Here’s the last great campaign in this run and it only seems fair that I choose something technology-focused for all you purists out there.

Today’s example is from HP and its recent ‘Let’s do Amazing’ campaign. Starring Rhys Darby (funny man) as well as Dr. Dre and a few other HP users, the ads are designed to look at one man’s incompetence with technology and how HP can really transform the everyday tasks of consumers and businesses. I’ve linked to a few videos below to give you a bit of choice, but they’re all pretty short and worth a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhqi5QgEr9c (Here’s the internal launch video to get the HP team inspired… hmm)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7rv1CsXkHI (Dr. Dre)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu8Re1mpB8M (HP Labs)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fb-6k5sn8Q (UPS Delivery)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jymYv2EvsQ (DreamWorks)

I think the ads definitely grab your attention because of the way they are made, but do they make you think ‘I should buy HP’?

As a tagline ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ sounds inspiring, but the examples provided don’t necessarily showcase the groundbreaking innovation that makes HP different from other suppliers out there.

Are there other scenarios where HP products can / could make a difference and therefore set the character-led ads and the HP products apart from the field?

It might not be the most immediate field to bring to mind, but HP do some good work in the healthcare sector with Electronic Medical Records and Picture Archiving and Communications Systems and so my suggestion would be using an example from here…

Let’s take Rhys through the hospital, where his entry card ensures his details are recognised on arrival and his appointment and department shown on the board in reception. Let’s show doctors doing their rounds with the latest touch-screen tablet computers where they can bring up individual patient records in an instant.

Potentially it’s an example a bit more worthy of the line ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ and is a clear showcase of pushing the boundaries to improve patient response times and medical treatment.

Just a thought…

Today I’d like to talk to you about crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is basically a problem-solving and production model. Problems are put-out to an unknown group in an open call for solutions.

More and more businesses and brands are looking to consumers to generate content either in the form of adverts or virals — which are then shared among a community of friends and brand advocates. And it’s a really good way of developing long-term engagement with a brand and product, as the audience actually has some form of emotion / time invested in the output.

One really good example of this is the current Doritos King of Ads campaign — inviting the audience to make the next TV ad for the brand. Having started in March, the competition has run across TV and online (including Facebook and YouTube), and is now in the final stages with the last 3 ads being put up for public voting. The winner will get the glory of their ad on TV and £200,000 in the bank — Doritos get an original idea, limited production costs and will probably have made their money back with interest from all the people buying the corn-based snack for ad-making purposes.

You can see the judges’ final 15 videos here – http://kingofads.doritos.co.uk/#/gallery/selection/type=userSubmission

And you can see the ad Dan and myself entered here – http://www.youtube.com/doritoskingofads#p/u/29/X1COmp74jqE

Sadly we didn’t make the cut, but it’s Doritos’ loss if you ask me.

Benefits of crowdsourcing include the following:

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly
• Payment is by results or even omitted
• The organisation can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organisation
• By listening to the crowd, organisations gain first-hand insight on their customers’ needs and requirements

Possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing:

• Added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion
• Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project
• Projects can fail to attract participants and sometimes require the agency involved to create and seed their own films
• No written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements
• Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers

Here’s the great campaign for today (the link is at the end of the post). It’s by DDB and Philips, for the latter’s cinema screen TV. It’s also the follow-up to the Cannes Gold Lion winner and much loved one shot sequence – Carousel (below).

The basic premise is this — if you have one story and one simple piece of dialogue, how many ways can you tell the story? For this exercise, the creative team took five leading directors and created five very different films. All of them were underlined by the message – ‘There are millions of ways to tell a story. There’s only one way to watch one.’

And I’d say the same thing to you, the nature of our business means that we, more often than not, push very similar products and messages to our clients. Yet there are always news ways to say things or new ways of making the familiar different. We just have to think of them

I won’t say much more about these, just have a look, turn the sound up and the ambilight on and pick your favourite (mine’s the one with the robot).

http://www.cinema.philips.com/gb_en/

The following ad is for Old Spice (it’s what real men used to splash on their face before the likes of Calvin Klein and Paul Smith made us all smell like summer meadows). Made by Wieden & Kennedy Portland, the ad was shot in one take and uses humour to great effect to get the audience’s attention.

The takeaway point:

This ad isn’t aimed directly at who you’d assume to be the typical target audience for male grooming products – men. Instead it focuses attention on addressing a female audience. There’s a level of aspiration in the tone (the man your man could be), but more importantly the ad is speaking directly to the people who spend the most money on male grooming – women!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1266206/How-women-massive-surge-sales-male-grooming-products.html

The humour in the ad and the fact that it was launched during the SuperBowl ensured that the ad also appealed to men — taking a familiar product and giving it a modern twist.

