PIXEL MAVERICK

Delta Airlines has redesigned their website.  The new look is sleek and definitely takes a “keep-it-simple-stupid” approach to decluttering and bringing the most important activities to the forefront.

I swear I remember a blog post from a UX guy about a year ago where he had created a mock-up of a Delta.com Redux and it made the rounds in the blogosphere.  If I recall his design, this takes several cues from it.

The redesign is really only a partial redesign.  The home page and the initial layer/ level of pages in the user flow is the new design …but once you get into the core parts of the site it is the old design’s page templates.

Nothing wrong with that in my opinion.  They have improved the 1st and 2nd touch layers of the site & can learn from the feedback before rolling that out throughout the remainder of the pages/sections.

As you know from my previous post, I had the privilege to attend a workshop at Boulder Digital Works last week.  The topic was “Making Digital Work” and it was setup in a workshop session style with a series of fantastic speakers & leaders of the advertising industry setting the tone with their presentations.  All of the presentations will be made available online and when they are I will post them.  In addition, the entire workshop was taped and can be viewed on UStream.

I went to the workshop with fellow Martinite, Kevin Rothermel, and between the two of us we tried our best to create a Twitter Fail Whale from the massive amount of tweets coming from @edubble_u and @KevinRothermel with a #digiwork hashtag.  We tweeted the notable quotes and pics from the workshop throughout the two days as they were occuring and based on the ReTweets and comments it looks like several people were following.

I have a newfound respect for professional bloggers and journalists who manage to Live Blog and Tweet from these types of workshops and conferences all day, and then still find the energy later that evening to pound out a blog post recap on the key takeaways of the day.  Seeing as it is 1 week since the workshop and I am just now getting my blog post recap published …my hat is off to the pros.

Yes, I can confirm that it actually is this gorgeous in Boulder…

This blog post is a recap of all of the speaker action from Day 1 of the workshop.  The reason for not combining Day 1 and Day 2 recap into one blog post should be evident by the coma inducing length of this blog post.  Enjoy!

Day 1 Kickoff/ Intro – Matt Howell, CIO @ Modernista

“What can we as individuals do to move our agencies forward?”

Matt Howell, CIO at Modernista, kicked off the workshop and served as one of the primary leaders throughout the 2-day event.  He focused his intro presentation on giving everyone a good base of knowledge about the current state of advertising to use as a foundation to work/ think from.  The gist of the presentation can be summed up as …How did we get here (A Brief History of Interwebs & Advertising)?; What things have changed (Mass Media 1-way Yelling is Dead, Consumer has Controls)?; and What challenges do agencies face due to the changes (Agencies Must Change Model and Process or Die)?

Now that you get the basic idea of Matt’s workshop kickoff speech, here are the notable quotes that I thought were great:

• “The structures and processes that guided our industry for the past 25+ years has begun to fail.  It is not working now, and something needs to change.  The old structures are actually becoming liabilities to the business.”
• “83% of the Mad Men viewers fast-forward through TV commercials (..we don’t even watch our own commercials!)”
• “TV and Print are not going away, nothing is DEAD but…growth will NOT come from traditional channels anymore.”
• Tobbaccowalla quote “it is much better to have a smaller share of an exploding industry verses a growing share in a dying one”
• “Be uncomfortably unsentimental about the old days.  Rip off the bandaid already!”
• “We have a lot of money invested in people who are no longer capable (or willing) of contributing.”

The New Digital Landscape – Alastair Green, Digital ECD @ Team One

“Ideas are now more important and powerful than ever.  The big idea is not dead, but it definitely has changed.”

Alastair Green gave a presentation that provided a quick overview of the “new digital landscape”.  Since Matt Howell had just kicked off the workshop with a solid foundation on a similar topic, the bulk of his presentation was really more of a roll call of various new things (new companies, new apps, campaigns, etc) that are happening with digital advertising and communications today.  Alastair is clearly very knowledgeable about the space, and to me he actually seemed more like a developer than what I am used to for a creative director (…he had a StickyBits t-shirt on, that seems pretty KPow-ish to me).  The main points to take from his presentation is very similar to Matt Howell’s, with the notable addition that he places a TON of importance on the role that User Experience (UX) will play in digital advertising and communications going forward.

