Agile Design

I was first introduced to the concept of Agile Development when Paul Giese, Traction's Director of Technology, had me read an eBook that was put out by 37 Signals.

The basic premise of the book is that there's a smarter way to develop applications. By taking a rapid, iterative approach where a team updates features early and often you wind up with simpler, better applications — in less time. Simpler is key. The argument made by 37 Signals is that most applications (think Microsoft Word or Excel) are bloated with thousands of features that 99% of us never use. Why would a company create a ton of features you wouldn't use? To justify the cost of selling you an upgrade every year.

Simplicity becomes very important for a number of reasons. First, if we have a dedicated team releasing early and often, we have to prioritize what they do next every couple of days. When you have to make choices, suddenly unnecessary features become... well... unnecessary. What you wind up with is an application that just does the things the human beings that are going to use it need it to do. And do them really well.

And this is why zillions of companies from Microsoft and Google to every twodotohdotcom start-up in the universe are using agile development to facilitate innovation.

Sounds great, right?

The problem for agencies has been that "agile" is contrary to how companies and interactive agencies structure things. The way we've done things with interactive projects in the past is:

STEP ONE: client issues RFP
STEP TWO: agency writes proposal or Statement of Work
STEP THREE: agency gets the job and writes a func spec
STEP FOUR: agency does the job
STEP FIVE: the client wants something that is out of scope—we have to write a change order!

Agile Development effectively gets rid of the scope. We have a budget. We have a deadline. We have objectives. We have process. Now, let's create something using our process that meets our budget, our timeline and our objective. What will we create? We'll find out when we get there.

Ironically, the ad agency retainer model works really well here. With an advertising retainer, you're not buying specific deliverables. You're buying a staffing plan — hours of people's time. We estimate hours based on potential needs, but what those hours will buy will shift based on mutually agreed upon priorities.

Lucky for us, Traction is both an ad agency and an interactive agency, so this actually works well for us. We're currently using it with about half of our clients—from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

But what we're seeing now is the need for more than just agile development, but Agile Design. In one case in particular, our team is currently prototyping a really cool, really top secret immersive digital experience for one of the world's largest financial institutions. The timeline is ridiculously tight. The potential scope is massive. There's a boatload of both graphic and interaction design work and presentation layer coding (Flash, AJAX, HTML) to do. And, the client wants to review it 2 or 3 times a week.

We're using an Agile Design process to make this work. We are creating a feature prioritization matrix and assigning a "must-have," "should have" or "nice to have" label to every component. Digital triage. We will upload work in progress daily, but designating key areas to feedback. Feedback goes into the matrix too. The benefit of presenting often is that course corrections are made early—incredibly important for a project with a large number of stakeholders. A hard-stop design and feature lock date ensures we'll have the time to test the hell out of this puppy and deliver the high quality product our clients expect and deserve (of course, the browsers we'll test it on where prioritized too).

Now that I've written this post, I guess the reality is that this is really a hybrid Agile Design & Development process, but that's not the point. The point is that a lot of guesswork goes into estimates for interactive projects. Why? Because until you've actually designed something, you have no honest idea what it will take to build it. Being agile eliminates the guesswork.

This is great for both agencies and for clients. What's important to each?

Agencies want to produce successful work that helps them grow their business, make a reasonable profit and have a good working relationship. An agile process enables them to create successful work, plan their resources effectively so they can make that profit and establish the kind of frank dialogue that makes for a great working relationship.

Clients want to produce successful work that helps them meet their business objectives, pay a reasonable price and have a good working relationship. An agile process enables them to ensure the work that is produced is focused on successfully meeting their objectives, is fairly priced and is managed with the kind of frank dialogue that makes for a great working relationship.

If anyone has any experience working with this kind of process in an agency environment, please post comments. I'd love to hear about it.

Traction wins 2008 San Francisco Award

Traction has been selected for the 2008 San Francisco Award in the Advertising Agencies category by the U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA). There's a press release about it here. Thanks, USLBA!

Real or Fake?

Check out Traction's latest for Adobe's Facebook fan page: Is it REAL OR FAKE? Go play now.

BBQ Smackdown II: The Rib-off

That's right. Last Friday was the second BBQ Smackdown at Traction. This time, there were three contestants: Russell "Crispy" Quinan, Ben "The Kid" Wilkinson and yours truly. Of course, I walked away with the trophy. And of course, Crispy has sought a legal injunction (translation = public sore losing). Personally, I would never stoop so low as to dispute the wisdom of a fairly judged contest that had found me to be the lesser man, but I'm not Crispy. 

However, I've pasted his email to our council below for you to be the judge of the judging.

