e-‐business campaign was originally conceived as a small business campaign.
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The idea of e-‐business wasn’t something that people immediately believed. We had told people what e-‐business was but no-‐one believed it was real so we created the e-‐culture campaign to show that companies were really adop2ng e-‐business. We took this campaign into the different industries IBM was doing most of it’s work in. We took it to the spor2ng events and sponsorships, including the olympics, that they were associated with. Then got a brief in from the Global Services Division. We hadn’t worked out how this idea worked for people, only products. We realized it took a par2cular type of person to be willing to move from the old way of doing business to the new way of doing business and we created e-‐people. We needed news around the new products that IBM was launching. E-‐Tools was the way we created a number of different products and service adver2sing for them with different looks and feels 2ed to the idea of e-‐business. It wasn’t un2l I pointed out to one of our crea2ve directors that the internet was not made up of wires and networks but actually connected of servers, mainframes and storage that we we understood that all of these products could be the engines of e-‐business.
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The e-‐business story has been told a million 2mes. Ogilvy had a big idea and then we made it. But honestly…that’s not how it was.
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We had no idea how big it could be or whether it would ever get there. We turned up every day to a new problem from a different division asking to be part of e-‐business. We believed in the idea and worked hard to understand the problem and played with the idea to see how it could be used to solve a number of different problems. We had to evolve the idea. We had to keep building on the idea and we had to turn this idea from a scribble on the back of a napkin to a business changing idea.
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A'er 3 years of doing that…Where do you go. I couldn’t see my self as an Ogilvy Lifer. (there were people there who’d been there 20 something years). That’s right for some people but it wasn’t for me. I’d found my feet in New York by now and I wanted to expand my New York experience.
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America was so different from the UK both in terms of the adver2sing spend and the focus on Television.. Big produc2on television. This was something new to me and I wanted to understand it. I wanted to get into the soul of this country I was just discovering. There was only one place to go
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BBDO at the 2me was s2ll ruled by the old school New York crea2ve heads. They didn’t have planning as such and I was recruited to be their first planning director.
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I was assigned to Frito Lay to start which included Doritos, cheetos, tos2tos, any chip ending in the leder OS. It was a very different culture.
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Both Steve Hayden and Chris Wall my crea2ve partners on IBM had come from BBDO and when I told them I was leaving they said being a planner at BBDO would be like being a “Chris1an missionary in Iraq”. They were right… It was the culture of celebrity, sports teams I’d never heard of, really simple, high produc2on spots with a joke or visual punch line. Every briefing I had would have 10 to 20 teams of crea2ves. Up to 40 people. A'er which the execu2ve crea2ve director would say “Now ignore everything he said and just do some great work”. I couldn’t possibly work with every team that was there…and honestly most of them didn’t want me there. But that was OK with me. I realized that not everyone in the room would be producing something for the assignment and so my goal became only work with the people who wanted to work with me and do everything I could to help make sure that their ideas were the ones that got made. This was a totally different type of hard work. Hard work that earns the right to sit at the crea2ve table. Take as much ownership and responsibility for of the crea2ve
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I fell into a partnership with Donna Weinheim who had been known for her Where’s the beef , Lidle Ceasars “Pizza Pizza” and Pepsi’s boy in the bodle ad. She was full of wonderfully simple visual ideas but had no strategic filter. I used to brief her one day and the next day she would have 87 TV ideas… 82 of them were terrible but there were one or two Gems. By filtering out the crap I helped her get more and more of her work produced.
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To the point where I had 5 ads in the superbowl of 2002…including this one for Fedex.
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In this crea2vely compe22ve environment…planning became the compe22ve advantage Teams that didn’t want planning started asking for the help the other teams were geZng. Slowly we increased the number of planners we had in the department.
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Perhaps my favorite learning experience was for Doritos. They’d done some par2cularly famous work around the bold flavor but now all the compe22on were copying them We needed to take the category to a new place
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I’d done a fair amount of work with teen boys by that point and I had the insight that ‘Dares’ from their contemporaries were what really mo2vated them. My brief was that boldness alone wasn’t enough. The real status symbol of teen boys was risk and daring and I defined the task as bringing daring to the already established boldness of the brand Jerry hated the brief. He said it had two ideas. …boldness and daring. I argued a lot that neither on their own was enough, so it had to have both. A'er playing with the idea he came round to the idea and used the line in the brief as the endline…more than that he came to believe the brief was right. We created this work called “bold and daring” as a story board and the client hated it. They’d never seen this approach and it was unlike anything else in the category. …also it was really hard to get the sense of it from the storyboard. It was unusual, surprising and a lidle weird…perfect for teenage boys but not something an execu2ve at Frito lay would like. Jerry and I were figh2ng for the work but no-‐one could see what we could see. In stead of giving up we decided to just shoot the spots really cheaply. We found a director who agreed to do it for about $18,000 and we shot three ads. This is one of them.
