Deep Focus' outspoken CEO urges marketers to re-examine the creative process, discusses the greatest legacy of recent media history and reveals who might make Twitter a viable marketing platform.

Jodi Harris: Deep Focus started out as a guerilla-style ad shop and is now one of the most well known and well respected firms for entertainment industry marketing. How did you gain a legitimate reputation in the face of all the competition from more established, traditional agencies and their digital boutiques?

Ian Schafer: We leveraged our entertainment roots early to not only launch high-profile, high-visibility campaigns (such as Miramax Films' "Kill Bill") but to execute them in an iconic, bold way as well -- with an emphasis on experience and engagement rather than on reach and frequency.

By being a multi-disciplined agency from the start (creative & technology, media planning & buying, public relations & social communications), a holistic perspective on digital media was part of our genetic code. While other agencies were retrofitting and modularly adding capabilities (and other agencies), we were growing organically, with each discipline growing stronger as each of the other disciplines got smarter. We also differentiated ourselves by actually having opinions and sharing them. Plus, movie studios aren't exactly famous for paying established, traditional agency prices. We were young, hungry, smart and motivated. We took advantage of that situation to turn other agencies' loss-leaders into our bread-and-butter.

Harris: Building a community of fans is an important step for these entertainment campaigns, and is gaining ground in other business sectors. It's a natural fit to leverage existing communities that support a particular brand, but what suggestions do you have for starting from scratch?

Schafer: When building a community from scratch, perhaps the most important thing you can do involves asking "why."  For example, you should be able to answer the basic question of "why are you building this community in the first place?" You should have a clear understanding of the goals you aim to achieve by connecting to your consumers -- and connecting them to each other. These could very well be different than your typical business goals. Rather, they may be goals that don't result directly in attributable sales but, rather, in the alignment of a brand with, and focus of a community on, a particular cause or lifestyle inherent to the brand.

The other "why" question that should be asked is "why would I join this community?" What does the consumer stand to gain by being an active (or even a passive) member of this community? What appropriate incentives exist for participants? You can prepare for this question by doing the appropriate market research before embarking on a social media "hunch."

From a technology and strategy perspective, it is also important to embark upon a discovery process to identify your development and distribution partners, who may very well be one in the same. Should you roll-your-own social network? Should you build on a modular platform? Should you build a community within an already existing social networking property? An understanding of your goals, your consumers and their behaviors and of your brand's personality will make finding the answers to these questions an easier task.

Harris: You've been a vocal proponent of social media and its value for marketers. In particular, you've mentioned the concept of 'social creative'. How do you define this discipline? What are its components, and what separates it from current strategies for building social media campaigns?

Schafer: With all this talk about social media and its companion technologies and monetization issues, not enough attention has been paid to what it is that convinces people to be social in situations that they otherwise wouldn't be: the creative. Historically, when we think about the creative discipline within ad agencies, we think of websites, video content and rich media ad development. The assumption has previously been that people search for our websites and content; that they get distracted and convinced by our banner ads. This all worked fairly well for quite some time, but that assumption has become arcane. Promotional websites get lost in a sea of noise. Banner clickthrough rates are lower than ever. More search results than ever before are returning pages created by consumers rather than professionals. Consumers are having media experiences on more devices than at any other point in history. Paradigm shifts such as these demand another look at the interactive creative process.

While social media deserves all the credit it receives, the concept of social creative deserves equal attention. I define social creative as creative that a) is portable -- meaning it can travel across destinations and platforms, b) is shareable, c) is either dynamically or manually customizable and d) spawns additional creative created by the very people that interact with it. The era of the promotional microsite is drawing to a close. That doesn't mean the widget is the end-all be-all future, but it might more closely resemble what the future has in store than bloated, over-complicated, inefficiently built, processor-heavy websites.

Harris: Is it difficult to get sign-off from clients for these types of campaigns, since it's currently a challenge to quantify success?

Schafer: We're finding that it's gradually getting easier to sell these campaigns to clients, but that may not be happening industry-wide. In order to distribute social creative, it requires a media plan that supports it. One that's focused on creativity, impact, contextual relevance, experience-enhancement and engagement. Unfortunately this does not come close to representing the average inventory being sold to us, or bought by the average media buyer. As a matter of fact, both big media and big agencies benefit from an environment that's as frictionless as possible. That happens to scale very well. But we've found that the marketing initiatives that consumers wind up spending the most time with are custom-built for the environments that they are (or might be) experienced within. This creates "good" friction. That means we're in the good friction business. Friction that yields an emotional response. Friction that materializes in a conversation. Friction that breaks through clutter. Unfortunately for big agencies (and fortunately for us), friction does not scale very well, and therefore makes it difficult to replicate and commoditize.

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