Adam Good is the Chief Digital Officer at Dentsu Aegis Network in APAC and in this podcast he is talking with Darren and reflecting on his career on both the marketing and agency side as the industry navigates the digital transformation and the impact of organisational alignment, innovation, collaboration, trust and a shift to Agile Marketing.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes
Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome back to Managing Marketing and today we’re in Singapore and I’ve got a chance to catch up with a good friend, Adam Good, who is the Chief Digital Officer, the CDO at the Dentsu Aegis Network here in Asia/Pacific. Welcome, Adam.
Adam:
Welcome to Singapore, Darren.
Darren:
Well, I’m here for the week (until Friday).
Adam:
Fantastic.
Darren:
The reason I wanted to catch up is you’ve had a really interesting career, from my perspective, in that you started off in film and entertainment. You got into advertising/digital but more importantly you’ve worked both agency and advertiser’s side.
How did this happen?
Adam:
Yeah. I don’t know, maybe you get fired on either side of it and keep changing around.
Darren:
Was there a plan? Are you one of these people that plan a career, a path of opportunity?
Adam:
I originally had a plan. I really just wanted to be in multimedia.
Darren:
You’ve taken me back to 1990.
The early days
Adam:
I schooled in multimedia so I think that’s what I wanted to do so I wanted to try the different industries. I wanted to be on different sides of media and especially with media when it was associated with big change.
And I think that’s what ultimately drove it. Initially, when I started out, I just wanted to do television; I really wanted to be part of storytelling. I was trained in that. I’m a qualified sound engineer by trade but then I did film and television in various different roles; technician roles, camera assisting, grip work, lighting. And really through that process you learn storytelling.
Somebody’s got a particular idea, they put it on paper and then they’ve got to express it through a team structure to bring it to life and I really enjoyed that. But at the same time, when I left school (year 11/12, 86/87) it was the first year they introduced computers so I was lucky enough to play around with the early computers, the Commodore 64s, the Atari’s, the early Apples.
In that space I got involved with Connected Computers and the internet so that was happening at the same time. So, I had these passion projects. I built one of Australia’s first online film directories because at the time I thought well film and television, Warner Brothers Studios, Fox studios was happening.
People were coming down to Australia to make content and tell stories but it was actually very difficult to find the whole team structure. So, in the early days I used the World Wide Web to put on bios and those sorts of things.
Darren:
There was a thing called the Production Book, which is still around. It’s all online but I remember back in the early 90’s you would buy the Production Book. It was like this thick tome except that because of the transient nature of the industry it would be out of date by the time they’d printed it and distributed it to everyone. They were always doing printed updates of it.
Adam:
I was 21, 22, having meetings with the Production Book and of course Read magazine and the Encore magazine having discussions about putting all of that content online. Ultimately, I couldn’t get agreement to do those things so I made my own.
I had a filemaker prodata base and was building one listing at a time because I was so passionate about it. But ultimately those businesses did go online over time and I went off and did other things.
Darren:
You’re talking about the very early days of the internet when the vast majority of people weren’t into it; it was quite fringe. But today, digital transformation, which is what you’re involved in now with Dentsu Aegis Network, it was also the job you were doing at Telstra as well.
There was definitely core around that whole digital media/ digital transformation as well. Because there are two perspectives of, in some ways, a similar objective that every business is trying to come to terms with.
Is it easy to do a compare and contrast of that?
Adam:
Look, I still think that we’re at the really early stages of digital transformation. It’s just our industry has changed so dramatically; media, telecommunications, advertising is at the big bang.
So, that’s where all my experience has been and now digital transformation’s going on into lots of other industries and categories. Of course, we’re seeing tremendous change in finance and travel and all the rest of it. But they’re still in a bit of a slow burn because they still think they can do what they’ve always done.
And so that realisation; how much velocity do I need to apply to a digital transformation over how much is this business as usual is really what I wrestle with all the time now. Back in an agency network with clients there are short-term marketing initiatives to sell products, make some brand impact over the longer term where the company is going through a massive transformation that they may be relevant in ten years’ time, they may be gone or they’ll be in a completely different operating area.
I think our industry has gone back. Our industry is completely changed. Still, some people don’t think it’s completely changed. I certainly do because I’ve been part of it in the role that I do.
The big bang
Darren:
You were close to that big bang when it happened.
