Porsche delivers car customization through new haptic ad format

Dive Brief:

• Porsche teamed with Zerolight and Ultrahaptics to create an interactive, haptic advertising format, per a news release. The technology, intended for public media installations and retail, will first be available at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 28-29, where attendees can customize a Porsche Cayenne Turbo and interact with the model through mid-air haptic cues, which are delivered through bare hands and don't require gloves. 
• Dealers can use the format for digital product placements and to create a digital showroom that allows them to engage with consumers beyond dealerships or websites. Users demoing the technology can scan a QR code to create a dedicated microsite with rich media content focused on their personalized vehicle and an "intelligent car configurator" that Porsche developed with Zerolight, which can be viewed below. 
• Porsche's advertisement was made using a series of videos that allow users to switch between several different car configurations. The videos were produced in a batch, in under 24 hours, as a more economic alternative to straightforward, static advertising, per the release. 

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 INDUSTRY DIVE

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Dive Insight:

In combining visualization and haptics — or, technology that's largely driven by touch — Porsche can better customize digital product placement and potentially create a more memorable, personalized browsing experience.

More brands are finding success by including haptic elements into their advertising, including BMW, Royal Caribbean and Arbys, according to research from Interpublic's Media Lab and Magna. The groups found that standard versions of ads reached a 37% level of happiness and 30% excitement, while haptic versions produced levels of 44% happiness and 38% excitement.

Immersive and interactive experiences continue to resonate with consumers, and many marketers — especially those with strong retail presences — are tapping bleeding edge technology like haptics and virtual reality to deliver them. Porsche's new format might step beyond feeling like a novelty by focusing on personalization, including by letting mobile users scan QR codes to set up their own microsites. 

Marketers Need to Stop Focusing on Loyalty and Start Thinking About Relevance

If your customer retention strategy relies on “buying” loyalty with rewards, rebates, or discounts, it is coming at a high cost. And these days, it could also mean that you’re giving up something priceless: your relevance.

That’s because the “loyalty era” of marketing, as we’ve known it, is waning. It was built in part on the notion that consumers will keep buying the same things from you if you have the right incentives. Yet, according to recent consumer research from Kantar Retail, 71% of consumers now claim that loyalty incentive-programs don’t make them loyal at all. Instead, in this new era of digital-based competition and customer control, people are increasingly buying because of a brand’s relevance to their needs in the moment.

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In fact, consumer research we’ve worked on at Accenture shows that in the U.S. market alone, companies are losing $1 trillion in annual revenues to their competitors because they are not consistently relevant enough. Loyalty remains important, but this finding indicates that the future of marketing — and, in the big picture, many businesses — depends on serving a customer’s most relevant needs in the moment. In this way, companies need to become like more like living businesses, building and sustaining symbiotic ties with their customers as if those relationships are with a concierge, butler, or friend. 

A New Definition of Relevance

To become this kind of living business, with a new understanding of customer needs, we need a new definition of relevance. Abraham Maslow’s oft-quoted “hierarchy of needs” — first published in 1943 — provides a good start. Maslow sought to map the psychological needs of humans and their motivations. But his framework also offers a model for rethinking the traditional four P’s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Most companies today are guided by these four facets of engagement.

The problem, however, is that brands using the four P’s exclusively often target a static customer archetype (e.g., a high-minded customer for an organic supermarket or a value-conscious customer for a discount chain). The reality is that there is no such archetypical customer. Everyone’s needs vary depending on time and context. And with today’s technologies, companies now have the ability to see and act on these fluctuations in the moment. Customers are increasingly expecting all companies to do just that, both in their marketing efforts and in the experiences they offer.

To become a living business, companies should expand their thinking to include the following five P’s as well: purpose, pride, partnership, protection, and personalization. These form a simple and comprehensive test of relevance. The first four extend from the top to the bottom of the psychological hierarchy — from what Maslow called “self-actualization” or fulfilling your full potential, to safety, a more basic need. The fifth, personalization, enables companies to connect with customers around any of these needs.

1. Purpose: Customers feel the company shares and advances their values.

2. Pride: Customers feel proud and inspired to use the company’s products and services.

3. Partnership: Customers feel the company relates to and works well with them.

4. Protection: Customers feel secure when doing business with the company.

5. Personalization: Customers feel their experiences with the company are continuously tailored to their needs and priorities.

Soul Cycle provides a good example of what the five P’s look like in practice. By creating a community for indoor cyclers and fitness buffs, SoulCycle’s purpose aligns with customers’ values of health and a positive environment. This experience creates a sense of pride for customers who want to participate in a high-end cycling experience (given the pricing and the tendency for instructors to be young and fit). Customers also feel that SoulCycle is a partnership in the lifestyle they wish to achieve: They feel like they are treating themselves with new, clean facilities, upscale bathroom products, and custom SoulCycle playlists on Spotify.

