This post is by Anton Buchner, a senior consultant with TrinityP3. Anton is a lateral and innovative thinker with a passion for refocusing business teams and strategies; creating visionary, data driven communication plans; and making sense of a more complex digital marketing environment.

Social media is still on the lips of most marketers and is now starting to infiltrate C-level discussion.

Thankfully the hype is settling down and strategic planning and logic is starting to be applied.

If you use the Super Bowl as a barometer, then at this year’s game (XLVII), you would have spotted these 26 TV Ads (out of the 52) with a Twitter hashtag:

1. M&Ms – #betterwithmms
2. Audi – #braverywins
3. Hyundai – #pickyourteam
4. GoDaddy – #thekiss
5. Doritos – #doritos
6. Best Buy – #infiniteanswers
7. Disney Oz – #disneyoz
8. Fast & Furious movie – #fastandfurious
9. Toyota – #wishgranted
10. Doritos – #doritos
11. Calvin Klein – #calvinklein
12. Cars.com – #nodrama
13. Bud Light – #herewego
14. Hyundai Sonata – #epicplaydate
15. Volkswagen – #gethappy
16. Subway – #15yrwinningstreak
17. Subway – #FebruANY
18. Bud Light – #herewego
19. Subway – #FebruANY
20. Bud Light – #herewego
21. MiO Fit – #changestuff
22. Pistachios – #crackinstyle
23. Speed Stick – #handleit
24. Budweiser Clydesdales – #clydesdales
25. Tide – #miraclestain
26. Samsung – #thenextbigthing

Whereas only 4 Ads mentioned Facebook, and 1 mentioned Instagram. None mentioned YouTube or Google+.

This is a massive turnaround from 2012 when both Facebook and Twitter were mentioned 8 times each.

Why?

Because Twitter is a character limited, short sharp notification platform, and Facebook is a social network for engaging with friends.

So it’s a no brainer that if you’re at a sporting event, then you’d be with your friends watching the game, with the occasional short distraction thrown in.

Touchdown

And it was impressive to see that Oreo had their social team and management on standby to quickly react to the ‘lights out’ drama.

Within minutes they scored with this Ad deployed via Twitter with the caption “Power out? No problem.”

https://twitter.com/Oreo/status/298246571718483968/photo/1

Turn the lights on again

However the tectonic shift is not in the type of social media being used it’s the fact that businesses today must integrate the fundamentals of social media into all aspects of their business practice:

• real-time
• people
• communities
• information
• connection

It’s no longer good enough to allow channels to operate in isolation, databases not to seamlessly talk, feedback to be ignored, and poor customer experiences to be created by out of touch front line staff.

Businesses must re-engineer into social businesses or face losing market share.

Here are my top 3 tectonic shifts required

Shift #1 – In-source employee ideas

Attract the right talent, and harness their potential for knowledge sharing.

Gone are the days of a pigeon hole job spec where information is cascaded up and down an organisation at snails pace.

Social businesses need to be agile and open to ideas from all employees. And more importantly harness the power of their employees to create content and conversations that can be shared both internally and externally.

How many of your front line staff are creating content for your company blog or Facebook page? How many are starting provocative topics of conversation in LinkedIn? And how many are shooting videos and snapping pictures at your corporate and sponsored events?

Social businesses such as Starbucks, Zappos, and Nokia are getting their employees excited about the brand they work for.

Nokia has evolved its internal collaboration strategy from forums and wikis to SharePoint and Socialcast. Over 14,000 Nokia employees now use Socialcast daily to facilitate communication and collaboration and keep up to speed on events as well as share stories.

Shift #2 – Outstanding customer experiences

No, it’s not a new concept, however it’s such an easy one to implement. Empower your staff to deliver incredible experiences.

A social business needs to constantly think of the water-cooler stories, taxi conversations, and party discussions that are now being held in social media.

A frown at reception, an “I’m too important to talk to the customer” attitude, or failing to return phone calls simply won’t cut it in 2013. And yes all 3 happened to me last week at a medical centre, with a telco and in a retail shop. They all lost my business.

And internationally, The Royal Bank of Canada recently achieved a 17% improvement in customer satisfaction from implementing a social customer care system that was integrated with their traditional call center.

So remember, it’s all about ‘them’, customers, and not about ‘you’.

Shift #3 – Commanding the centre of attention

We’ve started seeing the emergence of Social Business Command Centres with Dell, Gatorade and Hootsuite’s 2012 Presidential Election Tracker amongst the early examples.

It can either be one physical space or a virtually constructed team. However, most importantly, it’s the centre where listening, product innovation, customer care, engagement, advocacy and real-time content analysis is focused on.