Adam:
That’s right, I saw the fuse lit. I was very privileged to go to Telstra at a really interesting time. David Thodey, being very much a sales and marketer by trade and experience as well, and really just wanting to develop a customer-centric focused business but that meant you had to create these amazing experiences.
Darren:
Well, he was the first one, I think, in Telstra’s history to recreate the idea of copper wires and connections to actually being a media company. He wasn’t just thinking about the distribution; he was thinking about the content that would go into the distribution ‘cause he saw that lots of other companies were just riding the back of Telstra’s incredible infrastructure.
Adam:
No doubt about that. And I went into Telstra via Rick Ellis, who ran TVNZ in New Zealand, and I was lucky enough to work with TVNZ on the marketing side with Proximity and Colenso and Jason Paris (who is now at Telecom there).
They were very much a television network that went into streaming very early on and did TVNZ on Demand and a number of other made-for content programmes and when Rick came to Telstra I was lucky enough to join his executive team.
There was some great talent at the time to some big things and very disruptive things. There were some businesses in there that we had to look at. We had the Trading Post, Sensis, Foxtel, Bigpond, and as you say those words now you know how much change was implemented in those businesses during that time.
It was a really great opportunity to be there for that four and a half years as well as a company that was doing gangbusters as it moved from 2G to 3G to 4G and the growth of mobile and the device changes that Apple brought about and Samsung and NBN.
That’s been a real challenge. It’s two years ago that I was at Telstra and the four and a bit years that I was there I was part of a really good moment.
Darren:
A period in time.
Adam:
Exactly right. They’re going through a huge transformation as being a global business as well.
Darren:
There’s something you touched on a minute ago, which is this idea that digital transformation (as it’s occurring within organisations), it’s really interesting. From our experience, it varies from company to company the way they interpret this.
It’s interesting when you’re dealing with a company wanting to address the “digital transformation” because they see that if they don’t someone is going to cut their lunch. All the management consultants that keep putting up the slide about how Airbnb’s disrupted hotels, Uber disrupted taxis and all that sort of stuff. So, they’re seeing it as a defensive move.
Then you’ve got others who are quickly band-aiding things. They’re looking for where technology can help improve the efficiency of what they’ve always done rather than reinvent their business. But it’s a very, very small group that actually see what you touched on, which is the fact that the digital transformation is not just about slightly adjusting a business.
This is going to radically change business, isn’t it?
Adam:
Yeah, it does change radically but sometimes when changes happen I always see them as big changes but I think we adopt them so quickly that the human brain just sees them as an improvement and you move on.
I’ll give some examples for that. The digital transformations at the beginning– efficiencies is a really easy place to play in digital transformation; changing the workforce, bringing in automation looking at those sorts of things. That’s why consultants come into that. They’re very, very good at that area: they’re accountants.
They really know how to drive business efficiencies and put some of those programmes in place but it’s very category driven. So, the actual benefit that comes to that company is easily copied. Like the airline business, I’ve developed a digital transformation to select my seats on the plane.
Now, when that happens that’s huge innovation and it’s a great thing and it stops consumers ringing people up and wanting to change their seats but it’s an expectation you just do.
Darren:
Once it’s available. Why wasn’t it always there?
Adam:
What I’m more interested in is how you get digital transformation under that particular brand lens that is really ownable by that brand. Then they can take some of that ownable state into another level of transformation in a constant change to really differentiate.
Darren:
Everyone’s talking about innovation. Apart from digital transformation, innovation is the hot topic. I think what you’re talking about is driving innovation and specifically innovation that is enhancing or adding value to the customer experience because I think too much of it is defensive or opportunistic and not actually focused on how do we enhance, improve or add value to the customer’s engagement with this business and brand?
Innovation and implementing it
Adam:
That’s right. I quite like the idea of machines doing certain things for brands. I don’t get too worried about that. Obviously, you need to put humanity around the experience. So, when you’re selecting your seat you feel as though that’s a better experience to do than ring somebody, so, getting that balance right. They’re really good things to do.
But coming back to the innovation play, innovation generally means a lot of risk and doing things that have maybe not been done before so that whole test and learn. You have to have a particular client and a particular environment to do innovation properly.
There are a lot of things I’d like to do with our clients that I know when we get into that conversation they’ll say, ‘that’s all very interesting, Adam, we’ll get around to doing that in 6 months’, 12 months’ time’. And you just feel in your heart, o.k.
