Lessons from brands, agencies and start-ups on how to work together to unlock marketing-tech innovation
An illustrious panel united in Rome, from all over Europe, at the Global Festival of Media to debate the state of play for marketing tech innovation. It’s a big topic. It’s rife with challenges as the culture of three very different organisations — corporate brands, agencies and start-ups — clash when trying to unite to conceptualise and implement new start-up marketing tech on branded campaigns.
Fortunately the chair for this panel — strategist and author Michael Bayler - has an equally big personality, and a few views of his own. Michael was ring master of the panel including Doran Tal, mad-tech scouter for Havas in Israel; Emily Forbes, founder of mad-tech start-up Seenit, which is changing the way brands create video by enabling them to crowdsource engaging and authentic video at scale from communities, fans, and customers; Christina Richardson, co-founder of mad-tech start-up Openr which works like an ad-unit for content and social marketers, enabling brands to further engage the people who are viewing the content they share; and Rose Lewis, co-founder of Collider, the London-based accelerator that focuses on supporting and connecting marketing start-ups with brands.
Everyone on this panel — and probably in the room — appreciated that the relationship between technology start-ups, large brands, and the agencies that sit in the middle, is critical going forward. The need for creativity and constant innovation to improve campaigns has never been greater. But the panel also all violently agreed that this relationship is extremely vexed — a bit like a spotty teenager still working out life’s purpose. Growing up has to happen though. Innovation is the major agenda for everyone on the demand-side of the market, and business development — and frankly survival — is critical on the start-up side. But that doesn’t necessarily make the here and now any easier.
A full guide with advice from industry experts can be found here
At the moment there’s lots of happy stuff going on: Big players like Unilever, Nestle, O2/Telefonica, Accenture to name just a few all have accelerators, incubators or start-up programmes to fuel innovation via start-ups. Sometimes it is to stay ahead on the innovation frontier; sometimes it is to get ahead — Unilever openly admits they were very slow to jump onboard platforms like Facebook when they emerged - and working with start-ups is their commitment to not letting that happen again.
There’s lots of energy on all sides and plenty of conversations happening. But the general consensus is that it’s not quite firing. So what does best practise look like and what needs to be fixed? It’s a big conversation, potentially defining the future of the interface between marketing and technology, but the conversations have begun and that’s a start.
A culture clash and a collision of agendas
The most stalwart challenge is culture. When making these partnerships happen we’re dealing with such very different beasts; process-laden corporations, with agile start-ups, and innovative agencies getting caught in between he-who-pays and he-who-inspires. There are completely different objectives, completely different time-frames, and completely different outlooks at play.
The truth is some big brands don’t always want change — many would rather stick to the know quantities since they are proven rather than progress innovation — so picking your partner is key. Brands are the people with the budget at the end of the day — so it’s that fit that is critical. Start-ups need to be wary of thinking agencies hold the purse-strings — agencies are well placed to be facilitating but it’s the brand owner that signs on the dotted line. Closing that gap and aligning these agendas more efficiently is going to play a big part of the way forward.
There’s no dearth of start-up talent
It’s fair to say that there are no issues finding new start-ups. Attend any marketing event in Europe and you’ll find agenda items or showcase areas filled with start-ups from the major tech hubs of Europe. The challenge is not finding them, the challenge is implementing them.
This is two-fold: Firstly, it’s about the founders or management team of the start-up . It takes a well-developed, mature founding team to navigate the corporate world and pull it off with the level of professionalism required.
Secondly, it’s about the complexity of integration. The first battle for agencies is to break through the internal barriers — convincing colleagues to try the start-ups. Once that’s achieved the second cycle is taking it to the client and convincing them that there is an opportunity to do something that could be significant in terms of strategy for the long term. It’s a double challenge. It’s really difficult. But as Doran said “it all comes down to knowing what we want to solve with the start-up tech”.
Six weeks for us is like six months or six years for a start-up…
A large part of the culture clash is around time. A relatively speedy six week decision within a corporation can feel like six months or six years to a start-up, but this can all be ironed out by understanding. Christina was clear “at the end of the day it’s our job to understand the needs of the customer — be it the agency, brand or a combination of the two — and part of that is unpicking their timings and learning to work with that, no matter how frustrating it may feel”.
Agencies and brand-side team members play a key role in making this happen too by being open with feedback, and transparent and clear about the process and timings. Simply by communicating the decision-making process and stakeholders involved, alongside the expected timings, a more aligned process results.
Co-creating the story leads to creative campaign results
Inevitably it is the job of the start-up to define their proposition but agencies and brands can play a big part in refinement and the creative application it. Any start-up worth their salt will show examples of how their tech could work for a client brands when they present. However, it’s the agency and brand team that knows the brand the best, and that knowledge is far superior to a start-up’s best guesses.
Both Doran and Rose recognised that they play a key role in helping shape the proposition of start-ups, and certainly in the case of Openr is has been great account managers who’ve seen the opportunity to use Openr in a different way for their client with great results. This kind of collaborative thinking unlocks new creative solutions and the story can be crafted together so that it answers the real needs of clients.
The key contributing factor is that agency and brand people keep an open mind when seeing new tech — and rather than just hearing what is said, actually getting under the skin of it to find a nugget that becomes really relevant to your brand. It goes without saying, we’re all busy — and that’s another job we don’t have time to do — but it can uncover new creative solutions to incorporate into a future campaign. So it’s a trade off, and one worth making.
