Propagation Planning

How is your Portuguese? My interview with a Brazilian Planner

My Portuguese is not very good, even with that hurdle I was recently interviewed by Carlos Vilela, a Strategic Planner at Tom Comunicação in Brazil. The above chart shows the hits that this Blog has recieved from Brazil in the last 2 months and I thought the interview would be great for those readers.

Carlos runs a wonderful Blog about Culture and Marketing and has interviewed many influencial American strategic planners and translated those interviews back into Portuguese. I encourage you to visit his Blog and I'll share the interview for you in English:

1. How did you get started? Can you tell us a brief summary of your career?
I interned at JWT Los Angeles on Power Ranger Action Figures and I fell in love with advertising. Later I moved to San Francisco and worked in account planning at Publicis & Hal Riney and then switched to Tattoo Brand Consulting where I worked on brands like GAP, Glamour Magazine and Pepsi. The difference between advertising and brand consulting was the deliverable and for me I like a tangible part of culture as the end result of all my hard work.

2. How did you get into Propagation Planning?
I wanted to know what the next thing was after Connection Planning. I went to a conference at MIT called The Futures of Entertainment and interacted with some great minds and learned about earning media before you had to pay for media.

3. Give us a brief explanation on what Propagation Planning is about for those who don’t know.
Propagation Planning is a form of communications planning. It asks strategist to plan not for the people that you reach, but for the people that they reach. It asks the strategist to think about ways the message will spread after the viewer interacts with it. It asks the strategist to think about ways to earn media before you pay for media. It asks the strategist to start with the brand advocates and give them social currency to share upcoming information and buzz before it goes to the masses.

4. What's the role of propagation planning in advertising?
If your agency is an Agency of Record your client likely relies on you to help them with communications planning, organizing the promotions calendar and the initiatives that get supported with media. Media Planning is about Reach and Frequency. Connection Planning is about Relevance and Context. Propagation Planning is about Buzz and Advocacy.

5. What is its connection with regular account planning and what is its role on the planning structure on an agency?
Propagation Planning started at Naked Communications and they spun off a social media agency in Sydney called The Population that actually employs propagation planners. I think Propagation Planning is a tool that Account Planners can use when they are planning the annual communication plan for their client and when they write briefs. At this point it is a philosophy at most agencies and not a department, but that could change one day.

6. What do you do in your daily job as a planner?
I have all the typical planner responsibilities from writing briefs, running research projects and performing competitive audits. My agency also gives me time to run my Blog, which allows me to think beyond my day job and help influence where our industry is going. I also seek out vendor partners that can help the agency get more involved with Propagation Planning.

7. How do you see the future of this discipline?
Propagation Planning will be more impactful as clients integrate social media into their marketing plans. It allows for brands to have both Awareness driving plans and Buzz driving plans. The future of the discipline will be a hybrid of digital and video production, strategic planning and copy writing and these individuals will manage communities of brand advocates through Blogs, Facebook, Ning and/or Twitter. They will seed story-lines with advocates, engage in brand dialog through campaign narratives and crowd source insight that will impact product innovation for future campaigns.

8. How do you think brands can connect to people?
Often brands market to people based on what the company wants to sell, not what people want to buy. I think brands will start to walk away from traditional NPD processes and ask advocates to help them create a better experience (i.e. My Starbucks Idea). If consumers are the new brand managers they need a place where they can voice their ideas and change the brand to better serve them. Tools like Twitter and Crowd Sourcing will help brands enter this world.

9. What are your thoughts emotional connections between people and brands?
At my agency, 22squared, we believe that brands need to treat their customers like friends. This means that brands must have chemistry, remain authentic, act transparent, spend quality time, share a point of view and inspire each other. You can read more on this here: http://www.slideshare.net/brandonmurphy/the-friendship-model

10. Do you believe in brand loyalty? What should a brand do to get to this point?
Yes, brand loyalty does exist and we call it brand advocacy at my agency. Advocates buy more, talk more and recommend more. Brands need to measure the number of advocates they have minus the number of critics they have and keep tracking those numbers. They need to engage their advocates in their decisions and run the company for them (not for themselves).

11. In your opinion, how a planner should deal with the other 3 P's of Marketing, besides Promotion?
Price - Find a market that will pay more for your product. One of our clients, Florida's Natural Orange Juice discovered that Dubai will pay premium prices for orange juice. Fosters discovered that America will drink a beer that Australians won't touch.

Place - I like the idea of taking media to places where the consumer is, not where media is traditionally sold. Planners can also craft a better brand story which helps the sales team open new distribution channels.

Product - Planners have a duty to bring new product ideas to their clients and base those ideas in consumer insight.

12. Are you into marketing metrics? How do they aggregate to your work as a planner? How do you measure the effects of propagation?
I think all agencies are being forced to discover metrics that will help them do good work and achieve communication objectives. For Propagation Planning I like to use a free tool called Social Mention.com or pay for social media monitoring from companies like Radian 6 or Collective Intellect. You can also use partners like New Media Solutions or Neighborhood America to help seed and monitor propagation campaigns.

13. What do you know about brazilian advertising (we know you´ve been here) and what do you think of it?
Actually I have never been to Brazil but I know the APG is growing there. One of my favorite campaigns is by Santa Clara Nitro, "Is it possible to measure 12-million-people town's happiness?" The 'Is Rio Happy?' campaign leveraged a spectacular bill board in Rio, online and mobile interaction to update a happy face that changes based on the mood of the people. I also happen to know that W+K San Paulo has a fireman's pole in the agency and I'm very jealous of that! I think the next group of great planners will come from Brazil and Sweden. The planners that I have met from Brazil are great storytellers which will make them strong transmedia planners.

