Converge E-Book

Bob W. Lord

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 358

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The leaders of Razorfish share their strategies for mergingmarketing and IT To create rich, technologically enabled experiences, enterprisesneed close collaboration between marketing and IT. Convergeexplains how the merging of technology, media, and creativity isrevolutionizing marketing and business strategy. The CEO and CTO ofRazorfish, one of the world's largest digital marketing agencies,give their unique perspective on how to thrive in this age ofdisruption. Converge shares their first-hand experienceworking closely with global brands--including AXE, Intel,Samsung, and Kellogg--to solve business problems at thecollision point between media, technology, and marketing. With in-depth looks at cloud computing, data- and API-enabledcreativity, ubiquitous computing, and more, Convergepresents a roadmap to success. * Explains how to organize for innovation within your ownorganization by applying the principles of agile development acrossyour business * Details how to create a religion around convergence, explaininghow to tell the story throughout the organization * Outlines how to adapt processes to keep up with and takeadvantage of rapid technological change A book by practitioners for practitioners, Converge isabout rethinking business organizations for a new age andempowering your people to thrive in a brand, new world.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part I: Converge = Marketing + Technology

Chapter 1: The Collision of Media, Technology, and Creativity

Media

Technology

Creativity

Building the Renaissance Organization

The Five Principles of Convergence

Convergence Catalysts

Chapter 2: Next-Generation Storytelling

The Death of the Mad Man and the Birth of the Creative Technologist

The Democratization of Creativity

Collaboration: Chief Creative Becomes Chief Curator

Brands as Services

Convergence Catalysts

Chapter 3: Data-Driven Experiences

How Obama Used Data to Keep the White House

The Road to Marketing Utopia Is Lined with Columns and Rows

How Targeting Is Failing Consumers

Executives Fail to Prioritize Targeting

The Road to Better Targeting

Convergence Catalysts

Chapter 4: The Cloud

Grasping the Cloud

From EC2 to the Royal Wedding

Fast, Cheap, and in Control

A Tsunami of Data

Clouding the Cloud Issue

Convergence Catalysts

Chapter 5: Marketing Is Commerce, Commerce Is Marketing

The Store Is Dead, Long Live the Store

Retail’s Challenges

Toward a Single View of the Customer

Roads to Innovation

The Moosejaw Model

Convergence Catalysts

Chapter 6: Media

How the Fickle Consumer Uses Media

The Upfronts

Just Because It’s Digital Doesn’t Mean It’s Fast

Imagining Brands as Publishers

Convergence Catalysts

Chapter 7: Ubiquitous Computing

What Is Ubiquitous Computing?

The Home, Connected

The Self, Quantified

How Business Can Respond

Convergence Catalysts

Part II: The Road Map

Chapter 8: Creating a Religion around Convergence

The Convergence Mantra

Find Your Visionary

Turn Outward and Workshop, Workshop, Workshop

Build a Big Boat

Write Your Road Map

When Telling Your Story, Think Right Brain and Left Brain

Chapter 9: How to Change Your Organizational Structure

The Rise of the Chief Digital Officer

Bottom-Up Solutions

Create Cross-Functional Project Teams

Create New Roles within Both the Marketing and IT Functions

Employ Internal Account or Relationship Management

Establish a Collaborative Culture

Chapter 10: How to Change Your Processes

1. Change Measurement and Establish Objectives

2. Change Planning

3. Change Budgeting

4. Think Like a Software Company

5. Change Incentives/Compensation

Chapter 11: Achieving Convergence through Agile Methodology

Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools

Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation

Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation

Responding to Change over Following a Plan

How We Use Agile

Another Benefit of Agile Lies in How It Facilitates Communication

How to Get Started

Convergence Catalysts

Final Thoughts

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Index

Cover image: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Cover design: Bett Hallonquist, Atomic Design Lab

Copyright © 2013 by Bob Lord and Ray Velez. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lord, Bob, 1963-

Converge: transforming business at the intersection of marketing and technology/Bob Lord, Ray Velez.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-57552-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-63224-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-63222-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-63209-3 (ebk)

1. Business. 2. Marketing. 3. Technological innovations. I. Velez, Ray, 1969- II. Title.

HF1008.L67 2013

658.4′062—dc23

2012049840

Foreword

This book is insightful, relevant, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in marketing products and managing successful, sustainable businesses.

