The Journey's the Destination

NMA have published some of my thoughts building on the DMA Digital Measurement insights about new metrics for social media measurement - the article is here.

It refers to my colleague David Carr's thinking - which is summarised here.

There's more analysis and opinion here from Philip Buxton, who came to the DMA event and asked some pretty fare reaching questions of the direct marketing community. 

I've been involved in conceiving a digital event for the DMA which is on the subject of measurement for digital and offline campaigns.

The context is that more and more money is being spent on digital channels because they are perceived as effective (better targeting), efficient (cheaper) and more measureable.

The question we ask is: Is digital delivering what it promises?

What’s important about this subject is that it’s very current and an its something on which the DMA should have a point of view.

We’re conducting a survey which should give us the insight we require to both PR the debate and introduce it on the day.

Its here - please could you ask people in your organisations and also colleagues in other agencies to complete it. We need a few hundred responses, and time is of the essence, as ever!

The date they’ve provisionally booked for the live debate is after work on Thursday 15 October – its at the DMA.

Many thanks, and see you then, hopefully!

This is the message on the wall at TBWA Berlin (and all other TBWA offices?), where I recently spent a couple of days at a ‘Disruption’ workshop they ran for one of our clients.

‘Disruption’ is TBWA’s brand planning process, their rigorous approach to earning a brand a greater slice of ‘share of the future’. The process works through the conventional wisdom of a market (‘Convention’), using that to work out how a brand can behave differently (‘Disruption’) and developing these into an effective future for the brand (‘Vision’).

They’ve published a number of books on the process, and deeply embedded the approach into the agency’s planning culture, with workshops run frequently in all offices. The Berlin event however, with 50 participants, was on a much bigger scale than normal.

A huge amount of effort had been put into preparation with data, insights and campaign creative collected on to large floor to ceiling boards to set the scene and inspire. They had even converted a number of offices and spaces in to home environments (kitchen, living room, adult and child’s bedroom). The cherry on the pie was that after they’d shown some vox pops of consumers (diary studies around product consumption), a couple of the families actually came in and took questions from the workshop!

The process produced some really powerful territories, but most importantly, it built momentum within the client business behind embracing something new and fresh. Specifically these territories are about brand behaviour, not advertising, and inform the whole communications mix – not just advertising.

I left impressed and feeling that TBWA Berlin really are embracing integrated communications (not something I believe about most ad agencies) and await to see how much of the thinking is embraced and implemented, and how much does just end up as TV, out door and press. Watch this space...

I’ve been involved in the development of an idea which bridges the divide between marketing and finance people. It’s a collaboration between the DMA, CIM and CIMA and after 3 years of pain, it launched on 27th April.

It presents a process and practical checklists for clients and agencies to go through for proposition development and communications which is more effective than what happens in most companies now.

If we pull it off, it will become a movement, an enlightened way of organising the marketing process.

There's more info here.

If you'd like a copy of the brochure, please email me or register on one of the partners' websites (you can access them via the link above)