For your review and consideration:

They say that a Barbecue competition is the great equalizer among men. Unlike team sports, the barbeque master works alone, with no one to blame when staring defeat in the face. Like the puppet master who so elegantly manipulates string to give the doll life, the great barbequer makes flame and meat sear together into an almost mystical level of flavor and texture perfection. This is not a subject to be taken lightly, or to be manipulated for one’s own personal gain. The steaks are very high.

A “smackdown” was to occur on Friday evening, November 7th. What happened was far more sinister indeed. What happened was either an extreme travesty of justice, or perhaps, a plot far more intricate and dastardly, hatched on the day of Adam Kleinberg’s last Smackdown loss.

I submit to our General Council the facts of the evening in the hopes that any sane and or reasonable man or woman would agree that the following is clearly some sort of cleverly devised conspiracy perpetrated by Adam Kleinberg himself:

1. Mr. Kleinberg used agency “status meeting” time to pre pitch his barbecue recipe and story to the staff.

I think we can all agree that equal time must be given to all participants to pitch their wares. Not only did Mr. Kleinberg tell the entire staff about his barbeque prowess and menu, but he did so while standing atop our crow’s nest, some 10 feet above the heads of the audience—portraying himself as a deity. I can safely say that neither Mr. Wilkinson, nor Mr Quinan had the same opportunity to stack the perceptual deck in their favor.

2. Timing was unfairly manipulated by Mr. Kleinberg

Mr. Kleinberg knowingly captured an obvious advantage by continually changing the time of the barbeque. The invitation clearly says 3:00 PM. When asked when the meat should be coming off the grill, Mr. Kleinberg continually said in “20 minutes.” Apparently 20 minutes means 2 hours and 30 minutes because I believe the competition started approximately 5:30 PM. Both Mr. Wilkinson and Quinan had to actually turn their grills off and wait for Mr. Kleinberg. I should add that both Mr Wilkinson and Mr. Quinan were there and ready to begin on time while Mr Kleinberg was still hastily preparing.

3. A “scream off “ determines the winner in a BBQ competition?

Would a scream off break the tie between two fine artists? Would Salvador Dali hold a scream off against Van Gough? I think not. To select the winner of a barbeque competition, I would suggest a more appropriate tiebreaker to elevate the audience’s perception of the art form that is barbeque.

4. If a scream off is indeed fair (although I say NAY!) But if it is, how many people had left and were not there to cast their scream? Ballets were handed out in an orderly fashion, but screaming is anything but. Can Mr. Fanning actually measure the “loudness” of a screaming room of meat eaters? It is clear to me that his arm “meter” was broken and unable to deliver consistent and accurate measurement of decibels. Was every screamer even a valid screamer? This direction is fraught with peril.

It is clear to me that this entire competition was a cleverly manipulated farce; with malice of forethought I might add, by Mr. Kleinberg, who enlisted the help of the Master of Ceremonies himself, Mr. Theodore Fanning (if that is his real name?). I submit to our General Council that the two of them we’re planning on splitting all the winnings and beginning a new life in some other region where they could continually hatch these schemes on unwitting participants. They must be stopped.

I think the entire competition’s results are suspect and the only logical course of action is to hold the trophy in a safe and secure location until Mr Kleinberg and Mr Quinan can find some other respectful tie breaker that takes into account the art of flame and meat and not the screaming of a drunken audience.

Conversational Media Redux

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the CM Summit put on by Federated Media. I chatted with John Battelle last night at the cocktail reception and made the observation that this whole event was very web 2.0 of him. Meaning one of the keys of understanding what makes Web 2.0 tick is the idea that it's great to show your competitors' content—as long as they come to your site to see it. Literally a third of the people at the event had FM name tags,  but they provided value so I was happy to shake hands (I think about 7 of his people will be visiting Traction next week) because the event was pretty terrific.  Lot of interesting insights about how brands are able to use conversations as marketing—and this is important stuff to understand. As budgets start to get slashed in the coming months, it will be companies that understand how to foster connections with lower cost connections between brands and consumers that survive and thrive.

I'm going to go into each of these in depth in subsequent blog posts, but here are my top ten random nuggets from the conference:

1. Brands are Twittering like mad and a few new success stories have emerged—like Dell generating half a million bucks in sales from tweets about surplus inventories.
2. Avinash Kaushik, whose published some great books on web analytics, had this quote: "Engagement is not a metric, it's an excuse." I love that. He went to say don't try to sexify your metrics. Call them something ugly so they just say what you're really measuring. Time spent on site should be called "Time Spent on Site." True nuff.
3. My pal, Richard Jalichandra from Technorati, was on stage. Showed a great case study of how brands can align with content relevant to their audiences: an NFL Draft channel on Technorati sponsored by Hummer. Brands need to think about how they can align with conversations. Great creative media example. Also, seems to be doing really well with Technorati Media network annoucning an acquisition of AdEngage yesterday.
4. creative = media = creative ... these disciplines are becoming more and more intertwined
5. Federated Media launched a new social media metrics dashboard tool. If you know the url, post it in comments!
6. Social media tactics such as Facebook brand pages and Twitter are less expensive, but not without investment. They are only effective and authentic if they are done well. That takes time, energy and experience. A combination many brands don't have.
7. Current TV VCAMs (viewer created ad messages) are preferred 9 to 1 by their users. Kind of obvious and one of those statistics that don't mean much—but the examples they showed were pretty damned good spots
8. Justin Curtis, the digital creative director at Grey (and a very nice guy) pontificated that the art director/copywriter model cannot survive. The need to think across technology and media is a challenge. A great specific example he gave: a client was doing multivariate testing in a rich media banner and he had to direct the copywriter to give him 25 headlines to test in the ad. Not the kind of thing a creative director trained to find the one line that best expresses a very specific message necessarily knows how to respond to.
9. Porter Gale, the VP of Marketing at Virgin America, presented a case study on their brand. A great story of a brand being built from the ground up (reminded me of my conversation with the CEO of Pandora). Really great. I  but I don't think they're doing a good job leveraging conversational media and I'm not sure why she was presenting at this specific conference. Porter, expect a phone call...
10. Hashem Bajwa from Goodby showed this great piece for Wii on YouTube. Props. 

Conversational Marketing meets Experiential Marketing

The CEO of Meetup.com just announced that they are allowing brands to sponsor real life meet-ups that are organized on their site. He's on a panel discussing how conversational online marketing is being integrated into real world experiential marketing. I think this is going to be an emerging trend we see articulated in the media. 

This is the same premise behind the work we proposed to GM earlier this year (sadly, they took our thinking and executed with their retainer agency). Pontiac needed to get people in cars, so we showed them an idea called Karaoke Cab, where we put karaoke machines and video cameras in cars and gave people free rides in exchange for them singing on camera on the way. Then we were going to upload the video to the web and give people a mechanism to invite their friends to vote for them to win a Pontiac Vibe. Something we're going to see more of as brands look to inject themselves into consumer conversations—and avoid huge media expenditures— over the coming months.

Gian Fulgoni from comScore at CM Summit

Gian Fulgoni, the CEO of comScore is on. Talking about cookies. Making the point that cookies have been the accepted measurement device for unique visitors to websites, but a very high percentage of browsers now allow users to block cookies, resulting in inflated numbers. As high as 30% are deleting cookies once a month, he claims.

He's got a slide up right now measuring the impact of search. Says direct effects only account for 16% and indirect online effects another 21%. That means offline effects of search account for 63% of how it impacts buying. Basically, what he's been getting at is the need for ROI in everything but it's really a hard thing to quantify. 

However, he's optimistic retailers are going to continue to shift dollars online. Here's a study they did on impact of online marketing to offline sales:

119% search & display

82% search only

16% display

Makes me feel good about being an interactive agency.

CM Summit

I'm at the CM Summit today and tomorrow. Will get a few posts in. John Batelle from Federated Media is on stage right now. Tells us we're going to learn what works and what doesn't over the next two days. Of course, half the people at this event have name tags that say Federated Media, so I'm kind of sitting at an ad. But I'm here, so I guess it works.

More later...

Online marketing in a downturn

I attended a BtoB Magazine marketing event this morning here in San Francisco. Some interesting presentations from client-side marketers and some good insight during the Q&A session into how companies are reacting to the financial crisis. The presenters were from SAP, Sybase, Visa and Barclay's, so it was a good sampling.

So, how are these companies approaching the meltdown in the market? Differently.

If you want to skip the details, here the summary;

SAP - cutting budgets
Sybase - increasing budgets
Visa - not changing budgets

If you do want some details, keep reading...

My friend and client, Kevin Cox, Director of Strategic Initiatives for SAP Global Marketing told us that SAP is cutting budgets—but will continue to invest in building their brand while striving to find the most cost-efficient means of driving traffic to their online properties. He stressed that while budgets were being trimmed, "we're not shutting off the lights." Comforting.

Kevin gave a very insightful presentation on how SAP has evolved their use of search. SAP first started using SEM as a more cost-efficient means of driving traffic than print and traditional direct marketing. However, after observing their online properties, they found that investing in SEO by developing search engine-friendly content led to even more traffic through organic search. So much so, that now, they've abandoned landing pages and now focus on building optimized resource centers for customers on their website. Is it working? These resource centers are getting 40% of their traffic from organic search.