This is critical for understanding industry shifts, changes in customer behaviour and competitor conversations.

With 2.5 quintillion bytes of information being created every day and 80% of the information created being unstructured, it should be a full time job to unearth actionable insights and not left to the juniors in the department.

Nokia uses a tool called Agora which is a 6-screen social visualiser to monitor how customers use and talk about their brand, products, and competitors, and to get an instant feel of what’s being said about the company worldwide.

And NAB launched their social media command centre in Australia in December 2012. Take a look here:

Note, NAB’s social media community grew more than 350% in 2012 and now has over 135,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ with content reaching over 12 million users. They apparently receive around 5,000 comments and resolve 600 customer service requests through social media every month, a 10% growth in customer service interactions in social media, on average, for every month in 2012.

Action

So what do you take away from this post?

Hopefully the need to adapt your business now.

Some areas you can action internally. And others may need new partnerships.

If you want to read more about the stages of social business transformation, then I recommend Altimeter’s latest report here, written by Brian Solis and Charlene Li:

And if you need some help, then touch base with TrinityP3 and let’s discuss social business before your competitor does.

This post is by Darren Woolley, Founder of TrinityP3. With his background as analytical scientist and creative problem solver, Darren brings unique insights and learnings to the marketing process. He is considered a global thought leader on agency remuneration, search and selection and relationship optimisation.

It is interesting how traditionally the conceptualisation or ideas phase and the production or implementation phase has been seen as a continuum. That is the agency that is briefed on the project also produces the project.

This stems back many years when creative and production was offered as part of the process of the agency selling media. What was the point of the client buying media and then developing the creative in-house (which was the standard at the time) when the agency could provide this service as part of the media commission and of course a little service fee on top.

It is interesting because technology and a demand for greater accountability on cost effectiveness are continuing to change this view. More than a decade ago, major advertisers in the UK began to decouple production from the agencies. Television, print and later digital production is being outsourced to production specialists, who are more efficient than the agencies at delivering the outputs required.

There are largely two main directions this takes:

1. Going directly to the suppliers the agencies have traditionally used and forming direct relationships with these suppliers eg. Production Companies, Post Production Companies, Print Studios, Digital Workshops
2. Going to one of the growing number of transcreation companies that have grown, primarily out of the UK and Europe but are increasingly multinational and global

Why decouple production from your agency?

• Many agencies structure their remuneration to rely heavily on the production process to subsidise the conceptualisation process (as apparently no-one wants to pay for ideas?) and therefore costs can be high
• If you are a high volume and especially a fast turn-around advertiser (think retail, telco and financial services) there are economies of scale that are difficult to achieve with the agency alone
• The specialist transcreation companies have invested heavily in workflow and approvals systems to speed up the process and lower the overheads and so provide a low-overhead, lower cost alternative
• You are using multiple agencies for ideas and conceptualisation so you can deliver economies of scale at the production-end consolidating with a single supplier

So which way do you go?

The answer to this depends on your production requirements. The questions you have to consider are:

• Where is the majority of your production spend? Is it in a particular media production such as television or digital or print or across all areas?
• What is the size of your spend? Is there enough to deliver the economies of scale to make the decoupling process worthwhile.
• How cost effective is your current production? Are your incumbent suppliers delivering the efficiencies for your spend?
• What is the nature of the spend? Is it creating new productions or is it largely working to templates or creating multiple versions?
• How centralised or decentralised is your production requirement? Are you a single market advertiser or do you develop executions from the core brand idea across multiple and diverse markets?

Case Study 1 – Decoupling television post production

A telco client approached TrinityP3 concerned over their increasing cost of television production. We reviewed the past three campaigns and identified the heavy use of CGI effects in the agency developed campaign as the main driver with each production more complex than the last. Reviewing the proposed production spend and schedule for the coming year we were able to develop a business case for decoupling the CGI and post production from the agency and assisted the client in the process to deliver a 27% saving on their post production costs.

Case Study 2 – Transcreation services across multiple regional markets

An Australian advertiser had traditionally used an agency network to develop the primary brand strategy in Australia and then customise the creative concepts to suit each of the regional markets across Asia Pacific. Invited to assist with their agency review, TrinityP3 identified a significant component of the incumbent’s spend, especially in these regional markets was production. In fact the low agency fees in these markets were being more than subsidised by a higher than expected production cost. We developed a business model from our knowledge of the main transcreation companies and identified an initial 32% saving on production costs.

