Interview with Pandora founder Tim Westergren

This week I had the honor of being the first-ever guest host on Susan Bratton's DishyMix podcast! My guest was Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora. If you don't know Pandora, it's a genius service—are recommendation engine that creates radio stations customized to your personal tastes in music. Have trouble finding the music you love? With Pandora, it finds you.

How? You'll have to listen to the interview. Good stuff.

Download it on iTunes here. I'll update this with a link to Susan's blog when she gets back from Burning Man and posts a transcript.

What we do at Traction

Depending whom you ask, Traction is seen as a creative agency, an interactive agency, an ad agency, a design agency, a social media agency or some combination of the above. The common thread is that we design brand experiences across channels of communication. We believe everything is interactive.

In pitches, we illustrate that the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, intent, action) no longer exists in a connected world. What’s more, consumers are now empowered to consume media on their own terms—meaning brands must provide relevance and value more than ever before. We have a flexible process framework for developing communications in this environment.

Every assignment has five phases: Learn, Plan, Concept, Build & Evolve. The three areas we generally apply our process are User Experience Design (web sites, apps, mobile, anything with an interface), Social Marketing programs and Integrated Branding & Advertising campaigns.

Strategy happens in the Learn, Plan and Concept phases. First we learn—we gather inputs from internal (client) sources, on the target audience and on the marketplace. Then we plan a strategy that aligns to our brand and digital philosophies.

We believe that in the mind of a consumer, a brand can be one thing. That one thing is not a box. It is a prism through which a brand can be expressed. The artifact that we use to express how we got to that one thing is called the Brand Strategy. This is one of two key deliverables of the Plan phase for our end-to-end brand process.

The second deliverable of the Plan phase is called the Interactive Strategy. We are an interactive agency, but we don’t limit that to digital. The artifact we produce here defines target media consumption and shows how we will move audiences from awareness through conversion (and conversation). We’ve been calling our approach to designing integrated communications plans “Engineered Marketing.”

First, we redefine the purchase continuum for a scenario. Then we develop a big creative idea. Next, we “engineer” a tactical multi-channel contact strategy that takes into account how people actually engage with a brand today. Finally we produce a narrative across tactics to drive measureable results. We define how we will measure success from the outset and provide a transparent view into program performance along the way.

Observing human behavior to design solutions that meet human needs has become a hallmark of the worlds’ leading product design companies. But, no one has applied design thinking to communications planning—until now.

At Traction, we create a brand narrative that aligns business objectives with human behavior.