Bob and Ray set out their arguments for the convergence of creativity, technology, and media—simply and unambiguously. They make us think differently about marketing and about business. They help us understand what’s going on and how to survive in the evolving world of consumer-selection.

Creativity, technology, and media all serve to enrich the consumer experience. They have always done so in their, hitherto, largely separate ways.

But the convergence that is so well described in this book makes us challenge traditional assumptions about what we do, how we do it, and how we are organized.

Theirs is a world where success depends on getting rid of silos; where there is a coming together, a process of joined-up thinking on a massive scale recognizing the connectedness of things.

The democratization of data and of creativity, cross-disciplinary thinking, and next-generation storytelling present a compelling vision of the changes organizations must make if they are to succeed.

I have witnessed these trends in my own company. Increasingly, evolving consumer behaviors are requiring us to develop a more coordinated ecosystem of activity.

In particular, the proliferation of mobile technology globally is building an intense, always-on, one-to-one relationship between brands, businesses, and consumers. This is already having a profound effect on how we converge the strands of our marketing activity.

In our quest for sustainable growth, Unilever recognizes that its entire business model must change, and in order to lead, must adapt to a new, converging world.

We know we cannot deliver sustainable growth on our own. We must share ideas, develop partnerships, collaborate, cocreate solutions, and reimagine our brands in terms of the long-term benefits they bring to our consumers, society, and the planet.

Organizationally, we have brought together marketing, communications, and sustainability under one leadership at the global board level and are working through the ways that these converge. Our challenge is to build an operating model that can turn this complexity into a source of sustainable competitive advantage. In this hyperconnected world that feeds off data, I now feel that I am as likely to talk about my business in terms of cloud formations as I am organization charts.

The concept of convergence is game changing. As you read Converge, free your mind and ask yourself, Are my organization and I ready to face the challenges that it says I must in order to succeed?

—Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communication Officer, Unilever plc

Introduction

This is a book about how to succeed in a business environment in which creativity, technology, and media are coming closer together, a convergence that’s happening at the speed of sound. We’ll explore these trends, and we’ll describe the changes your business needs to make in order to take advantage of them. At its core this book is about innovation and success, about the present and the future. But before we can go on and plunge ahead, we need to look at where we’ve been.

Our story begins in 2002, anything but a banner year for most global businesses, not least the then seven-year-old Razorfish. Post-9/11 uncertainty was heavy in the air. Business sections looked like crime blotters, dominated as they were by the fallout from Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and other corporate scandals. Forbes counted 22 accounting scandals alone that year, and that’s not including insider trading and other bad behavior. Making matters worse for Razorfish, no one quite knew what to make of this whole Internet thing. The entrepreneurial fires the growth of the Web had lit just a few years before had been stamped out by the collapse of the house of cards that was the Internet boom of the late 1990s.

In our corner of the world, the Internet consulting and agency business, things were more than a little jittery. In addition to killing off new economy pretenders such as Pets.com, Webvan, and eToys, the dot-com bust had wiped out a lot of enthusiasm about the Internet. The decline of dot-com challengers meant that many Fortune 500 businesses had scaled back on consulting. In the marketing world, there was much the same story. By the end of 2002, online advertising, already just a drop in the spending bucket, was down more than 13 percent. The idea that the Internet was just a fad whose time was come was spreading through the business world. Our company, Razorfish, which had grown up with the dot-com craze, was not immune.

Formed in 1995 in a New York City bedroom, the funnily named Razorfish represented all the excitement and excesses of the time. Its founders brandished expensive clothes, boasted celebrity friends, and even owned a nightclub. They were brash and irreverent spokesmen for a new wave of business thinking that was trying to wrap its mind around the Internet. They were featured in outlets from 60 Minutes to Wired, whose term for them, “New Media Peacocks” both summed up their craving for the spotlight and the intense media skepticism around the company. Ahead of their time, they often lacked the vocabulary—and the media training—to capture in words all the value the company was bringing to clients, even in those early days. The 60 Minutes segment aired the famous exchange between cofounder Jeff Dachis and CBS correspondent Bob Simon when Dachis declared, “We have asked our clients to recontextualize their business.” Simon balked at the use of the r-word and demanded, “Tell me what you do—in English.” (An account of this interchange appears in Wired, September 2000.)