SoulCycle customers also feel protection in their purchase — which is expensive for a 45-minute fitness class compared to the cost of a traditional gym — because they are confident that the staff will help them with their needs and also will help them to make the most of each class. Finally, the SoulCycle experience becomes totally relevant when a customer has an instructor that personally inspires them, thus creating personalization.

Many companies will be challenged to satisfy all five P’s at once. The following three principles, however, should help them in their efforts to connect with customers on these fronts:

Go outside your comfort zone

Many companies have been using the traditional four P’s for decades, and many of those with great success. Often, this means companies will need to extend outside of their comfort zones to position their brands these new, expanded ways.

Consider Yoplait, the global yogurt brand owned by food giant General Mills. Consumers typically associate big food companies with mass-production methods and plastic packaging. Companies like these are more typically accustomed to using traditional 4 P’s approaches such as pricing and promotions to attract and retain customers. But Yoplait recently found itself contending with an influx of newer brands, including the Greek yogurt brand, Chobani, that emphasize and compete on meaningful connections to authentic food traditions.

In response, Yoplait pivoted toward a focus on customer relevance. Yoplait found that consumers often take pride in using products with a connection to an authentic national tradition — whether Italian olive oil, or Greek and Icelandic yogurt. Recognizing that its long history of making French yogurt could be turned into a market advantage, it embraced a traditional French method in which yogurt is cultured and sold in small individual glass pots. As a yogurt executive at General Mills noted, “The simplicity of this idea, that this is a French method, coming from a French brand, with a French name — that’s authenticity.” It is also something both Yoplait and its customers can take pride in.

The company is, at the same time, enhancing its relevance to customers in other ways. For example, it also recognized customers’ desire to feel protected. Their new “Oui” French yogurt product is all-natural, non-GMO, and promotes its very simple ingredient list.

It’s still too early to tell whether this targeted initiative will translate into increased sales. Nonetheless, it is a noteworthy example of a company purposefully pivoting to an approach that extends beyond its norms to be relevant to customers.

CVS Pharmacy, the retail pharmacy of CVS Health, offers another example. CVS Pharmacy is moving beyond a purely transactional retail model where customers fill prescriptions; instead, the company is focusing on helping their customers on their path to overall better health. In this way, customers share the company’s purpose. It also helps satisfy their desires to feel cared for, and helps build upon the trusted relationship most customers have with their pharmacist — an example of what we’ve termed protection.

Extending far outside the traditional retail paradigm, CVS is embracing technologies including predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to send their customers personalized reminders to refill or take their medications, in the spirit of partnership. And, the company has teamed with AI giant IBM Watson to anticipate patient needs, including when they might require more urgent care. These new avenues and practices will enhance the value for customers in maintaining an active engagement with a pharmacy retailer — and make the CVS brand more relevant in the moment through protecting their health and well-being.

Timing is everything

If the first four P’s are additive, the final one — personalization — is multiplicative. A key component of becoming a living business is conveying exactly the right message, experience, or offer to customers in exactly the right context. It’s a level of personalization that few companies ever attain.

Car-rental giant Hertz has worked to develop a “Just in Time” approach to delivering highly relevant offers at the exact moment when the customer is evaluating deals across the channels they prefer, whether it is through call-center agents, counter terminals, handheld devices, or the Hertz web site.

Using predictive analytics, Hertz suggests deals based a customer’s propensity to accept certain offers over others. For example, a customer who would be qualified for a buy-one-get-one-free deal might still receive a different (perhaps even less profitable) offer if she passed up similar offers in the past. The company understands that a promotion can only be as profitable as a customer’s willingness to take it — and an unwilling customer is a lost opportunity. That’s why offers are calibrated to a customer’s behavior in a way that all marketing channels can simultaneously use.

Don’t be loyal to the status quo

To succeed in this era of relevance, marketers and companies must be continuously willing to abandon the old. As new technologies shift customer journeys and expectations, they can (and should) also enhance companies’ abilities to engage with customers in the most relevant ways. Often, the greatest roadblock is a company’s lack of willingness to transform their processes, organizations, and mindsets as needed.

To overcome that barrier, some companies have shifted from a product-focused mindset to a platform approach.

Under Armour, Inc. offers a good example. Instead of thinking of itself merely as a sports apparel manufacturer, the company has purposefully developed a “connected fitness” ecosystem. In 2015, in fact, it spent more than $500 million to acquire two popular fitness-metrics services in a bid to become the world’s largest tracker of fitness information. The two services — one based in the United States and the other in Europe — had a combined 100 million subscribers when they were acquired.