The sound-bite quotes that I took from Alastair’s presentation are the following (read them with an English accent to get the full effect):

• “User Experience (UX) is one of the most important disciplines to emerge in the new digital landscape.”
• He recommended checking out WeePlaces.com for a cool FourSquare visualizer.
• Brands who “Get It” today — Nike, Gap, Levi’s, Bravo, BestBuy, Starbucks, Old Spice (well Weiden really but OS gets some credit)
• Where are we headed — More mobile, More socialized layers and Location-Based Contextual Awareness (messaging relevant to where you are at the time)
• Some important new roles in advertising – Creative Technologist, Technical Strategist, UX Designer, UX Planner
• “If you are going to play in this space, its about commitments not about campaigns.  The conversation does not stop when the campaign does.”
• “It is ok to not know the answer.  There are a lot of geeky helpful people + the interwebs.  Just ask.”
• “Try and fail.  Fail and learn.  Failure is part of the DNA, get comfortable with it.”

Defining an Audience – Kim Laama, CD @ AKQA

“A demographic profile does not cut it.  Who are your users?  What is their story?”

Kim Laama is a Creative Director at AKQA San Francisco, and is leading the charge there for using persona development as a means to identify and segment the audience over the typical demographic profile.  Kim comes from a software design background before joining AKQA which I thought it was really interesting.  I think some type of mashup of the software design process & the advertising creative process is a good place to start when thinking about how agencies need to change.  That being said, Kim’s presentation was not about fixing the agency process — it was about a better way to identify the audience specifically for designing & developing online experiences (digital advertising, websites, etc).

Although she seemed a little nervous in the presentation delivery, Kim definitely has a mastery of using persona’s to inform how something should be designed/ developed.  She presented her topic by looking at three case studies.  I thought that the connection from case-study to UX/ Persona power was weak in parts (nerves), but in the end she made a very good case for using persona’s to really dig into the emotions, behaviors and actions of each of the user group and how to use that to inform the information architecture/ messaging/ and design of whatever it is you are creating.  I had an opportunity to chat with Kim after her presentation, and she is delightful and super-smart and someone you would want to partner with on a project to learn from.

I captured the following takeaways from her presentation:

• “Consumers today have more control over the experiences they choose to have.  The best way to reach them is to understand them & understand where they are thinking/ coming from.”
• “Personas should be driven by quantitative and qualitative research.”
• “Personas should never be anonymous.  Give him/her a name.”
• “You need to be able to map the online personas back to the demographic profiles/ segments that media is probably using as their guide.”
• “Figure out ways to make your research output be visually descriptive.  If you have the time partner a creative with your planner to reach some visually explanatory outcomes of the persona work.”
• “To me the Team Trifecta = Art Designer, Interaction Designer, Engagement Planner.”
• Two book recommendations 1) Designing for the Digital Age, Kim Goodwin; 2) Storytelling for User Experience, Whitney Quesenbery

Creative Briefs in the Post Digital World – Gareth Kay, Director of Brand Strategy @ Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

“The piece of paper is far less important than the journey.  This is NOT a baton race.”

I think Gareth was probably my favorite speaker of the group.  This is partially because I had been following him before the workshop ever since hearing of the first surfacing of his “New Brief” proposal, but also because he is a skilled presenter and has a humorous way of delivering his message with nuggets of wonderful wisdom folded right into the laughs.  As the title of his presentation indicates, the focus of Gareth’s presentation was on the fact that advertising has changed so much over the years (…well the world has changed & advertising changed with it) but for some reason the creative brief has not changed with it.  Bottom line, he thinks this is WRONG and his presentation tells you why it is wrong and what he would propose as the new brief for today.

My list of bulleted quotes is not going to do this thinking the justice it deserves.  I would recommend you click on the link and go read the presentation & his POV on the matter to get the full understanding.  Gareth was full of quotable material throughout his presentation, but the ones that resonated with me included the following:

• “This is NOT about digital.  This is about digital as a type of idea, not a channel.  This is about the long, slow channel …culture.  Advertising is in the culture business.”
• Gareth got into advertising after his band broke up in 1992.  No strategic importance in this bullet, just thought it was funny.
• “Culture has moved on — but planning has not kept up.”
• “We live in the age of ideas that DO.”
• “Customers don’t own brands …but they do want to participate.”
• “The bigger a brand gets, the smaller it should act. (PSFK reference)”
• “5% of ideas will thrive over time, but since you cannot tell which ones those are you need to try a ton of them.”
• “Doing and then learning is a much better strategy these days VS Learning and then doing.”
• “The modern ad agency should live on Madison Valley (Madison Avenue + Silicon Valley)”
• “If all else fails, go to www.whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com”

How it All Comes Together – Dave Schiff + Alex Burnard, VP/ GCDs @ Crispin, Porter + Bogusky

“…Um sort of by accident, but with a hellovalotta passion and commitment dude!”

