Ideas for a Smarter, Faster World

I loved the Droid campaign from the moment I saw the “iDon’t” ads, though my affection wasn’t about product preference or interest. I’ve also loved the Apple campaign ever since Justin Long came on board. Simply put, I love competitive depositioning and am fascinated anytime a company has the right product, leadership and balls-to-the-wall attitude to make it happen. But today my fascination skyrocketed when I finally visited droiddoes.com and checked out their micro site on launch day. I went to the live feed called “Droid Does Times Square” where it took me a minute to figure out that they were showing off the phone’s differentiating voice search functionality by letting passersby call in and “search Times Square just like the Droid does.” And with the micro site live feed, anyone in the world could participate. At noon on Friday Nov. 6,  it was a 3.5 hr wait to run your own Droid voice activated search.

I forwarded this to my colleagues and said, “I have no idea what kind of emerging media this is, but it’s wild.”  Digital billboards in Time Square connected to mobile marketing, web integration, a PR campaign that yielded thousands of articles, experiential / engagement and here I am, blogging about it and boosting their social media results.  This seemingly small piece of a micro site had so many moving parts and pieces it had to take the kind of collaboration that in marketing sometimes seems unnatural or forced.   What caught my eye was how the idea works across all disciplines fairly seamlessly – one-to-one, digital, PR, media, creative, experiential, and mobile. Of course, the meeting of the minds that had to occur between giants like Google, Motorola and Verizon and their respective agencies must have been somewhat akin to herding really smart cats.

Switching gears slightly…I spent the first 8 years of my career in tech PR, and for 5 years, IBM was one of my major clients – which required me to get to know the tech services industry a little better than your average flack. And lately, I’ve been feeling like the marketing industry could take some notes from the tech integrators. IBM has long taken on Microsoft by pushing open source, open standards and open technologies, believing that the money is in the services and a longer relationship than could be established through the more transactional hardware and software industries (though other trends are changing that).  By being hardware and software neutral, they can provide the complete solution that’s right for their client’s unique need. Rather than pushing the same product or variation on it for everyone, they have the freedom to look at the entire business, and aren’t limited by corporate  requirement to incorporate their own products (though they certainly have them). It’s a model that’s served IBM well.

What if our industry moved towards “open marketing” model, where it’s not about the right digital solution or the right PR campaign or the right creative or the right social media strategy or the right customer loyalty program.  Yes, those things always have their place, but more often than not, there’s a bigger picture and a bigger opportunity. It’s a model that just puts a bunch of smart, un-like-minded individuals in a  room and lets them go at a client’s business. We’re seeing glimpses of it, and here at Brunner we’ve eliminated our individual profit centers to eliminate the pressures of unique P&L’s and have established dedicated, multi-disciplinary teams to do just that type of thinking. But it’s not a shift that took hold over night and it’s a constant cultural evolution. We’re always adapting because there’s a lot of power in a lot of minds and that’s not always easy to harness. It’s a process that sometimes seems like it can’t happen fast enough.

I’m not sure how many business out there are breaking down those walls fast enough, but I can tell you this much – it’s something Droiddoes.