Ogilvy Lab Day
Friday 26 October 2012 was Ogilvy Lab Day, held at Ravensbourne next to the O2 Arena, London, UK.
I apologise if any details are incorrect (please notify me) as I am writing these notes from my hand written notes on the day. I can’t always read my own writing!
Ogilvy Lab Day has been running for 10 years (I think) and this was the first time they have held the event outside of Ogilvy. Another first, they allowed members of the public to attend . You had to apply and if they thought you matched their criteria you could attend.
The audience was comprised of media creatives, advertising people, marketing people and another group which they referred to as “coders”. Thanks but I’ll keep my software engineer title. Coder implies I don’t think, just do as I’m told. The reality is if you want anyone any good, you want a creative person, a software engineer/developer. Whether the use of the word “coder” is ignorance or deliberate I don’t know. Based on continued reference to coders through the day by various speakers I think they see the creativity completely on the media/advertising/marketing side and software people as merely people to do their bidding. I hope that isn’t the case. Given the increasing reliance on interactive marketing having good software people is and will increasingly become a must, even in the advertising industry.
The day starts with an introduction about education, DMIC (Digital Media Innovation Consultancy) and the relationship with Ogilvy and the future of the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund). Ogilvy and Ravensbourne have had a relationship for the past several years, which has benefited both parties, with Ogilvy hiring some talented graduates from Ravensbourne.
The room contained 3 large screens. One large screen at the front and smaller screens at each side. The event was filmed. Video clips were interspersed with the talks. The title of the day was “Storytelling”. As such, the day covered various topics and contained stories from two women during the day.
More people attended than could fit in the main room. Apparently these people could watch from monitors in another room. Many extra people crammed into the room and stood around the edges or sat on the floor. An A4 ring bound white paper (40 pages) was available on each seat – “Making magic, using logic”. This file described some of Ogilvy’s methods for creating their work. I was lucky enough to get a chair and white paper.
A couple of animated clips of points from Rory Sutherland’s Wiki Man book were shown on the screens.
Branded Entertainment
This talk was given by Doug Scott and Cody Hogarth.
Ideas can come from anywhere.
They demonstrated several examples from the 60s, 70s and 80s. One such example was a Flintstones cartoon promoting Winston’s Cigarettes from the 1960s. How times change!
This is called Brand Equity.
Fast forward to 2010 and it’s all about co-created content. This is Collaboration Equity.
- 77% of TV viewers watch with another device at the same time.
- 40% of viewers watch and surf the web at the same time.
- 68 million on mobile.
- 248 million on tablets by 2015.
The “Fear of Missing Out” (FoME) is driving all this.
2011/2012 is the tipping point. Content must work on multiple platforms. An example given is Coca Cola’s “content 2020” program.
The speakers observe that “creative excellence is going to be superceded by content excellence” and that “VC funds are redirected from tech to content”. This is a $1.8 trillion market.
Types of program
Digital – downloadable or streamed, Broadcast – traditional TV broadcasting, Event – related to an event (for example the Olympics), Property – or related to a property of some sort.
Example: Make It Possible (I have note next to this indicating Coke 2020). Entertainment first, advert second. It’s not even a balance.
Example: Red Bull content for brands. Started by paying for the content to be shown on networks. Now the content is so high quality and there is a demand from the networks for extreme sporting content Red Bull can charge for their content. There is never an explicit advert for their product, but the branding is all over it. Red Bull’s work is produced by their own in-house media company, Red Bull Media House. Red Bull also release their work on a dedicated You Tube channel.
We were shown an excellent extreme snowboarding video promo which I later found on the Red Bull Media House website. It doesn’t appear to be available anymore, but this page contains videos of similar quality for other sports.
Example:Carling Lager. Carling Black label football campaign.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etmzOOtNCIk
Example:Intel. The “vice magazine” creative project.
Example:Canon: “Project imagination”. This improved Canon’s marketshare.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hj85mQQqhs
Example:Mont Blanc watches. This was a compilation of 1 second videos to celebrate the beauty of a second.
Example:American Express. The Hidden Talent program. Sorry I couldn’t find any examples of this work.
The barrier for participants in these types of programs must be as low as possible and must be social and/or viral.
Branded Entertainment Assessment Model
Content strategy leads to brand wealth.
Story about IBM’s Watson computer which featured on the US TV show Jeopardy. By the end of this unusual appearance of a computer on a TV game show, the results were 21x revenue with 3x profit. An estimated $50m marketing value.
The talk now moves on to discuss BEAM, the Branded Entertainment Assessment Model, which is described in detail in the white paper.
