The “Prime Directive:” Are They Ready for Innovation?

In America, people like feeling up to date. Few things endow us with the glow of self satisfaction like following an inovative trend. In my experience, this same impulse toward innovation-chic fuels lots of decisions made by marketing managers and, sad to say, many creatives. As an outgrowth of this impulse, the quest for innovation can take on a life of its own.

Given the green light by a client, creatives are so driven to “stay on trend” that we often forget to ask a critical question: Is our client ready for innovation? In the excitement of the moment, there’s a tendency to drop everything and start riffling through trade publications for inspiration:

“Dude,” says the eager-to-please creative, “we can totally reskin that app and we’re good.”

Talk like that, while hapless in its own terms, reminds me of the “steampunk” science fiction genre, which reskins computers and atomic power as products of Victorian culture. While such stories are sometimes entertaining, they’re always completely improbable. In the real world, culture and technology evolve together.

In a similar way, you can’t introduce “high-tech” creative strategies into a project unless it aligns with your client’s marketing culture. To find out if the creative approach you want to pursue is compatible with that culture, take a close look at your client’s recent campaigns.

Find their ground level.
If your client has been content to “push product” with limited time offers and a chorus line of micro-branded product features, they’re probably not ready for their OneShow moment. Additionally, if their digital footprint consists solely of a hyperlinked sales circular, you have a lot more work to do before they’ll let consumers co-author their brand narrative online.

No matter that your agency’s stock and trade is edgy-edged envelop pushing. Move too fast and the dire day will dawn when your client contact announces, “We need to take a step back.”

What’s happened? You’ve inadvertently violated your client’s marketing culture. If the CEO is only concerned with selling more product, it’s no use selling consumer engagement to the VP of Marketing.

“And by the way, how much is this social stuff going to cost?” the incredulous exec exclaims, banging a final nail into the coffin.

In short, it’s the hard-sell/soft-sell debate, swept into the vortex of changing times. And a vortex it is—so much so that many clients are clinging tight to the nearest tried-and-true tree branch, just hoping they don’t get sucked in.

Not long ago I dealt with clients who had never even considered the possibility of updating their perfect Web copy. Fine people, really, but I knew from the start we couldn’t get them to Web 2.5 in one step. It would be a long road ahead until they might finally grasp that marketing has changed forever. I found myself at their ground level, explaining that copy was more than a stream of features, benefits and “strong calls to action.”

Be realistic.
Trust me, I understand: Taking baby steps doesn’t jibe with the self-image of an iPad-toting, Kazuki-ObyO-shuffling, goji-berry-munching advertising guru. But as long as your agency has booked a client with a radically different concept of marketing than yours, you’ll have to be realistic.

That’s because, despite your concern with engaging consumer audiences, the first audience you must engage—after your own CEO/EVP Creative/SVP Account/SVP Strategy—is the client. To sell your clients even one new idea, you’ll need to understand their marketing culture down to its last holy worship word.

Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the unenviable position of being both 100% right and 100% wrong. So please, before you get the creative team in a lather about boldly going where no agency has gone before, make sure you’re not trying to sell radial tires to a corporate marketing culture that’s only just invented the wheel.

Click or Stick? It’s the Experience, Stupid.

Considering the intense competition to capture people’s attention online, it’s no surprise we continue to furl our brows over the “user experience” equation. Remember, your Web presence is not only competing with others, it’s also going toe-to-toe with every other life distraction.

Certainly, anyone who clings to the vanishing distinction between “phone” and “computer” feels these distractions even more acutely. Add to that “the office,” “TV,” your partner (or your anxiety about not having a partner), your kids, your health or whatever schedule your stomach is on—and the odds of a Web page holding your attention plummet quickly to single digits.

That is, unless the digital space you’re in offers an experience you value. This kind of user experience has little to do with how well you can navigate the navigation or comment on the comments. This is the total experience, analogous to the satisfaction you can get offline from shoving a quarter in a jukebox and letting the music wash over you.

What? You’re visiting a site that doesn’t let you do anything?   That’s a prescription for disaster. Without something to get engaged in right away, you’ll sooner click than stick.

