JWT turns mobile marketing on its head

You’d think one of the world’s largest ‘traditional’ advertising agencies would take a traditional approach to mobile marketing. You’d be wrong.

JWT is the largest advertising agency by revenue in the United States and the fourth largest agency network worldwide but its approach to mobile is anything but cautious. In this thought-provoking interview, we talk to Jeff Stier, Senior Partner Director of Business Growth North America at JWT and President of JWT’s innovation lab and incubator, Sector 64.

Before Jeff joined JWT, he started, built and sold four technology-related media companies. Which explains his entrepreneurial approach to the mobile opportunity.

Prepare to be challenged…

So what’s the big idea behind Sector 64?

Sector 64 is JWT’s innovation lab and incubator. Two things drove us to set it up.

First, the changing way that JWT is acquiring new clients. Instead of just waiting for the big brands to put their accounts into review, we’re going after their business proactively, before any review is announced.

Second, it’s about changing the financial model of the agency. Going beyond the traditional ‘work for hire’ model, where the client owns everything you create. That leaves the agency constantly vulnerable to a new CMO coming in, firing the agency and leaving behind no intellectual property.

With Sector 64, we’re reversing this idea by developing our own IP that we license to brands or go into partnership on. You can’t be fired from something you own.

Where does the mobile platform fit in with this thinking?

Mobile is moving faster than anything else. It’s where brands want to be. It’s also not too expensive or too risky so brands get an important learning experience in a non-threatening way. Everyone knows mobile will be huge. They just don’t know what it will look like. Our initiatives are helping brands find out.

Any examples of the kind of things Sector 64 is developing?

Here are two that are particularly relevant from the mobile perspective:

T-Minus is a mobile Web 2.0 entertainment product that lets people count down to favorite entertainment events like concerts, new movies, TV shows or games.

Another is Kabeep, a mobile club for new moms.

Both are examples of how mobile leads the way in new, hybrid services that combine web and mobile. In some markets, standalone mobile experiences may be the future. For the US, it will be multi-platform experiences and mobile will often be the front end.

Take us through the T-Minus idea

T-Minus solves two problems, one for the consumer and one for the movie studio, music label or content owner.

For the user, we all know the experience of going to the movies and watching the four or five trailers promoting upcoming releases. Most of us, when we see a trailer, we make a quick judgement about whether or not we want to see something and a mental note to ourselves if we do.

The problem is, we’re about to sit through four more trailers, a two-hour movie and dinner with friends.
By the time we get home, we may remember there was a trailer for a movie we wanted to see but we don’t remember what it was. There’s no mechanism for capturing that intent.

Coming from the other side, studios spend on average $35 million per movie on marketing – trailers are just one of the ways they do that. They want you to make that mental note to look out for their movie, but they have no way of identifying you as someone with intent to see the movie. And no way to convert that intent into a ticket.

With T-Minus, you see the trailer (or poster or review), text the movie name to the T-Minus shortcode and you’ve registered your interest and intent. Now we can send something every week to your mobile, counting you down to the big event – the release date.

Six weeks before release, you might just get information about the actors or the director. Five weeks out, maybe an alert that tickets are going on sale in a week. Week four you get the invitation to book the ticket, with a link to get some merchandise. Right up to the event.

So now we solve the consumer’s problem of tracking stuff they don’t want to miss while helping the studios identify intent to purchase and convert it.

For active movie-goers, tracking lots of events, there’s a website for managing their T-Minus profile and getting a more robust experience like full-screen trailers. So the web service is the tail but the mobile service is the head. For us, this is one of the futures of mobile: finding problems that are uniquely solved on a mobile device,
and backing it up with a web experience.

Why aren’t more agencies leading things like this?

Well, despite the reputation for creativity, agencies can be pretty conservative, risk-averse places. The brands often see where the world is heading before the agencies do and are often willing to be more experimental. For agencies, experiments that fail can mean losing the account.

And brands aren’t standing still. Today, Ralston Purina is doing their own pet site and they’ll even allow other brands to advertise on it. They’ve just become a publisher and gone for direct engagement with consumers. Owning your own content and controlling your own destiny is a natural evolution.

In the same way, Sector 64 is a completely independent unit within JWT so we don’t wait for any account team to ask for things. We look for gaps in the market, build stuff and then bring what we’ve built to the brands, inviting them to be a part of it. JWT clients may get first look, but they don’t own the property. We do.

Frankly, it’s almost impossible to be both a service company meeting client briefs, and an entrepreneurial company, bringing innovative audience platforms to market. Sector 64 focuses on new platforms.

Do Sector 64 projects have a common theme?

Not so much a common theme as a shared set of principles.

First, we put the audience at the center. When we build stuff it’s irrespective of what any given brand wants.
We flip it around. It doesn’t matter what the brand wants, it’s what the audience wants. Get the audience and the brands follow. That’s not rocket science but it’s amazing how uncommon it is.

Second, we go for engagement. Because people have a huge choice of media and entertainment. Engagement is more than the buzzword of the mobile Internet – like ‘eyeballs’ was for the Web. Engagement is what it’s all about and I don’t think that will change.