A reference is made to mip.tv which can be seen at ogilvy.com/miptv
Case Study #1 Storytelling
This story is told by Pat Cadigan, a female American science fiction author. Pat’s story is hilarious and involves nearly dying from anaphylactic shock (twice), once from prescribed drugs and the second from a contraceptive vaginal sponge that failed to work properly.
Two quotes from this story stood out.
“Children are wonderful, where do all the mediocre adults come from?”
and
“Make a difference, don’t hate your life.”
Case Study #2, Ford and Channel 4
This case study is presented by Cody Hogarth and Rob Romsay.
The case study is about “The Endless Winter (A very British surf movie)”. The movie is about surfing in the UK and features two surfers spending a year (I think) travelling the UK in search of surf, travelling, sleeping and living in the Ford S-Max on the days they are away from their families surfing.
The Ford S-MAX is an SAV (Sports Activity Vehicle), not SUV and is aimed at people in their early 30s who have a family but are still active with sports. Surfing seemed an ideal vehicle for this, sorry I didn’t intend that pun. It’s a crowded market so they used content marketing to penetrate the market.
They created a website for The Endless Winter which garnered over a million views.
The aspriational product placement film was re-scripted to make it more like a “Channel 4” production. More graphics were added to the film to make it appeal more to non-surfers. This is known as surf-porn.
The film was 90 minutes in length. This was then edited into 3 films of 30 minutes so that it could be shown as a film or as three separate shows depending on the channel or time of day it was being shown.
2.7 million digital viewers.
14 million broadcast viewers.
167 million watches.
They also held 8 events (2 at beaches and 6 in cinemas).
The film won an award at a film festival.
The £3 million price was paid by Ford.
Case Study #3, Transmedia Skins
This case study talked about the TV series Skins and how different media were used in the creation of Skins and the overall strategy. Skins is not just a TV series.
The creation of Skins as well as involving the traditional TV script writers, actors, production crew etc, also involved a content design company, games and adverts.
The main problem is how to deal with multiple series of a TV show when sometimes the characters are different from series to series.
50% of views are not from broadcast TV. 4oD is also available as an app. Viewing also happens on iPad and XBox. Much of the viewing is time-shifted from the original broadcast time. Demographics are 16 to 34.
There are two timelines. The first timeline is the video/casting timeline. The second timeline is the offline timeline where they make the characters “live” using Facebook posts, tweets and interviews. This second timeline is independent of the video, although it has to be in sync and cannot reveal any spoilers for the video. To do this they hired extra staff to play the offline part of the characters and develop plot/storyline for the offline periods (between each series). They developed a custom software tool to do the job – a beats and stories tool.
Panel Discussion – The Virtuous Cirle of Transmedia Storytelling
The panel comprised Doug Scott (Ogilvy), Bruce Daisley (Twitter), Danielle Style (Tumblr), Ian Forrester (BBC R&D), Cait O’Riordan (BBC Olympics).
I only have rough notes for this.
BBC Olympics had:
57 million unique users
111 million streams of video
12 million video streams to mobile devices
Did not exceed BBC’s capacity planning despite the planning being guesswork (no baseline to work with – previous Olympics and Commonwealth games with less people having broadband, no reference point). All it all worked just fine! Result.
“Binders full of women” Obama campaign produces Romney misstep.
“Tidal wave of crap that comes at us”.
Tracking sentiment via social media during Olympics.
Viral is a dirty word
The speaker is Olivia Rzepczynski.
The talk starts with some examples of what constitute a hit. “overnight successes” to organised events to completely unplanned successes.
The Gangnam style hit by “PSY” is not an overnight hit. This is his 6th album.
Red Bull Stratos.
8 million view live.
60 million views.
490 million people viewed Charlie Bit My Finger. $500K earned by the family. Now pursuing a collaboration with Ragu.
Four percent of YouTube videos get over 100,000 views.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world.
5 Step Plan
- Have a plan of action
- Creative in context
- Optimise first
- Distribute and promote
- Measure what matters
1) Have a plan
You need to identify a trigger event for your video. What will cause this to be interesting?
You need to account for different screen sizes. 20% of YouTube video is watched on mobile devices.
Define your “post-play” interaction (PPI). This is the conversion. Examples might be signing up, watching a movie, downloading a white paper, etc.
2) Creative in context
What is the job to be done? (Clay Christensen will love that :-))
| Entertain | Brand reappraisal |
| Inform | Product acquisition |
| Support | Make lives easier |
Sources of video:
- Pro
- Pro-am
- Archive
- User generated
- Sponsored
3) Optimize
Work out the script beforehand.
All dialogue, stunts etc.
Tags, metadata, etc.