Case Study 3 – Off-shoring digital production services

A financial services company had several years earlier engaged a digital agency with off-shore capabilities to provide their digital build requirements. TrinityP3 was asked to review the process and costs of this arrangement and identified that the off-shoring facility was under utilised. As the digital production spend had grown the agency had continued to perform more of this work locally than off-shore. TrinityP3 was able to provide the client with a number of options including a financial model for decoupling digital production to an off-shore facility that would reduce their annual costs by more than 50% in the first year with no loss of quality or increased risk.

Of course decoupling production from your creative agency is not for every advertiser. The process is time consuming and can pose significant risk if poorly executed. But for those advertisers with the right requirements, spend and mix to make it worthwhile it can deliver significant savings.

The agencies largely are against it, primarily as it reduces their revenue. But what are some of the risks or issues that you have heard about the decoupling process?

Leave a comment here so we can discuss them.

This post is by Clive Duncan a Senior Consultant at TrinityP3. As a Director and DOP he has an appreciation for the value of great creative and outstanding production values, while also recognising the importance of delivering value for money solutions to the advertiser.

It has been common practice for many years to produce television commercials on a regional basis to yield the potential economies of scale. The problem is that many regions are not populated by homogeneous markets. Instead, the region is filled with diverse and vibrant but often contracting and conflicting cultural norms that must be considered during the production process.

Often the need to accommodate these difference within the production process can significantly diminish the anticipated savings, depending on the creative concept, as more and more additional versions are shot to cover the specific and individual requirements of each market within the region.

Some years ago when I was an agency producer I was sent to Malaysia to oversee the production of a series of regional TVCs for our client a producer of a beverage / cordial aimed at mothers and their children.

The cordial contained a large amount of vitamin C our client from America was quick to point out this was the products USP (unique selling proposition), ideal for promoting happy, healthy growth in children.

The client had briefed the agency to make a TVC that could be easily adapted to the regional areas of China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The Agency had come up with a TVC that had a jingle based upon a classic Beach Boys tune. What this had in common with the target demographic I failed to recognize, nevertheless the client had bought the publishing rights and the deal was done.

All was going swimmingly until preproduction when the cultural requirements and sensitivities for the various markets began to clash. The Brand Manager from Sri Lanka and their counterpart from Bangladesh began discussing the wardrobe for their collective version.

For Bangladesh, the Brand Manager insisted the mother in the TVC wear a sari, the traditional dress of the region. As the production manager I personally remained neutral as both views were valid for the respective markets.

Eventually it was decided that the sari would be used for both versions.

The production proceeded well, the Chinese / Singapore and the Malaysia / Indonesian versions were completed without a hiccup.

It was the last day of the shoot and the mother was supposed to sway gracefully in time to the Beach Boys music as her children danced about holding and drinking the product, a magical and innocent advertising moment.

After the rehearsal the Brand Manager from Bangladesh approached me concerned that ‘her movement it’s, it’s too lascivious!” referring to the mother in the scene.

Now the word lascivious does exist and I knew what he meant but I had never heard it used in contemporary language. How a woman in a sari gently swaying could be considered lascivious was beyond me. I of course had to find a solution to the problem which was easy to do, with a re edit for the Bangladesh version, the lascivious mum ended up on the cutting room floor and the kids got extra close ups dancing and enjoying the product.

At the time, on the studio floor I thought how sad it was that a woman in a sari, gently swaying could be considered lascivious.

While we may think of the world as an increasing global village, the fact is that cultural diversity is alive and well and very healthy and must be considered when planning regional productions. Additional scenes, multiple shoots with different talent, wardrobe and even locations will be required and this will add to the cost and reduce the expected savings.

Greater Asia is a place that demands careful consideration when planning regional TV campaigns, and as a word of advice, always avoid anything that might be considered lascivious.

This post is by Pam O’Connor a Senior Consultant at TrinityP3. Pam is a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and an AMI Certified Practising Marketer, has lectured for the AAAA, RMIT and is qualified to ‘Train the Trainer’ through the Australian Institute of Management.

With the launch of the weekday editions of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to a tabloid size this week it raises the question as to why marketers did not take more of the opportunity to create advertisements that capitalised on the event.

With around 50 different advertisers appearing across The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Monday’s launch day saw only 3 creating an advertisement associated with the monumental change of the size in the newspaper’s nearly 180 year history.

BMW took the lead by “Change the Way You Move” with six various sized advertisements to promote BMW X1 which included a promotion of a chauffeured driven ride home in a BMW X1.

