Posts Tagged ‘Strategy’
Hooked. Alex Wipf: A Strategy of Flight.
Februar 1st, 2012 • Allgemein, Hooked, Interview
Tags: Agencies, Alex Wipf, Creativity, Hooked, Ideas, Interview, Leo Burnett, People, Strategy, Truth
Last year I started to conduct a series of interviews with some of the most interesting Marketing peeps I met so far.
I somehow wanted to take this concept one step further.My new series of interviews is called ‘Hooked’. Hooked is about leading Strategists and their hobby or a side-project. Hooked is about what people can learn for Strategy while they actually love to fly, cook, swim or whatever they do to become the interesting people that most of them are.
The first Person to be part of Hooked is Alexander Wipf – my long-time friend and all-round awesome guy. Alex is Head of Strategy at Leo Burnett, Frankfurt. And besides being one of the few truly digital Marketing Pioneers in Germany, besides being an awesome Photographer, young dad and many other things, he is in possession of a Private Pilot License. In other words: He is a passionate flier.
Irrelevant for his thinking as a Strategy Dude? I don’t think so. Get to know Mister Wipf.
You have a pilot license and you are Head of Strategy at Leo Burnett and started off as a user experience designer. I know you have an interesting theory about flying and UX. Tell me about it.
As machinery and technology get more and more complex, our susceptibility to allow technology or its interfaces to control us increases as well. As Günther Anders already noted in the 1950s (in “The Outdatedness of Human Beings 1. On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution,” 1956) at some point after WWII human technology had reached a tipping point when technologies weren’t just simple tools or extensions of ourselves, but rather complex systems that makes human capacity look outdated and miniscule. Being a thinker during the atomic age, his example for this was the invention of nuclear energy, which has a hazardous waste-product that has a half-life that will last longer than our species will be on this planet.
Trying to wrap your head around this fact is just mind-boggling. Essentially, we have created things that are simply bigger than ourselves and the consequences of which we aren’t really in control of anymore. Of course this is an extreme example, and it’s not a matter of us necessarily wanting to be controlled or hindered by the technology we create, but we implicitly accept it as necessary evil.
So, in order to cope with this, we create more technology that, in turn, controls the other technology we have. And we accept this largely because there is no way back.
As we have moved from the industrial (and atomic) age to the information age, the same forces are at play, only that the context is no longer the industrial and physical realm, but rather the informational and virtual.
Due to digital technologies, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, again, we are unable to deal with it all, so, again, after a few decades of information technologies being created to create, disseminate and store information, we are now inventing technologies to filter this information. The question is, are our interfaces designed with us in mind?
Facebook’s 1 Billion. Right Before the Mayan Apocalypse.
Januar 13th, 2012 • Trends
Tags: chart, Facebook, Social Networks, Strategy, World
Silicon Alley Insider’s Chart of the Day. iCrossings says Facebook will probably reach 1 billion users sometime in August 2012. Hardcore.
Read more at http://ghen.sl/yz6v84
New L2 Report. The Mobile Side of Luxury & Prestige Brands.
Januar 12th, 2012 • Brands, Reports, Strategy
Tags: Brands, l2, luxury, prestige, Report, Reports, Strategy
I think I can admit I am quite jealous of L2′s business idea. Providing digital business insights for the luxury and prestige industries is a good idea. But adding a sophisticated benchmarking that highlights the different facets of digital marketing, that adds specific (and needed) industry knowledge, and that’s probably even very very very well paid? High five.
I spotted L2 for the first time about a year ago when they first published their Digital IQ report on the most successful luxury and prestige brands in the digital space – the first compendium that I am aware of. And now they took the next step by publishing another extremely well founded report: The L2 Mobile IQ 100. A report on the mobile expenses, aspirations, and capabilities of the top 100 luxury brands worldwide. Well done L2 – you guys really understand your business.
Key insights
- Luxury & Prestige retail brands by far outperform luxury & retail brands mobile
- M-Commerce is nascent in the industry
- The majority of brands & retailers has no specific mobile strategy
- But: Per-capita revenues and searches in the industry by far outweigh more traditional means
L2 Prestige 100®: Mobile IQ — The Video from L2 Think Tank on Vimeo.
Social Media Management Software. Check Out Altimeter’s New Buyer’s Guide.