Third, we always look for some friction. Some problem on both the consumer and the brand side. That’s what every entrepreneur does but not many agencies.

Another principle: when we build something we never let a single brand control it. We invite them to participate, to sponsor a channel or brand a service, but the platform is ours and available to many brands.

What makes you better able to spot a need than anyone else?

We may or may not be better at this than others.
I think we bring a unique combination of skills to the table but the point is this: the mobile Internet is creating a huge galaxy of opportunities for solving problems that couldn’t be solved before.

It’s not just that new problems or market gaps are springing open every day (they are) but also that mobile gives us a new weapon for attacking existing problems.

The Kabeep example I mentioned before: the question was, “Can we make something on the mobile platform to engage pre- and post-natal moms?”

The insight was this: new moms are hungry for information about caring for their unborn or newborn baby. At the same time, there are hundreds of brands that would love to engage with these women.

Now, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of websites that cater to this market but very few mobile services. So we focused on what these moms want when they’re out and about.

And we found two big things: they want good deals (there’s a lot to buy when you’re having a new baby); and they want timely information. Anything from recipes and advice to guidance on health issues.

Mom’s out and about. She’s getting heavier every day. How can mobile help her? How about a recipe perfect for the expecting mother, with the ingredients she’ll need so she’s got the list when she needs it most, in the supermarket.

That recipe has a lot less value in an email at nine at night than it does when a mother tells us she’s out shopping.

How do you firm up the concept for a new service like that, when there’s no precedent to follow?

In the Kabeep case, we do it with pilots and tests and trials. We put something up, get the audience and start working with that audience to test and add new services.

We’re using the early stages to test everything. How many texts per week is right? What percent of people find it distracting? What percent want more? What’s the effect of small language changes on these things?

This learning may well be the most valuable return on our efforts of all. We’re using these early days of the mobile web to get to grips with it as a medium. And that’s solid gold.

Is video a big part of your mobile plays?

Right now, not so much. Maybe it is on the web part of any new audience platform but, in the US, the mobile isn’t there quite yet.

For Kabeep, we’re rolling out short form videos licensed from the Harvard Medical School – about your first sonogram or eating for you and your baby – but that’s delivered on the desktop web not the mobile.

The mobile networks most people use just aren’t fast enough. The handsets that can give a great mobile video experience are a tiny minority.

The thing is, brands don’t want to be associated with a bad mobile experience – even for a small part of their audience. They’d rather wait until they can guarantee a great experience for everyone. And there’s plenty of opportunity for mobile experiences that can do that today.

Some brands are happy to target smartphone users with really rich experiences. But for mass market, they don’t want to take the risk and I don’t blame them.

How do you de-risk mobile web marketing for the brands?

In the early days of email marketing, no one knew what worked. You had to build up the experience and the data. We’re in the same stage with mobile now. The key is to get in and start learning now, without spending a fortune or exposing your brand to risk.

The good thing, is you don’t need $200,000. You can do something worthwhile for $50 or $75k. It’s not a lot but you’ll learn a huge amount about how your target audience uses mobile. Today, that’s as important as anything mobile has to offer.

When we launch T-Minus in September, we’ll have no data. In a year, we’ll have incredible data that brands will want access to. If you’re releasing Scream 3, you’re going to be interested in, say, a million people who actively track horror films. Where can studios get that kind of information now?

On the more traditional side, how are you integrating mobile into the JWT offer?

We’ve actually embedded a mobile marketing company in our NY office. We’ve got four people right here where the strategies are being developed so mobile is no longer an afterthought. It’s part of the strategy from the beginning.

The end game is to have mobile strategists on the core team for every account, the way we now have digital strategists – which itself is only recent. Mobile engagement needs to be core.

Is mobile under-exploited by brands today?

Yes and no. The mobile industry loves to pull its hair out and wail about how slow big brands are to jump into mobile. And it’s true that just about every big brand (and many smaller ones) should be out there at least experimenting and learning.

But the truth is that mobile is not yet a big enough promise to make a real difference to a major brand.
A $500k mobile budget is a big mobile budget today, but it’s not going to move Coca-Cola forward in a way that the board will notice.

We will get there. Mobile will command big enough budgets to make a real difference the way digital is now. But when that arrives, I can’t say.

This is why we’re excited about mobile in Sector 64 right now. Because we can lower cost and risk by bringing finished audience platforms to brands instead of asking them to fund them and build them and own them and stick their brand permanently on what is still an experiment. This approach lets the agency get out of its own way.

How are you funding the technology behind these audience platforms for what are essentially spec projects?

That’s a hugely important aspect and it’s a core strength for us.

We approach the technology companies that have something to build on – often small, venture-backed companies that are in the technology business. We say, ‘We’re in the audience-building business and the brand-building business and we can use your technology to do something special.”

It might be a licensing arrangement. It might be a JV or other equity deal. But it takes the tech companies where they can’t go by themselves and it gets us the technology we need to deliver our visions.

This approach takes time and energy. You need to understand the technology as well as brands and audiences. But it pays off when you can make 1 + 1 add up to five.