Stop building…
To a great extent, the problem of maintaining interest online stems from the way many digital properties are conceived. Despite the Web 2.0 hype, sites continue to be conceived of as buildings made to house content. If your audience is clicking away faster than you can say “mxyplyzyk,” it may be because your paradigm is out of date.

Now that social space offers so many opportunities to upload, share, post, comment, repost, crosslink and download, a more accurate analogy for a 2.0 Web site is a broadcast channel. As a channel, the emphasis is not on how the site is built but on what it delivers. After all, part of the appeal of Facebook is anticipation: What snarky, joyous, revelatory, practical or whiny post will you read next?

In light of that, the emphasis on a majority of Web pages is all wrong. In this environment, the only reason for launching a site is to broadcast your brand. And like an offline broadcast channel, you need a steady flow of fresh, original material that sets your site apart as a brand. A stream of third-party information is not enough, even if it’s regularly updated.

…and start channeling.
Like the Thursday night comedy monopoly that NBC now barely hangs onto, or the Monday night comedy monopoly CBS would now like to claim, your Web presence has no reason to live without offering something people can’t get anywhere else.

If you’re an herbivore, it might be a Quinoa tabbouleh salad. If you’re carnivore, it’s a…well, I don’t know where to begin. Whatever you crave, the Web presence delivering it is the one you want to interact with. The others will crouch, shivering, neglected in your Favorites for all eternity or appear as one of the 516,000 results that turn up through the magic of Google.

It’s no good reposting the same chili recipe Americans have already been making with condensed tomato soup for generations. That is, unless your site also offers, say, clever brain teasers users can mull while they prepare that recipe for the 1000th time.

How can you tell if your targets will click or stick? Ask what your Web presence does for them. Unless the content does something for, and preferably to, your customers, just toss it out. It doesn’t matter how much your client paid for that content five or even ten years ago.

Because until we move away from warehousing pre-existing video, text, tools or widgets—and make a real commitment to creating experiences for consumers—the planned celebrations for the next digital era will just have to be postponed.

Marketing to “Emotographics”

Understandably, there’s a lot of attention paid to demographic studies. Our culture has reaped the benefits of scientific analysis and seen major advances in neuroscience and biochemistry. As a result, the temptation to seek quantitative data about human behavior is overwhelming for American marketers. If we comb through the statistics, the logic goes, we ought to find both what motivates consumer behavior and how to stimulate that motivation.

“Ought to” and “can,” however, exist in different dimensions. Even an ocean of data about the “Baby Boom Generation,” for example, has only relative value. How adults live their lives is only partly determined by the social forces at work when they were young. Over time, people change because life itself introduces change.

People who initially oppose legislation like the Brady handgun bill, for instance, might eventually come to support it—the moment they themselves are disabled by a bullet. By the same token, it’s life, not demographics, that made so many “Woodstock Generation” Baby Boomers vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Ultimately, reckoning how to reach a particular group takes more than a labeling system. If you’re talking to someone born in 1950, think twice about harkening back to “Jefferson Airplane.” Rail as their fans did about American foreign policy, I doubt you’ll find many 60-year-old MetLife sales agents ready to storm the barricades in a beaded headband.

Where are they now…
Whether I choose to acknowledge or ignore the voice in the back of the hall that just called out “Tea Party,” the very existence of that phenomenon only reinforces the point. No matter what demographic group you’ve crammed tens of millions of people into, you still have to answer the question “Where are they now?”

For all the same reasons, a lot of the discussion about “marketing to Millennials” makes me uneasy. Sure, people in this age bracket have identifiable traits, but I’m not convinced that, say, the rise of social technologies indicates any new psychological impulse. A young person’s insatiable need for social affirmation is hard-wired into the human condition. Cite statistics about Facebook-time, and all you’re saying is that Facebook is one critical tool for tapping that impulse.

In other words, Millennials are young. But what will the phrase “marketing to Millennials” mean in 15 years? Since we’ll have to take into account inevitable life-changing events, I can’t help wondering if marketing to demographic groups makes any sense at all.