Januar 9th, 2012 • 1 comment Reports, Social, Tech, Tools
Tags: Altimeter, altimetergroup, Business, Facebook, Presentation, Reports, Social Business Design, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Tech, Tools, we are social
So once you have given all the presentations about the value of Social Media and explained that a fan is not worth $2.38 (or something) you will – at some point – face the challenge of managing real time interaction with your customer. Here SMMS, a type of software especially designed to support the management of complex social interaction platforms, are usually your weapons of choice. Especially in a world in which any major enterprise has to be able to manage its 178 social media accounts in average.
A Social Media Management System (SMMS) is a software tool that uses business rules and approved employees and partners to manage multiple social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This system contains features such as governance, workflow, intelligence, and integration capabilities across the enterprise. The success of these tools is dependent upon a business-led strategy, defined processes, trained staff, and ability to measure efforts.
SMMS are there to reduce the complexity of large real time social media platforms. And there are many, many different vendors on the market. From Hootsuite to BuddyMedia, from Wildfire to Spredfast, no two vendors are alike and there is no one-fit-for-all SMMS-solution. Altimeter’s new “Strategy to Manage Social Media Proliferation” serves as a great overview over the SMMS-scene and offers metrics to support the choice for specific vendors based on the social objectives of your organisation.
If you have ever tried to give your customer a founded recommendation on which SMMS to choose you will know how important the following report is. In a market as cluttered and dynamic as this we need more top-level reports like the following one instead of infographics on Mashable.
Agencies and Briefs. And here, Ladies and Gentlemen, you can see: The Problem.
Januar 6th, 2012 • Advice, Strategy
Tags: Agencies, creative briefs, Funny, Strategy, Truth, World
I cannot really figure out whether I am disgusted or fascinated. Clearly this fictional Creative Brief is a great example on why so many Creatives think these documents are useless.
via ibelieveinadv
APG Netherlands. Shaping a new Home for Strategists.
Oktober 18th, 2011 • Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Amsterdam, APG, apgdigital, Article, Netherlands, new biz, Strategy, World
Most of you know that I live in Amsterdam for a while now – a city with many agencies, some Strategists but almost without connecting links between them.
A couple of months ago I wrote about an idea that some of my fellow Strategists and I carried around with us for a while: Founding an Account Planning Group in the Netherlands. I don’t want to go too much into detail here but all of us sensed that the small but very international Planner community in the Netherlands needed more exchange, progress, representation and also standardization. The result was one of the most pragmatic professional processes I have ever been part of. Yesterday we simply founded the Dutch franchise of the British (and Global) Account Planning Group – as guild of Planners here.
Our plan: to create a professional community for strategists that serves as forum for knowledge exchange, inspiration and networking for our little group of Strategists. We haven’t got many resources right now. But we are happy to welcome any brand and communications strategists in the Netherlands who want to help us shape this platform for the Strategists in the Netherlands (be they Dutch or not)
If you are one of them…
- sign up for our Linked-in group and spread the news
- join us for our opening event on Nov 17 at Strawberry Frog Amsterdam
- help us shape this group
A couple of weeks ago I have written an article for German magazine New-Business (which is closely connected with the German APG) about this process. I am looking forward to see us make the new APG NL become part of Europe’s Planner guilds.
The article (in German). Please click it to see it full size.
Mobile Apps. Why responsive design actually begins on the server.
September 28th, 2011 • Mobile
Tags: Apps, Mobile, Presentation, Strategy, Tech, Tools
Yiibu is a small office in Edinburgh specialized in Mobile marketing. And they spent quite some time to think about more efficient processes in creating mobile apps – particularly in replacing native with web apps.
If there is such a thing as a superhit on Slideshare their first presentation Rethinking the Mobile Web comes pretty close to it. And the deck embedded below is again a strong statement for web apps.
It is long but very smart.
It is just a bit more than a year that Chris Anderson on Wired claimed that the future will be “driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule.”
I guess this one time he was wrong.
Planner Survey 2011. The State of Marketing-Strategy Worldwide.
September 18th, 2011 • 1 comment Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Jobs, Money, Planning, Report, Salary, Strategy, Study, Survey, Truth, World
I have to admit I am a bit late with this post. But I have been travelling so please forgive me if you know about the ‘Planner Survey 2011‘ already. Many of you know this survey which my colleague Heather LeFevre conducts annually. Heather is Head of Planning at Strawberry Frog Amsterdam and for the seventh time she has tried to shed some light on the state of Marketing-Strategy worldwide – a remarkable effort for such a niche ‘industry’ within a ‘niche industry’.