With any campaign we need to really look at the target audience we go after — is there someone other than the obvious choice we should be speaking to? Can we take a different approach by speaking to someone in another part of the business who can influence our desired end-audience? What are their pressures / problems? What do they find funny? What do they do outside of the office?

It’s a starter for 10, but have a think.

Each week in the barn, we run an internal best practice session on something topical, inspiring, or simply useful.

This week, we’re considering a range of consumer campaigns and seeing what inspiration they have to offer. So over the next 4 days, we’ll have a series of guest posts from Ben Peckett (long-standing member of our Creative Team), sharing his pick of the campaigns and some related food for thought…

In a recent post I wrote about some of the lessons marketing can learn from sales. Now, moving once more into the breach, the Sales Executive Council has posted a list of the seven principals to bear in mind when developing any sales tool.

Sales is often supported by tools that help them, but sometimes there are so many that these tools doesn’t always take off. Because the same practical challenges are faced in most marketing projects, maybe there’s something we can learn from these too:

1. Make sure you keep your focus on your end goal right the way through the development.
2. Prioritize and feature requests and focus on those you think will impact success most.
3. Early in the scoping, collect as much feedback as you can to base your decisions on.
4. Communicate during the build why the tool will make a difference to the user.
5. Ensure it’s easy to use. There’s nothing worse that thousands of features no-one can use.
6. Conduct pilots prior to launch so if there is any feedback to react to you can
7. Make sure everyone can get to the tool and use it when they need to.

See the link for more detail, but to say these rules are limited only to sales tools is pretty blinkered. Most of them are just common sense for just about everything we do. It never hurts to repeat good ideas, though.

We recently launched a set of four new propositions for one client, to be taken out by sales teams across EMEA. Eventually, as much effort and thought has gone into communicating how the sales teams could use the resources as in creating the resources themselves: bringing to life different sales scenarios; selling the value of the collateral; explaining how some of the newer presentation techniques can be used. And if all else fails, communicate directly with the market and create a demand for the sales team to meet…

McKinsey’s recent interview with Shell CIO Alan Matula gives some real food for thought in evaluating how you approach major enterprises (and hold on to them once you have them…)

When you consider that Matula is talking about IT transformation that has been going on for a decade (and is now looking for payback over at least 15 years from, for example, a new standardised HR system), it becomes clear why the long-term approach is the only one to take.

He talks through the different phases of the transformation, and what comes across most strongly is a ruthless focus on reaching a successful outcome. When it comes to selecting suppliers, it’s clear that only those most able to sign up to the corporate vision have been selected:

“We started with the idea that we wanted 70 percent of our spending to be external. Of that, we wanted 80 percent to be focused on the top 11 suppliers. We put those 11 into three groups: First, there are the foundation suppliers, those in which we make long-term bets—Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Then there’s the infrastructure group, with three bundles—AT&T, HP, and T-Systems—for networks, end-user computing, and hosting of storage, respectively. And finally we have four application services suppliers—Accenture, IBM, Logica, and Wipro. What we’re doing differently is bringing all 11 of them together to work as a collective.”

It will be interesting to revisit the performance of this collaborative approach after a couple of years working. Shell is already noticing that traditional product/service divisions between suppliers are breaking down (movements like cloud computing and shifting to pay per performance models are exacerbating this at the higher level).

Matula’s closing comments illustrate 3 of his most significant priorities. Being able to measure the impact that IT has on the business. Having the skilled people available to manage relationships (internally and with key suppliers). And finally, avoiding failure at all costs – risk aversion is still top of the list.

“IT is more important and intense to the enterprise than ever before, and that essentially requires an ongoing effort to transform IT; there is always another phase. To support that mental model, the first thing is to never lose the perspective that you’re here to make the business more productive and more competitive. Our catchphrase, “business at the center,” keeps us grounded. Our position today is a reflection of the tight integration that we have with the business, combined with the efforts of key support functions like HR, finance, and procurement.

A second thing is that you’re only as good as the talent that you have. For instance, in the robust sourcing of infrastructure and applications we have put in place, the people at the interface are very important. They manage the critical supplier relationships with CEOs and top executives at these firms, and they have the technical know-how to help guide the suppliers.

Finally, if you don’t have the basics right, you won’t have any credibility. It only takes one bad “go live” on a project or a flaw in your basic delivery capabilities to set you back very quickly.”

What do bearded entrepreneur Alan Sugar and marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno have in common?

One answer suggested by last week’s episode of ‘Junior Apprentice’ is that neither would be much fun on a camping holiday. Lord Sugar set his ‘junior apprentices’ the task of creating a new camping product and pitching it to retailers. The episode is full of mentions of the lucrative size of the camping market, something that Adorno was writing about 40 years ago.

