1. Advertising Agencies at the Crossroads
Relevance and accountability in the age of disruption
By Tod Frincke, February, 2011
It’s tough to be an ad person in 2011. Not only do clients demand far greater accountability of their
marketing investment’s impact on the bottom line than in the past, but advertisers must
demonstrate these results in ever more fragmented and constantly evolving venues, with distracted
and finicky consumers, and amid a tremendous din of commercial messaging. In this world, who
could possibly hope to build meaningful brands and effective campaigns, consistently and with
demonstrable results?
A big part of the answer is as it ever was: knowing the consumer and being relevant to him or her.
This was always an industry best practice, and a brand message that lacks relevance is still a
marketing investment poured down the drain. Achieving and maintaining relevance is no easy task
today, but with an eye on the ball and a bit of talent, it can be done.
But relevance and breakthrough aren’t enough. Today, resonance and engagement are king and
queen, and successful ideas are experiential and social, not static
In today’s world of
or one-directional. A static idea, if it resonates at all, will not be
distraction, successful transformational: there’s simply too much distraction about.
ideas are experiential Experiential ideas engage consumers in their own groups and
activities. Experiential ideas seek to foster a conversation with
and social, not static
the consumer, as opposed to disrupting the conversation.
Experiential ideas are not limited to digital, but digital is usually at their heart. Experiential ideas
are intimate en masse, one consumer conversation at a time. Experiential ideas create an
engaging platform for consumer action, growth, bonding, or sharing.
And finally, while it’s great to deliver experiential work that engages the consumer, we are still left
with the question “does it serve the needs of the brand?” Brand values that resonate profoundly
with the consumer are winners only if they also position the brand for commercial success. Building
brand awareness or favorability is only as important as the role
of those metrics toward the brand’s business goals. And an Successful advertisers
experiential idea that attracts and activates a million Facebook and brand marketers in
fans is only as valuable as the customer loyalty and sharing today’s world are, in
generated from it.
effect, facilitators who
In the past, some traditional advertisers would have taken
find the common ground
exception to all of this, and the supposed co-opting of the
creative process. But the successful ones never did. They
and shared interests of
embraced their commercial role, and the best creative and brands and consumers.

2. planning talent in advertising has always been squarely focused on their clients’ needs.
And advertisers should embrace client accountability and experiential planning for another reason:
it's simply more meaningful, more creatively challenging, and more fun to create an effective
dialogue between the consumer and the brand than it is to create an eye-catching ad that garners
short-lived attention but doesn’t address the customers’ and clients’ respective needs. Successful
advertisers and brand marketers in today’s world are, in effect, facilitators who find the common
ground and shared interests of brands and their consumers.
So ideas and creative output in the age of distraction have a higher bar to cross: they must be
relevant and impactful as always, they must be experiential and transformational, and they must
clearly serve the needs of the brand. Challenging, yes, but for advertisers who take pride in their
creative chops, the challenge should be a welcome one. But how?
Experiential Ideas and the Consumer Behavior Path
The primacy of experiential ideas and of marketing
an agency that has the
accountability marks a crossroads for the advertising
industry, and woe to the agency that does not reinvent organizational will to
itself specifically for the task. But an agency that has the reorient itself to the task
organizational will to reorient itself can build winning, high
can build winning
impact experiential ideas, repeatedly and effectively, by
focusing on clear goals, on consumer behavior, and on rapid experiential ideas,
collaboration centered on the consumer’s behavior and repeatedly and effectively
experience.
A Framework for Accountable, Experiential Ideas
Focus on the customer-brand relationship and behavioral journey
Map out the path taken by a consumer with regard to the brand or its category, and use
that path as the contextual and experiential template for the idea.
Rally the team around the goal at hand
Clearly define brand success, and then align the work around the behavioral and
attitudinal metrics that ladder to that ultimate brand success. The #1 question at hand is:
“what is the behavior or attitudinal transformation that we’re trying to accomplish?”
Produce ideas via iterative collaboration around customer experience
Joining creative expression, customer experience and communications planning, build
and manage experiences that are relevant to the transformational goal and to the
context around it.