The Commonwealth Bank played on the change of size to highlight that interest rates often change and promote fixed interest home loans. The advertisement appeared as if it had been originally planned to appeared in a broadsheet newspaper and therefore had been cut off as it did not fit the new tabloid size. A bit lost on many readers as it looked as if it was a printing error but nevertheless a good attempt to focus on the change of the day.

Challenger promoted the ability of annuities to remain stable even if, as the headline read “This paper might shrink but my savings don’t have to.”

Mumbrella reported that Media buyers welcome first Fairfax ‘compact’ edition and data from Commercial Monitors shows that there were more overall number of advertisements on the previous Monday editions, up by 8 in Sydney and 4 in Melbourne.

With a greatly increased print run that was sold out in most outlets across the city by lunchtime, the interest in the newspaper was heightened with the new look. The topical nature of the change was being promoted across the day with publicity and news stories that scrutinised and dissected the new format. Even an evening edition of the tablet version of the newspaper (it almost sounds like the evening Mirror and Herald are being reincarnated).

The interest in special events, be they Royal and celebrity weddings, babies or scandals creates higher news interest be that readers or viewers. Advertisers should not let these opportunities slip through their fingers.

But with the amount of attention and interest being incredibly high only three thought it worthwhile to hone in on the new situation.

Opportunities like this are few and far between and worthy of engagement gold by the advertisers who took advantage of the moment.

Interested to hear your views. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

This post is by Darren Woolley, Founder of TrinityP3. With his background as analytical scientist and creative problem solver, Darren brings unique insights and learnings to the marketing process. He is considered a global thought leader on agency remuneration, search and selection and relationship optimisation.

Three years ago I was invited to talk to the ISBA COMPAG group on developing and managing collaboration between agencies. This has been a focus for me personally and for TrinityP3 since 2005, when we noticed that one of the big challenges for many marketers was managing their roster of agencies, while most processes and systems looked at only individual supplier relationships and not how to manage these more holistically.

This led to the development of the Evalu8ing system, which allows marketers and procurement to manage the multiple relationships that exist between marketing and their roster of agencies in one survey and one system. The process of using Evalu8ing with our clients has led to insights into the key elements required to create a collaborative environment, or at least a cooperative environment within the agency roster.

Taking a page out of the writings of one of my favourite authors, I was able to present this as the ABC of developing collaborative agency relationships – with grovelling apologies to Dr. Suess.

Here I want to revisit this presentation and expand and update some of the observations in that original presentation, which is here for reference. lets start at the beginning…

BIG A little a what begins with A?

Arrangements

With so many channels and so many specialist agencies, it seems that agency rosters can multiply like coat hangers in your wardrobe. This is because the roster structure evolves organically rather than being strategically planned. What I mean by this is that agencies are often added in response to an immediate need. This is a tactical approach to roster management and means that the suppliers within the roster often do not see a strategic requirement for their services so they are competing for their place in the roster.

While some marketers and procurement people see this as a power advantage, the fear and uncertainty this creates in the suppliers is counterproductive to creating collaboration which is heavily based on trust. Not to mention counterproductive for creativity which likewise requires a high level of trust. This does not mean you cannot have a competitive roster. It is simply that competition in the roster should be positive and not ever at the expense of the trust between the marketers and the agencies.

Alignment

The game Tug-o-War is a prime example of what can be achieved if a team of people are aligned. However alignment does not occur naturally in large groups of individuals or between multiple teams. Simply putting teams of people together will not create alignment. In fact depending on the diversity of the people within the teams and the diversity between the groups, alignment can be almost impossible unless you create some common, specific, measurable, achievable, short term objectives to which people can align themselves.

In the ideal situation, these would be the short term goals determined in the marketing strategy and then interpreted and defined for each of the agencies to deliver against. This alignment is also encouraged where all of the teams within the roster share in a success based reward.

Assessments

If you achieve alignment, you cannot simply rely on everything running smoothly. Of course, where it is small teams, it is easy to check in to ensure the relationship is on track. But larger teams and especially where there are multiple marketing teams within the organisation, all accessing and interacting with the same group of agencies on the roster, it is important to have a more rigorous and structured review process and the discipline to regularly review the relationships.

Interestingly, the type of process you use can influence the level of collaboration. You see in many cases people use performances based score cards and questions, where the criteria is specific to the performance of the individual agencies. There is a score card for media and a score card for digital and a score card for creative. This approach immediately positions the agency as a supplier and the marketer as a buyer. It reinforces the power game between the two and often leads to ‘scoring’ points off the agency with low scores.

