Only Dead Fish

Post of the Month - June 2017 - Nominations

Crikey. It's time already to open up nominations again for the next Post of the Month. So if there are any posts that you've read over the past month that you thought were particularly good, do nominate them in the comments or direct. As always I've got a short starting list below, but will add to this and stick a longer list up for a vote:

Designing Democratic Brands by Glyn Britton

Do It The Hard Way: Channeling Your Inner Bette Davis by Jim Carroll

What a digital organisational looks like by Janet Hughes

Do add to these nominations with your own.

Can Blockchain Save Digital Advertising?

In all the noise that came out of the recent Cannes festival, there seemed to be strangely little that focused on the problems inherent in the current digital advertising marketplace. Problems that were highlighted in a very articulate way a few months ago by P & G’s Marc Pritchard – namely a murky media supply chain with many hidden middlemen and a lack of transparency in agency contracts, problems with viewability and ad fraud, a lack of accountability and independent verification. Combine this with problems concerning publishers being able to properly monetise the attention that their content is drawing, and you have a market that seems ripe for an overhaul.

When I interviewed (friend of ODF) Gerrie Smits about the role of Blockchain in the organisation (he's writing a book on the subject) he drew my attention to the potential that this technology has to solve many of these not insignificant problems. Intrigued, I did some digging. 

So let's begin with some definitions. Blockchain technology has so far been mainly applied in the context of facilitating secure financial transactions. It is effectively a digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly. Don Tapscott, the author of the book ‘Blockchain Revolution’ has a handy one sentence definition:

“The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”

So a blockchain then is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network (click to enlarge).

Goldman Sachs have created a useful resource that shows how the technology is redefining the way in which we transact, and potentially ‘the way in which we buy and sell, interact with government and verify the authenticity of everything from property titles to organic vegetables...It combines the openness of the internet with the security of cryptography to give everyone a faster, safer way to verify key information and establish trust.’

A Blockchain browser startup business called Brave has launched a proposition around the Basic Attention Token (or BAT). A few weeks ago the BAT caused a bit of a stir by raising $35m in under 30 seconds. But the BAT is essentially an attempt to use the Blockchain to solve some of these very pressing digital advertising problems (BAT Whitepaper).

BAT is based on a particular type of Blockchain technology called Ethereum. Blockchain is commonly associated with cryptocurrency Bitcoin of-course, but the technology has a far wider range of applications beyond digital currencies (several hundred applications currently use Blockchain technology in different capacities). Essentially, Ethereum is ‘an open software platform based on blockchain technology that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications’.

Where Bitcoin represents one particular application of the technology, (a peer to peer electronic cash system, with the Blockchain being used to track ownership of digital currency), the Ethereum blockchain focuses on running the programming code of any decentralized application.

Sriram Krishnan, who until recently worked on revenue products for Snap and also founded the Facebook Audience Network, wrote an exceptional post (HT @addictivemobile) detailing some of the key benefits behind the BAT system, but also some of the potential obstacles it will need to overcome. The BAT works by having the browser (as an independent party rather than the publisher) measure attention. For now, this means users needing to use the Brave browser, but could in future be done through a plug-in or extension. That attention is converted into a token which has monetary value which can then be transacted between the publisher and the advertiser (‘It’s as if the browser has access to the advertiser’s bank account and sends some money over to publishers everytime it verifies an ad is seen’).

BAT thus removes the need for verification and tracking, ensures the ad is seen by an actual human being, replaces multiple layers of the typical ad tech stack, and therefore improves user privacy and helps the publisher to properly monetise their content and attention by ensuring fewer middlemen and a more transparent market. BAT can even go further by rewarding the user for their attention.

Krishnan also details some key challenges for this new and intriguing proposition however, including the fact that together Google and Facebook now account for almost three quarters of online digital ad revenue (US figures) and 99% of all growth in the market. For now, BAT is not focused on the native search ads and promoted posts that are dominant in these platforms but rather the more intrusive ads and tracking that are prevalent elsewhere, limiting its potential impact. BAT is also, for now, dependent on the growth of the Brave browser for widespread user adoption, although plug-ins and extensions may alleviate this issue. There is also the thought that more relevant advertising does actually come from understanding user behaviour which is currently done through tracking, so any replacement would lose this benefit, although given the current state of digital advertising data targeting that may be no big loss. And there is the issue that whilst BAT may be effective in measuring and verifying attention, it is not measuring any outcomes from the advertising and so not solving real attribution challenges.