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Both these examples from BBDO sort of led to the same conclusion for me. We assume that when something is good, beder than what you have, that other people will see it and embrace it. But that’s not true.
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Whether it’s planning helping make beder ads or a campaign that breaks the exis2ng mold of adver2sing, most people can’t see it. It takes a special team of people to band together and do whatever it takes to bring that idea to the world.
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Which sort of took me to the next chapter. I realized that what helped people appreciate new things or new ideas was great storytelling. I became very interested in stories and how they shaped our view of the world, the things around us and the communi2es that we iden2fied with. In order to pursue this way of thinking I had to leave BBDO and joined the storytelling agency who’d been talking about storytelling since 1916.
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I moved to JWT and ul2mately became the co-‐head of planning in their flagship New York office
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I worked very intensely on defining storytelling and what makes a good story and ul2mately boiled it down to 4 truths about story telling. The 4 truths were audience, teller moment and mission. Good story tellers really understand the audience they are speaking to. To be believed they have to be true and authen2c to who they are so we need to spend a lot of 2me defining who the brand is and what are the important truths that make the message credible. Good stories are not always successful. The reason is that if a story is not useful or valuable for the moment in 2me that they are told, they will be forgoden. Great stories have to be right for the 2mes, the culture, the context. This is what makes a good story resonate within a community. Finally, the Mission was the interes2ng one (and the last truth I added!) because it forced us to talk to clients about the brands reason for existence beyond selling and making products . It was about iden2fying a shared mission that the target audience would also believe in.
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Although I did a lot of great work at JWT that was great story telling there is one campaign that broke the mold and really got me thinking. What was different about this work was that it didn’t try to tell a story…it tried to get people to do something. We had already established the concept that HSBC valued differences in a previous campaign but the problem was that people didn’t think of themselves as different. The answer we came up with was to create something in adver2sing that would s2mulate them to think of how they were different. Get them to par2cipate in the idea of differences. To look at the ad and decide what their point of view was on a par2cular topic. By forcing them to take sides we hoped they would then understand that they are ‘different people’ that HSBC wanted to serve.
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This is one of my favorites from the campaign but there was print, online, outdoor and everything as part of this body of work…and it too ran all over the world.
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In fact this started a whole body of work at JWT that were brand ac2ons. People today have more informa2on and are more able to find out what is really happening at a company or organiza2on. They no longer have to rely on the messages that a company puts out into the world. As a result I believe that people judge brands less on what they say and more on what they do. Adver2sing and marke2ng is not just a way of messaging for a brand it is an ac2on of the brand. It is a behavior of an organiza2on and will be judged as such. If we want to change percep2ons of a brand then we have to change more than what they say. We need to try to change how they act as an organiza2on… this is what will change how people think about a brand.
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For many years Debeers ran an print ad with a picture of a dead rose and a diamond ring. It was exactly the same idea, just expressed differently, in a different medium. The choice of how we execute the idea is equally strategic to the idea itself. As a strategist I realized I couldn’t leave that to someone else. Strategy is both the idea and the execu1on.
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The focus on ac2on and crea2ng events and ac2vi2es that force interac2on revealed to me a problem with only focusing on stories. Stories live in people’s heads. What we’d started doing was crea2ng experiences, interac2ons that lived in the real world. We could create things that changed the experience of the brand and by defini2on the reality of doing business with the brand. If we could do this we could change the the interac2ons, the transac2ons, the products and services that a brand creates to build it’s rela2onships. Stories weren’t enough…there was more.
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Which led me to where I am today
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I’m excited about making stuff. Real stuff. (I realized that adver2sing agencies don’t really make stuff.. They spend the majority of their 2me thinking about what to make and thinking about how it should be made but they don’t actually make much. The making is outsourced to other companies, other directors and photographers and web shops who actually make things). I wanted to go somewhere to be in a making culture and that was what adracted me to R/GA
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R/GA started as a produc2on shop
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Balance of two different cultures that have grown up together – Crea2ve and produc2on: Shouldn’t really exist in the same building there is a very strong tension – producers just want projects to run smoothly and keep the project the same from beginning to end. Crea2ve minds on the other hand get bored and never rest un2l it is perfect. If they had their way they would keep changing it un2l it was too late. When I arrived we were adding a new culture to this mix. Building the strategic side of the business. Bob Greenberg felt he needed strategy because although R/GA had fantas2c crea2ve produc2on as digital exploded and R/GA’s rela2onship spread up to the CMO and CEO they were increasingly realizing that there was more to digital than just marke2ng…digital was effec2ng everything that businesses were doing from sales channels to product development, service development, distribu2on of content and informa2on… Clients started asking R/GA for what they should be doing and neither the crea2ve nor the technology people were in a good posi2on to answer. Strategy has been a very important part of R/GA’s growth not just in number of projects for clients but also the breadth and depth of engagements within the clients business
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We are expanding globally
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We have a very simple model that allows for thinking and making at every stage of the process. Even in our discovery process we are building things, tes2ng things out to see how people respond to them. In the crea2ve prices we imagine but we also prototype. Finally the launch of our ideas is just the start. Once live we constantly changing and improving our ideas based on real data and real informa2on on what people use and find valuable. This has really fostered a new type of strategic thinking for me which is much less ‘big upfront thinking’ and is much more incremental and itera2ve ideas. More like the champion and challenger of Ogilvy direct marke2ng . Ideas like IBM that you work on. Ideas like JWT that you experiment with to make them as interes2ng as you can.