Channel naming (video SEO – VSEO)
4) Distribute and Promote
Distribution channels:
- Paid
- Owned
- Earned
You need to careful how you do this. This advert for Liquid Plumr went viral and even ended up on porn sites.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7fz0jpuLkM
5) Measure what matters
Measure conversions as well as likes/plays
Case Study/Panel Discussion
There was a case study but nothing I felt worthy of noting, followed by a panel discussion for which I have no notes. Can’t have been that interesting 🙂
Story Telling – Incredible Edible
The next speaker was an amazing lady from Todmorden Incredible Edible. She told the incredible story of how Todmorden went from an ordinary slightly run down town to a place covered in vibrant planters, disused land turned into viable allotments, crime reduced. And all of this done by volunteers spending time tending to plant beds, replacing weeds and flowers with edible food.
The talk was wild, funny and informative. The speaker (I think may be Pam Warhurst) was mad, passionate and crazy (in a good way). Brilliant. Talk about audience engagement. A great speaker at any event and a superb inspiration for what can be achieved in a community.
Food, creating a revolution.
“If you eat, you’re in”.
Every egg matters.
Vegetable tourism.
Green Route Map.
The power of small actions.
Sexy Little Numbers
The next talk was by Dmitri Maex, co-author of the book Sexy Little Numbers.
The subtitle is “How to grow your business using data you already have”.
You can also use free data. Free data is available in product reviews. For example look on Amazon at any product then look at the product reviews for that product. For me, I always read the best AND the worst reviews and include those as data points along with everything else I already know about a product.
Data Visualization, referencing Ed Tufte (giant in this field, Google him).
Useful guidelines:
Graphical Integrity
Data Ink (amount of ink must correspond to size of data)
Chart junk (don’t add stuff to a graphic that is decoration, that has no value)
Tag Clouds
Story Telling
An example is soso limited and the creators project.
Apparently a talent crunch is coming. There are not enough people with good, relevant statistics training. As such getting good analytics in the future may be hard.
“Everyone has got a plan until they get punched in the face”, Mike Tyson.
Agility. OODA loop, created by man that designed the F16 fighter.
Sense -> Orient -> Create -> Intent -> Sense -> Orient ->…
Data is used in the basement, but not in the boardroom. This needs to change.
Random notes:
New Data
Automation
Double Hub blog (sorry, I couldn’t find this)
attentionwizard.com
At the end of the day Dmitri signed and gave away a large pile of his books. I haven’t yet had time to read Dmitri’s book. When I do I’ll write it up. It looks really interesting.
Rory Sutherland
Rory was the last speaker of the day. He had been unwell prior to the talk but decided he was well enough to attend. He was talking about behavioural economics.
People are influenced by:
| Habituation | What I do |
| Contagion | What others do |
| Context | When and where I do |
| Social pressure |
Market research, problems.
Sunk cost bias. Innovators dilemma.
Things need to be consistent.
The framing of student loans in the UK.
If you call it a loan people feel like their is a nose around their neck for the rest of their life. This is wrong because you only pay the money back if your income exceeds a certain threshold and even then you pay it back as a small increase on your income tax. There is no penalty for late payment and no bank to foreclose on you. If you reframe the student loan as simply a small increase in your income tax until the money is repaid it is clear for any student from any background, wealthy or poor to see that they don’t have a noose around their neck and the offer is a good one.
Start with theories then use the data to validator or invalidate it.
Reference to Peter Drucker (he gets into so many talks!)
I have an MP3 of this talk, but at this time I don’t have permission to post it. When I do I’ll make the MP3 available. When I get more time I’ll provide detailed notes of Rory’s talk from the MP3.
As usual Rory’s talk was very funny and entertaining.
Conclusion
I’m very pleased I could attend Ogilvy Lab Day and delighted that I was allowed to attend. I’m not exactly a media type, whatever one of those is. I don’t use that term as an insult. It’s simply that I don’t know what jobs most of the other people in the room do. I guess most were marketing, sales, media creation (design, graphics, video, audio), etc. There were some software people there as well.
It was an interesting experience being there. At first I wondered why I had attended. I was watching these lovely videos (some of which I’ve managed to include here and others which I could not find to show you) and listening to these interesting talks about an industry I know nothing about. And I was thinking “this is great, really interesting, but why am I here? What can I learn? And can I help anyone else that is here”. Anyway as the day progressed the topics turned more towards things relevant to the software industry and I started to understand more of what is involved in the transmedia industry. I have a much better understanding and respect for the work these people do than I did before I arrived. It’s clear the people in this industry are there for the same reasons people enter the software industry. They enjoy it. They thrive on being creative and having a challenge.
It’s the same and it’s totally different. If that makes sense.
I really enjoyed it. It was a blast.
And I got to see the Millenium Dome, now christened the O2 Arena. Much smaller than I expected. I just don’t understand where the money went. A billion pounds (1.6 billion dollars) for that? You’ve got to be kidding.