[SxSW 2012] Part III: The agency as product creator

Uno de Waal: A key theme threading through SxSW this year is the idea that an agency (marketing, advertising, communications etc) should function in very similar ways to a start-up. This is primarily running through the start-up track led by the 500Startups crew, under guidance of Eric Ries and Dave McClure, but other talks have also peppered the packed schedule.

My background is in product management and I’ve always had a semi love-hate relationship with digital product creation - love the product you create but sometimes it feels like squeezing water from stones. Two talks over the weekend resonated the most with me, the first one led by Robbie Whiting (@robbiew), who is director: creative technology and production at Duncan/Channon, and the second a ‘fireside chat’ between Eric Ries (@ericries), Dave McClure (@davemcclure) and the audience.

Whiting had a brilliant talk urging us as agencies to think about the rise of “makers” and the role that these people play inside agencies, as this is central to the question of how do we market in a consumer society that has moved on from TV ads, print DPSes, radio spots and banner ads.

Value of advertising is decreasing

Whiting makes a case that the value of advertising is decreasing, and that we need to create things that people want, and not make people want things. According to Whiting, we as agencies should be experimenting with creating things, as it is these acts of creation that will be what sets us apart from our competitors, and similarly help our clients stand out.

It’s not necessarily the actual product that is the end goal; we don’t need to create finished, polished products such as Basecamp, Chalkbot or Projeqt, but that the process of tinkering, experimenting and learning is key. Using Agile/Scrum development methodologies is the best way to get this process better aligned.

Agile/Scrum was another focal point for the Lean Startup talk by Ries and McClure. While their talk didn’t centre specifically on agency structure or operating as a start-up (that’s only coming later), it did dispel some of the common myths that people have associated with what it means to be lean.

Cut to the chase quicker

Being lean does not necessarily mean that you should be cheap and focus all your efforts on cost reduction; it simply means that you cut to the chase quicker and focus on the activities that create value over and above anything else.

This is an easy model to apply to advertising. Often campaigns are produced where an overly complicated solution is provided for eg user content submission, entry into a competition or some other key performance metric. We need to focus our campaign production, planning and execution on finding what activity creates the most value for the user whom we intend the campaign for, and rollout according to that.

Unfortunately, one reality of advertising that I find difficult to resolve with the Lean Start-up philosophy is to launch as soon as possible. According to Ries, you should get your new photo-sharing web-app out there and into the market as soon as it’s possible (his words are that, if you aren’t embarrassed by your first product, you’ve waited too long). However, this isn’t always a viable reality with advertising, as essentially each campaign can be seen as a whole new “product”.

Yet the principles of delivering a first draft campaign as soon as possible, being metric and data-obsessed and focusing on your core audience are all lessons we can use from the Lean Start-up.

Actionable things you can do:

Ask the people inside your company what they have created recently. You might find a knife crafter, cake baker, car restorer, kids’ top-hat maker. These are all physical acts of creation that should be shared and promoted in the path to facilitate the “culture of doing things”. And you might find some interesting ideas for campaigns.

Identify the key value creating actions in your campaign. Does this create the most value for the user or for the client? What can you change (or pivot) that would increase your conversion?

And if that fails and you really can’t find anything positive: somewhere in Google Analytics, among all the downward trends, there is one chart that is going upwards to the right. Find it and put on a happy face again.

Follow @triggerisobar and Twitter list @Bizcommunity/sxswsa2012 for the duration of the festival.

For more:

• Bizcommunity: Top five things learned at SxSW 2012 by Karin Botta
  
• Bizcommunity Blog: trigger/isobar goes to SxSW