IanSchafer.com

Hear/See Me Talk About Location Based Services on BlogTalkRadio and BBC World News.

Thanks to MediaBistro and AgencySpy for letting me talk about the advertising and marketing opportunities that Location-Based Services (like Foursquare, and Gowalla) are bringing to light, and for the opportunity to tell the world a little bit more about GEOFocus, our location-based marketing practice.

Check out coverage of the piece (and hear it, if you'd like) at AgencySpy here. Or, you could just grab a listen right here:

Thanks also to BBC World News America for having me in their segment on Foursquare (along with one of their founders, Dennis Crowley) which you can watch here (I wish I could embed it).

The SoDA 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook

Deep Focus is a member of the Society of Digital Agencies, a non-profit association dedicated to advancing the industry through best practices, education and advocacy. The global association is currently comprised of 41 well-regarded Digital agencies with members located across Australia, Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, Mexico, South America, and the United States.

We all got together and assembled what we affectionately call The SoDA 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook.

On behalf of Deep Focus, I contributed a segment on how social media is affecting content consumption.

2010 will be the year that social media-fueled technology and behavior is responsible for more content consumption choices than ever before. As the media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, marketers will need to become more nimble than ever, and start getting on the leading edge of trends, as opposed to waiting for them to emerge.

There are several great contributions from our friends at Big Spaceship, AgencyNet, and Schematic, so I strongly suggest that if you read one piece of forward-looking thinking on the new year, that this be it. It's the best I've read, and I'm proud of my fellow SoDA members for their brilliant insights.

Check it out:

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

My Adweek Social Media Strategies Keynote Presentation: Social Media is Mature. No It Isn't.

By popular demand, below is an embedded version of my keynote presentation at Adweek's Social Media Strategies conference on 9/22 (MC Hammer opened, I closed. That's how I roll.) I'll be adding the audio from the actual presentation as soon as I receive it, so please stay tuned for that. I promise that it will make it at least 1.5x better.

Social Media Is Mature. No It's Not.

View more documents from Deep Focus.

Thanks to everyone that attended, and thanks to my team at Deep Focus that makes all of this possible.

We're Hiring the Best Strategists in the World.

We're adding to our all-star lineup here at Deep Focus, and we're looking for the best strategists/Planners (with a capital "P") in the world, ones who "get" social media, but are also analysts, skeptics, and geeks by nature.

If you're into it, email jobs(at)deep-focus.net, with "Senior Account Strategist Applicant" in the subject line. Email me with discretion, please. I get tons of email, and I want to make sure someone gets back to you in a timely fashion. I'm not that timely.

Sorry we're not holding some kind of contest or Twitter stunt for this. Too busy 'round these parts.

Senior Account Strategist

Job Duration: Full Time
Job Location: New York, NY USA
Job Requirements:

Deep Focus is a full-service, thought-leading interactive marketing agency and consultancy. We deliver the most innovative, creative, immersive, effective, and efficient interactive marketing solutions through the creation of experiences that bring consumers closer to brands and each other via technology, goodwill, conversation, and good karma. Our creative, media planning and buying, publicity, promotional, and communications services have won the industry's top awards and our clients' hearts. Blah blah blah. You should know who we are if you're at the CEO's blog. :)

We are looking for a Senior Account Strategist to join our team.

Responsibilities for this position include, but are not limited to:

-Leads internal teams (including junior strategy analysts and cross-functional partners) to develop robust strategic social media marketing roadmaps for clients
-Manages social media strategy process from research and analysis through development of strategies and tactics to meet client business objectives
-Leads strategic brainstorming sessions and actively contributes to creative ideation
-Designs custom metrics aligned to client KPIs and guides periodic reporting to client on achievement of metrics
-Continually evaluates clients ongoing marketing initiatives, and incorporates developments into strategic roadmap as appropriate
-Develops client-ready presentations and documents based team input
-Engages clients regularly to maintain relationships, manage expectations regarding deliverables, and ensure recommendations align with business objectives
-Manages junior strategy analysts in the completion of their work
-Works internally with department liaisons to ensure deliverables are met in all areas, including creative development, media planning/buying, community management and publicity/promotions
-Inspires the team to consistently deliver superior client solutions that meet or exceed client goals/expectations
-Provides constant clear direction to team members at all times
-Assists executive management with new business proposals as needed
-Performs other duties as assigned

