CHAPTER 4
STOP HIRING MBAs
Your Business Needs Hybrids to Succeed
AS WE’VE SEEN, the belief that control is part of any marketing efforts today is truly an illusion. The creative economy relies on imagination that derives from day-to-day experience—and this is where MBA strategists are left in the dust. You can’t do what you haven’t yourself experienced. If you aren’t feeling the pulse of your industry, and see how it interacts with other industries, you’ll have a hard time moving beyond the conventional.
THE NEW DISRUPTION: INFORMATION JAMMING
Once it is realized that hierarchies are better left to the military, disruptive marketing can spread across a business organization at a rapid rate. We saw this in 2011 with the advent of growth hacking. If we put marketing on fast-forward, we need more than just data-driven measures to move the needle in an attention-starved economy. The new disruption is “information jamming.”
The expression is a riff on “radio jamming” and “culture jamming,” which are attempts to disrupt establishment processes by using subversive tactics like pirate radio and street art. Information jamming is the term used to describe how disruptive marketers look at the world moving forward. The core belief in information jamming is: Don’t hate the media because they won’t help carry your narrative to the desired audience. Do it yourself. Be your own media.
Information jamming is commonplace among the most radical of disruptive marketers, those who are pushing the envelope into areas—such as measuring the brain’s reactions to their messages—that many perceive as unethical or antitrustworthy in terms of customer confidence. David Brooks, my mentor and currently senior vice president of digital and social media strategy at Ogilvy & Mather, wonders if this is the right path for all situations. Regarding the study of customers’ neurological reactions to advertising’s messaging, he says,
I have not seen marketing tools that delve into mapping messages and behaviors to things like the amygdala or prefrontal cortex and how they are affected. I think marketing and advertising have always mapped their products to one’s feeling better or achieving more in some way. I think what digital technologies will increasingly allow for is “reading” how people are reacting and adjusting what the message is based on the emotional reaction. I expect a debate on this too as it’s an area that is clearly controversial.
Because of the controversial, attention-getting nature of this topic, some companies try to own the conversation. Yet this is a lesson the disruptive marketer understands very well. If you find parts of this book controversial, or if you are at odds with some of my predictions or points of view, then I’m doing the very job of disruptive marketer. I’m reaching you in ways that spark emotion and drive conversation.
For decades, brand messaging has tried to evoke “feel good” sentiments. But debate is at the heart of information jamming. Indeed, not everyone should agree with brand narratives. Yet, many brands have been reluctant to take a stand, afraid that they’ll alienate their customers. But if they don’t stand for something, they won’t stand for long.
Information jamming means stating a point of view strongly so as to attract attention, spark conversation, and encourage disagreement via content that is not overtly, consciously branded.
CASE IN POINT
Going Viral
The biggest project I have worked on that used information jamming was called “A Boy and His Atom.”
In 2012, while I was working for Ogilvy & Mather, David Brooks and I were brought into a meeting. This wasn’t unusual. If you work in the agency world, an average day is filled with meetings because they’re billable time. But this meeting was different.
We assumed that the creative directors for the IBM account wanted to make another TV ad, which had been the firm’s main driver for many years. But we were wrong. They were interested in hearing about how to make content go viral. They, like so many others, had realized that some of the biggest things on the web didn’t just happen organically; there were triggers to direct that content to an audience and then have it either spread like a wildfire or die on the vine.
The meeting was interesting. Unlike most meetings, the creative team didn’t want a social or digital strategy. They wanted research on the science of sharing. They wanted to know more about what induced people to share content with others. David and I hurried back to our desks, realizing that maybe this big one-hundred-plus-year-old company was finally going to do something different. We just had no clue how different it was going to be.
Earlier that year, the New York Times released research on “the psychology of sharing.” It was relevant, but to me, too linear an approach to the subject. The writers made it appear that if you identify the six personality types who share content, then you can have successful marketing campaigns. That approach was just too simplistic.
But I did find one nugget of information that others had overlooked. One of the groups identified in the article was dubbed “Hipster.” Not really your Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Capitol Hill (Seattle) hipster, but it certainly was the online hipster who shares cutting-edge content and who works in the creative industries. David and I dug a little deeper. Of those six types of people who share, it wasn’t just that hipsters shared cutting-edge content but also that the content was both cutting edge and unbranded.
