Agile Advertising

                      "You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose"

                                              Mario Cuomo

There's a phrase coined by Paul Isakson that has been going round in my head since I saw it in Paul's deck on Modern Brand Building some time ago:'Stop Campaigning, Start Committing'.

Paul talks about the difference between changing your core brand message to fit what you think people need or want to hear today so that they buy your product or service (campaigning), and building your brand on core principles that never change (committing). The difference, in other words, between short-term gains and a constantly changing story, and marketing for long-term growth and creating an evolving collection of coherent brand ideas and experiences over time.

Tough perhaps, to keep focused on the long-term when the average tenure of a Marketing Director is 18 months and when, now more than ever, it's all about hitting the next quarter's number. But the structural change that needs to happen in marketing and advertising works to a different set of rules. In an environment that is participative it is rude to start a conversation and then walk away. In an environment where your audience have contributed to the success of your idea by building on it, and helping it spread, it is rude not to acknowledge that contribution. In an environment where your audience demand interaction with your brand at their convenience, rather than yours, it is rude to ignore that demand. Conversations can strike up at any time, with anyone, and will last for as long as they are interesting, fun or useful.

This creates a problem. Because the traditional advertising process is established around discontinuous cycles. I'm a big brand, I do two bursts of TV a year. I'm a product launch, and I make a big noise around the time that I launch to make as many people aware of me as possible.  I'm a service, so I decide what I want to say about my service and then I say it to as many people as possible as many times as possible over a short window of time to convince them to use it.

The Advertising industry is not set up around continuity. It is set up around campaigning. Campaigns have a beginning, middle and an end. The process, the model, the way advertising is made, the way it is bought, the way it is implemented, the way it is assessed, are all focused on keeping this model alive. Advertising is stuck. We may be campaigning in poetry, but we haven't written the prose yet.

Digital models of-course work differently. Digital is all about experimentation, adpatability, optimisation, beta. What Mark would call 'lighting lots of fires'. Being flexible, seeding many ideas, optimising the best ones. Digital also allows for adpative change. Instead of coming up with a grand idea, researching it to death and presenting it to the world, it allows for a continuous cycle of development and improvement.

So if the future is at all going to be about a different kind of relationship that audiences have with advertising, perhaps we need to create room for more of that which is incremental, iterative, adaptable, collaboratively formed. Agile advertising, if you like.

In software development there is an interesting way of working called Agile Development. It is an approach that aligns the development process not only with the objectives of the organisation but with the needs of the customer in order to allow the rapid delivery of high-quality software. Agile methodologies generally involve a process that encourages frequent adaptation, teamwork, self-organization and accountability.  

Agile techniques are interesting because they are far more adaptive and iterative than traditional methods for developing software. And to borrow from a post written by Kelly Waters, our Web Tech Director here, Agile Software Development operates around some key principles:

1. Active user involvement is imperative. Agile cannot work wothout continous feedback, from internal stakeholders and end users. There is complete transparency.

2. Agile teams must be empowered. The team includes all the necessary members needed to make decisions, and make them on a timely basis.

3. Time waits for no man. Timescales are fixed but requirements emerge and change. This contrasts to more traditional development techniques where one of the earliest objectives is to capture all known requirements and "baseline the scope so that any other changes are subject to change control".

4. Agile requirements are barely sufficient. Requirements are captured at a high level so not everything is detailed upfront. This allows for swift adaptation and minimises the time spent on anything that doesn’t actually form part of the end product. The output is therefore highly relevant to the needs of the end user.

5. How do you eat an elephant (in small bitesize pieces). Small, incremental fulfillment all the way through helps minimise risk, results in better control on costs, and allows for change. Beta is good but perpetual beta is better.

6. Fast but not so furious. The focus is on frequent delivery of products and regular iterations through a regular rythym and pattern of sprints and work cycles.

7. Done means done. With traditional development, when 80% of project is completed, the last 20% often takes forever, because needs have changed. With agile, features completed within an iteration should be 100% done ie. shippable

8. Enough's enough. Apply 80/20 rule. 20% of the effort can yield 80% of the results so do the high value stuff first.

9. Agile testing is not for dummies. Testing is a continous, integrated part of development.

10. No place for snipers. People can become detached. Close co-operation and collaboration wins.

It's interesting to think of what advertising could learn from this, and the potential to work not only with clients, but with audiences, in a different way. The benefits of a process like this are clear:- speed to market, agility, adaptability, relevance, quality, visibility. Best of all, it's people driven. Interesting thought.

Comments

[Mike Berry]

Beautifully expressed. I love this post.

Agile Advertising must be the future, but for the next few months/ years some of the big ad agencies will continue to find reasons to resist it. They feel threatened and uncomfortable. For those who do think like this, however the future will be bright - in the current tough economic times and even more so when the sun comes out again.

[ed cotton]

I think the idea here is great and makes so much sense given the current culture, but there's one massive difference between digital and traditional; flexibility. The stuff ad agencies make is semi-permanent, it's printed ink on stock and burned into film, it's set like stone.

So perhaps there's a question here..

If we want to be agile, don't we have to be digital?

[John Dumbrille]

This is good stuff - nice going Neil.

Agile advertising is cool. I think (software company) 37 Signals: their blogging approach probably fits into this classification.

Not sure we have to be digital, but we have to be in a fail safe environment, which big companies have had a hard time producing. To achieve a state of agile, or even model driven agile development (an emerging software hybrid that dares to also speak of abstractions and planning bursts) means looser organizations, and means distributing tasks to associates that are not on the payroll full time. Otherwise, a fail safe approach, which requires a lot of experimentation, can be very expensive.

[conrad lisco]

Really great post.

Its too bad that we have to trade short term business imperatives for the long term brand destination. Agile advertising seems like a step in the right direction. But it feels like an overhaul, not an evolution...of thinking, of talent, of "the model", of the agency-client relationship and of the agency ecosystem generally.

The comments above from Mike, Ed and John suggest that there will be serious resistance to change by some. Perhaps that's the [other] real problem...

[Rob @ Cynic]

How can you expect people to believe in you when you change who you are every 2 minutes?

I think a few companies out there need to know that being relevant and being schizophrenic are very different things ... which is why my belief is the brands that live a philosophy and consistently fight for their customers loyalty [rather than expect it because they did one nice thing in 1979] are the ones who will ultimately win the hearts, minds and wallets in the most cost efficient ways both now and in the future.

I'm sure there'll be lots of people who can say otherwise, but for all the money being spent on marketing, its funny that the amount of brands that have fundamentally infiltrated culture and genuinely mean something to people is still relatively small ... and still relatively the same guys as it has been for the last 10 years.

Sure there's some 'new entrants' - but for the money spent, it's an embarrassingly small number and yet ... and here's the irony ... it is something that is possible for most companies, especially the ones who started because they felt there was 'a better way'.

It's not about brand experience, it's about brand belief ... prove it or lose it is my view.

[neilperkin]

Great point Rob. In the context of this post, my beef is more with the rigidity of the advertising cycle. The reason that most advertising sticks to these cycles, where campaigns have a beginning, middle and an end, is because the whole legacy model is built around it. What you say about brand belief is right, but room that digital creates for the iterative and the incremental has got to mean that there is room for a more iterative and incremental way of working to, hasn't it?

[Mark Purpose]

Great blog, I would like to try out some of these ideas myself -Mark http://www,purposeadvertising.com The nation's first ad agency that gives back their profit to good causes...

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