Requirements

-5-7 years of management consulting, industry analysis, or agency experience (in a strategy, planning, business development or strategic account management role)
-3-5 years experience in staff management
-Bachelors degree (BA/BS) from a four-year accredited college or university
-MBA preferred but not required
-Experience working on online social media community development, management and marketing campaigns
-A strong, strategic customer service orientation and the ability to form long-term relationships with mid-senior level partners within client organizations
-Strong analytical, writing, critical thinking and problem solving skills
-Structured thinker with experience writing client-ready presentations
-Solid project management and presentation skills
-Confidence and desire to work with and lead colleagues on multi-disciplinary teams
-Self-starter who demonstrates considerable initiative and commitment to producing high quality work
-Excellent verbal and written communication skills
-Expert knowledge of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Power Point)
 

The ‘ Integrated (Big) Agency Model ’ . Will It Blend?

As each week passes, it seems another large agency (read: holding company-owned, >1000 people) is announcing their plans for 'integration'. This week, it's MindShare, as MediaPost reports.

As MindShare's North American CEO Scott Neslund declared, "We're making a very clear statement that the time has come to break down the silos."

Intentions? Good. But will it blend?

Various other efforts from the large agencies have been announced in the past few weeks and months, with some announcing digital's move to the forefront. Some, like MindShare, have taken the 'media-neutral' stance.

It seems that the rationale for all of this is positioning -- positioning of the media agency as something that is more than reach + frequency buyers of volume. Positioning is one thing. Being able to back that up with legitimate creativity is another.

The problem with all this is that creativity was not a building block of any of these agencies. They were established to plan and buy tons of media (traditional media) back when the fragmentation of television from broadcast to cable made everyone freak out. It was no longer so easy to buy television, print, and outdoor, and more hands needed to be brought on-deck to scale.

To scale.

Scalability has been the foundation for all these agencies' success. When you look at any of the holding companies' balance sheets, the media businesses are the segments driving those profits and revenues.

And then came the web. And infinite fragmentation. As much as big new media tried to lead us down a 'portal' (broadcast) model, the web has mega-fragmented. And that fragmentation is practically infinite.

Ironically,infinite fragmentation has become the undoing of the very agencies that were born out of the 'original' fragmentation of media. What infinite fragmentation should do is force us to re-think the role that agencies play when it comes to scale. And while the uber-large agencies are re-thinking and transforming, it's imperative that they understand their role.

It's very, very difficult (dare I say, impossible) to scale in terms of breadth (of reach) and depth (of experiences) simultaneously.

As the social media explosion continues, we know just how important experiences can be (although not how we can apply metrics -- but I'm working on that). But scaling reach and experiences at the same time is usually an exercise in futility for brands, not to mention their agencies.

So the question is, can big media agencies built upon breadth, deliver depth? Creativity needs to course through the veins of an agency of any size to apply it consistently to both strategy and tangible output.

In the opinion of this blogger and CEO, there's no precedent of retrofitting something that large into what the industry is calling for. Brands need smaller, more nimble, more innovative agencies built as integrated problem solvers from the ground-up -- with creativity as its religion and the ability to deliver experiences (with the results to back it up) as its practice.

The web can still be a reach medium. But as it continues to fragment, it's costing more and more money to deliver that reach. And maybe that's the role of the larger media agencies. If I'm a brand, I've already got my reach through television. I want to use the web to deliver the depth of an experience that brings consumers closer to me.

Thoughts on Modernista ’ s Website and the Future of Ours.

There's been so much talk about Modernista!'s new ultra-web 2.0 website (or lack of a site at all). It's taken me a while to get around to discussing it, but here goes...

Take a moment to visit Modernista!'s new site.

So basically, what the site is doing is using all the tools that exist at the web's disposal to turn people on to the agency.

Honestly, most of it works like a charm. I really do like it, even though the problem with using search results to provide information is that so many people have been commenting on Modernista!'s new site, that most results are talking their own site launch rather than the work they do for their clients (which is a narcissism problem that plagues many creative agencies out there, and search results only shine a light on that).

Max Kalehoff provides a really good overview of the site today over at MediaPost.