...and what are they feeling?
Even if we assume certain traits stay constant over time, we still have to make
a relevant emotional impact. No one ever sold a product to an age group. Products are sold to an emotional state. You can sell a home alarm system to someone who fears burglars. You can sell an iPad to someone who fears being out of date. And you can sell the Like-ing of a Facebook eco-app to people who pride themselves on their commitment to the environment.

These emotional associations, like life-stage events, are what cut across generational lines most effortlessly. So I have to ask if the Millennial label isn’t more flawed than most. How, on any level, can we compare a 15-year-old boy from rural Mississippi with a 27-year-old woman from urban Massachusetts? Even if they both did see Iron Man 2, I can’t help thinking there’s more that separates than unifies them.

So instead of asking “What era were they born in?” ask “What are the best ways to address the emotion your brand evokes?” Seen from that angle, your targets’ birth years are only relevant as a possible indicator of the life-themes you need to address in real time.

Am I calling now for a theory of “emotographics?” Oh, please. Advertising,
in all its forms, is a process not a belief system. Instead of another theory, what we need is to develop our powers of observation about what it means to be human.

Selling Creative

Many people, including seasoned professionals, underestimate the effort that goes into the first stages of a creative project. There’s a tendency to think only of the practical matters that follow, because these are easier to grasp and easier to quantify. Yet for those in the creative hot seat, the execution phase is a piece of cake, compared to the hours of deep thought that go into building creative concepts.

Multiply that by two when the creative team, like a mythical mariner, must steer its fragile craft on a narrow course between conflicting imperatives. On the left is a steep shoreline cliff of conventional wisdom. On the right, an equally steep cliff of visionary demands from creative leadership. Getting stuck in the middle is a nasty business because, to put it mildly, the two ideologies clash.

Let’s assume your creative team successfully navigates those perilous waters, arriving ashore safely with concepts strategically correct and technically sound. Then let the real clashing begin. Let project team members hammer out their differences and build a presentation rationale addressing all parameters. Talk it up, throw it back in the oven, argue, wrangle, storm out of the conference room—and eventually arrive at a consensus.

With luck, the process has been positive. You’ve burned away everything superfluous, everything rooted in Marketing Anxiety—and every element whose only function is to angle for a major award. Your concepts now also contain no traces of technical gimmickry, sheer laziness or the sad parade of meaningless tactics that often substitutes for creative strategy.

If you’ve reached this stage, you have a right to feel good about yourself. But there’s one crucial step to take before the concepts go before the client.

Make the commitment.
The entire project team must commit to selling the concepts, to defend them against the oncoming barrage of cautious, ritual responses. Instead of crumbling, sell, but keep one thing in mind: Selling creative has nothing to do with “winning the argument”—and it can’t be done with charisma alone.

In reality, the process involves teaching clients how to evaluate creative work. Wean them from their ritual responses. Lead them step by step, from competitive analysis, through project strategy, through positioning statements and the creative platforms underlying the work you have on display. Helping clients see the big picture, the “concept of the concept,” teaches them not to focus on surface details, like the presence or absence of the color blue.

Even at that, however, your work’s not done. You also need a coherent strategy for selling the creative through every phase of production. Otherwise, with a snip here and a chisel there, the concepts you thought you’d sold will slowly transform into a carbon copy of last year’s campaign. If you’re committed to the idea you sold, you’ll have to keep selling it all the way down the line.

It’s worth the risk.
The assumption that great creative sells itself with its sheer fabulousness is inaccurate. The best work is exactly what’s hardest to sell; like anything actually new, it stirs up the fear of the unknown. Why does this matter? Because without the ability to sell real creative concepts, an agency is on its way to oblivion.

If the majority of your work is so conventional it could be produced by a team of freelances and a print shop in a couple of afternoons, you haven’t made a commitment to doing great work. That commitment begins with the courage to present what you believe in, sell what you present, and stand by what you’ve sold. It may not be easy to overcome ingrained beliefs but the rewards are priceless. In fact, freeing your client from the prison of conventional wisdom is probably the most creative thing you’ll ever do in any branch of advertising.