In 2012, the social web was full of branded content, as it is today. Too many brands thought they could stamp their name all over it and people would pay attention. Of course, this is the conventional marketer’s arrogance. In all our digging, we couldn’t find an example of non-branded company content. Then David stumbled on what we would eventually present to the creative directors as a way to convince IBM not to overtly brand its viral undertaking.
In late August 2011, Chipotle released a film with Willie Nelson covering Coldplay’s song “The Scientist.” (How come so many innovative things happen in late August? Because many people are on vacation and aren’t paying as much attention to their devices, so it’s a good time to run tests that go under the popular radar.) “The Scientist” was pure synchronization genius, its content unbranded and inspiring. The only mention of Chipotle was at the end of the film, when it noted “chipotle. com.” Otherwise, a viewer would think he or she was watching an animation on sustainable farming.
The song was even available for download on iTunes, with all the proceeds donated to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation (which they had set up to create a more healthy and sustainable food supply). To date, that video has garnered over nine million views. But views tell only part of the story. Unbranded marketing has swept that organization, including an author series on its in-store cups, entitled “Cultivating Thought,” and an original Hulu program called “Farmed and Dangerous.” Even more important, Chipotle is a mainstay with Millennial audiences. It has a great product, and its unconventional approach to brand marketing is one of the main reasons why it’s been so successful.
Ultimately, IBM agreed and went with content that made the Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Smallest Movie.” As of this writing, “A Boy and His Atom” has had 5.6 million views. The movie mentions IBM Research only at the beginning and end; the rest of the 1:33 clip is about data storage. In 2013, the film was awarded several Cannes Lions awards for Best Branded Content.
I find it funny that David and I persuaded the Ogilvy creative directors to come up with unbranded content, and that the result won awards for best branded content! Maybe it’s because people actually paid attention to it.
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If you want branded content to travel further in the form of shares, unbrand it as much as possible. #disruptivefm
6:35 PM—21 Feb 2016
If I could go back in time, would I change anything about that project? Yes, I would have used data about the lack of women in tech fields and the difficulty of recruiting women into science and technology positions. And I would have retitled the film “A Girl and Her Atom.” Had IBM gone this route, I think the film would have captured the concerns about the scarcity of women in technical fields, and the company would have been seen as a leader in this area.
WHY MFAs ARE STRONGER MARKETERS THAN MBAs
Apple never invested heavily in marketing, preferring to build great products and save money on fixed costs. Then something strange happened: Samsung phones, which feature a different operating system (the open-source and Google-owned Android) and a bigger screen, began to pick up market share in 2013. Soon, as Samsung was seeing major adoption across various markets, Apple moved toward television commercials in an attempt to differentiate its products from the competition. One ad, at the end of 2014, showed the iPhone not simply as a phone but instead as a mobile creative tool featuring a user who was an artist. Shortly after this ad aired, Apple reported that iPhone sales boomed, while Samsung reported flat sales or marginal growth.
Creativity in the new economy isn’t simply about selling; it’s also about how you can stand out from the pack. How does a brand survive in a world filled with copycats, reverse-engineered products, and free intellectual property and still be relevant? Much of this answer is going to come from a new way of thinking that involves art, science, math, psychology, and media. It doesn’t align with the resounding corporate or higher education culture that says MBAs are the best qualified to occupy marketing roles.
Richard Florida explains what the creative economy means from a commodity-meets-people perspective:
Creativity is multidimensional and comes in many mutually reinforcing forms. It is a mistake to think, as many do, that creativity can be reduced to the creation of new blockbuster inventions, new products and new firms. In today’s economy, creativity is pervasive and ongoing: We constantly revise and enhance every product, process and activity imaginable, and fit them together in new ways. Moreover, technological and economic creativity are nurtured by and interact with artistic and cultural creativity. This kind of interplay is evident in the rise of whole new industries from computer graphics to digital music and animation. Creativity also requires a social and economic environment that can nurture its many forms. Max Weber said long ago that the Protestant ethic provided the underlying spirit of thrift, hard work and efficiency that motivated the rise of early capitalism. In similar fashion, the shared commitment to the creative spirit in its many, varied manifestations underpins the new creative ethos that powers our age.
The majority of advanced marketing positions are always advertised with the phrase “MBA preferred.” While this made sense for much of the knowledge economy, it makes less sense in the creative economy. Once upon a time, the MBA was the shining beacon of the corporate hierarchy. Today, more and more that beacon is lit by the creative types who come from graphic design, copywriting, video production, and photography. Alas, the MBA is a dated badge of honor, while the creative types (many of whom hold another kind of master’s degree, an MFA) are the darlings of the workplace.