Nonetheless, BAT is an intriguing idea and one that deserves a lot more discussion than it seems to be currently getting. It feels as though Blockchain technology has the potential to solve a number of key challenges that are currently facing the digital advertising industry, and perhaps even provide the basis for the kind of industry-wide standards and measures that Marc Pritchard identified as being so critical to its survival. Mystifying then, that there is so little discussion about it at big industry events like Cannes.

Google Firestarters 24 - Deciphering Digital Transformation - The Event

On Wednesday evening we had the 24th Google Firestarters which took digital transformation as it's subject. The event had been well oversubscribed within 48 hours of registration opening, demonstrating the high level of interest that there is around this topic in agencies right now (this was supported by the IPA Future of Agencies research that I did which revealed the disparate range of agencies and consultancies that are coalescing around this burgeoning area). It's a huge subject but as always with Firestarters we wanted to take some different but challenging perspectives on the theme and we had four excellent talks that I think achieved that really well.

First up we had the brilliant Emily Webber, who has worked with people and organisations in both the private and public sectors to develop their agile capability for sustainable change, and gave a fascinating talk on scaling learning through communities within organisations. Developing a organisational learning culture in the context of transformation is something that I talked about a lot in my book, and Emily brought that to life through the lens of enabling better cross-functional progress and learning at scale within a business. She talked about how the number of connections between people in a team (and therefore communication traffic) increases exponentially as the team grows bigger, and how the organisational response to these kinds of scaling issues relies on hierarchy and the creation of functional silos.

Yet learning across the organisation is an essential element in achieving real transformation: 'learning is done better when it's done together'. Social learning theorist Albert Bandura said: 'From observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action'. Collaboration is about building on top of each other's ideas, and yet so many organisations treat learning as an individualistic thing. She referenced Simon Wardley's concept of Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners, making the point about the different types of people needed in an organisation to bring innovation and transformation to life, and Dan North's thoughts around Delivery Mapping, talking about 'skills liquidity' and the cross-over of business need, current skills and desired skills. Emily's concept of 'Communities of Practice' enables learning horizontally across the business, and a collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of individual intelligence. When combined with a 'safe to fail' environment, fast feedback loops, and an empowered supporting network, people can really fly, it allows for decentralised learning and scales good practice.

Scaling learning through communities in digital transformations from Emily Webber

Tim Malbon followed with a witty, insightful talk on how the process, practice and culture of building digital products and services can support business transformation. In that sense, the product is the means to an end, with the process actually serving to impact a wide range of organisational practices including workflow, resourcing, processes, hiring, training, learning and so on. If transformation is the aim, the product is the how, with multi-disciplinary product teams learning (he echoed Emily's point about how people learn better together, so agency and client staffers are combined) how to prioritise, innovate and iterate - how a lean/agile product innovation team works. This becomes particularly important when you consider that real transformation comes from not only customer experience, but employee experience as well. 

I'd thought it was important for this event that we had a client perspective, from a company that is undergoing digital transformation, and so was happy to have Johan Enstrom, Digital Transformation lead at Pentland brands (Speedo, Canterbury, Mitre, etc). Johan adeptly captured just how hard the change process is in reality within companies, particularly in managing priorities across disparate levels of maturity, knowledge and capability in the business. He talked about the importance of qualities such as honesty and humility in enabling the culture that supports change and inspires creative solutions, and of understanding the nuanced levels of skills needed at each level of the organisation, and how decisions are often hard in this context because they are not always binary choices. But a shared sense of purpose that allows more fluid application of strategy is key.

Our final talk was from transformation consultant Lucia Adams who drew a lot on her experiences transforming a big global media owner. I've written before about Lucia's wisdom in saying that: ‘Digital is 10% tech and 90% human. Organisations talk about digital as if it is 90% tech and 10% human’. Her talk built on this premis, describing seven myths of transformation (drawing a lot from Steven Johnson's excellent book on Where Good Ideas Come From) . Change management, she said, is often an expensive, waterfall beast that treats people as objects to be shifted this way or that and the effort that goes into ‘transformation programmes’ is usually met with an equal and opposite cultural force. Change is not single thing, it is a 'swarm', and yet a leader needs the courage to set a direction. Eureka moments and epiphanies are a fallacy - true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way, serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, and error sets off the truth. Platform building she said, is by definition an exercise in emergent behaviour.