The thing with this site though, is that while it does a great job of talking about press and showing off stills and bookmarks, it doesn't tell me about strategy. Or case studies (everyone always asks me for those). Maybe it's because we're also a media agency, but there's got to be a way to tell the agency's story with personality, without going completely ethereal or puking Flash.

We're working on a new official site for Deep Focus, and are going to be doing some interesting things with it. Believe it our not, we've had the same site design for about 4 years. Hey -- it's been really busy around here.

Stay tuned for an official launch announcement, but hats off to Modernista! for getting us thinking about official agency websites again.

In the meantime, if you've got ideas for us to use for our website, just let me know. I'm listening.

My Final ClickZ Column: Online Advertising ’ s Stunted Growth

Sure. Online advertising spending is going up, up, up. But I want to ensure that if we're going to continue to ascend, that we excel as well.

I'll no longer be writing for ClickZ -- hey, I'm a busy guy -- but I will ALWAYS be passionately blogging right here, and chances are, you'll be hearing from me occasionally in some other publications here and there. Taking my spot at ClickZ will be someone I know and love, so stay tuned for his musings...

In the meantime, here's an excerpt and a link to my final column on ClickZ:

This is my last column for ClickZ, and it's been a great couple of years.

A lot has happened since my first column in June 2005. Video advertising continues to blossom, and rich media is a standard part of nearly every media plan. Online advertising spending continues its ascent, with nary a sign of letting up. Consumer habits are evolving, and social media is a daily part of their lives.

A rosy picture, isn't it?

Not so fast.

This industry, including publishers, agencies, and marketers, is stunting its growth and limiting its potential. You wouldn't know it by all the M&A activity surrounding these captains of industry, but, trust me, it's a big problem. It's like the interactive industry is an advanced second grader the school doesn't know how to handle, so he's placed in third grade for half the day. The student may be recognized as intelligent, but he'll have a difficult time being socially accepted.

If we are to advance on our own merits, we must make some fundamental changes to the way we strategize, sell, buy, and provide online advertising. The following are but a few items we must address before we can be officially labeled "mature"...

Click here for the rest!

Marketers Are At Least Thinking About Social Media. But Not Enough.

As reported by ClickZ, according to report published by TNS/Cymfony (who just bought Compete.com, BTW), nearly 50% of all marketers believe that there should be an executive-level position at their companies to oversee social media.

"The names were all over the place, but it was clear in those names that the companies are really starting to think, 'How do we do it in an organization or structure... and how do we turn it into something that can be part of the mainstream [marketing] mix?'" said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer of TNS Media Intelligence and Cymphony.

While this sounds great, the report comes littered with expectation management.

"Clients, particularly the slower-moving clients, want best practices," he said. "They want proven models."

That's not always realistic. Whether it's video sharing, social networking sites, or micro-blogging, "clients want to get into it, but want guarantees, want the cookie cutter approach," he said. "That's not going to happen."

So basically, this report says that marketers know they are years behind consumer behavior, but are not necessarily willing to make any marketing changes unless they can get proven results. This, again, is a function of too many marketers looking at social media as a 'campaign' instead of an 'initiative'. If properly executed over a long period of time, a solid social media initiative will yield a bumper crop of results, I can assure you. Agencies have to teach themselves to think outside the campaign as well.

There are a handful of agencies and consultants that DO have the right experience and best practices. Marketers just have to accept the fact that it might just not be their existing media and creative agencies. As a matter of fact, if the agency doesn't have a full media/creative/public relations offering, they probably won't be able to have the right (and unbiased) experience and best practices to succeed in social media.

A Way to Value Engagement … or Value Beyond Engagement?

This post summarizes an ongoing conversation I've had over the past couple years with Brendan Light, SVP Research and Development at Buzzback Market Research: a super smart guy at a super smart company.


The Internet. It happened fast. One day, I was a high school, checking out images of college campuses on CD-ROM, the next, I was emailing from a "terminal" in my college library. The transition from analog to optical media-based digital content to Web-based content happened in a heartbeat and big business (and subsequently, big advertising agencies) had to adapt...fast.