Darren:
It’s not going to happen.
Adam:
Well it just takes time. We need to start now. We need to be doing those things now because in 6 or 8 months’ time we’ll get a head start on that. I see this all the time.
You know the new iPhone and all its apps—the amount of AR that’s coming in brands is huge. But look at what Ikea has been doing for some time. They’ve been rearranging their furniture in virtual spaces for some time now. They’ve got a real gap on certain brands.
When they were seen doing that 18 months’, two years ago, marketers were going, ‘oh well that’s all very interesting but we don’t need to worry about that just yet’. But they’ve got two years’ worth of learning and they’re ahead. That happens all the time.
Darren:
A little bit of that mentality is because oh well we can always just catch up by copying what everyone else is doing, which is not innovation is it?
Adam:
That’s not innovation. Copying is o.k.
Darren:
Copying is o.k. but don’t pretend you’re innovating when you’re letting someone else do all the leg work and then copying what they’ve done, as a way of being the also ran in the marketplace.
Adam:
Yeah, generally we’re driven by statistics. If you look at the budget I would probably spend 70% of my budget on things that you know have been working but then another 20% on things that you’ve been testing and learning and now want to scale and get going because it might become part of that 70%.
But then 10% of your budget on a bunch of things that you’re prepared to kind of lose that money but you’re prepared to give it a real shot. That can be hard because you’ve got a client and you’re saying’ you’ve got to maximise 70% of my marketing dollars for all the things that work?’ And I say, ‘yeah, you really do.’
If you can get that conversation happening in the planning stages you’re kind of spring boarding into some interesting work but if you don’t have those conversations then you’re suddenly talking about the 6, 8-week campaign cycle—that’s tough. That’s probably the toughest part about being on the agency side is campaign windows.
They’ve never changed in my time being here. What can we do in about 6 to 8 weeks?
Darren:
Which is very short-term thinking isn’t it?
Adam:
It is.
Agile marketing
Darren:
The other thing that’s creeping in is we get a lot of marketers phoning up and going, ‘we want to embrace agile marketing’. The conversation for us is around, ‘what do you actually mean by that?’
In actual fact, most of them are not talking about agile as in Agile (capital A), Marketing (capital M). They’re talking about agile with a small ‘a’ and they really just mean we want to be faster rather than test and learn.
Agile sounds promising but the whole concept of test and learn actually scares a lot of marketers and having been on that side, what is it about test and learn that is so scary?
Adam:
I don’t know. And you’ve been a creative as well. I’ve been very much on the direct side a lot of the time in creative agencies, which is a lot of test and learn and so whatever happens there you’ve got to go to certain customer databases and see whether the message resonates or the offer works.
So, I don’t think there is not an understanding of test and learn in a marketing sense but when you get up to the experience layer, which is a little bit more tech development, a little bit more work that has to happen outside of the marketing realm and into the owned ecosystems and digital teams and ecomm teams – there are just a lot more people to coordinate to make that whole environment work.
Test and learn has a different meaning in that and agile was obviously created from developers because they had to do sprints. They had to work out different software sprints to get an application working.
So, I think sometimes we’ve taken the wrong analogy of what software is and tried to force it into marketing into 6 week windows.
Darren:
The agile marketing manifesto is quite interesting. It gives you eight principles of agile marketing and interestingly, it was agreed by a group of marketers who met in Silicon Valley. So, they were sitting there seeing agile software development, which is a totally different process and they said, ‘what can we learn from this?’
It’s interesting from my perspective because it’s one of those issues around language that everyone’s picked up on this idea of agility or being agile but they haven’t actually picked up on the rest of it, which is really about constant optimisation of your marketing effort.
I use the metaphor of sailing. To me the traditional marketing approach is like beating into the wind. This where I want to get to and I’m going to do one long tack this way (which is developing my strategy) then I’m going to go about and execute it, I’m going to hit the point that I want.
The trouble is we live in a world where the wind is constantly shifting and it’s so easy to get knocked off your line so that you miss the point. Whereas, agile says I’m going to go on one tack and constantly monitor my position and if I get knocked off the wind I’m going to go about and do something different and that to me is agile marketing.
It’s that ability to have that environment within your organisation all aligned to optimising performance. Have you seen many people able to deliver that?
Adam:
I think it’s an organisational decision you need to make as well. Companies that are trying to manage the day to day of the way they operate plus also bring in a change of management, digital transformation it’s sometimes really difficult to bring the two together under one management team structure.
If you go to the Googles, Amazons, Facebooks, and Alibaba’s of the world they’ve just got lots of different work streams that have got their own projects that are not interdependent on everybody else and then there’s an executive committee that looks at the various different work streams and what’s relevant for today’s revenue over new future revenue streams.
Not many companies can do that. But technology companies have been able to run that really well because they understand agile. We’ve just come back from San Francisco. We’re lucky enough to take clients into Palo Alto and we do the tours and we do the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, and the Snapchats.
Everybody kind of wanders around saying, ‘I’d love to take some of this back to our organisation’. I’ve been there enough times to know how some of this stuff really works and you can’t just take the veneer of it and apply it through your organisation without a full transformation from the bottom up.
Darren:
These companies have grown from a particular culture, which is an engineering, software development culture, which is all about test and learn.
Adam:
Yes. I mean in another sense because you get to the end of the week and your client will say, ‘I want to work differently now let’s change’ and you go, ‘great, let’s do the 15-minute call on Monday’. ‘No, we’ll do a little bit of this work and you do a little bit of that work ended with 15 minutes and you kind of move in these little automatic sprints.
But then suddenly the old way of working starts happening and you go back to the…
Darren:
Three-hour meetings with a room full of people.
Adam:
Exactly. And you go, ‘well you probably didn’t look around Google and try to do the same as what they’re actually doing. That’s why I’m employed I suppose.
Darren:
That’s another thing that comes out of the agile marketing approach: it’s all about collaboration. And it’s not collaboration based on having lots of meetings, it’s actually collaboration of alignment with people having very specific tasks and responsibilities and getting on with the job. Then tapping back in at some point to update, which is not the way that marketers seem to work.
Adam:
Not so much because they haven’t done script, worked out their full story and this is where the 360 in my career comes from. What I’ve really learned the most out of the film and television industry was there was a script, a defined story that we were going to create but as we went into the day to day shooting and talking to people and the interpretation of that story and the additional creative ability of a sound guy, lighting guy or director’s interpretation, that’s when magic happens.
Brand planning
Darren:
It’s like the blueprint of a building. You need some sort of roadmap or plan that everyone can align to as that vision. And isn’t that what brand strategy or brand plan should be about?
Adam:
Yeah, I think brand planning is extremely important.
Darren:
Because that’s the story. The brand plan is the story for the brand.
Adam:
It is and great brand plans always tend to go back to the original story anyway, it just gets updated.
Darren:
Everyone points to Apple, Nike—we always go back to the same brands and go, ‘we want to be like them’ but they all have great brand stories that everyone’s aligned to.
Adam:
They do but the articulation of a brand sometimes takes a little time, especially with boards of directors, to understand what brand strategy is because it needs to be broken down into a number of different work streams; revenue for today, customer experiences for today, adjacency businesses, partnerships and all sorts of different things.
Sometimes, creative agencies can talk about brand for too long and they’ve not actually said much at all because they tend to think it is a sort of linear story. Because the outtake of that has been traditionally a small film or mood or emotive thing.
Darren:
Which comes back to your 6 to 8-week campaign cycles.
Adam:
The sooner the brand can be a business and transformation strategy, and then an implementation plan the better. It’s an interesting time with business at the moment. We’re seeing these tech companies on the stock market and I’m just blown out by how big these platform players have become.
Their investment to get that big has taken a little bit of time but there are going to be some big losers.
Darren:
If only investors and shareholders in traditional companies were willing to pour hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope that maybe one day they’ll turn a profit.
Adam:
That’s right.
Darren:
Because at the moment you’ve got quarterly reporting and if someone doesn’t get their numbers the whole market gets nervous. I think the most famous is Amazon because for years and years, Jeff would just say to the investors I’m just going to plough it back in. There are no dividends, no payoff this month because we’re just going to plough it back in.
Adam:
Incredible. He wants to make things and he also changes from a book company and his voice tech so he quickly moves from his management consultant brain to actually making something, getting it out and playing on the adjacencies of where their business could be.
He thinks very quickly to say, ‘you may be buying a book, what is the fulfilment path?’ What are the virtual, physical touch points? He’s very good at it.
Darren:
And how can I innovate that to actually enhance the customer experience to build loyalty and trust?
Adam:
Yeah, it’s a pretty good business. I think their share price would still be pretty low.