14. Who are your references (idols, mentors, authors, friends, other planners, etc) on the issue?
Faris Yakob (McCann), Julian Coles (The Population), Ian Schafer (Deep Focus), Ivan Askwith (Big Spaceship), Jim Elms (Grey), Henry Jenkins (MIT) and Ben Malbon (BBH Labs). Most of these people are not trained Account Planners but they are brilliant media, digital or storytelling strategists.

15. Last, but no least, what practical tip would you give to the planners that are starting their carreers right now?
Blog and Tweet. It's very important to share your ideas and inspire others at your agency on what good creative is. As a planner people look for you to be infected with culture and blazing a progressive trail so the agency can remain relevant and marketable. Post comments on other blogs to show your interest and extend your network beyond Brazil.

TNT uses your info in Leverage campaign

My wife sent me this link for a video that incorporates a photo of me and an inside joke about me not trusting the Tuxedo measurements she took of me (I was sure my waistline was smaller).

Bud Caddell who writes the Blog, 'What Consumes Me' wrote a post on Spreadable Media talking about people having a personal stake in things that they spread:

As Henry [Jenkins] points out, people do not spread things to spread them. Like so much social communication, it has a social function, both phatic and generous. It operates within a gift economy, where value is generated in transference, not purchase.

Further, as I’ve endlessly pointed out, if you let people mess with your content, it gets more spreadable - because people suddenly have a personal stake in its propagation - this insight was at the heart of propagation planning, learning that we took from the Sony work and applied to the digital activation of the Cadbury’s Gorilla campaign, the digital longevity of which was driven entirely by remix culture. 

I think this is a great example of people wanting to spread a campaign and integrating personal relationships and information into the message itself.

Razorfish Social Media Influence Report

"Traditional top-down branding will become increasingly impotent as Social Media grows." This was the quote that stood out in the new Razorfish Social Media Influence report on page 9.

They go on to say, "Consumers continue to rely on personal networks to learn about new products and services. Consumers are shaping brands as much as brands themselves are. Brand management will require greater transparency and stronger connection to consumers than ever before. Today, consumers do not have complete trust in the marketing efforts of brands on the social platforms making the brand management tasks all the more difficult."

I think agencies need to seriously look at Online Community Management and hire writers and cultural analysts that can contribute to an ongoing social dialogue with the real brand managers - the consumers.

You can Download Report Here

Good Production is Spreadable: Evian Case

A few years ago I was speaking with Knox Duncan (now at Wong Doody in Seattle), and he said when he worked on Nike at W+K the the production budget was bigger than all of our agency billings combined when we worked together at my last shop. This quote resurfaces a lot in my mind, particularly lately, as the percentage of production to media seems to be decreasing when it should be opposite.

Good production is spreadable in a new media world. Evian just spent a lot of money on production for an online ad which was posted on You Tube to promote their Live Young positioning. MSNBC described the campaign like this:

The piece is called “Skating Babies,” an online ad for Evian bottled water that’s rung up nearly 5 million hits internationally on YouTube in little more than a week. Among those myriad viewers is TODAY’s Natalie Morales, who has two young children, including a son who’s nearly a year old. Her oldest son loved the ad, she told co-host Matt Lauer, who also admitted to having watched it with amusement.

I can always tell something is popular when my wife tells me to watch it and something that I didn't find on an industry Blog. This is exactly what Propagation Planning should produce.

Is it hard to move a larger part of your budget to production to earn media and spend less in paid media? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

The Supreme Court of YouTube

I know many of you have seen this video about the musician that had his guitar broken by United Airlines, but I also thought this CNN coverage of the event was interesting. After failing to get compensation from United, he took his case to YouTube. As of today the video has been seen 1.3 million times and I think the court of public opinion has ruled in favor of the David Carroll.

United says this video has been a "Unique Learning Opportunity."

Can Nursing be the hub of Word of Mouth?

There was a great post on Psychology Today about predicting success through Culture Smarts. The post goes on to say that, "People with culture smarts can have a lively conversation with anyone--about restaurants, pop music, art, fashion, business, tech trends, the news of the day.  They're lifelong learners who keep gathering a little information about a lot of things that you don't necessarily learn from school.  You learn it from people."

Sociologist Nan Lin who devised the method as a way of analyzing people's personal networks (reprinted in Consequential Strangers). She choose a list of occupations and surveyed 3,000 employed or previously employed adults, aged 21 to 64 that know people in that list of occupations.

Here were some of the results:

Best-known: Nurse–nearly 70% of the respondents knew at least one.

Somewhat well-known: 45% or more respondents listed a hairdresser, lawyer, police officer, computer programmer, or middle school teacher.

Not very well-known: Fewer than 20% knew a taxi driver, CEO, production manager, or a congressperson.

Least known: Hotel bell boy (2.7%)

How does this relate to Propagation Planning? I am curious to flip the research and find out what occupations have the most connections and influence.

Could the nursing community propagate messages or be courted in a way to share messages about the value or experience of brands? How influencial are these occupations? For example 70% of people know a Nurse but do they respect the recommendation of nurses on things outside the medical field? only 20% know a congressperson but do they respect the recommendation of a congressperson higher than a nurse?

Making Peoples Lives Better

Making Peoples Lives Better

View more presentations from Matthew_Broughton.

The audience can talk to each other

This is a great video that We Are Social posted:

The Creative Paradox of Positive Thinking

This isn't really an example of Propagation Planning but it is a good example of tackling cultural trends and consumer confidence issues head on. Using the recession as context and relevance for this commercial the team at DDB did a great job of highlighting a 'creative paradox' by producing an upbeat song and dance in a dooms day narrative.

Social Media is the New Punk Rock