So what happened? Everyone reacted instinctively and created an advertising convergence culture...and I don't mean this in the good, Henry Jenkins way. This was more a convergence of media aesthetics--the creative executions that populated the Web evoked familiar print and TV advertising styles. Even digital DM and CRM programs were really just ports of their offline brethren--not systems reconfigured to take advantage of interactivity. At the time, it was more important that clients and consumers wrap their heads around the medium in a way that was familiar. There's a silly phrase: "we only use 10% of our brains." Well, we marketers (and our clients and consumers) have only been using about 2% of the Internet. It's nobody fault, really; no clients (or consumers) were really prepared for the power of this fully operational battle station. What's sad is, since the advent of online channel, nothing much has changed. Online Advertising still rarely equates to Interactive Marketing. Digital, it turns out really just means not analog.


But, as the search for engagement valuation continues, there could be a way for agencies and brands to work together to create a different kind of value system redefining, or at least taking some of the pressure off of the idea of "engagement". To do it, we have to up the ante: it's time to define and differentiate Interactive Marketing from Online Advertising.


How? When? Where? Whaaaaa?


The onset of the Semantic Web means more powerful targeting. Targeting that could get very close to simulating an online, controlled research panel. Tools like Buzzback's suite of creative research applications (or ones like them) could provide back-end qualitative and quantitative analysis, as well as a flexible creative platform that will allow individual advertising executions to double as learning labs for valuable market research.


A new form of compelling interactive units would be more dynamic, always morphing and relating to user interaction on a collective and individual basis. Because the creative is more responsive, interaction rates would increase and clients would receive new types of valuable data that's far more actionable than what they're getting today (think about it: in addition to today's conventional tactics, these high-powered units could inform product designs...or anything else a client would usually get from a focus group).


This approach could help close the gap between what's measurable and what's actionable for our clients, increasing the value of the creative and the placements.


Some people might scream, "you've got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" but the combination of creative advertising and market research could be the most powerful and most valuable convergence we'll see.


What would it take?


1) A Reality check. Focus groups and surveys are dying. Research companies need to upgrade their approach and enroll their clients in this shift. I expect it would also take independent research companies and creative shops buddying up. If either expect to be successful without the other, they're mistaken (unless they can spend lots of time and money building a best-class department).


2) Pliability. Clients and agencies need to develop more flexible strategic plans...or develop them more frequently. Part of what makes this model so interesting is how actionable it is...but agencies can't do anything if they're constricted by a plan that's 6 months old. There's really no way to predict where a conversation with consumers will go...and the most valuable reactions will be in response to the most current consumer activity. So the way most plans and spending forecasts are developed today, they probably couldn't support this system well enough to extract the value.


3) A Breakout Hit. Money is money is money. How many times did clients ask for Subservient Chicken (without any idea how many chicken sandwiches it sold). Even though this new hybrid model would be more efficient for clients, engaging for consumers and flexible for agencies, it better not taste like medicine. A great execution for a popular brand that yields amazing results (anecdotally as well as statistically) will help this become reality. How do we increase the chances of that happening? Simple. Make sure that all your online advertising ideas are embedded with interactive marketing smarts.

The BCS and Interactive Agencies.

In the spirit of the NCAA Football Bowl Championship Series, I’m going to make an analogy here. Digital agencies are like college football players. The vast majority are role players. They are there to catch the spending that has migrated towards the medium. Some are big, some are small, but there is also a tremendous amount of mediocrity. These are the kinds of players that either accept their mediocrity and prepare for a ‘normal’ career after their last game, or are just blissfully unaware. They might make a big play or two, but they are there to fill a role, whether it’s blocking, tackling, or catching a short pass. They serve a purpose and nothing more is expected from them. And the industry needs role players like that to operate.

But the standouts, the best players on the field, they can anticipate. They seem to know what is going to happen before it does.

Some are purebred elite receivers (digital media agencies) that can catch that spending and be nimble enough to change their routes on-the-fly.

Some are pure elite running backs (digital creative agencies) that can make something out of nothing. They see nothing but an open field in front of them and can make magic happen, but don’t count on them to catch a pass.

Some are quarterbacks (digital strategy agencies) that are capable of calling their own plays, and not waiting for a call from the sidelines. They know when to pass, when to spend, and when to call an audible and change a play.

The best of the best though, the MVPs, are the players that can catch, run, and pass. Maybe they are three players that are part of the same package. But they can not only be on the receiving end of plays but call them as well.

What kind of player would you want on your team? What kind of player would you want to be?