Yet blue-chip clients seeking new voices who could help them understand the Internet hired us. Offering a mix of business strategy, technology, and design, Razorfish won clients like Ford Motor Co., Giorgio Armani, and Charles Schwab, turning the company into a major concern in just a few years. Partaking in the era’s initial public offering (IPO) fever, Razorfish went public in April 1999, raising $48 million. The stock, initially priced at $16, closed on the first day of trading at $38, a pop that was evidence of the insanity that had taken hold of the markets. By 2000, after a string of acquisitions, Razorfish had 1,800 employees in 13 global cities. But within a year, the Internet bubble deflated and the decline began. The NASDQ composite, which touched a high of over 5,000 in March 2000, was below 1,200 by late September 2002—more than three-quarters of its value erased. In November 2002, Razorfish, with just 230 employees and stock that was trading for less than $2, was sold—for the less-than-princely sum of $8.2 million.

For some companies in some industries, this would have been the end of the road. When the party ends, the company with the funny name and more PR than revenue gets bought up on the cheap and chopped up for parts, a story that had become familiar during the dot-com wipeout. And our case didn’t seem like an exception. In an interview at the time, Ned Stringham, the chief executive officer (CEO) of SBI Group, Razorfish’s new owner, summed up the level of enthusiasm for the brand: “We’re going to continue using Razorfish for a little while longer.”

But this was far from the end of the line for Razorfish.

Indeed, even in those dark days, there were positive developments that, more than just keeping the lights on at our company pointed the way to the future in which we would not only survive but thrive. In particular, there were a couple of client engagements that demonstrated to us that the Internet was far from a fad and that if used properly it could be an amazing way to connect with your consumers.

First, there was Cisco Systems, whose routers and switches had powered the Internet boom. Despite its vital importance to the Web, Cisco Systems had hit the same tough stretch the rest of the tech world did in 2002. Just two years earlier, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world measured in terms of market capitalization. But after making the largest write-down in history in 2001, it was facing plummeting demand for its hardware as technology spending was cut.

There was another problem. Cisco’s global Web presence, the front door of the company for customers all over the world, was tough to use. It had been built around the vast company’s many business units, not for customer use. To put it simply, if you were looking to buy a router or a switch—Cisco’s core business—it wasn’t easy to figure out where to go. Aware of the problem, Cisco asked us to redesign its corporate website to add a deeper layer of intelligence and interaction that was more oriented around how customers can manage and solve problems. We built a content management system that was grounded in what Cisco’s resellers needed and delivered the relevant product information based on sellers’ vertical industries.

Now it might sound straightforward, but back then it was anything but. No agency in the world could do what we did, nor could any technology company. Why? Because you needed to know both the business plan and the marketing plan and understand how to deploy technology to bring the two together. At its base, the assignment was about shaping a digital asset for customers’ needs, not the company’s silos.

The second telling assignment was for a very different kind of company. Where Cisco was a huge enterprise, Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media (MLB.com) was anything but advanced. A spin-off of the 130-year-old league, MLB.com was housed not at MLB’s posh Park Avenue headquarters but in Chelsea Market, across the street from where Google would set up shop years later. Back then, Chelsea Market wasn’t the boho mix of work and play it is now, where cute food shops, restaurants, and coffee shops feed well-heeled office dwellers. Back then, rats and other pests roamed the office. One night, an MLB.com executive who had pulled an all-nighter and slept on the floor awoke with fleabites. But roughing it made sense when you consider that MLB.com was effectively an in-house startup.

MLB.com was created in 2000, with a focus of tying together and monetizing its digital assets. In a major coup, the League had convinced all of its 30 clubs to cede their digital rights to MLB.com. To understand the importance of this, think of the 30 teams that make up Major League baseball as 30 different operating subsidiaries, each with its distinct history and culture. Many of them are bitter enemies with grudges that go way back. In other words, this required nothing less than getting the Red Sox and the Yankees on the same page. But they did it.

The next step was creating the consumer experience, a job for which MLB hired Scient, an agency which would eventually be rolled up into Razorfish. The team developed the overall website infrastructure and the ticketing infrastructure, as well as the streaming media. For the time, it was a massive success. As one article summed up: “The grand old game has brought itself to the point where it can face the same challenge as thousands of other big businesses: how to harness the Web channel for revenue, marketing, and enhanced customer experiences . . . at least Major League Baseball finally recognizes the Internet as a channel to serve the one part of the sport that ultimately matters most: the fan.”