Don’t mention the R-word
Unlocking these new technologies for campaigns comes down to being open to trying something new. That however comes with the dreaded R word — Risk. Talk about risk and we see people recoil. Rightly so, for big brands there is a lot to lose, but we need to keep it all in perspective. Working with a new start-up tech is not going to be the make or break element of a multi-million pound campaign. The focus at the start should be on trying a new bit of tech on one small bit of one campaign, and learning from it. Once the teething troubles have been overcome, you can try it on a more grand scale — eliminating risk.
There is a fear of failure but that needs to be turned on its head. We need to limit the risk and celebrate failure — treating it as a learning process. It means you are actually trying innovation, looking to pushing that boundary of what can be created.
Collaboration is the magic ingredient
Making this happen comes down to a mindset — individuals can’t be in fear of their jobs if something small doesn’t go quite as well as hoped — whether its agency or brand-side. Similarly, start-ups shouldn’t feel like there is only one shot to ‘get it right’. This kind of pressure rarely gets the best from anyone.
Having all parties around the table as one team from the start with agreed expectations and a mindset of progression — rather than win or lose — will provide the desired results. Innovation and creativity can be unlocked from these working partnerships without fear of failure and that’s what leads to stretching boundaries and delivering really creative new things.
What is value? Defining success from the start
Working out what success looks like is critical to this. It’s about communication. A start-up will have a sense of what they expect from a campaign based on their previous results, but this might not be what a brand and agency team expects or is even looking for. Neither is wrong, but the misalignment needs to be realigned to get the best out of the campaign.
Michael distilled this into a value equation: there is such a focus on metrics now, but the discussion here is actually about value. Simply by being different start-ups are usually redefining value, so it’s sometimes tough to compare the new version of value (or the value the tech brings) with the previously ranked metrics. Openr is adding another step on the customer journey that wasn’t there as an engagement opportunity before — by converting content readers closer to a commercial result. Similarly, Seenit exists more in the creativity space so the focus is more on somehow measuring engagement. Hence teams need to agree at the start what success looks like.
The value of agencies in the mix
The campaigns being run are complex and multifaceted: In a recent content campaign for a large global brand, Openr was one of three technology providers that needed to work seamlessly together just to get some native content placement that opened with an Openr message. At its core it was simple, but it required significant team alignment the first time it was done. This is where the agency skill set comes in — where the account managers who know and understand each micro element of the mix can be puppet masters to align and deliver what we all want — a successful campaign.
The value is also clear in the post-campaign review stage as demonstrated by Seenit. As the creativity and creation platform Seenit have no influence on the distribution and consequently engagement with the videos created. Yet on first glance, a campaign can be deemed a failure if those all-important view metrics are not achieved. Start-ups can be automatically filed away in the ‘failed’ pile for a metric that had nothing to do with them. Fortunately the agency teams dissect and understand the respective channels clearly and pinpoint the contributing factors. The best then iterate and run more activity to prove the successes next time.
Landing and expanding — the challenge of scale
Start-ups begin by being the new kid on the block. The new shining thing. A brand manager or an account director, seeks out something new and is bold enough to try it and make it happen. Once that start-up is through the door and has delivered something though, they’re not the new shiny thing which makes scaling from there a totally new job.
The job becomes more about rolling out to different departments, different agency teams, and brands within an organisation — and that’s a very different job to the first. Michael lay down the gauntlet saying he didn’t believe this bit was happening, but Rose, Emily and Christina could all identify instances where this has happened. However, there’s definitely more to do. The challenge becomes much more focused on how does it integrate, how does it fit in to the day-to-day activities — because that’s how you achieve scale.
Will this work? Or do we need radical change?
Success for everyone should be doing something that has a positive impact for all involved for the longer term. For the brands, for the agencies involved and for the start-ups.
In the immediate term — the holy grail would be around feedback. This is not a new point, but the road is a long one to getting consist best practise around this. Start-ups are so often left in a vacuum. They go in, present, have positive conversations, then don’t get any feedback — despite many requests and follow ups. Getting feedback — even if it’s just a one sentence reply is invaluable. The feedback ‘we’re working on it’ or ‘not right now’ is great because everyone knows where they stand. Believe it or not — even a ‘no’ with a succinct why is more valuable that silence. If the feedback says the proposition was wrong it can be improved next time; if the feedback is not right now, then future timings can be agreed so as not to waste everyone’s time chasing in the meantime. A little bit of feedback can improve the relationship all round.
Long term it’s all about a mindset shift. The more that we work together as partners, and we go into things saying ‘we’ll try this together’, the more we will deliver market shifting results. With that in mind, there was a call out from Rose to all CEOs and CMOs to put innovation at the core of the agenda. By doing that teams become empowered to try, and that shifts start-up innovation to a strategic level rather than a purely tactical level. It’s about the senior leaders giving permission to their teams at all levels to experiment, to try new things, and as part of that, to fail, in order to deliver long term market shifting results rather than get left behind.
Get the guide for free: Start-up tech — The future of marketing innovation & how to do it right, co-created by Openr and MEC — download here
Christina is the CMO and co-founder of Openr, an innovative content-sharing tool used by brands and agencies to drive tangible action from all the content that they share. Christina spent much of her career managing and growing FMCG brands at Nestle and Robinsons, and then turned her hand to young start-up brands, and has never looked back since. Her first marketing technology business was acquired by Enterprise Nation in 2015; and today she spends much of her time focusing on the growth of Openr. As well as this, she teaches Entrepreneurial Marketing for University College London, and is a mentor at UCL and Bathtub2Boardroom.
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