The event was broad-ranging and extremely insightful so my thanks to our brilliant speakers, to Google for hosting, and all those who came on the night and joined in the debate. As always, Scriberia did a great job of visualising the talks. If you have any themes that you'd like us to cover in future Firestarters, do let me know.

Agencies as Sensemakers

It seems fitting in the week when the ad community has decamped to Cannes, an event which seems increasingly dominated by the ad technology players, to write about agencies and technology. This is also the week of-course in which Publicis Groupe have announced that rather than spend money on flashy awards and events, they are investing in creating an internally-focused, AI-based 'professional assistant platform' to connect their 80,000 employees. It's laudable to want to empower different ways of working and to bring dispersed disciplines and resources together in new ways, but the cynic in me worries that this just another example of an overly enthusiastic focus on shiny/proprietary technology at the expense of focusing on the people stuff that really drives change - behaviours, culture, the very fabric of the way in which you work (this has been a key theme in the digital transformation work I've done with clients over the past years). I'm sure we'll see.

Anyhow, there was some really interesting feedback around this theme that came out of the interviews I did for the IPA Future of Agencies report which came out recently. The overarching metaphor/model I used for the report was Charles Leadbetter's Systems and Empathy matrix, which captured neatly the dichotomous nature of the dynamics in the market right now and the spectrum of capability along which agencies are positioned, from the systems end (characterised by data/technology/operational and business models and efficiences) all the way through to the high empathy end (founded in human insight, creativity). So it is with agencies. Large, traditional consultancies schooled in business and strategic consulting, organisation and operating model design, moving to expand design and creative capability to create more of a 'full stack' approach. More creatively and digitally led agencies broadening out from marcomms and front end into consulting, technology and digital transformation. A disparate set of consultancies and agencies converging on that top right quadrant. 

One of the key challenges in this shifting dynamic (particularly for the creatively-led end of this spectrum) is to understand the new context that technology creates for marketing and advertising. Whilst some agencies seem determined to ignore it, the reality is that this context is changing dramatically. And I'm not just talking about the growth in ad tech. Each year (friend of ODF) Scott Brinker does a heroic job of tracking and mapping the burgeoning marketing technology landscape. In fact 'burgeoning' is something of an understatement. Back in 2011 when he first started mapping the market he was already tracking 150 vendors. That number has roughly doubled each year since then so that in the latest survey which has just been released we now have over 5,000 different marketing technology solutions across a huge variety of competencies. Solutions that are increasingly platformised, enabling marketing teams to plug together a variety of different specialised and vertical solutions to create their own 'marketing stack'. It's a huge degree of complexity that is fundamentally changing the discipline, function and operations of marketing. 

More than one interviewee for the IPA research noted that agencies simply do not have enough understanding about this technological shift (and that clients themselves are struggling with this level of complexity). This is a challenge for agencies, but it's also an opportunity. It may not be necessary for many agencies to understand the operational intricacies of specific technologies (unless of-course that is a key part of their proposition), but there is an imperative on every agency to appreciate the technological context within which they are operating. Work and ideas that make sense in the context of the client organisational focus on all aspects of customer experience, a broader set of customer touchpoints, more diverse brand content delivery, and growing marketing automation and technology-driven execution are critical. 

With so many martech vendors convergence is an inevitability but there is an opportunity for agencies to make sense of new waves of technologies for clients and to distil and enable the realisation of the value that they present. In the report I focused this into three key areas:

1. Potential:-  the ability of agencies to enable clients to better understand the potential of specific technologies and trends to enable better prioritisation of client attention and investment and properly assess strategies and focus
2. Integration:- to understand how different combinations of technologies might be brought together for beneficial effect (and be larger than the sum of the parts)
3. Application:- to appreciate and advise how technologies might be applied for business benefit

As successive waves of new technology (AI, VR/AR, IoT) take hold, this role as ‘sense-maker’ for clients creates further opportunity in the operationalising and optimisation of new technologies and capability. There were a number of agencies I spoke to, for example, that were doing some really interesting work around creating the equity/practices/processes designed to help a client operationalise and scale a new capability around the globe. 

There is enormous value to be had in being the trusted adviser and enabler. But without an understanding of the broader context in which advertising and marketing now operates, agencies will really struggle to play that role.

You can download a copy of the full IPA Future of Agencies report here.

Post of The Month - May 2017 - The Winner

Quite a close vote this month but delighted to say that the winner of this month's vote is David Wilding's post on why it's time to transform how we measure media. Well done David - you join the hall of fame. My thanks for everyone who took part.