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Fundamental to this ACTIVE LEARNING -‐ we have to work hard to ensure we are learning faster than the pace of change. This is the equa2on we use at RGA…learning has to be greater or equal to the pace of change. If our learning and our experimenta2on isn’t ahead of the technology curve then we know we and our clients risk obsolescence. As planners our goal is to stay ahead of the curve. We do this with all our projects…constantly evolving and constantly itera2ng.
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Nike + the project we are most known for is very different in technology terms to the technology that it started with. The idea has grown and built but fundamentally our original idea is s2ll as vibrant and exci2ng as it’s ever been
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So far I think the aspect of planning at R/GA that excites me the most is that most of what we do has never been done before and that demands of planners and strategists a slightly different skill. What planners tend to do is find things and share them with other people and inspire them to do something interes2ng. Whether that’s a trend or a data point or a fact about the brand…Invariably we are finding things that already exist. That someone else created.
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What I require of planners these days is more than this. Not to focus on what is, but to focus on what could be. To believe in something that you can only imagine and then work with other people, technologists and crea2ves to make it real. -‐ Whether that’s an tool, an app, an event, an experience, a new way of doing business or a new consumer behavior. We can change the world and we can work hard and surround ourselves with others who are also willing to believe, and make that thing that thing happen. And even if you fail.. It’s a much more valuable learning experience than doing things that have fundamentally been done a million 2mes before.
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Now to do that you need a totally different group of people and that’s some of what I’m doing at R/GA
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This approach demands an understanding of a wide variety of inputs – business data, category understanding, opportunity analysis, product and service development, sales channels as well as research, ethnography, not just research and insights
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It demands an understanding of a huge variety of different types of output from marke2ng and messaging, products, services, experiences, events, internal communica2ons, design, retail, mobile, social, apps, content produc2on.
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To do this we need a very different group of planners and I believe we are building one of the most diverse strategy groups in the world.
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And with these people it’s not about puZng them together the same way and the same structure for every problem It’s about puZng unusual and unexpected combina2ons of people together and seeing what happens
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This was true when Jay chiat said it and the agencies were made up primarily of art directors and copy writers and account people and the output and talent were very very similar. Agencies get bad when they are trying to scale doing the same thing over and over again.
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But when you are diverse in talent and output your size is not your enemy, it’s your friend. As bob said.
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Finally I want to share some last minute things that I am thinking about and that I currently find interes2ng… Who knows where these will end up.
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The first is how brands build themselves. I don’t need to tell you that most brands build themselves around creating products or services and selling them to consumers
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And, in order to grow, Most businesses extend their portfolio to create additional products and services
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Best example is Coke which started as a single product but as they grew
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But it grew to become the company we see today by adding Sprite, Diet Coke, Minute Maid, Dasani, and many more brands to the portfolio. Today, Coca-Cola sells over 500 brands of beverages across 3,500 individual products, in over 200 countries, selling 1.7 billion drinks per day. And the story of Coke is not terribly different from the story of P&G, or Toyota, or Citibank. Every one of these companies started out with a single product or service, eventually expanding in this horizontal fashion to meet the needs of more and more consumers, growing ever larger along the way.
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But, when every brand in every category is growing in the same way, the result is proliferation of choice, commoditization, price wars and ultimately a hyper competitive market where growth for everyone is impossible
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What we are seeing, especially with new technology brands but also with some other non-tech brand is a new business strategy.
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It’s about creating connections between things that provide incremental value to consumers. So rather than finding new consumers to sell a variation of your product or service you identify additional products and services that can be sold to the same customer. And with each new product or service you enhance or deepen the brand relationship
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Each new piece creates an additional node in the value ecosystem, further driving up value for consumers. What constitutes an ecosystem of value? Each node is also a potential new entry point for new consumers, as you will see in a minute.
