Image courtesy of Laura Borse (Flickr)
In my last post, I wrote about the changing dynamic between brand, agency, and consumer. The old model of brands employing agencies to sell their stuff to consumers is no longer a win-win proposition for all parties concerned. The notion that that television continues to be the “Drug of the Nation” no longer holds sway in the developed world and that a consumer-centric model, grounded in our online habits, has taken hold.
It continues to be the case that the vast majority of agencies will, enter into a devil’s pact with the client, to produce something which seeks to be neither inspiring or engaging for fear that it alienates the client’s core audience. As Martin Weigel puts it:
It results in the sort of work that aims squarely at the middle. And thus caution and anxiety further feed the oversupply of crap.
It is almost as if brands have been caught in the headlights of the internet and it’s impact on consumer attitudes and behaviours. The majority of agencies have been quick to fill the vacuum with endless powerpoint case studies to show to clients that they should do ‘An Old Spice Man’ or some such derivative. Going down such as path leads to a simple executional existence at the expense of any creative strategic vision.
The problem is how do agencies define their strategic credentials in the face of rapid social and technological change that has now put the consumer first? A new framework is required that is flexible enough to cope with these changing forces and yet have the efficiency to deliver.
There’s been a lot of good dialogue around Lean Thinking and around Eric Ries’ Lean Startup publication. I do believe some of the core themes in both apply to planning and have a place within ad-land.
Lean thinking: a Philosophy
Before evaluating the principles of Lean Thinking, and whether they can be applied to the world of advertising, you need to understand the historical context with which the thinking developed and evolved. Toyota is widely credited with applying a lean thinking philosophy in it’s manufacturing business in the 1950′s. Essentially it’s focus was to design a process that eliminated waste (muda), inconsistency (mura) that leads to overburden (muri). Especially important in post-war japan with the entire economy still in recovery.
What it achieved was a process rooted in:
- Continuous improvement in terms of people, process, and products/services
- Respect for people and partners to produce the right results
- Sticking to a long term vision
- Embracing a culture of learning
It’s no wonder that the philosophy was adopted so readily by the next wave of tech start-ups after venture capital funding was pulled or incredibly hard to secure after the dot.com crash of 1999/2000.
Building solutions with the consumer in mind
So why should ad-agencies look to apply such as a philosophy as Lean Thinking? It’s clear that agencies push the boundaries with what the consumer can do with the internet. So it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith that agencies will begin to produce a sticky platform that is consumer centric. To some degree this has already happened with the 50/50 project that I mentioned in my last post.
Neil Perkin neatly summed up an ideal world in which planners take a lead role in helping business solve problems:
…as products and services become ever more digitised, and messaging becomes experiences, perhaps the one group of people best positioned to lead agencies into a new relationship with clients are those that can help businesses find the right problem to solve, truly understand customer need and work back: agency planners.
Agencies planners are well placed to put consumer centric design at the forefront of any product or service they ship. Through the application of Lean Thinking all the phases of concept, build, test, and deploy put the emphasis on the consumer, whilst embracing a culture of learning to reach that goal.
Ghetto testing
Part of that continuous learning philosophy and the need to eliminate unnecessary waste may be along the lines of testing employed by games company Zynga. They employ a form of A/B testing to assess what new features have the greatest demand from the consumer. This is done by creating a range of online ads, with each individual ad acting as a pitch for a new product or functionality for their games. Depending on the amount of traffic the ad gets, determines whether that functionality has been validated by the consumer.
This approach effectively flips the entire concept for using online ads for acquisition purposes to one in which validates a business’ course of action. Such an approach should be used more readily within ad-land to determine a strategic course as being valid without necessarily expending the time and effort to build it only to see it fail.
The End in Mind
I overheard a project manager lament the fact that there were too many senior planners in the agency and that this was causing him problems with his budgets. But what if an agency could deploy their best planners to create something truly brilliant and consumer centric, whilst eliminating waste using lean thinking? Being smart with the long term vision whilst cultivating an environment of continuous improvement can be found in most successful businesses regardless of the sector.
Planners are in a unique position to cultivate this philosophy within the agency environment, and bridge the gap between testing assumptions and executing against them with the minimum amount of waste. Regardless whether Lean Testing, becomes another dated buzz word, the underlying principles have universal appeal and may effectively deliver in a world of complex change.
Some of the themes expressed are explored in some detail by Neil Perkin’s series of Firestarters workshops #1, #2, #3.
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