by: David Polinchock
Well, I’m very excited to say that based on this list, the Brand Experience Lab has been named "Agency of the Year!" Well, not really, but we should be. It was based on these criteria that we started the Brand Experience Lab in the first place, four years ago this month. Don’t believe me? Take a look at what we were saying back in 2001, long before the industry was talking about the importance of creating great experiences.
We’re very happy to see other people join the experience conversation. And we hope that it will lead to people understanding tha value of our first prediction — Authenticity is the Key. You see, it takes more than cool tactics to create the kind of experience that we’re talking about. And to be authentic, you need to know who you are. So here are two quick exercises that you can do at your company:
- Take out a piece of paper and in ten (10) words or less, write your brand story. Not your brand facts, but your brand story. Then get at least 10 other people to do the same thing, without telling them what you wrote. Collect them all and see if everyone is telling the same story. Odds are, you’re not. But hopefully, there are at least a couple of threads that are the same for you to build on.
- Gather a group of your employees and have one person tell your brand story, as if they were telling a story to a group of first graders. It’s about the language you use and the honesty of first graders.
You see, the first thing that the Agency of the Year will do is make sure that their clients have great stories to tell. Stories will be a great currency in the future. But they have to be compelling, authentic and relevant brand stories. They have to resonate with your audience and they have to be true.
So read through the list below and look at our comments. And, if you’ve been thinking about working with us but haven’t called us yet, better call before being named Agency of the Year goes to our heads!
What should an agency of the year look like? In my eyes–in this era of the rising "you"–an agency must embody ten critical attributes and capabilities:
1. Foremost, agency staffers must be passionate about acting in the interest of consumers as much as they are in the interest of paying clients. You must do good things in the world and reciprocate with others. Tolerance for anything else is waning.
2. The agency must drop tactical communications from its core positioning and instead embody the value of creating great experiences, with tactics following. (Emphasis mine. This is something that we’ve been saying to agencies since we started the Lab and something I’ve been preaching since the mid-90’s. Maybe now people will start listening! DBP)
3. The agency must embrace a world where paid media placements lose overall traction, and instead master the new currency of word-of-mouth, where reputation and propensity to recommend are earned. These latter factors increasingly determine your ability to communicate and be noticed; they are the new media pipeline.
4. The firm must strive for everlasting client partnerships, not because of insatiable desire for ongoing revenues, but because it understands that programs which achieve deep, ongoing customer experiences and loyalty are incompatible with a start-peak-end model. It’s all about a transition from campaign to platform mentality.
5. An agency of the year should be one that first evaluates the client’s internal processes and culture, to ensure those dimensions optimize opportunities for greatness, not hamper potential.
6. The agency must gain expertise in areas of innovation, product and customer service–versus solely on marketing communications. When the client fails to deliver those fundamentals, the agency must recognize that any advertising or marketing communications will only threaten or erode the client’s brand, or simply waste money. Yes, sometimes the client’s baby is ugly, and it needs help beyond advertising or marketing communications. (Again, something that we’ve been saying since day one. It’s why we created the Experience Audit, so companies can see whether or not they’re actually delivering on their messages. It’s also why we created our university program, to help explore the innovations that will be driving our storytelling in the future. Of course, it goes without saying that we always explore those innovations from the consumer side first! DBP)
7. The firm will value institutional customer-listening as a core competency far more than institutional speaking.
8. Enterprise creativity will stem not from a creative department, but collectively from a group of staffers with diverse disciplines, each with the ability to think creatively, abstractly and from different vantage points. These passionate staffers will often have backgrounds in digital, science and algorithms, multimedia, social sciences, history, arts, culture and more.
9. The agency may get out of the advertising business, for the most part, and perhaps outsource the more tactical aspects.
10. The agency increasingly will recognize and organize around you, the individual.
Original Post: http://blog.brandexperiencelab.org/experience_manifesto/2007/01/mediapost_publi_5.html