Under Armour intends to enable these platforms to grow independently, while reaping aggregated data that can inform and expand its apparel designs. Ultimately, the goal is to link customers to new services such as innovative start-ups that are developing embedded sensors and biometric readers for apparel. In the words of CEO Kevin Plank, “Brands that do not evolve and offer the consumer something more than a product will be hard-pressed to compete.”

Similarly, automaker BMW has embraced partnerships across a broader ecosystem to help its customers navigate their urban environment, with or without their car. Customers can now see their engagement with the brand as an ongoing relationship, rather than a one-and-done purchase. To provide its customers a seamless transportation experience, the automaker links them into a broader of ecosystem of car-share and rental companies, parking aids, electronic-vehicle charging stations, and location-based mobile lifestyle apps.

Today’s mobile-enabled consumers are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating their purchasing decisions. They will choose the brands most relevant to them at an increasingly rapid pace. And they’ll pay a premium. Living businesses — those that achieve this profound degree of relevance — will have pricing power and will drive repeat purchases. Those are the ultimate goals of loyalty, now newly attainable, when relevance matters more than ever.

The Most Successful Brands Focus on Users — Not Buyers

What makes a brand successful in the digital age? A joint study by SAP, Siegel+Gale, and Shift Thinking suggests that digital brands don’t just do things differently; they also think differently. Where traditional brands focus on positioning their brands in the minds of their customers, digital brands focus on positioning their brands in the lives of their customers. Furthermore, they engage customers more as users than as buyers, shifting their investments from pre-purchase promotion and sales to post-purchase renewal and advocacy.

As part of our study, we conducted an online survey of more than 5,000 U.S. consumers and asked them about 50 different brands, both digital and traditional. We asked them about their perception, usage, preference, and advocacy for the brands. We also supplemented the survey with well-known brand rankings, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and an analysis of their marketing expenditures and strategies.

We found distinct differences between legacy/traditional brands and newcomer/digital brands. For example, consider the following “brand twins” – pairs of legacy and newcomer brands that compete in the same industry. In every case, the legacy brand rated higher on the statement “Is a brand that people look up to.” But the newcomer brands all rated higher on the statement “Makes my life easier.”

Airbnb vs. Hilton/Marriott
Dollar Shave vs. Gillette
Red Bull vs. Coca-Cola
Venmo vs. American Express/Visa
Tesla vs. BMW
There were similar differences in how people’s brand perceptions are formed and reinforced. Respondents were more likely to hear about legacy brands through advertising and traditional media, compared to digital brands which are more often discovered via social media and direct word of mouth.

Overall, we found two distinct clusters, which we have categorized as purchase brands and usage brands:

Purchase brands focus on creating demand to buy the product, while usage brands focus on creating demand for the use of the product. Consider the makeup department of a department store. The whole focus is getting you to buy the product with samples and professional makeovers. By contrast, Sephora and Ulta provide instruction, community, and services to help people feel confident in being able to use the makeup themselves when they get home.
Purchase brands emphasize promotion; usage brands emphasize advocacy. Vail Resorts remade their entire marketing strategy with a program called EpicMix. It’s a social network for skiers that uses gamification, performance data, and photos as social currencies that skiers want to share with their friends. Most other ski resorts focus on promoting their snow-making abilities and giving discounts on lift tickets.
Purchase brands worry about what they say to customers; usage brands worry about what customers say to each other. For example, where traditional hotels put more emphasis on the content in their advertising, Airbnb puts a greater emphasis on the content generated and shared by hosts and guests about their experiences.
Purchase brands try to shape what people think about the brand along the path to purchase; usage brands influence how people experience the brand at every touchpoint. Apple Stores are an example of this shift, from the removal of a checkout area at the front of the store to the prominence of the Genius Bar. Where other stores are focused on making a purchase, Apple Stores are about having an experience.
The simple view would be that traditional brands are purchase brands and digital brands are usage brands. But there are exceptions, including brands like Visa, FedEx, Lego, and Costco, which exhibit many of the characteristics of usage brands. We suspect that the nature of their products, culture, and business model leads them to more of a usage mentality. They think of customers less as one-time buyers and more as users or members with an ongoing relationship.

The difference between purchase and usage brands can be seen through the lens of the “moments of truth” method that has become a cornerstone of customer experience design. Purchase brands focus on the “moments of truth” that happen before the transaction, such as researching, shopping, and buying the product. By contrast, usage brands focus on the moments of truth that happen after the transaction, whether in delivery, service, education, or sharing.

The benefits of shifting from purchase to usage are reinforced by our research. Survey respondents show more loyalty to usage brands. They had stronger advocacy in the form of spontaneous recommendations to others. And they showed a higher preference for usage brands over competitors, not just in making the purchase but in a willingness to pay a premium in price. On average, the usage brands were willing to pay a 7% premium, were 8% less likely to switch, and were more than twice as likely to make a spontaneous recommendation of the brand.

Golf coaches have long known what marketers are figuring out: the best way to hit the ball is to focus on the swing and follow-through.

Companies looking to exploit the branding potential unlocked by core digital technologies need to make the shift in their engagement with customers – from purchase to usage. These changes fundamentally require rethinking strategy, organization, investment, and measurement. In many organizations, marketing comes after product development. But a usage mindset requires a closer relationship between marketing and product development because the brand and experience are increasingly one and the same. Typically at purchase brands, customer service and loyalty take a back seat to marketing campaigns and lead generation. Usage brands, by contrast, elevate customer service and loyalty from resource-starved cost-centers to key drivers of growth and profitability.


The role and investments in advertising must also change to shift toward a usage model. Purchase brands try to create differentiation in brand perception in the hope it will influence consideration and purchase. But usage brands are focused on how their products will make a customer’s life better. The role of advertising for a usage brand becomes getting useful content and experiences into the hands of customers. The message becomes “Look how we can make your life better now, before you’ve even spent any money with us. Just think how much more we can do if you become a customer and use our product or service.”

The shift from purchase to usage has implications for measurement as well. Ad impressions are valuable, but what matters most is engagement. Usage brands look at engagement through a much wider aperture. They recognize that some of the most meaningful activity happens outside the sales funnel. Do people find the content created by the brand to be relevant and useful? Are people actually using the product? Are people spontaneously talking about the brand or product? A usage brand marketer would rather have a five-star rating in their online reviews than win an advertising award at Cannes.

More broadly, the shift from purchase to usage suggests that we need to rethink how we measure brand equity. We’ve all seen the annual brand ratings put out by the top firms. But they measure how much a brand is worth to investors more than consumers. Furthermore, their focus is on how people perceive the brand rather than how they experience the brand. Companies that get too focused on winning in the ratings will find themselves ultimately losing in the marketplace.

Although our survey emphasized B2C brands, we believe the Purchase and Usage mindsets are equally, or even more, relevant for B2B brands. Business solutions tend to have longer life cycles than consumer products and there is an even greater opportunity to deliver value outside the sales funnel. In addition, many B2B companies are moving to cloud-based services with membership and subscription-based business models. With these models, the purchase is just the beginning of a long-term relationship. The economics are driven primarily by renewals rather than by initial purchase. In turn, renewal rates are driven not by what buyers think about the brand, but what users experience of the product or service. The key is to think about prospects not as buyers, but as future users.

These 12 Agencies Have Masterfully Adapted in an Increasingly Digital Marketplace

Faced with the relentless onslaught of digital change, agencies have been forced to adapt quickly or risk irrelevance. For the most part, the industry has responded in some form or another. Our list of Agencies 3.0 aims to shed a light on those shops that have adapted most nimbly. In most cases, they’re small, independent shops whose size allows for fast adaptation, be it making use of earned media, bringing clients deeper into the creative process, or even embracing automation on their own scales. Here’s a sampling of shops that have earned the attention.

360i
Clients: Coca-Cola, Canon, Red Roof Inn
Offices: New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, São Paulo

A granddaddy among digital agencies—it started as a search specialty shop in 1998—360i has adapted to the changing needs of the marketplace as it heads into its 20th year. After merging in 2005 with New York agency Innovation Interactive, founded by Bryan Wiener, 360i dived heavily into social once its bona fides as an SEO specialist were cemented. Then in 2011, it added brand strategy as an integral part of its offerings. Last year, the shop evolved into a full-service media operation following its merger with fellow Dentsu Aegis Network agency Vizeum, but never abandoned the tools it learned and developed along the way. The end result is what CEO Sarah Hofstetter dubs “alchemy:” 360i’s broad offerings to deliver a deeper execution of the interplay of paid, earned and owned media.

New analytical units including the Contextual Actions Platform, which blends search with real-world data, produced work for clients like Red Roof Inn, for which it paired flight-cancellation and traffic data with the hotel chain’s mobile search efforts, and Canon, for which a Cannes Lion-winning effort displayed real-time photo tips incorporating weather, traffic and other information via digital out-of-home media. The agency bristles with other advanced analytics tools like F3 (the fractional factorial framework), which tests ads and ad formats for maximum effectiveness, and a predictive bidding process that tackles the problem of bid optimization around campaigns with low digital profiles.

The shop is now focused on ways to harness Alexa and Google Home to raise brand awareness and visibility via voice search and chatbots. And an in-house lab of sorts has led to ideas like Adaptoys, an Adweek Project Isaac-winning effort to develop toys for paralyzed people. —Michael Bürgi

Crossmedia
Clients: U.S. Bank, White Castle, GNC, Tillamook
Offices: New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles

Call it the little media agency that could. Crossmedia, formed in 2000 and allied with German media independent Crossmedia GmbH, has worked to outfit itself with all the tools of its larger holding company rivals. Its analytics arm Redbox (not to be confused with the DVD-rental firm) sits at the center of the operation, its aims ranging from standardizing real-time advanced attribution for all clients’ online and offline media and sales to matching anonymized IDs of U.S. Bank’s customers across several business verticals to optimize media spend for maximum return.

Last year, Crossmedia formed its own programmatic unit, claiming to be the first independent media agency of its size (total $350 million in media spend) to do so. For co-founder Martin Albrecht, a media-buying operation underscores Crossmedia’s belief in delivering transparency to clients—by controlling its own programmatic destiny, the shop ensures clients it’s not double-billing them.

Crossmedia recruited five chefs to create original recipes using White Castle sliders, hoping to change the burger chain’s image as hangover food.

So is dispelling the notion that an agency need be media or creative. Says founding partner Kamran Asghar (a 2014 Adweek Media All-Star): “I wanted to create a place with a holistic approach to communications, and shatter the idea that you were either a creative or a media guy. To us, media is creative.”

To that end, the shop—which is known for serving burgers to staffers every Friday afternoon—created a campaign for White Castle that partnered with Tastemade and Foodbeast to recruit chefs in five cities to make their own unique recipes using the chain’s sliders—a bid to turn consumers’ thinking that it’s not just a place for late-night hangover-busters but serves what it calls “crave-able” food. —M.B.

DCX Growth Accelerator
Clients: L’Oréal, Rémy Cointreau, Fiverr, Coca-Cola, Meetup
Offices: Brooklyn

DCX Growth Accelerator is the 12-person, Brooklyn-based shop behind such social-activism efforts as #JessesPricedOut and airBnBodega.com on behalf of a local business, Jesse’s Deli, threatened by a rent increase—covered by media outlets ranging from The New York Times and NPR to Fox News. More recently, DCX got a lot of attention for its “Trump Huts” campaign—centered around a group of “protest huts” in the shape of President Donald Trump’s hair placed outside of Trump Tower in New York to dramatize the growing wealth divide. DCX’s attention-getting campaigns have helped it land a number of major consumer brands as clients as well, including Coca-Cola, L’Oréal and Rémy Cointreau and rapidly growing tech clients like Fiverr and Meetup.

In a bid to draw attention to the growing wealth divide in the U.S., Brooklyn-based indie DCX created these protest shelters in the image of our president’s hair.

The shop was started two years ago by Doug Cameron, co-founder of the agency Amalgamated, who notes the seismic shift in what clients want from agencies. “Large agencies have spent the past five or six years racing to grow their capabilities in digital areas—everything from social listening to data analytics and programmatic media buying, ecommerce funnel optimization and ad tracking,” he says. “Ad tech firms and the social media giants have been doing the same, and are now increasingly going directly to clients, offering very user-friendly services at a fraction of the cost. Clients tell us that they are actually happy that DCX offers only core services such as brand strategy, comms planning, creative and production expertise because they can work directly with Facebook, Google and ad tech firms for almost everything else.” —Tony Case

Erwin Penland
Clients: Lenovo, Tumi, Denny’s, Califia Farms
Offices: Greenville, S.C.; New York

Erwin Penland is a 30-year-old creative shop that not only makes ads but also consults for clients and even builds tech for them. So besides launching a branded content series for luggage maker Tumi that employed a wide range of personalities (a Formula 1 driver, a pro skateboarder and the like) sharing their travel experiences with Tumi’s high-end 19 Degree suitcase, EP also built a content hub to which viewers of the series were directed, resulting in 11,000 product purchases via clickthrough.

Or take a web video series created for nitrogen-infused Califia Nitro coffee beverage, in which EP’s creative directors were let loose with cameras and came back with footage of prospective customers that resulted in the series, backed by a paid social effort. It launched in August and netted over 20,000 page views to WTFisNitro.com, led to over 23 million impressions across paid social tactics, and doubled the client’s benchmarks.

“We haven’t reinvented advertising. We’re still an ad agency … but brands and people keep changing, so how we approach a business challenge, how we create and talk to people have to keep changing as well,” says president and CCO Con Williamson.