Tuning In to the Social Mind Meld

From the magician at the county fair to classic science fiction, TV, film and digital space the concept of mind-reading has long been a topic of wonder. Some people even find it tempting to speculate what animals might be thinking, if only you could somehow make their thoughts audible.

While the mystic power of telepathy still hasn’t manifested itself in the general population (maybe it skips a generation) if you spend enough time in social networking/link sharing space you can get a rather detailed picture of what people are thinking. In fact, I reckon nothing can cure you of the yearning for special mental powers faster than 20 minutes on Reddit, Fark, Propeller, Shoutwire or for that matter, Mashable. At the very least, you’ll come away with a much more precise understanding of the phrase “too much information.”

As disturbing as are the most cynical comments that crop up on these sites, they do offer a convenient pulse-taking mechanism, especially if tempered with a little common sense. Fact is, given the opportunity to read, day after day, what’s on a wide swath of the world’s minds, your approach to digital marketing should change radically.

Where have they been?
Of course, part of what goes on in the comment boxes at these sites is pure theater. Particularly on Reddit, the game of gross-out one-upsmanship does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the minds responsible for it. What can’t be discounted, as I see it, is the impact this state of mind has on users who might, just a click in the future, be arriving at a home page near you.

Coming directly from an environment that feeds on the dark underbelly of human cynicism must surely color a visitor’s perception of, and reaction to, your message. Given that, it’s probably wise to ensure there’s nothing on your pages that can’t pass the “Really!?!” test. Unfortunately, that may well include some of the cherished language your client or your company has been wearing close to its heart for over a decade.

Mapping mental states.
Looked at more broadly, the issue of “where have they been” is, I think, relevant to all audiences. Knowing where your target is hanging out online is crucial to the reception of your site. While Facebook and Twitter get an enormous amount of press, you need only spend a short time in the wider world of digital social interaction to realize there’s a lot more going on than status updates, “like-ing” or following @aplusk.

Your audience is thinking, feeling, yearning, criticizing, laughing—and zoning out on the incredible glut of information squirting out of the digital feeding tube and any one moment. In light of that, figuring out where your customers have just been is at least as important as managing their user experience once they land on your home page. Think of it as a kind of GPS for mapping out their mental state.

Thoughtful rethinking.
When you realize that the amount of time people spend online is now quite staggering, even by conservative estimates, the chances of someone coming to your site directly from a social site are very high. Remember, they’re going to be in the state of mind evoked by where they were last. That suggests you need to pay careful attention to your site’s opening gestures. Do they help your audience shift gears quickly, from mocking Lindsay Lohan to grasping the benefits of a Roth IRA?

In a certain sense, there’s nothing new here. The human mind has always had its subterranean depths. The only change is that, through some kind of hypnosis, social space has seduced people into blurting things out that would otherwise stay hidden. Used thoughtfully, this aerial view of the human psyche gives us a powerful way to fine tune our empathy for the people we want to reach. Along the way, it should also reshape our entire approach to selling our wares.

The Value Reflected in a Tall Glass of Water

Regardless of your business goals or brand promise, whatever you display in digital space has to have its own intrinsic value. People might love your product, but if you don’t offer them something they care about and can use online, they’ll be gone by the count of ten.

What do people value? That’s always been hard to pin down, not least because it tends to shift, wiggle, waffle and shear every few hours. In a situation where enormous sums of money have to be gambled on the quantitative analysis of demand—people have an annoying habit of changing their minds. Still, the whole premise of starting a business rests on the idea that a core of observable common life themes gives us some basis for “marketing smart.” The problem is, where do you find them?

While the number crunchers at Alexa, Quantcast and Hitwise use different methods and serve different gods, looking over their shoulders can be enlightening for anyone building a digital content strategy. Even without a perspective-refining visit to PopUrls or Digg (or the entire ecosphere of available analytics), clues to those common life themes already emerge from the data.

