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Drillteam is a brand innovation company which follows a 2.0 approach to engaging consumers.
Our sweet spot: the hyper-mediated, time-shifting, ad-skipping, lean-forward consumer.
Our expertise: moving beyond the 1.0 model of broadcasting a singular message to 2.0 engagement. We interact directly with these influential consumers to co-create your brand.
Social networks. Blogs. Web 2.0. Word of mouth. Influencers. Live event activation. Brand ambassador networks. Online Collaboration Tools. Engagement. Relevance. It’s all connected through a mindset of interactivity and consumer control. This 2.0 world requires something more than new tactics. It requires a new approach. A new process.
That approach is what we call collaboration. You want some help navigating? Good. That’s what we do.
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Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" theory wise widely accepted in Silicon Valley as a rationale in favor of online niche vs. mass business models. The basic premise: Amazon can carry an infinite number of titles, so a narrowly targeted bundle of products can be as economically attractive as more mainstream products, if not more so. Companies are encouraged to move away from the blockbuster strategy that invested the most amount of money in the few, high potential hits that can generate the greatest rewards.
A Harvard Researcher has recently debunked this theory in a report from HBR, Should You Invest in the Long Tail? Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school takes a statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and cultural industries to investigate whether a niche strategy can be a profitable one.
Using data from Rhapsody (one of the favorites in the Long Tail book), Neilsen Video and Soundscan, and an Australian DVD-by-mail company Quickflix, Prof. Elberse looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that offline and offline patterns of shopping behavior essentially the same. Anderson has replied on his own blog, begging semantic and definitional differences between how one describtes a hit and non-hit, or "head" of a curve and "tail," but overall Elberse can back her claims with clearer data.
Mr. Anderson responded on his Long Tail blog, saying much of the difference between his analysis and hers involved how hits and non-hits, or "head" and "tail" in the book's lingo, are measured. Aside from that, he was generous in praising the article, and said he welcomed the sort of rigorous scrutiny the theory was getting.
What does this mean for consumer behavior? The "water cooler era" is not yet over - people congregate around hits not just because we are interested in mainstream tastes, but because we are all social beings that want to share a common cultural dialogue. This dynamic is further accentuated online. Additionally, Anderson's claim that a small group of fanatics drive the demand curve for obscure products was also undone. It turns out that the people that consume obscure products are simply heavy consumers of said products. They like and gravitate toward mainstream and obscure alike, and interestingly they have a greater fondness for the blockbuster. As Prof. Elberse states, "there is no segment with a particular taste for the obscure."
What does this mean for marketers? We've seen this recently through ethnography studies on indie culture. Indie music lovers are primarily music lovers - they take in blockbuster hits, but spend so much time hunting down music that they love that they tend to include more obscure, local bands into their iTunes list. The niche identity indie music lovers may have felt 10-15 years ago when it was a small, edge group of people is replaced by a mashup of mainstream and indie lifestyle. Young adults in particular don't want to choose an identity type and live within a specific niche, and there is real value to brands in learning how to navigate the shift between mass and more localized communities.
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Google is creating the best example of how to reach wide audiences online, in a hyper targeted format. Yesterday Google announced that they would be distributing webisodes from Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane via their AdSense publisher network . Google will sell pre-roll, sponsored links, and for a substantial fee MacFarlane will create a customized animation on behalf of a brand.
What does this means for brands? Sometime in the future, you will have an open pipe to advertise, just like you used to on the big old TV set, only in shorter, more limited formats. More importantly, for the right price and content, you'll be able to acheive the kind of scale you get on TV - something that none of the online media players have been able to crack.
The jury may be out on the future success of this model, but Google has gotten one thing right: they're not trying to solve the ad distribution problem by coming up with the best format and pipeline for video ads to run. Instead, they've put compelling content at the center for their distribution platform, piped into an existing network of destination sites that are already benefit from their ad distribution platform. Why go to Hulu or a Viacom site when the content will be brought directly into your natural habitat?
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From Joe Marchese at MediaPost, and we couldn't agree more. Although Joe doesn't go as far as you need to go to be a social media agency.
"Put simply, Madison Avenue wasn't built to service brands in social media and, more importantly, Madison Avenue is not built to make money from the proper activation of social media for brands. The question is, can the system adapt, or will a new breed of agency be born in the vacuum of effective social media campaigns? Evolution or revolution? I have seen evidence of both.
Activating a brand in social media delivers a variety of benefits. Social media's conversational nature means that a campaign can deliver a lot more than simply message distribution. Social media can give a voice to a brand's customers (or those a brand would love to have as customers)."
Joe then prescribes the ideal social media agency:
_Long term partner rather than campaign-based
_Provide product feedback
_Provide message feedback to creative
_Achieve social media distribution
_Measure the ROI for the whole brand
As an agency who has been managing customer collaboration marketing programs for a number of years now, we would say that this list does not even begin to touch the laborious and strategic work involved in delivering ongoing social media services. As the lead social media communicator, we find ourselves interfacing with R&D, corporate communications, customer service, research and insights, corporate strategy and planning, in addition to product and marketing. We concur wholeheartedly that the current Madison Avenue business model is not set up for this kind of work - it is more behind-the-scenes, the big insights may never get a Cannes Lion, and the valued work often has very little to do with a sexy creative execution.
The opportunity, though, is tremendous. A smartly deployed, collaborative social media strategy can become the central engine for the brand, defining the future of a company will creatively co-create the future of the brand directly with consumers.
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Open innovation trend must be real if McKinsey is reporting on the trend. McKinsey provides a top level overview if you're looking to understand how this trend developed, and to sort out the difference between product development, supply chain, and marketing innovation.
Many of the usual crowdsourcing examples are cited - LEGO Mindstorms , Wikipedia, Threadless, and some very outdated examples from Second Life. But there were some interesting case studies from the B:B world, such as the cocreation community that developed the ATLAS particle detector. If we think participatory marketing is hard, try building a complex scientific instrument with 2,000 different scientists on the internet.
Definitely check out the report's list of how tos, particularly regarding intellectual property issues, incentives and rewards, clear roles, distribution of work into smaller focused efforts. We find that this advice rings true with the primary challenges we face in creating these collaborative communities: defining community rules, IP guidelines, and mutually beneficial rewards that fit the relationship between the brand and the community members.
The Next Step in Open Innovation
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We launched our summer office league yesterday in NYC and Chicago. It was one of the most fun, hilarious and VIOLENT nights of whiffle ball ever!!
Here are the NYC league stats so far:
Matador beat HEEB 5-1
Sony BMG beat FADER 17-0
Check out the trash talking and photos on our blog:
Team Saucony Originals
The Onion vs. L’Oreal tonight @ 7pm in Central Park if anyone wants to come out to watch!
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