)
Instead of being focused on the reality of today, we need to open ourselves up to the possibilities of tomorrow, Vale tells Masoom Gupte and Viveat Susan Pinto
Where on the evolution timeline of communication do we stand today?
The real change and the route of all goodness and all evil in our industry is the fact that the fundamental blocks of communication changed five years ago. So from the beginning of broadcast to until five years ago, all communication was made of two things, the media and the message. About five years ago, a new thing arrived - technology. Suddenly where just these two things existed and there was a clear distinction between what people do and how they do, you have technology, which sits between the media and the message. A piece of technology can be both the media and the message, it can be the channel or the piece of content. For example, if I ask you: what is an app? Is it a piece of media or a message or technology? Yes, yes and yes. A lot of the conversation is, therefore, about where planning needs to go, and how we must approach communication in these times is at the very heart of this change. Technology changes everything at a very fundamental and strategic level.
The other thing is the speed at which change is taking place. There has been a massive step change in the communication process that lasted a while before the next wave came along. For instance, ask Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the internet, whether he changed the face of communication. If you say yes, I ask why not Thomas Edison, without whom we couldn't have learnt how to harness electricity, the base of every medium of communication. Why not Gutenberg, the inventor of the press? Historically, this is how it has worked, one major change and then a lull, before the next one comes along and takes communication to another level. With the advent of technology, we are no longer in a world of step changes. We have a curve of changes.
What do you mean by a curve of changes?
Earlier, we were in a world before where we adapted to changes and established a period constancy. and then came the next one. If someone invents a television, we spend a lot of time perfecting television ads. If someone invents the internet, we perfect banner ads, content wise, placement wise. But the world that we are living in is one of exponential change. The curve of change is getting steeper and the speed is becoming faster. We have to rethink about our ways of framing communication. Instead of being focused on the reality of today, we need to open ourselves to the possibilities of tomorrow. This means our risk-taking abilities have gone up too.
A few years ago IBM did a study, which saw that the complexity gap was rising with CEOs. In the study, CEOs admitted that the world is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and that they didn't know how to manage it. The defining role for agencies in the future will help clients navigate the changing landscape.
How do you manage to execute this 'lean into future' philosophy?
A lot of it is about attitude and encouraging our people to look for new and interesting solutions. It forms a big part of the agency culture - promoting an entrepreneurial culture, listening to ideas, hiring people with the right attitude. We believe that you hire for attitude, train for aptitude. We have also started to grow businesses that we believe are at the forefront of this philosophy. Metalworks, for instance, is a technology laboratory that creates stuff that synergises media, message and technology. It focuses on creating usefulness around the brand.
Social media and digital have contributed a great deal to the way brands communicate today. What's your view on the work being done in the space?
There is the paid, the earned and the owned model, where you create paid communication, drive consumers into the earned media and expect them to share it across their social networks. But I don't buy that. It does work for some type of ideas but I feel we are too busy doing that. I don't think we have to do paid, earned, owned work. We are looking for ideas that are interesting and already exist in the social space. We are not very good at this yet; we will take time to get better because this is a very different way of thinking about people. We need to understand better how dual screening works.
When people are watching television, a lot of them are also simultaneously using Facebook and Twitter on their mobiles or tablets. We need to create an experience that straddles both the screens. Consider the work we created for Mercedes in the UK in 2012. We created the world's first ad where the minute-long ad came on television and at the end of 40 seconds asked the viewer to tweet how she would like it to end. The ad completes its run and in the next spot, the ending that got the most tweet-votes is used. This is the viewer interacting in real time with your brand. We managed to get 7.1 lakh leads for this campaign - phenomenal for a UK car launch and the model that we launched with this campaign has 6.2 per cent share of the UK hatchback market today.
We talk about getting brands to be interactive. But given the number of brands - and assuming the levels of interactivity that exists between products and consumers - is there a point beyond which consumers cease to interact with brands?
Yes, one really needs to think at what point does interactivity become interesting or boring. To be honest, I don't have an answer to that. The only thing one knows is that human beings have a relentless appetite for entertainment and usefulness. I think we are away from that point though. The trap is that technology, which helps us build this interactivity, also empowers the consumer to ignore brand messages. Take the DVR (digital video recorder), for instance. Consumers are watching television, but lots and lots of it of the same kind. Thanks to the DVR, people are ignoring a lot of other television. Or take the example of Google. It learns what you like and customises the information thrown back at you every time you run a search. The only thing brands can do in this scenario is to focus on building usefulness around the brand and stick to a truthful message.
The example that you shared about Mercedes is quite apt for the ongoing debate on whether the lines between creative and media outfits are blurring. Your thoughts...
Yes, they are getting blurred. A lot of media agencies are quite entrepreneurial and we have realised the opportunity. Plus, with technology, the medium is often the message. There is really a hunger and desire for new ideas in media agencies and I see it all over the world. We are increasingly creating resources that are allowing us to blur these boundaries even more.
THE STRATEGIC PLANNER
-
A former broadcast journalist, Vale has been in the media agency business for close to 20 years and is regarded among the top planning professionals globally