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We are calling this functional integration. In this meeting GP 1Mais1 today we saw a fantastic example of this from Pablo Capile of Circuito For a do Eixo
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The text book case study of Functional Integration is Apple. Yes I know you’re fed up with examples of Apple. But I’m not talking about Apple as a marketer.. I’m talking about the business model that Apple is using to grow as a brand. I am talking about one of the fastest growing brands and businesses in the world and they are doing it like no other brand has ever grown before. It’s boring to talk about apple all the time but when mass manufacturing was invented by Ford at the beginning of the industrial age, everyone looked to Ford and learned from Ford because they were the first business to create products for mass audiences and invented new ways to make products and distribute products. They invented the idea of factories, mass consumption, mass distribution and mass marketing. Apple is doing the same for the 21st century. It will be the text book case of the future and not just for advertising and marketing
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In 2000, Apple released OS X. Soon after its release, each new Macintosh came with a free copy of a new software program called iTunes, enabling you to manage a digital music library. The ad campaign at the time had the headline “Rip. Mix. Burn.” Wired Magazine took this to mean what technologies like iTunes would eventually do to the music industry.
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About 11 months after the introduction of iTunes, Apple introduced the next node in its functionally-integrated ecosystem: iPod. The interconnection between products and services was beginning to become more apparent.
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From the ipod it made perfect sense to move into the phone business, then the apps business with the app store. Then the data storage business with cloud computing to the point where apple has so many different businesses that it is truly impossible to know what business they are in. What they have is an ecosystem of different products that add incrementally to the relationship that people have with the brand. Coke does not have this. P&G does not have this, Unilever does not have this. Very few companies have this. Most product manufactures do not have this. The more apple products you use the more value you get. Because all their products are connected there is a very good reason to use all apple products. They work together so well. You would be foolish to use a different phone, a different cloud storage service if you have just one of the other pieces of the ecosystem. With Coke, P&G, Unilever there is no advantage to drinking both coke and diet coke. These is no advantage using Tide washing powder and Crest toothpaste or Old Spice and Head and Shoulders. These are different products for different people. There is no connection and no incremental value.
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Apple is not the only brand prac2cing func2onal integra2on. Google is doing it too.
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Google has built a similarly integrated ecosystem of value that spans email, blogging, digital video, documents, mobile opera2ng systems. And, a month ago, we helped Google create a new node in its ecosystem of value with the launch of Google Wallet..
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Take BMW, for example. Certainly not a technology company in the classic sense.
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But look at its press releases over the past 12 months. BMW has announced one func2onally-‐integrated idea a'er another.
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But the strategy of the world’s most valuable brands like Apple and Google, the new name of the game is Functional Integration. If we are going to continue to be the growth partners of our clients, we’re going to need to evolve.
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So what I’m interested in making these days is not just experiences and marke2ng but working with clients to help them define how they will grow in a connected and digital age. Help them build new products and services, now sales channels and new tools for building beder more func2onally integrated revenue models
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I’m really interested in making service layers that connect the physical products of brands. Digital service, digital pla`orms, digital systems that service layers on top of products that create this func2onal integra2on. We need to think of brands not as stand alone objects but part of a system. Thinking of a brand as a system is important in the digital age. Each touch point has to have it’s own reason for being, it’s own usefulness and value but if it is connected to a bigger system that whole system has to work towards some other bigger goal. It’s like the mission I talked about in the storytelling chapter but it is more profound than that. Brands need a purpose above and beyond the products they sell that people share. This purpose is what we believe defines the brands strategic vision and their product and service innova2on. As such strategy and innova2on are indis2nguishable from each other.
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As this connected system grows then so does the data. The interes2ng aspect of data for me today is not what data exists or how we collect it and analyze it. Everything we create in the digital age generates data. We can create any data we need. We can build things that generate the most valuable and useful data. A lot of the best, most interes2ng conversa2ons we’re having with clients is not what data they have but what data do they need to have compe22ve advantage and then how do we create the system that can generate that data.
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Finally, crea2ng impact. Making a difference, not just in the percep2ons and minds of people but also making an impact in the real world. Crea2ng new behaviors for businesses, crea2ng new behaviors in our consumers. Crea2ng new habits, new experiences, new products. When strategists get out of the world of marke2ng, the skills they have. The skills we are all developing are very valued in a lot of different businesses and organiza2ons. It is my work on behavior change that has opened doors to the UN Malaria net distribu2on program in Nigeria. It is the work in story telling and ac2ons not messages that opened the door to me working with the US Marines War College to advise senior leaders of all 5 armed forces on strategy. It is this experience that has me working with Start ups, Venture Capitalists, Harvard University and many not for profit and social enterprise organiza2ons like Acumen Fund. It’s not just marketers that want our exper2se. This experience has made me realize that what we do in our business has great value outside the industry but only if we keep inven2ng, keep pioneering and keep our industry at the forefront of this digital shi' we are all experiencing.
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