3. The consumer behavior path is elevated to such a fundamental role in this model because it serves
effectively as a linchpin between business accountability, customer needs & attitudes, and
behavioral & experiential context. It positions specific customer behaviors and attitudinal shifts to
be the master of the insights, the strategy, and the ideas. And it frames marketing opportunities
in a way that advertising and all types of marketing communications can address them:
experientially, dynamically, and effectively.
This is so because the wants, needs, and behavior of the consumer evolve as he or she progresses
through a long-term relationship with the brand. This evolving dialogue and set of needs
progresses from initial awareness, to various phases of consideration and shopping, through a
more intimate customer experience, and ultimately (when
things go very well) to loyalty and advocacy. The experiential ideas are
experiential and social context also evolves, as the consumer formed integrally, with
becomes more willing to engage and to share.
the context, the creative
These moments in a consumer dialogue, and the shifting expression, and the
needs and context, become the focus of the collaborative
effort to create experiential ideas relevant to the experiential and social
conversation. This is not a traditional creative challenge, design all joining forces
where the idea is formed in a tissue session and is then to bring the idea to life
scaled to suit the scope of work. Instead, experiential ideas
are formed integrally, with the context, the creative
expression, and the experiential and social design all joining forces to bring the idea to life. This
must be so: lacking any of those components, the idea is fundamentally incomplete.
And what about the Brand Itself?
The brand itself, of course, must live above this fray of the fleeting whims of a given moment or a
given customer experience, and to some extent branding may exempt from the revolutionary
experiential and contextual changes that are emphasized in this paper. But the brand must
support all of them; the brand must represent the sum of the client’s side of the dialogue with the
customer. The brand and its core values are its character, and they are the persona that
represents the client through the long experiential dialogue with the consumer. So brand planners
and creatives must ask themselves, "what is this persona, and what are the core values that we
want to bring to the customer conversation and experience?"

4. Putting it into Practice: Changing the way Agencies Approach Problems
At a high level, the process for taking on this complex task is simple. Advertisers can turn theory
into practice via four easily measurable steps.
1. Choose the Moments
What are moments in the customer lifecycle dialogue that are the keys to building
brand success?
2. Identify the North Star
What behaviors, and what attitudinal shifts, do we want to produce at those
moments?
3. Discover what Matters
What matters to the consumer at these moments? What barriers, motivators,
wants and needs are the keys? What’s the behavioral and experiential context?
4. Craft the message & the experience
What is the creative expression and the set of customer experiences that will most
effectively address what matters, and impact the desired behavioral and attitudinal
shifts for the benefit of the brand?
Again, if an organization aligns itself properly, this is not an impossible process by any means. But
the devil, of course, is in the execution, which requires a deep embrace of change within an
agency, accompanied by fundamental cultural shifts. To thrive in this new world, and to execute a
process that engages consumers and influences them to the benefit of the brand, both agency
leadership and every discipline must actively divorce itself from traditional, linear advertising
processes.
Account teams and agency leadership must be The devil is in the execution,
champions of the new approach, and take ownership which requires a deep
of facilitating the required collaboration.
embrace of change within
Planners and creatives must engage in a holistic
conversation with experiential and contextual
an agency, accompanied by
planners. The brief is no longer a creative brief. It’s a fundamental cultural shifts.
customer dialogue and experience brief.
Digital strategy, experiential design & digital production must be grown and embedded in the
agency such that digital experience is integral to every step of the process. A “digital department”

5. is doomed to failure, and the term “digital agency” will soon become an anachronism. There will
be agencies that successfully rebuild themselves around digital, and there will be failed agencies.
Media and communications planning must embrace a more strategic role, and must be a core
contributor to the experiential dialogue strategy from its inception.
Research and measurement, similar to key digital roles, must become deeply embedded and
actively involved, developing the measurement framework to connect the experiential design with
the context and the brand’s goals. In a nutshell: effective measurement doesn’t constrain winning
experiential ideas, it makes them possible.
As discussed before, the model for interaction and collaboration must similarly change. One
model used effectively for Facebook initiatives is essentially a publishing model, with daily
intelligence briefings and content reviews. There are many such models for interaction, but they
share one common trait: they are laser focused on the nurturing of consumer behavior and
experience with the brand.
These are difficult and often painful changes for any agency, and particularly for those with deeply
ingrained legacy cultures. But they are also essential to every agency’s survival, because in 2011
we are at the crossroads marking the end of the early digital age. Moving forward, it’s simply not
enough to be smart. It’s not enough to have a brilliant consumer insight. It’s not enough to have a
great idea. And it’s no longer about a creative or a communications strategy.
It’s about a customer-brand dialogue. It’s about producing effective ideas that engage and
transform. It’s about connecting the needs of the brand and the consumer.
And it’s about the agency having the will and the wisdom to embrace change. Change that
empowers great ideas.