Substitute the word customer for fan, and you’ll understand the central kernel of this book. What MLB understood from just about the dawn of the Web is that the customer comes first and your business silos and organizational charts, not to mention egos, are way down the line. Engage the customer with the right technologically enabled creativity and you’ll provide experiences that not only keep them coming back but really ring the register. And the benefits of that outlook are clearer than ever, as MLB has continued to innovate. Its MLB.TV, a subscription service that broadcasts all games, has been a hit. By 2012, MLB.com was bringing in about $620 million from tickets, mobile apps, and streaming subscriptions, according to an article in Fast Company. If it had gone public as its owners had discussed, the article stated, the IPO would have been worth about $2.5 billion. “Baseball’s digital arm,” the author wrote, “has quietly proven itself to be New York’s top tech startup of the last decade.”

In both instances, we saw how marketing, media, and technology were all coming together and we saw how important it was for consumer-facing companies to be ready for it. Cisco needed to think past its organizational prejudices to create a Web presence that made sense to customers; MLB needed to get its various stakeholders on board to create a consumer-centric experience rather than a fragmented one. Now its content is available wherever consumers are: on computers, tablets, and mobile phones, on Apple TV, Roku, and Xbox.

Crucially, MLB and Cisco validated our own positioning at a time when many naysayers were telling us that we had to make a choice between being a technology company or a marketing company. There was no room, the criticism went both externally, and internally, for a company that tried to do it “all.” At the time, we suspected this was a false dichotomy. Years later, we know it was.

FIGURE I.1 The Razorfish Model

For us, Cisco and MLB were bright spots in the overall gloom that had fallen over the Internet business world in 2001 and 2002. They were hints of a convergence that would only pick up speed in years to come, as Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple continued to innovate, and Google, Facebook, and Twitter came on the scene. The lesson was that even in times of irrational exuberance, of high-flying IPOs, you might be skeptical that all is just media hype and little or nothing of long-lasting value is being created. You might even have that feeling now, what with Facebook’s billion-dollar acquisition of the zero-revenue Instagram and the less-than-scintillating social media IPOs of 2012 fresh in your mind. The truth is that even most overinflated bubble produces long-lasting value. For all its flaws, the first dot-com bubble gave us eBay, Amazon, and, we humbly submit, Razorfish, a new type of consulting partner.

That 200-person company near death in 2002, whose brand was being written off by its new owners, is now more than 3,000 employees strong, with 20 offices all over the globe, and a central part of the fast-growing digital operation at our parent company, Publicis Groupe. Our client list runs from automakers like Ford Motor Co. and Mercedes-Benz, to packaged goods marketers like Kraft and Kellogg, to tech players like Microsoft and Samsung, to other blue chip companies like Unilever, UNIQLO, Staples, Nike, and Best Buy. Our success at creating both marketing experiences and technology solutions and products has led to recognition from numerous industry publications such as Advertising Age, who named us an A-List agency in both 2011 and 2012, and analysts like Gartner and Forrester, the latter of which called us a business transformer in their 2012 New Interactive Agency Landscape report.

We’ve made it because for more than 15 years we’ve lived at the center of the convergence and we’ve done it despite people telling us it couldn’t be done.

For more information on the concepts explored in Converge, to connect with the authors, and for additional information on cited sources, visit convergebook.com.

Part I

Converge = Marketing + Technology

Chapter 1

The Collision of Media, Technology, and Creativity

What is convergence? A little disambiguation, to borrow a term from Wikipedia, is in order. As a quick glance at that community-built encyclopedia will tell you, the concept of convergence holds meaning in fields from computer sciences and telecommunications, to economics, accounting, and sociology, to biology, mathematics, and logic. Convergence serves as the name of a Goth festival, an information technology (IT) show in the Philippines, and a Mexican political party. It’s served as the title for several works of literature and music. Convergence, it’s clear, means a lot of things to a lot of people. Its popularity reflects the era we live in, an epoch in which boundaries are made to be destroyed, in which unfamiliar ideas are brought together.