What caused this shift? For one thing, MBAs are no longer different from other people in the work environment. They might not all have coding or data experience, and they might not know how to design. Many might not even know how to manipulate media to their advantage. Some aspire to strategic roles, but they don’t want to execute. Laura Stack, author of Execution Is the Strategy, explains that when MBAs want only to strategize, both the organization and the individual fail. Stack says that “pie in the sky” strategies created by people with no boots on the ground won’t succeed as often as strategies created by those who can execute for desirable results from end to end.
Geoffrey Colon |
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Execution is the strategy. Hire people who can think and do. You’ll see more results. #disruptivefm
6:36 PM—21 Feb 2016
The disruptive marketer isn’t just a 50/50 analytical/creative hybrid; he or she is also a strategy/execution/analyst expert who can do it all. And creativity is an essential skill for these roles. That’s why an MFA can be more powerful than an MBA, especially if that MFA learns code!
The exciting new world of the creative economy is just the tip of a very large economic opportunity. Creatives possess new skills. And businesses want more of them because creativity isn’t just a nice discipline to add to a team; it’s a matter of economic life or death.
Complex, challenging creative work is difficult to automate or outsource cheaply. Indeed, creativity is what transforms utilitarian, indistinctive products like Windows 10 into devices that people actually need, love, and use creatively. Those who can transform creativity into actual disruptive execution have the potential to be the future leaders of this new world. More than ever, those with imagination are outpacing those with process.
Technology is driving this boom. Smartphones, cheap sensors, and cloud computing have enabled a raft of new Internet-connected services that are infiltrating the most tech-averse industries: Uber is roiling the taxi universe; Airbnb is disrupting the hotels industry; Spotify has upended the music MP3 model after Napster upended the compact disc model.
In commerce, disruption is the norm and conventional brand marketing approaches won’t work anymore. A business that will upend a legacy titan in the next five years probably hasn’t even been born yet. But when it is, it will come from the mind of a new creative, possibly an outsider to marketing—maybe a musician or an artist who dabbles in building iOS apps.
It won’t be someone armed strictly with an MBA.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING
Let’s think about how creative fields like fashion, music, and pop culture are overhauling brand marketing. Recently I’ve seen many articles and blogs about influencer marketing, brand advocacy, word-of-mouth marketing, and content marketing that make it appear as though these are new disciplines within marketing. Many of those who are preaching from their soapboxes are old-school marketers who only recently crossed the digital divide. It reminds me of all the newbies who think EDM (electronic dance music) was created in 2008.
Brand and marketing creativity is not new. In fact, much of it is rooted in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, where one person would turn to another for goods or services. Things were so personal that rather than exchange money, most transfers were based on creative barter. The more good word of mouth a merchant could generate about his service or goods, the more able he was to feed his family.
I ran my first word-of-mouth campaign in 2003, for Red Bull Music Academy. This was prior to today’s social ecosystem, and so it contained no measurements and met no ROI demands. Yet, Red Bull knew that if you excited a niche audience creatively, its members would tell their friends.
Fast-forward to today. We’re in the emerging era of what author Joshua Klein has labeled “reputation economics.” Essentially, according to Klein, your most powerful asset is who you know, not what you own. A combination of factors that couldn’t have existed in ancient societies, or even in much of the twentieth century, gives us the ability to level the playing field, get a better idea of customers, and personalize our services while also scaling those services to a global marketplace.
For example, open-source software development is rewarded largely by peer recognition, since there is no financial reward. The desire to enhance one’s reputation is the key mechanism for getting involved in such projects. Will the same lure be the case for marketing participation by customers?
The New Normal of Brand Marketing
Marketers are no longer in the advertising business; we are in the relationship business. How do we know what people are feeling before we even speak to them about a solution? In this new norm, listening—not dialoguing—is the barometer. Listening gives us an indicator of what people are feeling. These days, if you want to go out of business, keep having one-way discussions about using advertising. If you want to sustain long-term success, however, cultivate relationships by listening first and then having a dialogue in which the other party’s emotional investment takes precedence.
Marketers need to spend less time advertising to their customers and more time connecting with them, growing with them, and listening to them. The path to this relationship is creativity, not knowledge. No amount of knowledge can help you in this situation.
While many companies and agencies rush to hire social media strategists, digital experts, and chief content officers, forward-thinking organizations are building influencer programs or hiring chief influencers. Some employees are simply becoming influencers without a mandate because of the abundance of publishing platforms and networks at their service, like LinkedIn, Pulse, and Medium. These programs are a combination of diagnosing customer feedback mixed with amplifying company insights in a robust, ongoing dialogue. Several of these influencers have a mixture of skills including:
Product and competitive product awareness
Awareness of technology evolution
Product research and development
People relations
Thought leadership
Controversial points of view
The ability to connect and listen to customers and other influencers directly within a line of business may seem antithetical to our long-held perspective on brand marketing. Yet this creative destruction uses two key elements to help customers learn and make decisions: debate and ongoing conversation.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the qualities needed to create these new programs. In the rush to be on trend with what they consider new, many organizations try to establish a foothold in a discipline in which they don’t have much investment, or they will shape it to have the look and feel of an advertising campaign. We know how successful that will be.
SEEK OUT CREATIVE HYBRIDS
To navigate this new, creative economic growth territory, the best way to be a marketer is to not be a marketer at all. Instead, it is to be a media company. For years, media companies struggled with digital formats, but lately they seem to be crossing the chasm. The New York Times, Washington Post, and even Condé Nast have embraced new ways of thinking. Armed with content, data, and creative talent, BuzzFeed, Vox, Mashable, and many new media outlets have successfully pushed the envelope, reimagining what media should look and feel like. And the titans have perked up. As of July 30, 2015, NBC/Universal was heavily invested in both BuzzFeed and Vox. Even big media legacies realize the power of data-driven, creative-hybrid outlets.
While brands continue to navigate this new world, it’s important to note who is on your team and how the team handles working in this environment. So, ditch the “MBAs preferred” approach to marketing and embrace the 50/50 creative-hybrid approach. You can start by building on and improving these seven personality traits for your team:
1. Listening skills. Listening is essential to future success. To truly find out what’s interesting in the world and how it links with other things, you need to possess amazing listening skills. This flies in the face of conventional marketing, which has always believed in amplification. Yet as we know, those who do all the talking cannot stay silent long enough to listen and learn. Know when to shut up.
2. Curiosity. Rather than trying to find something interesting in everything, pay attention to the things you genuinely find interesting—no matter how obscure, silly, embarrassing, or irrelevant they may seem. Because when you are curious, you bring your whole self to whatever you’re doing. You give it your full attention, and you have the energy and persistence you need to do something innovative.
CASE IN POINT
Think Like Da Vinci
You can be curious about more than one thing at a time. Author and entrepreneur Frans Johansson has dubbed this “The Medici Effect”: “When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas.” Leonardo da Vinci is often revered as a universal genius, equally at home in the arts, sciences, and engineering. Steve Jobs and the late, great advertising guru David Ogilvy are frequently thought of in the same way.
In da Vinci’s time, the conventional separations between disciplines did not exist, as they currently do in corporate or academic environments. Universalism was an attribute common to all gifted persons of the Renaissance, not unique to Leonardo. Sort of reminds you of a liberal arts education, right?
da Vinci moved easily from science to art and back again. Only in a culture in which there were no rigid boundaries could this take place. This is the world where the generalist now lives in business.
Alas, there are too many people in positions of power who don’t like the lack of single-minded focus that’s prevalent among the “butterfly minds” of today’s Internet generation. But perhaps this is not a hideous modern aberration so much as a return to the world of Leonardo da Vinci, where it was considered normal, even admirable, to flit from one thing to another. da Vinci’s notebooks are full of half-baked projects, such as flying machines that literally never got off the ground. But nobody seemed to get upset about that.
Geoffrey Colon |
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Curiosity is the number one trait in a disruptive marketer. Hire people who ask “what if?” #disruptivefm
6:37 PM—21 Feb 2016
3. Emotional Intelligence. I believe that a greater awareness of emotional intelligence (EI) will lead to more women taking positions of power in marketing and in embracing disruptive marketing. Some industries are becoming so competitive that effective marketing is no longer a numbers game. Instead, it is about connecting with customers and clients in meaningful ways. This connecting entails building friendships with your target audience so they adopt your culture. Those entrepreneurs who can successfully walk in the shoes of their customers almost always create a foolproof model for success and longevity.