Let me start by saying that Dave Schiff and Alex Burnard are the reason “don’t judge a book by its’ cover” is accurate.  They don’t look like your average creative director, and I am pretty sure that they could kick your average creative director’s ass or at least scare the bejezzus out of him/her. While the ass kicking and scaring might be one of their skills, what Dave and Alex do for a living and do very well is to serve as Creative Directors at CP+B.  Their presentation was to tell the group how to take an innovative, progressive and no-precedent type of idea for a client and figure out how to get it done.  Oh yeah, and how to get it done on a budget that is next to nothing.

The vehicle that Dave and Alex used for covering this topic was to tell us about a groundbreaking project/ campaign that was their brainchild – Shocking Barack.  The concept was for one of their clients, Brammo Motercycles, and essentially the idea was to go on a roadtrip along the same route that the Auto-Execs took in their excessive travel to get to Washington, D.C. to get their government bailouts.  They documented the entire trip, came up with a lightning-fast process for editing/ legal/ community-management, and learned that what they had initially planned for the project turned out to be absolutely NOTHING like what the end product ended up being.  The key is that they started out with something small, and then got that out to the audience to begin building a following — and then took the community feedback to inform what their next moves were (literally if you want to look at the map).

I think the best way to gain knowledge from this presentation is truly to watch the video on UStream + to go check out the Shocking Barack site to see how things ended up.  The key takeaway for me was that the ability to build and shift and optimize on-the-fly was the key to their success, as opposed to the traditional approach of a HUGE campaign creation & single massive launch.  Here are the key takeaways that I got from their presentation:

• Previous to this campaign neither of them had any “real-time advertising” experience.  They figured it out as they went along guided by the community.
• “People began following us and our journey, but it was clear that they were holding their cards (participation, advocacy) close to the vest until they knew we were not just a silly ad campaign – until they knew we were for real.”
• They developed relationships with the PR/ Media/ Journalists who picked this up early on in the trip.  They collaborated and shared inside info with them constantly along the way which led to better stories written >> which led to more following >> which led to more stories >> and so on.
• They had a 24 hour cycle that they developed for all video, blog-posts, etc.  That cycle included several typical touchpoints along the way including …client approval and legal.  In addition they included the media team in the loop on this cycle so they could optimize based on what was coming up.

If you are still reading this, I am shocked.  This is by far the longest freaking blog post I have ever written.

If you are still reading this, then check back tomorrow for the Day 2 recap.

Hopefully the recap provided some additional value or context to the slides that will ultimately be made available for all the presentations or from just watching UStream.

I have the extremely rough task of visiting Boulder, CO next week to attend a digital workshop at Boulder Digital Works.  I am attending the workshop with Kevin Rothermel, a planner here at The Martin Agency who is a cool smart guy that you definitely want to work (in spite of his surly attitude and loud dinner voice).

In an attempt to share as much of the knowledge gained from the workshop as possible, Kevin and I will be providing the coverage of the workshop.  We will be tweeting throughout each day to capture & share some the great statements and quotes as they happen so you can steal them and try to pass them off as your own later.  Every evening we will each write a Daily Recap blog posts that will provide our overview on the day’s learnings with our key takeaways.

The knowledge we can share …the kick-ass awesomeness of Boulder, CO you will just have to be jealous about.

The speaker list is pretty awesome if you are an advertising geek like me.

Workshop Speakers:

• Gareth Kay: Director of Brand Strategy, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
• Matt Howell: Chief Interactive Officer, Modernista!
• Edward Boches: Chief Creative Officer, Mullen
• Michael Tabtabai: Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi
• Alastair Green: Creative Director, Team One
• John Winsor: CEO, Victors & Spoils
• Kim Laama: Associate Creative Director, AKQA
• Scott Prindle: VP/Executive Creative Technology Director, CP+B
• Dave Schiff: Creative Director, CP+B
• Alex Burnard: Creative Director, CP+B
• Craig Bramscher: CEO/Chairman, Brammo

In addition to the great speaker list, the Session Topics that will be covered look very exciting.  All of it is relevant to what we deal with on a daily basis in the advertising industry, and definitely is relevant for what Kevin and I are seeing at The Martin Agency.