What’s on their menu?
Now, I don’t expect my squint-and-generalize methodology to yield definitive answers but, for what it’s worth, here’s what I see. In the U.S., the “top sites” break down into broad categories. Leaving aside Search, a means to an end, the largest of these categories appear to be:

• Community
• Entertainment
• News (including Sports)
• Reference
• Shopping
• Technology

…in addition to a category that deserves no further mention.

Crude as this approach is, what it tells me is that people go online in a very purposeful way that qualifies the assumptions encoded in the phrase “surf the web.”

What emerges is a snapshot of the collective unconscious. People crave community, for example. Proclaiming “I’ve got something to share that makes me valuable” is an irresistible human urge. So adding sharing functions to your Web presence might seem an obvious way to motivate repeat visits.

How do you serve it?
Looking more closely, I think there’s a fad/fashion angle to Facebook that can’t be captured with the addition of “Share Your Story” to your site map. Despite your best efforts, what you create will lack something crucial to the experience. You’d do better to create a branded Facebook group and capture the magic at the source.

Whatever tack you take, to feed people’s hunger for community, you must build the sharing impetus into the DNA of your message. Talking to visitors in a personal, fresh and improvisatory voice captures the ambiance of community more effectively than transplanting social media features to your home page in a literal way.

By the same token, your attempt to add an entertaining video is unlikely to capture the glamour of Hollywood—especially if you’re in the business of hawking baked beans. Even so, you can become more sensitive to the entertainment value of your content. Keep in mind, that “entertainment value” means more than exploding delivery vans or explosive love scenes.

What’s really at issue is your ability to weave a compelling story line about your product, service or cause. Where Hollywood excels is in driving a point home in a step-by-step progression toward an inevitable conclusion. The Hurt Locker doesn’t pause every five minutes to say, “Click here for more information.”

In that sense, your interpretation of current Web trends has to go beyond the numbers. Don’t strive for a one-to-one correspondence between the data points and your content matrix. Instead, model your content on the emotional topography that emerges from that data: the driving human need to know, to wonder, to be awed, to acquire—and feel ourselves reflected in the faces of others. The data says people constantly seek emotional satisfaction in a desert of emotional frustration. Will your site be the tall glass of water your audience craves?

Copywriting Creative Technique

As an agency copywriter in the heat of the moment, when assignments fly past your desk like gnats around a summer barbeque, it’s not uncommon to experience a touch of burnout. Suddenly, the simplest writing tasks can appear insurmountable—particularly if the topic in question is something you just can't get into.

That’s when you discover the importance of creative technique. If, up until this point, you’ve been relying on sheer insouciance or chemical co-dependence, you’ll watch helplessly as all your stopgaps, fallbacks and go-to places start swirling down the drain at a pitiless pace. That’s the time to realize you can’t sustain a career as a writer in any field with raw talent alone.

You also need a dash of creative technique.

Now, I’m not talking about grammar rules, an ability to type 100 wpm or an eidetic memory for the Top 10 Foolproof Writing Tips That Really Work. I’m referring to the creative exploration of your own heart, mind and spirit—whatever those three concepts mean to you. To write well, day in and out, you have to be aware of, and honest about, your own inner life.

The block is you.
No use, in other words, pasting over your disaffection for the topic you’re writing about with a “can do” attitude. I assure you, that way lies madness. Acknowledging your disaffection for the topic is the first step to finding a solution, precisely because it gives you a little distance from your feelings.

In fact, in my experience, what we are pleased to refer to as “writer’s block” (when it’s not caused by clinical depression) is mostly due to misdirected feelings. As a Copy professional, your job is not to dwell on how you feel about a topic, but to empathize with the emotion it calls up for your audience.

If you’re coming up blank it may be because you’re dancing the words around without feeling the music. If the topic is diaper rash, let’s say, and you don’t have any kids, stop tapping the keyboard and think. Think about how your friends, your relatives the neighbors talk about their families. Talk it over with them. Tap into the rhythm of joy-frustration-aspiration-fear-celebration-heartache that accompanies everyday life as a parent.

