Beyond Advertising

Creating Value Through All Customer Touchpoints

Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Catharine Findiesen Hays

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119074090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

The fundamental relationships among brands, media, and people are being transformed, and just as we try to adapt, along comes a new disruption. Are you and your organization prepared to deal with today's unprecedented speed and scope of technological change?

Beyond Advertising provides a business transformation road map for an aspirational future, based on the insights of more than 200 of the world's most forward-thinking executives, innovators, and academics all grappling with today's unique challenges and opportunities.

This book offers a concrete set of principles, including The All Touchpoint Value Creation Model, designed to lift us out of reactive thinking and encourage the co-creation of a future better for business, better for people, and better for society. Actionable steps include:

• Holistically orchestrate and allocate resources across all touchpoints
• Redefine expectations of success to align for multi-win outcomes
• Provide every stakeholder at all touchpointsa R.A.V.E.S. standard of content: relevant and respectful, actionable, valuable, exceptional experiences, and a shareworthy story
• Develop all touchpoints to maximize the M.A.D.E.s value of context: the complete person, the features of the delivery platform, the dynamic environment, and synergies with other touchpoints

Part I
The Motivation for Change

If you want to predict the future of advertising, imagine throwing a bottle into the ocean… . Many pundits point out singular ‘futures’ in marketing and advertising by watching waves and musing about where the bottle is headed. This is useful in the short run. If you have a long-term objective it's more useful to focus on recognizing forces beyond the waves that will intersect in unexpected ways to shape, if not predictably determine, the future. Many forces shaping the future of advertising are well known, just as it's well known that tides move the ocean. The question is whether we understand their effect in shaping the future.

— Christopher Kenton, CEO and Founder, SocialRep (2012)

Yes, the changes that you are feeling are real. There is something bearing down on traditional approaches to advertising and marketing with unprecedented headwinds—the first visible indicator of the size and scope and speed of change that is to come. As the saying goes, we ain't seen nothing yet. Understand these changes, heed their import, and there is still time to make a course correction and thrive. Others are already doing so by harnessing these new forces, finding the new North Star that we present in Part II, and creating the more nimble craft and crew that we outline in Part III.

Why do we need to bother changing? What is the motivation for change? How are the five forces of change speeding up our world, disrupting traditional approaches and mindsets, and yet providing unprecedented horsepower to enable needed new approaches?

In Chapter 1 we delve into the five dramatic worldwide transformations that are impacting everything we thought we knew about how businesses and organizations communicate and connect with their customers (see Figure I.1). In brief, they are:

1. Rapid, Breakthrough Advances in Science and Technology
   What are these breakthroughs and how to harness their power?
2. Exploding, Redefined, and Enhanced Media Landscape
   How to allocate resources for the greatest return?
3. Skeptical and Empowered People
   How to attract and retain both connected and unconnected “talent” and “consumers”?
4. Fundamental Cultural, Social, Environmental, and Geopolitical Challenges
   What are the roles and responsibilities of brands as global challenges grow louder and more insistent, and what does this have to do with advertising?
5. Disruptive and Compelling Business and Revenue Models
   What are the means of survival when disruption is almost inevitable?

Figure I.1 The Five Forces of Change and Opportunity

Equally important for a Beyond Advertising future, these forces of change represent not only the source of actionable insights to be monitored and tapped, but also the opportunity set for contributing a net positive impact from innovative and purposeful brand touchpoint initiatives… . And the Most Important Tool for Harnessing the Future

The industry clings steadfastly to conceptual frameworks that in many cases date back 50 years or more. And the fact is that many of these frameworks are not just wrong but seriously misleading, so much so that they often lead to suboptimal outcomes, outcomes that are the very opposite of what the marketing team both wants and needs.

—Mark Tomblin, Chief Strategy Officer, TAXI (2013)

If you think you already know what you need to do, or as may be the case, what everyone else needs to do, then you will either read the book searching for confirmation of that point of view and/or reject anything we offer that doesn't reinforce your point of view. Based on our conversations with even the most forward-thinking people, we realize that entrenched thinking, or expecting affirmation, is a danger. So, before we explain the model that will address these challenges, we have a favor to ask. Actually this will be a requirement, since the new model that we outline in Part II won't mean much if you are still holding on to some old ways of thinking. Before you read the next part of this book, take a moment to suspend your current thinking, your mindsets, and those mental models that in all likelihood have worked so well for you for so many years.

In Chapter 2, we walk you through this process of tackling what we have found to be the single greatest impediment to change and transformation: mental models that worked in the past but must be challenged, given new realities to meet the future (see Figure I.2).