For Tumi, the agency developed a branded content series that tagged along with several personalities, including a Formula 1 driver and a hat designer.

In the case of Lenovo, which wanted to prove its indestructibility, the shop got literally sadistic by putting products through torture. The results of the “Beatbox Torture Test” for its ThinkPad X1 Yoga product, executed on Lenovo’s Facebook page, delivered 340,000 views, 183,000 likes and 2.6 million impressions in a week. “It’s still about good ideas first; that part is timeless,” says Williamson. “Our relationship with [clients] is: Don’t show me more of the same … show me something I haven’t seen before. We find the headroom, and we begin to tinker.” —M.B.

FCB/Six
Clients: Drug Free Kids Canada, Gerber, Nestlé, CIBC
Offices: Toronto, Montreal

The vision driving FCB/Six is clear: ads need to be rewired to achieve one-to-one marketing in which no two people ever experience a brand in the same way by creating more sophisticated customer connections. FCB/Six wants to be the agency to do it. The Toronto-based, 75-person shop has roots in the CRM world, but president Andrea Cook, a self-proclaimed data addict armed with a fully integrated agency background, has set out to build a business in which clients “bend toward technology and data” but also toward more focused creative output framed by insight. “We are moving to a place where there is zero windage,” says Cook, basically eliminating waste in the millions of brand interactions in order to create custom activations powered by automation for individuals, at scale.

The latest example of FCB/Six’s marketing philosophy debuted this month for Drug Free Kids Canada. Titled “The Call That Comes After,” the campaign aimed at combating teen impaired driving is an integration of five platforms: IBM’s Marketing Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, SMS, YouTube and an on-demand video rendering engine. The creative starts at TheCallThatComesAfter.com, where parents create a video clip for a teen and share his or her name and cell number and the name or nickname they use for a parent. The video, which is sent to the teen, shows the dire consequences of driving on drugs, followed by a series of frantic texts from a parent asking if they are alright. The texts then make an unexpected shift as the increasingly frantic messages begin showing up on the teen’s phone, jarring him or her from passive viewer to a real-time participant.

“What we were looking for was a digital tool that would connect with both parents and their kids on the issue of drug impaired driving,” notes Marc Paris, executive director of Drug Free Kids Canada. He says the real challenge to FCB/Six was to connect with teens via their mobile- and text-first world, while being powerful enough for them to pay attention to it.

“Data capture allowed us to bring real-time personalization to each recipient, using it to render each video with a highly personalized and targeted message, and to integrate video, email, online and SMS into one seamless experience,” says ecd Ian Mackenzie. —James Cooper

Greatest Common Factory
Clients: SafeAuto, Nike, The Salt Lick
Offices: Austin, Texas

A small agency started six years ago by GSD&M expats, Greatest Common Factory (GCF) pairs multidiscipline teams with a range of clients—from the world famous to the hyperlocal. “Bringing the client into the kitchen,” as the agency puts it, enables real-time insights to be put in the market more quickly.

For example, Charlie Kordes, chief marketer for client SafeAuto, leads a team that is involved with GCF in every element of the creative process—from brainstorming to being on the set while ads are shot. The results have been phenomenal. GCF’s “Enjoy the Road Ahead” helped curb seven straight years of losses at SafeAuto, leading to 38 percent growth in new quotes and 36 percent in sales.

GCF’s work on behalf of client SafeAuto car insurance turned around poor results to deliver a 36 percent surge in sales.

“GCF is a better way to work,” says Kordes. “It’s really direct collaboration. We’re in it together, and the intensity produces more ideas and execution in a short time frame than the traditional advertising setup ever could.”

GCF has implemented its approach for clients from Nike to The Salt Lick, a local barbecue joint. John Trahar, creative partner at Greatest Common Factory, lays out the philosophy behind how GCF does business: “We realized that clients are buying ideas that have to be made into effective content that generates results. It doesn’t come from meetings; it comes from real conversations. We discovered that great work based in relevant brand truth occurs more quickly and reliably in a dialogue with the client than in a pitch to the client. So we let our clients into the process itself.” —T.C.

ICF Olson
Clients: Bauer, Skittles, LensCrafters
Offices: New York, Chicago, Toronto, Minneapolis, Los Angeles

Agencies breaking out of the initial shock of disruption take many types of first steps. They pen new mission statements, adopt—or buy—new capabilities and/or tech, or seek new talent profiles to recast the ranks and culture as ultra modern leaning and 3.0.

ICF Olson’s move was to create a collective. Formed out of a traditional network model, the 900-person shop, which is headquartered in New York, built four specialist agencies across what it determined to be the four sectors most crucial to success in the brand marketing ecosystem: creative expression, public engagement, customer relationships and loyalty, and digital experiences.

