City of Paris

A marketing consultant came to one of the companies I work with, and she recommended that we think green—make our products recyclable, etc. My initial reaction was that being green—whatever that means and encompasses—is now the price of entry for any business. For as long as I can remember, recycling has been a part of agency life. And I have been bragging to friends about the fact that the solar voltaic cells on our roof generate most if not all of the electricity we use at home.

But exactly what does thinking green mean in business and, more specifically, in marketing and branding? There is a fair amount of good reading out there. Here are a few thought starters.

Sustainability and corporate social responsibility are broader, and more meaningful, frameworks for thinking about a company’s interaction with its stakeholders, society and the environment. Beyond conservation of resources, companies must begin to think responsibly about their impact on behavior and culture. This concept is summarized nicely in a Bloomberg Businessweek article, Finding Promise in Sustainability 2.0 and in a McKinsey Quarterly article, When sustainability means more than ‘green’.

So how do we turn these ideas into practice? Or, where do corporate social responsibility and brand communications come together? Moving Up to Sustainability 2.0: Five Trends Shaping the New Agenda offers some good insights and importantly connects corporate social responsibility to social media, making a strong case about the convergence of the two. “Where social media has the biggest impact is in enabling greater openness and transparency between brands and people,” writes author Becky Willan. Well said.

There seems to be a fair amount of hoopla around Apple’s decision not to support Flash on the iPad. So I asked my friend Mark Wrabel of Low Res Theater to share his perspective on some of the issues. Low Res Theater specializes in interactive healthcare communications.

How much do you rely on Flash for your work?
About half of the projects I’ve been building lately are Flash-based.

Does the fact that Flash will not be universally supported, at least for now, get in the way of your work?
No. The projects I’m working on are more custom builds for presentations and trade show booths, not so much over the Internet.

Is Flash overrated?
Not really. Flash is a fine product. In the right programmer’s hands it can do a lot of wonderful stuff.

Where/when does Flash excel?
Flash can be used by newbies and hardcore programmers alike. Naturally, with more programming knowledge, you can build a more robust product. And there is a niche industry for selling pre-built Flash content—much like stock images for designers.

Are there programming tools on the horizon that can do the same job—and perhaps better?
HTML5. The big issue with Flash has to do with browsers and the Web in general relying on one proprietary plug-in to run all these things. If something happened and Adobe killed Flash tomorrow, much of the Internet would break. You can see this when you surf on an iPhone. The HTML5 standard will replace Flash eventually, along with other things like Java and Silverlight. And HTML5 will have the features currently provided by the plug-ins.

What do you think are the ramifications for Apple? For Adobe?
HTML5 is a couple years behind in development, so I’m sure Steve Jobs is on the phone daily, yelling at people to speed it up. If Adobe is smart, they are already planning to integrate their tools into the HTML5 world in the near future and are seeing the demise of Flash in three to five years and either planning on morphing that into something else or phasing it out. A lot can happen in three years. Maybe something else will pop up that nobody saw coming and wipe out all of these things with something totally new.

Will this fuel the PC vs. Mac divide?
No. It’s not a Mac/PC issue. (Besides, Macs and PCs are getting closer all the time.) The plug-ins and HTML5 will work on both. What it is doing is pissing off developers who are losing money by things not being able to be seen on iPhone or iPad devices or by having to build a duplicate version in Apple-approved code.

If You’re Curious
How the iPad is already reshaping the Internet (without Flash)
Adobe drops effort to get Flash into Apple’s key products
Adobe vs. Apple war generates rage, Facebook group

The news media is all abuzz this week about Twitter’s revenue model and the launch of “promoted tweets.” Advertising Age, Financial Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are just a few of the national business publications that covered the story. But Twitter came up with more than a revenue model that is based, at least in part, on advertising. With a new metric called “resonance” Twitter is, to my mind, beginning to frame how the effectiveness of social media for marketers can be measured and how we can begin to understand what’s important in designing social media campaigns. Essentially, Twitter’s advertising model allows brands to promote tweets by placing them on top of a Twitter search result, and as with other paid search results, there will be visual identifiers to separate promoted tweets. More important, the new metric measures how well a particular tweet resonates with the audience—the number of people who see the post, pass it on to others, reply to it or take any other action such as clicking on the links. If a tweet falls below a designated resonance score, it will no longer be displayed as a promoted post. The brand is not charged, but by the same token users will not see irrelevant content in their Twitter stream.

There are many ramifications of this concept of resonance in Twitter advertising. Customers will applaud the removal of messages they don’t find useful. Marketers will be forced to think before they simply dispense information. To me, it is an advertising model that is tailored to the social media context and not just borrowed or adapted from print à la the early days of display advertising.

The Altimeter Group, whose founder Charlene Li wrote the social media primer Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, posted what I believe is the best explanation and analysis of “promoted tweets.” I consider it a must-read for all marketers.

