There’s a ton of slideology at Cannes. We all heard some of the highlights whether there or, as I was, sidelined back at home – JR’s presentation of his tremendous giant faces peeking out from some of the most tense places; and Paul Adams for Facebook.
Jesse Desjardins pulled together his annual 100 best slides from that onslaught. That meta-presentation is at the bottom of the post.
The one slide that really stuck out to me (beyond the JR piece which must be in the favella’s in Rio) was this one simple blender slide from the Kraft presentation. I didn’t see the rest of the presentation. I almost don’t want to. This slide by itself is likely more aspirational than real but still speaks worlds about a key innovation happening around us.
We need new models of working together to produce the most effective, the most digitally-enabled, the most organically social, the absolute best new creative. It’s not just team structure, its not just a fresh organizational chart, its more. It’s a different business model. It’s social that is horizontal (vs. hierarchical) and networked. It’s incubated and special. It’s tied to a different measure of profitability on the agency side that stretches beyond the timesheet, the mark-up, and the procurement-optimized rate card.
Here Kraft crosses out workshops and think tanks to get to what fascinates all of marketing-dom now – silicon valley models of incubators and start-ups. Marketers are entranced by the apparent agility of small tech start-ups. They do move faster generally unencumbered by the bureaucracy of big, established businesses. But is it realistic that Kraft can establish a start-up set of behaviors?
If they really set up a start-up it is. That means removing the burdens of a traditional brand marketing team whose job revolves around incremental sales targets and where “innovation” is defined by a new package design or 50% less sugar.
We need new ways of working. I am not sure the blender model is the roadmap more than an artifact of one company trying something different. I had the chance to work at a major FMCG last week. We used their process to bring multi-disciplinary groups together to work on marketing and solution problems. It was one of those models that downplay channel choices till much later, focuses on ideas and generally tries to get smart people to set aside their narrower commercial interests to get to the best ideas.
It worked pretty well. Still, it was designed “pre-social” and put no specific emphasis on driving advocacy. Would that process look different if the most important measure beyond sales was growth of positive customer advocacy?
Comments