iMedia's content chief zeros in on the essence of industry collaboration with Avenue A | Razorfish's David Friedman, and on how marketing is quickly becoming a team sport.
Dave is the president of the Avenue A | Razorfish Central region. Throughout his career, Dave has helped retailers and consumer products firms understand how to use technology and marketing to build stronger brands with their customers. His background combines the disciplines of consulting and marketing to create deep insight into the behavior of the digital consumer.
Brad Berens: The theme of our Summit is "Collaborate or Die!" For many, "collaboration" is a flabby word, like "nice"... as in, "wouldn't collaboration be nice?" But there is a growing body of thought out there that talks about the urgency of collaboration. From online entities like Wikipedia to how quickly Don Imus lost his job, the stakes seem to be high for changing a top-down, siloed approach to creating all sorts of media, including advertising.
As an agency president, what does "collaboration" mean to your everyday life?
- Consumers: Today, consumers are creating the bulk of new content on the web through blogs, picture and video-sharing site and community sites. This trend will continue. Marketers shouldn't fight it. They must become part of the discussion.
- Clients: Our clients know an immense amount about their customers and brands, but they often don't realize the pace and magnitude of change being driven by the internet. We need to internalize their knowledge while educating them on the potential of the channel.
- Teams: Some of the best ideas are driven by new technology. Some are driven by great creative ideas. But, the best ideas come from many different perspectives working together. Our teams include all walks of life including designers and technologists, planners and quant-jocks, advertisers, site builders and more.
- Partners: There is an incredible amount of innovation in the digital space today. We are constantly meeting and evaluating potential partners to identify the most promising new solutions.
Berens: Avenue A | Razorfish is unusual in that it's both independent and almost entirely digital. What are the challenges and opportunities that face your work with brands and other agencies, particularly the traditional agencies that are used to owning the client? Do you think the industry can ever get to a place where everybody can play nicely in the same sandbox?
Friedman: Across our clients, we work with almost every major ad agency and dozens of smaller agencies. In the best of worlds, it is difficult to get such a diverse group to work together. The internet is changing the balance of power among the agencies just like it is changing the relationship between brands and consumers. Many agencies are struggling to keep up. I have seen some great successes. It takes a strong client to force the agencies to work together to focus on the consumer needs and the marketing objective.
Berens: Those are terrific answers, but I'd love to get more particular -- because the concrete example always brings topics like this alive -- while acknowledging that you can't talk about actual clients or actual other agencies. Is there a particular story about how AA|RF overcame -- or sadly failed to overcome -- a hurdle to collaborate that you can tell about while changing the names to protect the... innocent? I'll make up "SURF" as a CPG/detergent client and "8Gency" as the mythical other agency.
Friedman: In difficult collaboration situations, we find it necessary to be overly specific about roles and responsibilities of each agency. Defining these roles up front is time consuming and tedious, but it makes the overall process much smoother. For example, a couple of years ago, we were working for a client on a complete redesign of an existing site. The client was asking three agencies to collaborate with each other and the client's internal IT organization. While each agency had different duties, they overlapped significantly. Furthermore, the client was planning to put its account up for review and each agency hoped to win the review. AA|RF drove the process of defining more than 50 different responsibilities, decisions and approvals. We used a RACI matrix that defined what organization was responsible for the task, accountable for the results of the task, consulted during the task or informed of the end result. The creation of this tool forced us through a (painful) process that paid significant dividends through the project.
Berens: You said earlier, "It takes a strong client to force the agencies to work together to focus on the consumer needs and the marketing objective." But is the burden really all on the client? From your perspective, how can an agency lead on this? On the other side, what are the real barriers? What would a collaboration mistake be?
Friedman: While the client plays a critical role in the success of agency collaboration, it can't all be the responsibility of the client. Agencies need to leave their egos at the door. They need to realize that the agencies and the client succeed or fail together. We try to lead in this process by focusing on the need of the customer. Typically, the client/agency team has access to huge amounts of customer information. Our marketing solutions need to focus on real consumer needs and behaviors. If we keep the customer need at the forefront, the agencies are much more likely to come up with the right answer. Too often, we see agencies focused on just their own marketing channel. In most cases, meeting the consumer needs and marketing objective require multiple channels to work together. While it is important for clients to give the agencies room to work, if clients don't stay involved in the process, a single agency can drive the process to the wrong answer (particularly if the lead agency is parochial).
Berens: A question on creative: let's talk about advertising clutter online and how to cut through it without simply SHOUTING at your customers. Given what you said about the vast bulk of content being created by consumers, are there any best practices you can recommend about how to make agency/brand creative distinct from what the consumers make? One of the big mistakes, for example, is for a brand to pretend to be a consumer-written blog because the fallout when the truth comes to life can be a black eye. But should a brand labor to differentiate its creative work? And, if so, how? And here's a question when I'm asking for a collaboration success story either from AA|RF's work or from the work of another agency that you thought scored.
Friedman: Clients should not pretend that they are users. The backlash around flogs (fake blogs) is evidence enough of that. That said, client-generated content can be a valuable part of a user-generated content world. Client content is judged by a harsher standard than user-generated content. Clients need to provide unique assets or higher production values to make their content stand out. I think that Nike has done a good job in this area. It uses its athlete relationships to create unique content. For example, Nike produced a video featuring Renaldinho putting on a pair of Nike soccer shoes and then performing amazing tricks (including hitting the cross bar four to five times in a row from 30 meters). The production value of the video was low, but it included proprietary content. The video has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube.
Berens: I'm a journalist, not an agency guy... is there a question that I SHOULD have asked you about collaboration that I missed?
Friedman: Measurement plays a very important role in collaboration. Clients need to take the time to create clear objectives and metrics. That gives the agency team something specific to shoot for. It also keeps us accountable for the results of our work. I recognize that measurement is difficult in some channels and categories, but that isn't an excuse not to try.
David Friedman is central region president for Avenue A | Razorfish. Read full bio.
Brad Berens is editor in chief & chief content officer , iMedia Communications, Inc. Read full bio.