Forrester Research recently published a report called “The Future of Agency Relationships” and it was featured in Advertising Age this past week. In essence, it is advocating that clients take more of a leadership role in defining and shaping the agency’s role and service offerings, and offers some good ideas, including reaching out beyond the agency world to companies like Google, Sapient and Akamai Technologies. It pointedly criticizes agencies for the bundling of previously unbundled services such as PR, interactive, media and direct marketing and the resulting “jacks of all trades,” and the tendency of agencies to “tell you they can build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.” Also at issue is getting the “slew of shops managing their businesses … to play nice together.” “Not only does the client have to lead the relationship, but they also have to force collaboration,” as one agency CEO puts it. One of the key driving forces of the changes is of course new media. Do I hear the polite reprimand of agencies that have not gotten themselves up to speed on social media?

Personally I think it is a great idea for clients to take a more proactive role in shaping their relationship with agencies and, even more important, in integrating the service offerings from different agencies. The client who really understands his/her business and has a clear idea of what each agency can and needs to contribute to the communication mix will not have to “force collaboration” because that clarity of vision will replace needless jockeying to figure out specific roles. A lot of confusion and inefficiencies happen when the client is not clear on who does what, which leads to inappropriate assignments and sets up the entree to the blame game.

More important, agencies should take these rumblings, largely from the client side, as a cue to rethink their business. Why is it that so many technology-savvy digital agencies continue to rely more or less exclusively on traditional agencies for content? And what is stopping traditional agencies from bringing in new media talent—both technical and strategic—to lead instead of be led? With the way we work today, accessing top talent is much easier than it was not too long ago. And why not take the advice Forrester Research is giving clients for ourselves? Let’s redefine our role before it gets redefined for us. Let’s embrace these alternate service providers and integrate their offerings into what we do. Forrester also advocates “incentive-based compensation.” Why not? And I know many agency principals will respond with a wry chuckle to this one: “Create a productive relationship with procurement.”

Monday’s cover story in Advertising Age, “Bud’s Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand” caused quite a buzz at ad agencies. The article squarely blames the consulting firm for driving the campaign that resulted in Bud Light’s first-ever full-year sales decline in history. The “Drinkability” campaign focused on process and product attributes (less watery than Coors, less bitter than Miller Lite, and you can drink a lot of it), a change in direction from the previous emotional appeals. One agency principal commented that one fundamental problem is that consultants are good at linear thinking and process, which tends to ignore the emotional component so critical in advertising.

What a great example this is for healthcare marketers. I chuckle at the reference to product attributes as I think about my frequent discussions with product managers and my attempts to persuade them to whittle down their list of “unique” features or to make their “single most important message” truly singular. Some might say that marketing to professionals about products they use in a work setting (e.g., healthcare) is different from consumer marketing. I say that these are the people who forget that we are dealing with human beings, not decision-making algorithms on a computer.

As to the role of consultants, most of us in the agency business have experienced run-ins with some bright star from a big-name consulting firm who comments, by invitation or not, on communication strategy and creative concepts. Most of these comments add up to no more than brief disruptions and annoyances. In those instances when the agency does find itself heading toward a subordinate role in communication strategy, then it’s time to look inward to see if the agency team is falling short on strategy and original ideas. If the agency has been delivering consistently, then there may be other factors such as the communication between agency and client, or the introduction of a powerful newcomer, as in the arrival of a new CEO (an Anheuser-Busch heir) in the case of Bud Light. It seems that at the end of the day, it all comes back to humans and their interactions.

Depending on whom you talk to, corporate identity can be very exciting, as it is often to an entrepreneur who is creating a new company, very restrictive (to someone who doesn’t like to follow rules but who happens to work in a big corporation) or a strategic component within an overall communication program, which to me is a pragmatic way of looking at it. And what I mean by pragmatism is that we need to look at corporate identity in light of the role it plays in helping a company accomplish its business goals and not how it provides an outlet for a company stakeholder’s creativity or self-expression. With this perspective, then, the process of building and maintaining a corporate identity becomes more objective and rational. The emotions that we are concerned about are those of our audience, not of internal stakeholders involved in the process. Suddenly, it’s easier to make decisions, because making choices based on well-defined, business-focused criteria is far simpler than figuring out who likes what or reconciling personal preferences. With this in mind, I would like to offer some basic rules I’ve learned to follow.

Consistency trumps creativity. I often counsel clients that the discipline and consistency with which a corporate identity system is implemented are far more important than how unique, original or visually distinctive it is. Standing out from the crowd is not bad, but consistently communicating the identity that a business has carefully crafted will ultimately create the desired image—one that builds value for the business.

Keep it simple. Sometimes the corporate identity “policy” goes overboard with complex rules that indeed are restrictive but, even worse, difficult to follow. For those of us who are in a position to write style guides, we need to remember that corporate identity is implemented at many levels, from the specialists in marketing and communications departments to the many business disciplines that communicate with customers, prospective employees and corporate partners on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find more followers when the rules are easy to understand.

Beyond the visual identity. I always like to quote Clive Chajet, who speaks of the brand as the sum total of a corporation’s conversation with society. Corporate identity goes beyond logos, typography, colors, grids and all those graphic parameters, to the way your receptionist (or computer voice) answers the telephone, office décor, attire, business practices, interaction with the community, etc.

If you’re interested in reading more about corporate identity and related topics, here are two of my favorites: Marketing Aesthetics by Alex Simonson and Bernd H. Schmitt and Image by Design: From Corporate Vision to Business Reality by Clive Chajet.