The model is designed to perform nimbly but at scale. To that end, its foundation capability, borne out of creative shop Olson, is a proprietary tool called anthrolytics. The tool is a marriage of the empathetic point of view of anthropology and the science of analytics. The goal is to help brands better understand, think like and serve the customers they hope to reach.

“It has been exciting to look at where the market is going and building for the future,” says Louise Clements, global agency lead for ICF Olson, adding that a collective allows the firm to be client-centric while leveraging specialists with laser focus from their four shops.

ICF Olson built social conversations that engaged kids for Bauer.

Regarding anthrolytics in practice, Clements points to the work that ICF Olson has been doing with hockey apparel brand Bauer. When the agency took on the business 13 years ago, it was No. 4 in its category. By understanding that hockey-crazed kids rather than their parents drove brand conversations, ICF Olson turned away from paid media and, via an app, built a new social language for that audience.

Bauer is now the category’s top brand, and by 2008, industry accolades, including Effies, started rolling in.

“We are not mired by old legacy systems that we can’t get rid of,” says Clements. “We are purpose driven.” —J.C.

Los York
Clients: FitBit, Motorola, Nike iD, Nike Jordan
Offices: New York, Los Angeles

When Dex Deboree and Seth Epstein, co-founders and managing partners of Los York, purchased a less-than-successful production company four years ago, they spent the first two years figuring out why the firm was failing—before transforming it into the successful agency it is today. “We saw the problem as something much bigger than just the company having a problem and really the whole infrastructure of advertising really shifting. That created who we are today and why we exist,” explains Deboree.

With Los York, the goal was to create an agency that would take the traditional advertising and production skill sets and create one seamless operation that does everything under one roof. Think of it as the Swiss Army Knife version of an agency.

Since opening its doors, Los York has helped a number of brands—including FitBit, Motorola and Nike iD—come up with world-class creative at scale, but often with smaller budgets. Recently, the agency worked with the Jordan brand to launch Carmelo Anthony’s 12th shoe style, the Melo M12. Unlike previous campaigns the agency created for the brand, with “Built for More” the team worked directly with the New York Knicks star to tell a more personal story that focused on Baltimore, where he grew up and developed his talents.

Los York tapped into hoops star Carmelo Anthony’s humble Baltimore roots to help launch his 12th shoe style under the Jordan brand.

“The concept co-developed with him and came out of his own voice,” notes Deboree.

The campaign relied on digital and social channels and employed no paid TV media yet managed to become the most successful campaign for the Melo franchise, amassing nearly 12 million views. —Katie Richards

Noble People
Clients: PayPal, Braintree, Slack, Honest Tea
Offices: New York, Los Angeles

New York-based Noble People bills itself as a creative media agency and boasts a simple mission: to serve clients an innovative, fully transparent media strategy via smart planning, integrated buying and effective optimization. “We wanted to work at a place where the practice of media was subjective and iterative but also based on numbers,” says co-founder and CEO Greg March. “We didn’t see an agency like that that existed, so we got together to try to make one.”

The founders of Noble People, who include chief creative strategist Todd Alchin and COO Lindsay Lustberg, all led media departments at renowned creative shops such as Wieden + Kennedy and CP+B. Noble People’s client roster lists PayPal (including global commerce tool Braintree and money transfer service Venmo), Slack and Honest Tea.

Noble People’s work for Braintree rewarded coders with free coffee if they could decipher coded messages at coffee bars in San Francisco and other markets.

The independent shop prides itself on doing more with less. In 2016, Noble People cut Braintree’s display spending that targeted the coders and developer community by 70 percent year over year, shifting the remaining direct-response dollars to a thought leadership program. Highlights included video podcast integrations and a continuation of the prior year’s Code for Coffee Tour, which offered web developers free java at coffee shops in San Francisco and other markets if they could read Braintree’s coded messages on sandwich boards and the like. For a cup of coffee, source code became developers’ currency of the day. Noble People also struck a yearlong sponsorship with TechCrunch Disrupt. The result: sign-ups have continued to increase by 50 percent.

“We make sure the creative matches the intention of the media every single time, backed by rationale and customization, no matter the client,” says March. “We did the exact same thing for Braintree and it worked.” —Lisa Granatstein

Ogilvy Delivery
Clients: Unidentified, London-based CPG client, U.S.-based b-to-b client
Offices: New York

As part of a major recast of its global structure announced in late January, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide formed Ogilvy Delivery, which is designed to offer clients a blend of production, project management and tech services with the goal of moving work out of concept into reality in a more agile fashion.