SAP is cutting, but Sybase is going the other direction. Mark Wilson, their VP of Marketing feels like now is the time to make some noise and be provocative. He said that Sybaseis actually increasing the budget for a new campaign set to launch in the coming weeks. Comforting.

He also characterized himself as a "chronically stingy" marketer and gave three tips for inexpensive, yet effective techniques he thinks works.

1. Video. Lots of it. Sybase is shooting cheap, single camera videos with limited production value of product managers writing on whiteboards, product demos (imagine someone just holding up an iPhone and walking you through an app) and customer testimonials. Then they distribute them everywhere they can: the web, sales presentation, even email. He cited a 50% increase in email newsletter click-through rates when Sybase started adding video to their emails.

2. Mobile. It's easier than you think to publish a short-code and get a mobile program up and running. Sybase used it at a golf event they sponsored and awareness rates for those who received the mobile ad were exceptionally high compared to those who didn't.

3. Conversation Monitoring. We've done a bit of this at Traction for some of our clients. There are a number of vendors out there that allow you to monitor the volume and tone of conversations about your brand and your competitors online. Sybase monitors them regularly to see what the customer is saying about them and adjust their messaging accordingly.

Alex Craddock said Visa is "keeping marketing budgets static" and continuing to shift toward online media and finding innovative new ways to connect with their customers. Comforting.

He showed off their Visa Business Network Facebook app which is pretty cool. I actually had joined it a few months back because they give away $100 free credit in Facebook ads as an incentive for joining. Great incentive. Very relevant to their mission of helping small businesses leverage new channels like Facebook. The app is kind of a community with a community on Facebook. I'm not sure if they've actually created a valuable tool that has staying power, but they have 70,0000 people who have added the app, so if they can continue to provide ongoing value, this could be a really great program for Visa.

Also spoke to a few agency people I know. Like Traction, they are staying busy and doing well (knock on wood). Interestingly, Traction is participating in an RFP for a major travel company right now. The reason they are looking for a new partner: because they want to shift their marketing budget online and need a partner that can help guide them toward a path of being ROI-focused marketers. We also just won a major account (that I can't talk about yet) that is looking for us to come up with big viral ideas—that are not dependent on big media budgets. Seems like a trend.

So, there you have it. The trickle has not yet come down whole hog on marketing yet. I'm sure it will, but the trend is toward innovation and online channels. I'm glad Traction doesn't make our bread and butter on mega-budget TV spots.

Traction on FastCompany.com

This interview with blogger Wendy Marx is supposed to be on the front page of FastCompany.com this afternoon (my favorite magazine these days):

Word of mouth marketing, the power of everyday citizens to talk up – or down – a brand is on a roll.

If you ever doubted its power and reach, take a step back for a minute to April of this year when a no-name blogger outed Sen. Barack Obama for his now infamous “bitter remarks.” The bittergate story changed the political landscape and for a time upended Obama’s campaign.

While word of mouth is certainly not new, smart brands, agencies and personal branders, not to mention politicians, are taking up the WOM cudgel as never before and making it a strategic part of marketing.

That’s because the Internet has spiked WOM’s reach. Call it the power of everyday folks to help make or break a brand.

Or as branding expert Adam Kleinberg, CEO of advertising and marketing agency Traction puts it, “Marketing is not just a conversation between a brand and consumer but between individual consumers. It’s no longer just one-way communication but two-way communication.”

In the old days, if you had an opinion, you told your friends. Then came the Internet and social media, and suddenly anyone had access to a worldwide megaphone to air his or her opinion. Smart marketers are recognizing that ordinary consumers want to express their thought and passions – and enabling that.

“Social media,” says Kleinberg, “is all about giving people a chance to realize that ‘what I say’ matters.”

Kleinberg’s company, for example, created a Facebook community for a new product called Livescribe, an audio pen gizmo geared to students. A case study in how to grow a successful brand online, Livescribe’s Facebook page grew to more than 10,000 people in just 45 days. The secret? An adroit combination of new and old media, including a clever viral video to encourage students to identify with the brand, a promotional giveaway for joining the Livescribe community and an opportunity for community members to talk about themselves and the product.

“We’re allowing people to interact with a brand,” says Kleinberg. “In a sense we’ve created a ‘circle of life’ for a brand. People enter the community and see how excited others are about the product and these new members in turn inspire others.” The proof of course is ultimately in the numbers. Livescribe had 9,000 people get on the pre-order list before their pens were even on sale.

“At the end of the day, social media is about allowing people to create their own content online,” says Kleinberg. “Social media’s greatest strength is to get people who are passionate about your brand interacting with it. The operative word is interactive.”

What are you doing to get people to interact with your brand? I’d love to hear from you.

Wendy Marx, Peronal Branding and PR Specialist, Marx Communications, Inc.