4. Creativity. Steve Jobs famously said,
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.
In the creative economy, every profession requires some degree of creativity. Creativity is taking preexisting elements and integrating them in a way that has never been done before, with the aim of improving conditions. Indeed, some may argue that creativity is the source of all innovations and improvements. And how you build that creative vision is through experience. How you gain experience is by doing as many different things as possible. You never know how those experiences will influence the future.
5. Abundance. In the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson counts the ways that giving away content can help boost your business and build your tribe. He argues that many individuals under the age of thirty aren’t used to paying for digital information when they know they can find it somewhere online for free. By tapping into this demand for getting something for nothing, you can attract and maintain a loyal audience while building premiums as you go. Some feel this flies in the face of monetization. Again, a growth hacker builds via customer experience, whereas an MBA-trained brand marketer uses monetization. The former is thinking about the customer; the latter is thinking simply about the company.
6. Story making. Marketing is no longer about corporate storytelling, mind tactics, manipulation, or persuasion. It’s about inspiring your audience to tell a story by using media in new and different forms. Ask yourself, “What story does my business allow others to build or make? How do they help translate a narrative with their POV to others?”
7. Generalist experts. If you’re a marketer and still don’t understand how paid social targeting works, you should make an effort to improve your knowledge and skill set in this area. If you’re good with pay-per-click advertising and data, but you don’t understand the creative process that goes into producing video, creating imagery, or design, make an effort to learn more about how creative content is actually made. Don’t be an expert in one area. Be an expert in both.
In 2013, during a Twitter chat session, I noted that social marketing and search marketing were rapidly fusing. When people asked why I thought this, I noted two converging data patterns:
1. Search advertising is set up around keyword and segmentation targeting to serve your ad. When a user clicks on an ad because she feels it’s relevant, the advertiser tracks convergence and the network the ad is served on builds revenue. Facebook and Twitter are similar to Google and Bing in these areas.
2. Ultimately, social networks are integrating search into their offerings to create a frictionless user experience. For example, I might not want to toggle between two applications in order to Google something while I am on Facebook or Twitter if I can perform the search right there. Plus, in the near future, search options may center on interests, not keywords.
For those in the marketing profession, it’s not enough anymore to be “just a creative” or “just a data scientist.” You now have to be a generalist. For a number of professions, the world is converging. Even education has adopted hybrid modeling, where students learn more because they choose subject matters to learn on their own—and this kind of “active learning” results in better test performance and what is known as subject mastery (or subject knowledge).
The key to success lies in understanding how all these technologies intersect with creativity. You can’t be a subject-matter expert in only one field. You have to be a generalist. You have to be a hybrid professional.
My wife, Allison, said it best when she entered the world of digital video content after working in television production for ten years. When I asked her why some people who had twenty years’ experience were being passed over for an open senior role at her company, she said, “They are looking for a preditor hybrid for that position.”
“A what? Sounds like a machine from The Terminator. How does that help in digital content?”
She laughed. “Not a predator, a preditor, a ‘Producer/Editor.’”
What she meant by this was someone who can shoot, produce, and edit content. The reason they had a hard time finding someone is many candidates with the execution experience don’t have the managerial skills, while many of those with managerial experience don’t have the execution skills!
There’s a reason hybrid roles are picking up steam. Companies always want to cut costs, but they also want people who understand entire processes so as to create efficiencies. These new hybrid roles offer agility at the same time as they peel away layers of bureaucracy (freeing up more space for creative thinking!).
In conventional marketing, you may have hired one person to do search engine optimization, another to do search engine marketing, another to build and design a website, another to do social media, and yet another to do inbound marketing. A disruptive marketer is a hybrid professional who can do all those things while analyzing web and social analytics to figure out what landing page has the highest bounce rate and what video to shoot for Snapchat tomorrow.
The disruptive marketer figures out what tools work best in any particular scenario. It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s a matter of what if? In an era in which creativity may be the main motivation to provide customer connection, we need more tinkerers. Is the 1950s “organization man” finally behind us? Bruce Nussbaum, author of Creative Intelligence, thinks so. “The organization man is dead,” he writes. “He thrived when smokestack America thrived. When airlines, banks and telephone companies were highly regulated. When Japan built shoddy cars. When computers were huge and an apple was something you ate.” Good riddance.