In his essay ‘Free Time‘, Adorno discussed the way that the culture industry takes our real need for ‘freedom’ and brings it back within the capitalist system (through organised hobbies and activities like camping), where money can be made and people controlled (’recharging’ before another busy week at work):

“The naturalness of the question of what hobby you have, harbours the assumption that you must have one, or better still, that you should have a range of different hobbies, in accordance with what the ‘leisure industry’ can supply [...] It is linked to the inner needs of people in the functional system. Camping – an activity so popular amongst the old youth movements – was a protest against the tedium and convention of bourgeois life. People had to ‘get out’, in both senses of the phrase. Sleeping out beneath the stars meant that one had escaped from the house and from the family. After the youth movements had died out this need was then harnessed and institutionalized by the camping industry. The industry alone could not have forced people to purchase its tents and dormobiles, plus huge quantities of extra equipment, if there had not already been some longing in people themselves; but their own need for freedom gets functionalized, extended and reproduced by business; what they want is forced upon them once again. Hence the ease with which the free time is integrated; people are unaware of how utterly unfree they are, even where they feel most at liberty, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.”

I wonder how many of the junior apprentices were questioning their role in profiting from pseudo answers to people’s desire for freedom…

As an aside, Adorno also has interesting views on sun tans as we approach the summer holiday season. This section follows on from his analysis of the camping industry:

“Taken in its strict sense, in contradistinction to work, as it at least used to apply in what would today be considered an out-dated ideology, there is something vacuous…about the notion of free time. An archetyptal instance is the behaviour of those who grill themselves brown in the sun merely for the sake of a sun-tan, although dozing in the sun is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and impoverishes the mind. In the sun-tan, which can be quite fetching, the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people they themselves become fetishes. The idea that a girl is more erotically attractive because of her brown skin is probably only another rationalization. The sun-tan is an end in itself, of more importance then the boy-friend it was perhaps supposed to entice. If employees return from their holidays without having acquired the mandatory skin tone, they can be quite sure their colleagues will ask them the pointed question, ‘haven’t you been on holiday then?’ The fetishism which thrives in free time, is subject to further social controls.”

If there are marketing lessons to learn from Adorno (and there may well be something in his insight around how an industry can identify deep inner needs and align its products to those – even if it’s not possible to truly answer the inner need), it doesn’t really seem appropriate to think about them. And the fact that we now spend our free time letting ‘the culture industry’ (in the form of programmes like ‘The Apprentice’) train us to be better business-people… well, it’s probably better that we don’t go into that either.

If there’s a lesson to learn from last week’s episode of the ‘Young Apprentice’, it’s that no amount of salesmanship can shift a poor product – and that the difference between a poor product and a good one can be as simple as 5 minutes discussing a target audience.

It has been said, (if it hasn’t, then we’ll say it) that the best marketing is about taking the cream of your sales team’s capabilities in one-to-one sales and turning this into a mass-market lead generation machine. This tends to be why the best campaigns involve a close marketing-sales partnership to understand how to position offerings, view the competition, differentiate themselves and drive prospects through the sales funnel.

It’s also been oft repeated that the best marketing is about communicating the right messages at the right time.  So maybe we can bring these together into one grand unified theory of marketing-sales success? Wishful thinking maybe, but McKinsey this month published the results of their research into the buying habits of 1,200 decision makers in long- and short-sale cycles across the US and Europe. This insight into b2b sales draws a powerful conclusion: the top two turn-offs (comprising over half of those surveyed) that sales people could do were to have inadequate knowledge of their product/service and to try to communicate with them too often.

Timing + message. QED.

Fortunately, these two faux-pas are perfectly possible to remedy. But in the theme of this post, it’s not just sales that should learn this lesson but marketing too. And we bear this evidence out frequently – the most successful communications are the ones that tie a significant aspect of the product/service to a timely need of the audience. When this happens, the audience doesn’t see it as ‘marketing’ – it’s just a valuable part of their business day.

I’ll delve into another area where marketing can learn from sales in a future post, but maybe you have some experiences on this area already that you’d like to share?

We’ve shared below the slides that Colin Cram presented at the recent Sales & Marketing Forum.

A founder member of the Central Unit on Purchasing (forerunner of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC)), Colin held senior procurement positions in the public sector for over 30 years, responsible throughout for shared services, outsourcing and organisational re-engineering, and third party spends of up to £7bn a year. His presentation steps through an overview of procurement in the public sector (scale, challenges, realities for suppliers…) and highlights some potential changes that could deliver savings of £25bn and fresh opportunities for suppliers…