I don’t want to say anything about her research. Just check out the 2011 document below. But I really want to thank Heather for her continuous curiosity in this topic. Great insights. I particularly the more localized character of this year’s survey compared with 2010′s data.
By the way: If you want to follow Heather on twitter, do it here.
Consumer Love. IBM shows how not to ask the right questions.
August 15th, 2011 • Reports, Social, Social Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Facebook, IBM, Media, Prediction, Presentation, Report, Research, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Strategy, Trends
IBM has just published a study called ‘From Social Media to Social CRM‘ (PDF download). I first liked it because it was not boring. It did not repeat the same old shit that you read anywhere else. In fact…it seemed quite uncomfortable and innovative. At first.
So at first some of the study’s claims did not sound very surprising, nevertheless heretic for many people in the industry. IBM found out that most people are not so much into learning about your next campaign on social networks. They are actually almost exclusively interested to meet their friends. And pretty much the only reasons why they friend a brand – according to IBM – is VOUCHERS.
Yes. All of us hate these types of relations.
Who wants to date a girl that only spends time with you because you pay all the restaurant bills?
IBM has got an explanation for you why you spend time with this girl (the social consumer): Simply because you want to think the girl loves you.
Businesses are three times more likely to think consumers are interested in interacting with them to feel part of a community. Businesses also overestimate consumers’ desire to engage with them to feel connected to their brand. In fact, these two activities are among the least interesting from a consumer’s perspective.
Consumers are willing to interact with businesses if they believe it is to their benefit, feel they can trust the company and decide social media is the right channel to use to get the value they seek. That value could be in the form of a coupon or specific information. Engaging with a company via social media may result in a feeling of connectedness for consumers – an emotional, intangible gain – but the wish for intimacy is not what drives most of them.
I agree with the latter claim even though IBM streamlined the study to make sure everyone understands VOUCHERS as the key consumer desire. How? By benchmarkting the girl’s (social consumer’s) top reasons why she dates you compared to your top reasons why you date her. The result could not be much different. And yes: According to this study most of her top reasons to date you are connected to restaurant bills.
So does that mean all of us should forget about investing into next year’s social activation? Definitely not.
APG Netherlands. Does Holland need a Strategy Foundation?
Juli 31st, 2011 • 6 comments People
Tags: Amsterdam, APG, apgdigital, Netherlands, Strategy
I live in Amsterdam for a bit more than a year now. There is an old joke about Germans (no, not the one with the towels or with invading other countries) that whenever you put a German somewhere he will try to found some type of club. And I am no exception to this rule.
After arriving in Amsterdam I tried to get in contact with (professionally) likeminded people. And I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t quite easy to meet other Strategists. I knew some of the local Strategists via twitter but all connections 
between them were 100% personal – either you knew a couple of your colleagues from other agencies or you didn’t. No real professional network structured collaboration of the Dutch and the Expat Strategists in and beyond Amsterdam.
Thanks to the support of (the perfectly well connected) Heather Le Fevre I was able to invite the major share of Amsterdam’s Brand/Account/Creative/Younameit Planners to a bimonthly ‘Stammtisch‘ event which we organize via a Facebook Group (feel free to apply for access if you consider yourself a Amsterdam Strategist). Our little group has grown to more than 60 Planners in and around Amsterdam and we meet on a regular basis.
But honestly – shouldn’t interaction between Strategists in the Netherlands be more than an informal Beer every once in a while? I think it should. And I would like to discuss whether this should be something they call Account Planning Group (APG) in the UK and in Germany. Yes, I am talking about a formal institution.
So what is an APG and why is it purposeful? APG UK defines the mission in the following way
- Encourage dialogue among the members and provide a ‘home’ for planners, representing the interests of the planning community.
- Provide training especially for younger members of the community
- Give access to Case Studies
- Enable new publications on the subject of planning, contributing to other publications, and organising various events and debates.
APG is a not-for-profit organisation run for and by its members. That means it needs some kind of membership fees. And it also usually requires a small team to run day-to-day operations on behalf of the larger community. If you want to learn more about the role of the Account Planning Group check out the UK’s APG website.
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