Workshop Session Topics:

There are four (4) hands-on workshop sessions that take place between the speaker sessions outlined below.

• Kick-Off: A three part opening that looks at (1) how things had worked, (2) why things are changing, and (3) the challenges facing organizations seeking to evolve.
• The New Digital Landscape: Interactive media work is typically a lot differ- ent from traditional media work. Look at the broad range of channels, the diversity of execution, and how digital work can differ in terms of schedule, budget and team structure.
• The Changing Client / Agency Relationship: How clients and agencies are changing the mechanics of their relationship to create a more progressive, more voluminous body of digital work.
• Defining an Audience: The age of the broadcast demographic is dead. A look at persona development and other more relevant means of identifying an audience and the segments therein.
• Creative Briefs in the Post Digital Age: Has the approach to writing a creative brief changed in the past two years? Has it stayed the same? How account planning and the briefing process is dealing with the challenge of creating work in today’s media environment.
• Integrated Concepts: A look at some of the best work in the industry. Then working backwards to explain how creatives interpret and respond to a brief, how strong ideas are conceived, how they’re presented to the client.
• The Agency Organization: The circumstances through which digital work is developed can be radically different than that of traditional. This looks at agency team structure, the physical environment of the agency, resource distribution, pressures on profitability, and how to stay nimble + motivated.
• The Client Organization: Clients ultimately determine the work that goes into market. This segment looks at (1) changes to internal structure that lessen bureaucracy and improve the quality of the end product, and (2) what can be done to get more out of your agency.
• Technology: One of the greatest differences between traditional and digital work is the role of the lead technolo- gist. This segment looks at when and how to inte- grate technology into the concepting process, and what type of technologist is required to fulfill this job.
• Production Process: An overview of the steps in the production process, including what roles are involved at each stage. Contrasts how interactive production / project management differs from that of traditional.
• How It All Comes Together: Focus on an industry gold-standard case study. From briefing to concept to design to development to launch – how it was all done.

So, if any of this sounds interesting to you — please check back with my blog and with Kevin’s blog during the early part of next week.  Also, if you are a master multi-tasker and can follow streaming tweets and still be exceptional at your job then follow our tweets during the day to see how things are going.

Mine – http://twitter.com/edubble_u

Kevin – http://twitter.com/KevinRothermel or http://twitter.com/MartinTweets

If you work in advertising or any role where you are consulting with companies about some aspect of their ongoing relationship with customers — you may have come across the challenge of figuring out your client’s “Social Voice”.  Essentially it is the same thing as a brand voice & it refers to the type of personality and communication style your client’s brand has when engaging with customers.

You might think that Social Voice is a totally new thing attributed to the recent impact of social media, but that would be incorrect.  Successful brands have had a social voice for as long as there have been companies that sell goods and services to customers.  What social media has done, is shift the power to the customer and as a result the spotlight is now beaming down on a brand’s ability to engage with customers as a key success metric these days.

Initially most people who think about brand strategy all day thought that Social Voice should be some type of straight personification of the brand.  “If my brand were a person what type of person would he/she be …fun, serious, quirky, brash?  What does a quirky person talk like anyway?  Why would someone want to be friends with my brand?”.  I think this is the right direction, but this approach is not applicable for ALL brands.  I think this type of social voice works well for companies that have a strong and highly visible individual that regularly represents the brand — a CEO or primary spokesperson that is front and center in all marketing efforts or perhaps a small business where the owner IS the brand.  In these cases, I think having a single social voice that comes from the person at the center of the brand is the right way to go.  Clearly this person who represents your brand has an engaging personality that people like and think of when they think of your company (or you have bigger problems) so thier voice is the right social voice.

For the majority of companies, however, I do not think a single prescribed social voice is the right approach.  Most companies do not have a single person or spokesperson that exclusively represents the brand to the world.  In most situations, a company’s brand is represented by the hundreds or thousands of employees that engage with the customers on a daily basis.  In fact, even with companies that have a strong individual representative …the employees still are the most important aspect of the company delivering on it’s promises.  These employees ARE the brand.  In these cases, a single prescribed social voice would come off as totally fake and customers would punish the company for that.

(Imagine having a casual conversation with someone at a party …but whenever they spoke they were reading from a script.  Fun party.)