Break through.
Then start writing. You’ll probably find it a tad easier because, instead of pushing words across a white surface, you’re wrapping them around a shared experience, a solid block of reality. Suddenly your inner wheels have traction again and—whoo-hoo—you’re back on the road.

But you’ll miss the whole point of the exercise if you don’t take it a crucial step further: Pay attention to your state of mind. Once you learn to recognize the telltale signs of mental readiness you’ll save yourself hours of head-banging frustration. Instead of trying to get creative when your heart-mind-spirit isn’t ready, you’ll put your efforts into getting ready.

And here’s a final thought. Whatever creative techniques work for you, make sure—insist—that every project you undertake is scheduled appropriately. Nothing spurs the onset of “blank-itis” faster than an unrealistic timetable for the amount of Copy you’re expected to produce—even if the topic’s one of your favorites. If your colleagues believe that all you need is enough time to type, the next technique to master is the gentle art of managing up.

Innovation: The Myth of the Wheel

Over time, “innovation” has become a worship word in American business. If the clamor for it in digital space is more strident than in some other scenarios, it may be because no one seriously believes the medium has actually hit its stride. Underlying our manic celebration of innovation is the sense that the mother lode of profit and consumer engagement has not yet been struck.

Trouble is, digital space already has an established legacy of yesterday’s best practice. You can still hear remnants of “fold anxiety” creep into any discussion of page design. “People won’t click, people won’t scroll” goes the boogeyman’s mantra that keeps Web Design buried tight under its covers when the lights go out.

Like the license plate games that kept kids busy on long car trips before portable DVD players, the game of “Spot the Study” also quickly negates any attempt to move away from the status quo. “I read a study that says…” the game begins. “I read it, too,” goes the ritual response, “and I know another study that goes further…”

At the end of the game, everyone agrees that the only way to handle a given problem is the tested and proven way. The discussion is even capped with its own variation on ite missa est: “Besides, there’s no sense reinventing the wheel.”

Circular arguments against change.
Ah the wheel: quintessential metaphor for innovative thinking. Fact is, however, the wheel has been reinvented countless times. A gear is a wheel reinvented to make machinery more efficient. A pre-digital clock face is a wheel reinvented as a time keeper. A DVD disc…

Without the realization that invention and innovation are both dynamic and self-renewing, nothing would ever change in American society. We’d all be washing our clothes by beating them against rocks at the nearest body of water. No sense reinventing the rock.

Hence, if we value innovation, we have to accept its essential nature. Innovation forces people to reexamine their belief systems, opening up closet doors precariously shut tight against the avalanche of unexamined ideas pressing down on them.

And, of course, sometimes innovative thinking fails.

We’ve all experienced the hive mentality that sweeps the conference table when a “great idea” swiftly gains acceptance in a euphoria of self-realization. It’s times like these that give innovation a bad name. That’s a shame, because this fall from grace is based on a deep misunderstanding.

A leap of faith with a planned trajectory.
Innovation, the genuine article, isn’t a magic mantra. It arises from a delicate balance of imaginative leaps and the careful, methodical working out of an underlying premise. Contrary to popular belief, the race to innovate can only be won with the equal cooperation of the tortoise and the hare. Einstein, you’ll notice, didn’t just have a flash of inspiration about the nature of space and time. He also did the math.

Encouraging true innovative thinking requires a paradigm shift in your business process. It’s not enough to scour the competitive landscape and look over the shoulders of Success. You have to believe enough in your own team to let them make a leap of faith. Caution: Innovation implies risk and risk implies investment. Companies who sell themselves as the loss leader, followers of the “Crazy Eddie” acquisition model, can forget about innovation.

If you do, however, want to blaze new paths, remember: Innovation doesn’t necessarily manifest itself all at once in game-changing glory. Often, innovation occurs in waves, leading from one bold leap to another. It’s hard to imagine TV without radio, or radio without the telegraph—not because their technologies are necessarily similar, but because the concept and social impact of one lit the fire of the concept for the other.

Ultimately, if innovation is your goal, banish all talk of the wheel. If ever there was a case of what goes around comes around, the dampening effect of tired clichés is the number one reason your company’s best ideas may be rotting on the vine.