Digital Influence Mapping Project

How Has Creative Direction Changed: Steve Hayden

I am a Creative Director. Have been for 15 years. While I started in "digital," I didn't start in digital, so-to-speak. I produced TV spots and broadcast design for a decade. Once a CD, I attacked integrated marketing campaigns across mediums - TV, print, radio, out-of-home, all forms of digital. As Greg Johnston, our group CD here at Ogilvy PR says, "it's the 'idea' that matters."

As our 360° Digital Influence team does more and more integrated work with the more traditional advertising teams at Ogilvy, I set out to ask some of the most well known Creative Directors in our ranks how "creative direction" has changed over the last ten years.

I got lucky and was able to corner Steve Hayden, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, and one of the most respected Creative Directors in the business. I didn't expect his answer....

Another good interview with Steve Hayden from Ihaveanidea

PR Week's Blog Competition is On!

I am thrilled to be included in PRWeek's Blog Competition which just launched! This is all part of their 10th Anniversary celebration which will continue on from now through a great event in November. While I feel a dark horse in this race as I cover more than just public relations, I can't help but ask for your votes.

So, click here to get to the voting dashboard and to see the others in the competition! Remember - click on "Digital Influence Map(ping) Project to vote for this blog!

Thanks and enjoy the read!

Future PR Skills 2008: Run Quick Pilot Programs

Part of a series

Two new pressures have emerged over the past few years that should change how public relations professionals:

• We now live and work in a  state of "perpetual beta." This is a phrase you will hear a lot around Ogilvy and for good reason. With the rise of social media, we live in a permanent feedback loop where nothing can really ever be called "finished." This is true of our cients products and services and it should also be true of our marketing and communications programs. We can measure immediate response to our efforts and then adjust our "campaigns' accordingly.
• At the same time, short term campaigns do not take advantage of the compexity in communications nor do they reap the same benefits of an ongoing relationship with customers.

The short story is that we are now in a great time of innovation. The same predictable media spend won't cut it anymore or, more accurately, it may work today but maybe not tomorrow. Can you afford to wait out all of these changes as if they were fads? Will social networks recede in importance? Will disruptiveWeb 2.0 technologies just stop appearing? Will we all stop discovering new competitors in places we never thought to look?

It's hard

Part of our job is to become perpetually prepared for change. One way to do that is to shift gears from deploying big lumbering year-long programs to nimble, measureable shorter pilot programs first. This is hard for a number of reasons:

• Pilot programs are designed to try things we don't exactly know will work or work as expected. Most managers feel it is their job to know stuff not not-know it.
• The measurement required to guide pilot programs is "pretty good" measurement versus the lock-tight logic of CRM measurement. If it were up to CRM disciples, no so-called pilot would be deployed until you knew it would have a positive ROI.
• Pilots take a lot of attention and care. They take someone who will own them (their success or failure). You cannot just draft a media plan, alert the 360 agency players and say "go get 'em."

Requirements of pilots- based planning

• A simple measurement and reporting model that happens in real-ish time and a decision making process for mid-stream changes (e.g. our outreach to food bloggers isn't clicking in, let's expand the incentive or expand our list....)
• Time within an overall program (I hesitate to use the word "campaign" as it has such short term maning). Time to try a few things within a pilot to tweak and find effectiveness before you scale up (e.g. let's run 4 weeks worth of our effort in St. Louis, adjust every week and then expand out to a regional approach)
• An understanding of how multiple disciplines affect each other - advertising,, public relations, search marketing, direct marketing, experience marketing, etc....
• A tolerance of short-term failure. How else do we learn?
• A longer term view. This may seem like a contradiction. To run a pilot, you must be extremely 'present' and to judge its usefulness to your business, you must have the capacity to see beyond the immediate results of one pilot. (e.g. if this pilot perfoms a certain way, and we can scale to 12 markets, what will be the impact on my overall sales this year and next?)