When the employees ARE the brand, the best approach for developing a social voice is to make sure the employees can be themselves.  I am not proposing a free-for-all with no brand direction, but rather a loose range that allows individual personalities to shine within.  I think the approach to develop this type of social voice range for a brand includes the following steps:

1. Do the whole brand personification exercise and figure out what type of person your brand is & how they would act/ talk/ behave
2. Once you have that single voice for your brand consider that your center point
3. Take the center point as the bulls-eye and establish an acceptable range of personality types and behavior that circles around it
4. Look for employees that have personalities that authentically live within this acceptable range
5. Let them be themselves, and directly represent the brand with their own style

This approach is definitely described at a high level, but I think it covers the main steps that should be taken to figure out what type of social voice range would be successful for a brand.  At the end of the day, people do not want to be talked to with no opportunity for two-way dialogue …nor do they want to hold a conversation with a person who clearly is faking it and not being themselves.  So, it is better to let the people that work directly with the customers be themselves than to give them scripts or worse to muzzle them.

What other approaches for brand voice and social voice do you know of?

One of my favorite blogs, Fresh Networks, has a recent post with a great video of Matt Rhodes presenting his thoughts on how to approach social media in Europe.  His overall point is that a multinational brand should not attempt to create one single global social media strategy and apply that to all countries.

I agree with Mr. Rhodes that you cannot take a single social media strategy and apply it globally with success.  Each country has it’s own mix of culture, social activity preferences, and social landscape — therefore each country should have it’s own social media strategy.

While I do agree with him that each country should develop an approach that is optimal to it’s mix, I do NOT think that means that a multinational brand should approach social media without some form of unified strategy.

Keeping Mr. Rhodes’ valid points in mind, I propose that a global brand should take a rational Fixed/ Flexible approach to developing their global social strategy.

Fixed (Global):

• Policies (What you can & cannot say, PR issue escalation, etc)
• Operation Protocols (Centralized CRM acquisition, Analytics, Naming conventions, etc)
• Social Voice (My approach to this is to personify the brand as a center point and create a halo range from that — various individual and country authentic personalities can live within that range)

Flexible (Per Country):

• Environments (FB, Twitter, YouTube, Ning, etc)
• Engagement Strategy (Q&As for Germany, Blogs for France, etc)
• Social CRM (Flex business rules for evolving relationships)

Finding the right Fixed/ Flexible ratio would take time and would constantly need to be monitored and revised to remain optimal, but I think if a multinational brand were to take this approach it would be successful.  They would be able to maximize their social media efforts per country while still ensuring that each country’s individual efforts was contributing to the brand and business goals for the global company.

What do you think?

What global brands are doing something like this (or a better model) well today?

Google has a funny and smart twist on their habit of changing up the “G-O-O-G-L-E” that is above the search bar on their main search page.

This little Rube Golbergesque animation is a visual reference to their recent interactive video that advertises how fast Google Chrome is.

I found a great Slideshare presentation today from Luckie that provides a nice look at how retail is using social by presenting 8 case study examples + some review commentary on each.

One of the strategist at Luckie, David Griner is the author of a blog called Social Path that is excellent.  It is one of my favorites in my blogroll and if you do not already follow it, I suggest you start.

As someone who is passionate about soccer (football/ futbol/ etc), and has played the game since I was 5 years old …it has always bugged me that in the United States soccer gets frequently labeled as wimpy, sissy, fluffy compared to other more American sports.  Anyone who has played the game knows that this is far from the truth and knows that soccer players are some of the toughest most in shape athletes in all sports.

So …”Thanks a lot!”, to the Guardian.co.uk for making this your front page feature image this morning.  That picture will definitely help to dispel the whole sissy sport myth.

Simply amazing.

The video of all the players in action is incredible enough, but all the “what if” scenarios and how the results affect the world economy & society was a really creative addition to the story.

This commercial has been running heavy for the past month so I am sure that all of you have seen it — and most likely you all thought the same thing I did ….“Man what a let down that this was for AT&T!”.

As much as I hated realizing that it was an AT&T spot, I have to give the agency responsible credit for creating a great commercial.  They zeroed in on the fact that the majority of people do things for a living that they are not entirely happy with.  Music is such a great trigger to tap into emotion.

This great commercial would have come full circle for me if it had been for any number of things that could relate to a person chasing his/her REAL dreams.

• Going back to school (Any college as long as it was not one of those fake online schools or annoying ITT deals)
• Starting your own business (Kickstarter, Bank Micro-loans, etc)
• Changing professions (Job board, Executive recruiting, etc)

What did you want to be when you were 5 years old?