At its launch, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide CEO John Seifert said the formation of Delivery revitalizes the agency’s commitment to the critical craft skills required by “art of making” in a rapidly changing digital environment. A year in the making, Delivery’s blueprint pulls insights from Ogilvy’s global leaders regarding emerging talent needs and underlying technology platforms to better meet clients’ increasing complex and shifting needs. “Simply put, without world-class delivery we will not be able to produce great work and deliver the value our clients seek from their marketing investment,” Seifert explained in a company memo.

Seifert described Delivery as operating across three key pillars: a program management office, a studio ecosystem and a developing technology function that will bring infrastructure solutions to the agency and clients, both of which need to better “navigate and negotiate” a post-disruption world.

Former OgilvyOne Worldwide president and COO Günther Schumacher will lead Delivery as worldwide chief delivery officer. He will work closely with chief technology officer Mike Tidmarsh on Delivery’s emerging tech.

Schumacher sees Delivery as an answer to a fundamental paradox that exists in the brand-marketing ecosystem: while the barriers around brand creation have all but disappeared, the world where that creation emerges is massively complex. While not naming them, Schumacher says Delivery is in the process of working with a large London-based CPG client and a U.S.-based b-to-b account in transforming their teams, redefining the content and cadence of client culture and conversations, and redesigning the traditional service model.

“This world not only requires new ideas, it requires new capabilities to bring those ideas to life. The idea is the technology and the technology the idea, and we have to celebrate the way of making things differently,” says Schumacher. —J.C.

Phenomenon
Clients: Wilson, Aetna, PepsiCo, P&G, Intuit
Offices: Los Angeles, Chicago

Once a traditional ad shop, Phenomenon has morphed into a sought-after business transformation agency by investing in and adding capabilities across AI, UX, product development, data, design and more. The  agency notes that it now works closely with a client’s entire C-suite, not just the CMO, in order to transform its business goals rather than service its marketing needs. An example: the agency’s role in developing the much-lauded Wilson X Connected basketball, thus transforming Wilson from being perceived as the maker of your mom and dad’s tennis equipment into a truly hot brand among a new generation of sports lovers.

Phenomenon’s work with Wilson to develop the X Connected basketball led to a 126 percent surge in conversation around the brand.

For Wilson, Phenomenon’s pod-like structure allowed it to morph into different flavors of ideation and execution, depending on the need and the imperative at that time. With high market share in slow-repetition products and a lagging brand health metric in passion for the brand, the name Wilson had become nothing more than just a logo on a ball, racket or bat. In partnership with the board and leadership team, the agency took on multiple roles to help combat that problem—fulfilling such roles as management consultant, brand strategist, product designer, digital leader, and yes, ad agency. But what did all that mean for Wilson? Among the results, talk value around the brand increased 126 percent, while online sales are delivering their strongest growth ever.

“In today’s landscape, the last competitive advantage is being first. Using revelations instead of observations, we are obsessed with championing innovation for clients, helping them avoid the pitfalls of convention and becoming an intrinsic part of culture,” says Krishnan Menon, co-founder and CEO of Phenomenon, which also counts Aetna, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble and Intuit among its clients. —T.C.

RQ
Clients: Samsung, Airbnb, YouTube, Google Play
Offices: Los Angeles

There’s no shortage of influencer marketing shops, but one such Los Angeles-based agency boasts a unique business model. RQ, an outfit that stands for Relationship Quotient, steers clear of paying influencers and celebs to partner with brands. Instead, co-founder and CEO Brian Salzman and his team of “cultural scientists” employ a more seamless strategy by creating long-term authentic brand-influencer relationships with people “who are the infrastructure with culture,” specifically in entertainment, sports, food and tech. Along with what RQ calls “relationship marketing,” the agency backs up its work with deep dive intelligence and insights on reach, engagement, impressions and conversions.

“Unlike the influencer marketing agency, whose sole purpose is to broker paid partnerships between brands and digital media influencers, we approach building relationships between brands and influencers in the same organic vein that marketers use to approach word of mouth marketing,” says Salzman, whose clients include Samsung, Airbnb, YouTube and Google Play.

Deep relationships are key for a brand partnership to be successful, adds Salzman. In August 2016, RQ matched Samsung’s home appliance division with Dancing With the Stars’ Emma Slater and Sasha Farber. The couple received a Family Hub refrigerator and spread the word about the appliance via dinner parties and social media.

“For the first time ever, Samsung appliances had built a relationship with influencers around their authentic use and love of the product,” Salzman explains. “The relationship quickly led to organic social sharing. What RQ has created is the tool for brands to build these relationships.” —L.G.