Figure I.2 Challenge Entrenched Mental Models

For example: we should probably stop referring to “consumers,” which implies a myopic mindset that defines “them” based on what and how much they consume. How would it change your mindset to think about “them” as “us” and about them as people whose lives we might enrich?

And that's just for starters.

Chapter 1
The Five Forces Driving the Need for Change

To prepare for [the] future, it is vital to understand that the greatest threat to progress is the inability to see around corners, the inability to respect our past and the unwillingness to realize that the way we succeeded is not the way we will succeed.

— Thomas Harrison, Chairman Emeritus, DAS at Omnicom Group (2012)

This Chapter Is about Inspiring You to Go Beyond Advertising. Why?

When we asked our Advertising 2020 contributors about what the future could and should hold—what was both necessary and possible—they scanned the horizon from their respective vantage points across disciplines and around the world and brought into focus an unprecedented convergence and interaction of extremely fast-moving trends, highly disruptive insights, and rapidly emerging capabilities that we will experience just a few years hence. A world that is becoming a reality in our daily lives, now.

As John M. Baker, CMO of Mirum Agency, notes, “The challenge with predicting the future is something science fiction writers talk about all of the time. Aside from the difficulty of getting it right, the hard part is balancing the consistency of human experience with the pace of change in technology” (2012). By asking what could and should advertising look like, we privileged aspiration over accuracy. By asking experts immersed in many different industries, we gathered together the viewpoints best suited to balance experience and change. The result: points of view that brought to life dramatic worldwide transformations that have occurred in recent years, impacting everything we once thought we knew about how enterprises communicate and connect with the customers they desire. Initially identified as game-changers for the world of marketing and advertising, these forces are rapidly and irrevocably reverberating across all roles in the executive ranks—especially as they are being redefined and realigned—and throughout their organizations, challenging entrenched assumptions, mindsets, and methodologies.

A power trio from Doremus—Evelyn Neill, executive creative director; Howard Sherman, president and CEO; and Mathew Don, chief innovation officer—paint an evocative image of where we're headed:

Technology is geography (it's one world)

Sustainability is efficiency (greener is cheaper)

Each person is empowered (freer to soar & freer to fall)

These obvious points capture a snapshot of wonders—the ubiquity of Internet-facilitated revolutions, the rise of efficient technology, and the high cost of fuel that is inspiring it. The rise of the individual voice thanks to the technological amplification of that voice. The crumbling of the paternal employer and blue chip safety—replaced by the empowered, mobile, entrepreneurial, global, untethered, and unprotected individual finding his or her way in the world. It's a marvelous, dangerous, adventuresome world. A veritable plugged-in Dickens novel (2012).

However, as we talk with executives in our Wharton Future of Advertising workshops and in Jerry's Wharton Fellows Programs, as well as with our students, there still seems to be an underestimation of just how these forces—and their interdependencies—will change established approaches. And, equally important, that they offer tremendous transformational capital to get at some of the most intractable issues facing business leaders today.

That's why the visionary thinking of our 200+ Advertising 2020 contributors is so essential. From them we distilled five key themes to help focus your thinking and spur you to take action (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Five Forces of Change to Motivate and Enable

And just for good measure, add to the transformative nature of each of these forces the exponential rate of change, the magnitude of change, and the complexity and interdependencies among the forces. As Thomas Burkhardt, global brand builder, puts it, “Following the mantra that ‘the future is already out there, it’s just not very evenly distributed' we are already seeing today what will be even more necessary and prevalent in at the beginning of the next decade” (2013).

Bob Greenberg, executive director of Advertising Week Experience (AWE) brings these ideas to life in “Two Letters from 2020:”

---

THE FUTURE

To: Brands and their agencies

From: A customer

I was born in 2000. I'm 20 now. Just graduated college and starting my own life. Voting in my first presidential election this year—psyched!

I've grown up with mobile devices.

You used to call them “smart-phones”—quaint!

I have one in my pocket as intelligent as the Watson computer that humiliated Brad Rutter on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Why Beyond Advertising is a Must-Read for CEOs, C-level Executives and Change Agents
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Who Should Read This Book?
• Part I: The Motivation for Change
• Part II: Toward a New Model Beyond Advertising
• Part III: What to Do Now to Get Ready for—and Co-create—the Future
• Appendix 1: The Backstory The Wharton Future of Advertising Program and the Advertising 2020 Project
• Appendix 2: Advertising 2020 Contributors
• Appendix 3: WFoA Global Advisory Board
• Appendix 4: Planning and Conducting an Experiment
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement