Digital Marketing Advice from a Cannes Lions Award Winner
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The Cannes Lions Festival is the most prestigious event in the advertising industry and every year in June, thousands of industry professionals converge on the city of Cannes to celebrate the best of the best in the advertising world and to see who will walk away with a coveted Cannes Lion award.
This year the Cannes Gold Lion award in the Film category went to BBDO Canada for its hilarious “Cat” ad for Skittles Canada.
One of the brains behind the Skittles ad is Zach Klein, Digital Strategist at Taxi 2. I met up with him a few weeks ago at the Taxi 2 offices in Toronto to get his take on the key components for a digital marketing campaign and to find out what his thoughts are on the emerging trends in the advertising industry. Zach has a string of high-profile advertising and marketing awards under his belt so who better to talk to than him.
So what would you say are the key ingredients for a great digital marketing strategy?
That depends on a lot of factors. The first step in any strategic exercise is to determine the objectives and that generally starts with our clients. What are the goals? Why are we investing in this space?
Next, you want to get a good handle on the landscape where you’re focusing your efforts. What are competitors doing? How are people engaging in the space? What are the norms? What can be molded and what should be left alone?
From there you wanna burn brain cells and come up with an interesting yet simple way of achieving your goals based on the realities of the environment.
So much of what we do is dependent on the objective. For example, letting people know about a new car (awareness) is different than getting them into the dealership to test drive a car. The strategy really comes down to the challenge and the landscape.
Lastly, I would also say the role of a digital strategist is to help develop creative work with corporate intentions that respects the codes and culture of the digital space. Our old marketing tactics just don’t fly anymore.
So what does it take to be a great digital strategist?
You need to be immersed in the digital space. Understand the cultural rules of Twitter, Facebook etc. Get in there and have fun. While you’re doing that, don’t forget you are only one person and not the archetype of user behaviour.
You also need to have a passion for technology. Being excited when new things come out and wanting to get your hands on the goods helps. It should never be about the technology but it’s important to know the tools at your disposal.
Back to my point about “you are not the archetype” – it’s also about analytics, finding out how people behave and the volume of a given behavior. Getting into the numbers and figuring out usage is really important. Remember, it’s never about you.
Next I would say it’s about getting out of the office and the digital space. Get out there and do the things that you love. For example, if you love fencing, allow your passion and insight into that subculture to influence your work. It’s about taking all these different things that normally don’t go together and sticking them together and creating new things that are exciting and garner their own attention. Mold and hack.
Check out Jon Steel’s 7 Points on Planning. He’s a Godfather to the planning world. He encourages planners in his department to block off time to leave the office and experience something different. Go to the beach and watch people engaging with their families, take a knitting class, observe how people behave in a very crowded, public environment. It’s really about absorbing the world around you, recombining it in interesting ways and applying it to business challenges.
What trends do you see emerging in the advertising industry over the next few years?
Activating marketing efforts in the mobile space is definitely on our radar. There’s work to be done on behalf of agencies to get it right, mainly, how are brands actually welcomed and useful in this space?
Increasingly, we’ll see people connecting around interests as opposed to their existing social networks. That has always been a key aspect to the online space (interest based communities) but we’ll see the relative share of interest-based relationships growing. Instagram is a great example of that, people building connections around the interest of photography.
We’ve seen mobile phones (tablets) taking over conventional computers and I think what’s going to unfold over the next few years is gonna be insane. Things like near frequency chips (NFCs) have been around for ages but I think more brands & services will be building them into their brand experiences, as critical mass of smartphones becomes a reality. When I was at SXSW last year, someone said to me “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” I thought that was interesting because it’s so true.
Lastly, I would say products and their services will become increasingly smarter and interconnected. The idea of Service Design will be a major topic moving forward.
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