The other issue is that different score cards for different disciplines focuses the agencies on their personal performance and away from the concept of the collaboration for the benefit of the collective group. This is why all parties should be assessed against common, consistent criteria with a true 360º approach where the marketer is also evaluated based on the same criteria. This is one of the fundamental principles of Evalu8ing as it creates a perfectly even playing field devoid of the power plays so common in other relationship score cards and surveys.

Big B little b what begins with B?

Bonus

Most agency remuneration models are counter collaborative as they recognise and reward the volume of work undertaken by the agency and not the results delivered. If you are rewarding agencies for the volume of the work they undertake, then you will find that each agency will be competing for more work as a way to increase their revenue. And in an environment of a limited budget it means they are competing with each other for a share of that budget.

This type of competition works against collaboration as each agency is working on bettering their position at the expense of the other agencies you want them to collaborate with. Instead, the bulk of the remuneration should focus on rewarding all the agencies collaborating together for achieving their and hopefully your common goal. The focus should be placed on having all parties align to a measurement of success.

Bonding

There are a lot of technology companies making a fortune out of selling technology solutions for collaboration. But as my colleague Shawn Callahan at Anecdote has found, there are many reasons these collaboration tools fail to get traction with human beings. And that is a key point about collaboration. It is about relationships between human beings. Collaboration requires those groups of people to share values, share expectations and share their goals and objectives. This requires a high level of trust. Interaction, talking and sharing these objectives provides the opportunity to share learnings from successes and failures. This sharing and bonding builds trust.

The problem is that many times these ‘bonding’ opportunities only occur with account management, and often at the most senior level. Here there are financial and relationship agendas as the account management team of each agency is responsible and held accountable for the profitability and financial growth of the account. Instead, marketers should encourage agency teams to share and bond at all levels and across all disciplines within their agencies. In my experience this is especially effective in creative and production, where the focus is more on outcome than financial performance.

Boundaries

Following on from Arrangement, is the need to set very clear operating boundaries. Often when agencies are appointed to fulfill a tactical need there are no clear boundaries set up in the engagement. This can first of all lead to the incumbent agencies on the roster feeling threatened and secondly the new agency unknowingly overstepping their area of responsibility increasing the perceived threat. This leads to turf wars with the agencies becoming more focused on defending their patch and share of budget and trying to take a share of budget from the other agencies.

To stop turf wars requires rules of engagement in contracts. There needs to be very clear and defined roles and responsibilities. This is not simply in regard to disciplines and services, but also in defining process. We have found that the Engagement Agreement process is an ideal way to work with the agencies to define these role, responsibilities and boundaries, but it also sets expectations and allows the agencies to own the process.

Big C little c what begins with C?

Capabilities

One of the ways agencies are trying to increase revenue is in the diversification of their services and capabilities. This is sometimes achieved through acquisition of another specialist agency or grown through recruitment of key agency staff. But it is almost impossible for any one agency to excel at all of the disciplines they say they provide.

The problem for marketers is in determining what is the core competency of their agency and what is simply a bolt-on competency in an attempt to capture more of your budget. In determining the core capabilities, the best way is to talk with the agencies’ other clients, who use these services and see what they think of the quality. Another way is to simply have the agency present case studies on a regular basis of what they have delivered for others. The main thing is to judge the agency’s core competencies through action not words.

If a rostered agency demonstrates a new competency that allows you to potentially consolidate your roster and remove a specialist, then simply undertake a limited review of that capability between the two in a structured and transparent way. Any other approach and you will encourage distrust and suspicion between the agencies on your roster.

Communication

Of course great communication is essential for collaboration. But I want to specifically focus on disputes and dispute resolution. This is because I believe that creativity is like sand in the oyster that creates the pearl, creativity and innovation is prickly by nature and can cause irritation. But managed properly this can create valuable enduring and productive relationships. Therefore a dispute resolution process is essential.

When disputes arise, rather than ignoring these and hoping they go away, it is far more effective to create a forum that allows a free exchange of concerns on issues. This collective ownership of the problem will often produce ideas and innovations that enrich the relationships, the process and ultimately the marketing outcomes.

And Culture

In the original presentation my last C was collaboration itself. And I reiterated the importance of managing the process by establishing rules and regular management. But more importantly than this is Culture. Collaboration is not simply a process. You can implement a process but that will not mean you will get collaboration.

Collaboration is where two more parties have agreed to work together to achieve a mutual goal where all parties share in the value created. This requires the presence of a culture of collaboration. It means developing mutual trust and shared values. Because if you do not have a desire to share the value of the outcomes you will at best have cooperation or at worst simply coordination. But essential to collaboration is a culture that builds and maintains mutual trust between all parties.

Interested to hear your views on getting collaboration between agencies. Leave a comment with your thoughts.