Yesterday I started a new job as Head of Innovation of Cheil UK. Given this is a new role for me, I thought it would be useful to get some direction from some of my friends/peers on how they view the role of innovation within an advertising agency (beyond what I already knew from my own experiences as well as the excellent pieces by Ben Malbon on the topic of Chief Innovation Officers). Those that kindly lent me their words of wisdom were as follows (thanks guys):
Adam Good, Executive Vice President at Proximity Worldwide
Andy Kinsella, Innovation Director at Glue Isobar
Andy Sandoz, Creative Partner and Innovation Director at Work Club
Faris Yakob, Chief Innovation Officer at MDC Partners/KBS+P
Johnny Vulkan, Partner at Anomaly
Mattias Hansson, Chief Innovation Officer, SWE in association. w. JWT
Mike Williams, Digital Innovation Strategist at Ubermore.com
Here are some of my favourite answers to my questions:
How do you define innovation?
JV: Creating change, either through the invention of something new or the evolution of something that exists.
FY: Exploration and application of different outputs from similar inputs
AG: It’s the opposite too madness and doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. In business, advertising or production development innovation is the delivery of value through an idea or set of ideas that focus on improving the customer experience. It’s about developing a culture to trying things, pilot programs, test and learn always seeking incremental change that show improvements in the customer experience.
MH: Since the latin word “innovare” actually means “renewal” I define my work as Innovation Officer to include 1) Renewal and upgrading of existing innovation (-processes, services, etc), 2) act as a magnet for innovation (new ideas and stuff) in the organization, and 3) making (innovation) ideas really happen (connected to revenue).
MW: Making something new that provides value to the people using or experiencing it.
It’s about small steps to optimize your core business whilst seeking completely new ways to grow in the future. There’s enough of an accepted body of knowledge around the processes and benefit of innovation that any agency wanting to thrive needs to actively make it a core facet of it’s culture and structure.
The digital revolution has forced this into focus for agencies. But, really, innovation isn’t just about being digital, or being at the edge of the latest trends. It’s about creating a learning business that can adapt faster.
You currently have Innovation in your job title, what does that actually mean?
JV: Yes, but I think we built the company so that everyone feels a sense of responsibility and opportunity for innovation. We encourage and often incentivize everyone to dabble with new technologies but we’re also clear that ‘new’ doesn’t always equate to ‘better’, nor does it equate to ‘useful’ for what our clients and partners may need.
I think innovation has to be done with a sense of responsibility and occasionally that means restraint. Clients spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building things in Second Life before anyone stopped to ask the fundamental question ‘Why are we doing this?’.
It’s critical to know what is going on and stay up to date, it’s even more important to understand what may be usefully applied.
AK: Connecting the dots and making sure the agency is being as smart as possible. I’m interesting how brands can play a meaningful part in culture, and looking at what happens when art, entertainment, and social interactivity collide. People tend to think it’s about technology role but it really isn’t – more often it’s about using existing technology and habits with a fresh approach. We often talk about “solutions grounded in understanding”.
FY: It means that I’m allowed to ask stupid questions. Like..WHY? Instead
HOW and WHEN.
It means I pick up some of the assumptions that are buried so deep we forgot they were assumptions. Like what do advertising agencies do?
It means when we want to change the process to get to different solutions I think about how.
Give us an idea of what you do day to day to deliver innovation in your business?
AS: Questions and answers.
JV: Listen and share, create options and hypotheses and encourage the decisive members of the team to help make the decisions that turn information and action.
AG: Obviously plenty of reading, following innovation blogs and people with a strong design background is something I do each day. I also think it’s important to get away from technology and try to do things that don’t use it at all. Try to move away from complexity and get to enjoy very simple things. Here is where you find great ideas.
What do you think are the key characteristics to being successful in an innovation role?
AG: You have to be an energetic self-starter with both creative and analytical organizational skills. Be focused on teamwork, collaboration and building effective working relations with clients and all members of your team. When driving a project for a client be the one leading consumer engagement and always getting to the truth of the brand. You also need strong understanding of brand marketing functions, as well as operational dynamics that can affect a company’s ability to reach audiences and drive sales. Be driven to create meaningful tools and architecting user experiences. Once you have an idea on the table, apply and interactive mindset and a focus on making the end user feel personal with it. The idea must be helpful towards advancing the users purpose. Always ask yourself why do I care about this idea?
JV: Curiosity. Open-mindedness. A desire to learn. The ability to pause and think. Restraint finely balanced with an ability to take risks. Basic commercial understanding.
AK: Diverse experience, a broad perspective, and the ability to inspire others to do great work.
AS: Stop and think. Ask the stupid question. Look up.
FY: Being able to define success appropriately for all stakeholders.
From your experiences, what can be the biggest barriers to true innovation?
AK: It can be an incredibly scary place to be. For an agency and client. Everything about the ad industry is structured to deliver campaigns in tried and tested formats.
AG: Being worried about failure. No one likes it but unless you make mistakes you don’t learn anything and you don’t move forward with new thinking.
MH: Coward employers not willing to take the risk.
MW: Lack of top-level buy-in. Unwillingness to find the resources and business rational for experiments, trying untested and the seeking the unknown. The inability to learn quickly mid-project and change direction when something isn’t working. Having to make promises.
JV: Three areas really:
One is having a fixation on the latest stuff without proper interrogation. It leads to fad solutions and in communications has sometimes led to agencies using other people’s money to score PR points. It’s ok to pause.
Apple, arguably regarded one of the most innovative companies in the world were rarely first into any category – they observed and then did it better.
The second is to pause too long. The stream of innovations and technologies is not likely to stop and you need to be comfortable in the stream and allow yourselves be carried along by the current. Experimentation is a part of it, as is observation. It’s about balancing your comfort with the unknown and risk with your own sense of purpose and common sense.
The third gets harder every year, but its about accepting you don’t know it all. Every day has new lesson, keep your eyes and ears open, absorb as much as you can with as little cynicism as possible and then filter out as much as possible to leave yourself with a few things you can focus on that make the most sense for the task at hand.
What has been the most innovative thing you have seen in the advertising space over the last six months?
AK: Heinz Get Well Soup. Such a simple idea but I really like it. It’s nice to see brands opening up and creating content for fans.
MH: -I like the way that iPad-advertising really can use technology to talk to my inner feelings in an virtual but “real” way. Like this:
and this, really – not (kid)ding:
JV: I think foursquare (and other location based concepts) remain the most interesting area of evolution. A few years in we’re moving past the novelty value of the ‘check-in’ and onto concepts of timely offers and ‘mobile point of sale’ and promotions. Couple this with ‘Groupon’ thinking and the imminent mainstreaming of NFC in mobile devices and we have all the pieces of the puzzle almost in place to shift shopping behavior. It’s come from where the ad industry often (wrongly) perceives as the least glamorous part of our role – retail communications but those that embrace the data and a human interpretation will reap the rewards.
AS: Patagonia and eBay - Buy only what you need
AG: We all can impulse spend but what about a product to help us impulse save. Westpac launched in March this year an innovative impulse savings product to help New Zealanders save as impulsively as they spend. Impulse Saver, a free iPhone app that enables customers to save denominations of their choice up to $50 with a simple click of a button. More details here.
FY: The WWF file format for the World Wildlife Fund. To tackle a brief to convince people not print documents unnecessarily, the agency created pdf-like file format that cannot be printed.
MW: BMW Guggenheim Lab – I loved the brutal simplicity of TEDTaxi from TEDxBuenosAires:
What technologies/behaviours that we can see coming up in the next 12 months excites you the most?
Digital Storytelling (AK): (taking stories out of the text or video format) What does is mean when brands become publishers and content providers? Work like The Creators Projects by Intel and Vice Magazine changed the way people look at branded content. From Crowd Created stories such as Google’s ‘Life in a Day’ to Social Stories enabled by apps like Flipboard, the Internet has finally allowed brands to connect and communicate with people in more interesting ways.
Integration technologies (FY): Technologies like siri – that stich together disparate applications and data sets to create seamless usefulness.
NFC, voice control and in fact sheer processing power (JV): We’re probably one chip set (let’s call that A6) and bandwidth (4G for the masses) away from a mobile experience that is close enough to laptop experiences to make it feel natural and instinctual to do more. At that point the blurred line will disappear and shopping and commerce at a physical level may well go through the same radical shift as occurred in the first iterations of online commerce. The data will be on the surface and intuitive – we won’t be launching apps or scanning things, we’ll know more about the things we’re looking at as we go.
Rise of the Web Apps (AK): (HTML5 magazine, online ads, platform and device independent – seamless integration across device) People consume media on lots of devices and expect seamless integration across them all. With HTML5 and responsive design we’re finally getting to a place where we can deliver those great brand experiences people expect, in all the places they expect. There’s also loads of experimentation in this area, and projects like The Wilderness Downtown and Ro.me give us a glimpse of what’s going to be possible in the next 5 years.
Smart Mobile (AG): The increase in hand held internet enabled devices has allowed us the ability to create action sensory communication. Mobile phones and smart devices today have eyes with inbuilt cameras. They have brains to know where they are located via mobile networks. They also have ears with built in microphones. They have a skin that you can touch which increasingly allows a brand a platform to augment consumer’s senses and truly change behavior
Social TV (AK): (increased used of 2screen and backchannels) Over 50% of people in the UK now browse the web while watching TV. From X-Factor to the Superbowl, people group around shows and are taking part in shared experiences, with the top shows regularly becoming a trending topics on Twitter.
Sustainability (AS): All brands will be seeking to deliver on this. It will drive more digital products and huge change in behavior, output, message etc.
Hope you found the answers as interesting as I did. I found it also quite comforting the different backgrounds that those in that innovation position come from, ranging from people who had stints in retail, the music industry to designers, to operational roles to entrepreneurs.
Ultimately it seems that innovation is a state of mind and as much about creating culture and an environment where everyone feels that can deliver innovation as it is about being on top of the latest trends and spotting which ones are going to be most appropriate to deliver on your client brief. And maybe someone was right when they said that the role of Innovation in an agency will be dead in eighteen months. But in the meantime I truly believe it has a huge role in helping define the new agency models in the advertising industry and I hope that I can match the success of the people who were so kind to be interviewed.
Other related articles:
Do we really need Chief Innovation Officers in Agencies?
Ten Things I have found to be true about ‘Chief Innovation Officers’ in agencies