The importance of trust
Darren:
I just use that term ‘trust’. It is so important and you would have found this throughout your career both from the agency and advertiser side. You can’t do this without having and building trust in all of the people that you’re working with, right?
Adam:
Yeah, definitely. There are massive structural challenges out there with media, data, viewability, reporting, and all of those areas. There’s a lot of ambiguity there at the moment and that requires a really strong partnership with a client and an agency and media and creative working together to build through that.
Sometimes the trust breaks down and they go to pitch because they don’t feel they’re in a workable environment to work with their existing teams.
Darren:
I think trust has been challenged because it wasn’t that long ago that marketers could sit down with their agencies and go, ‘this is what I want to achieve’ and then they’re all working towards a common goal.
I think so many marketers and their agencies now are falling on this trap of every 6 to 8 weeks. Correct me if I’m wrong but you always find the best clients are the ones where you feel you’ve actually got an alignment to purpose, an alignment to an objective because you can actually contribute to that rather than being an order taker or deliverer, don’t you think?
Adam:
Definitely. I’ve played on both sides and the marketing role has become a big role now in a company, especially if they’re given part or all of the digital transformation agenda, they’ve got to know a lot more about technology than they did before.
They’ve got a balance between current sales and future state and then they’re wrestling with do I go to one agency or network to fulfil everything? How much specialty do I bring in and get that balance right?
They have to be the orchestra.
The need for a ringmaster
Darren:
Or the ringmaster.
Adam:
They definitely have to be the ringmaster because agencies feel as though they’re going to solve the problem. And some agencies don’t even ask what the problem is because they think they know what the problem is and that they can quickly solve it.
But when you’re on the client’s side you know internally that there is so much more that needs to take place and so you really do need that agency relationship that can be very trustworthy with yourself but you’ve got to be the ringmaster.
But the agency has to come back into that organisation and play with a lot of new people that are sometimes outside of their own silos of responsibility. If that trust breaks down pretty early, if the client says, ‘you don’t need to see that part of the business yet, and we’ll manage this or that’ you sort of know that this is going to take a little bit of time.
The better agency relationships are when the agencies are able to provide services within a lot broader context and with broader organisation. Of course, if they’re able to present to CEOs and Boards that’s even stronger.
Because they hear the problems more and they go, ‘oh, I thought the problem was x, y, z but there are a couple of other challenges in there that we really need to know’ because maybe the client didn’t know as well as they could.
Darren:
In some ways what you’re talking about is the way that the relationship has moved from being this trusted adviser, and the worst part is if that relationship slides down to being a supplier, vendor or provider of services rather than being able to get under the skin of a problem.
I think agencies get filled with curious people that like to solve problems and if you can’t articulate clearly the problem they’re going to solve whatever problem they come up with.
Adam:
That’s right. I’ve been lucky to work on both the client and the agency side of it. Creative agencies, when you’ve got creative teams and curious people, it’s just fantastic. They can only solve the problem that is presented to them.
So, how good was that brief, and how good was that insight? They do want to come at it from a creative point of view and stay true to that. The creatives that have got that inquisitive business side that really ask the questions about the business they’re great teams to work with.
Darren:
The strategic creative person.
Adam:
And they are coming about now. Part of the challenge in our industry is the way we express creative ideas because we like to be very purist in that sense. Our awards world has got to the point where we can’t’ award for that because that was done in 1963.
Well as a digital guy I don’t really care; it’s just did it get any better? So, sometimes we balance some of our own problems of creativity and what creativity means in the new world of business sense.
Darren:
Ultimately, the value of creativity is not how many awards but how well it fixes a commercial problem and the value it either generates or the loss it mitigates.
Awards vs creativity
Adam:
There are plenty of awards.
Darren:
Over 700, globally. So, if you want to enter for an award you could enter 2 a day for a whole year.
Adam:
I just meant we’re struggling on some of those big awards like Cannes and what they actually mean now for both the agency and the client. That’s a shame because some of the awards are given on small ideas but they could be even bigger.
But they’ll never get any bigger because the creatives have seen that idea and said, ‘we can’t do that any further.’ I’ve seen stuff over the years that could have been products or full-blown services but the agencies and the creative teams have gone, ‘oh, we’ve already done that so we don’t want to do it anymore’.
They get bored really easily so they’re looking for the next big thing.
Darren:
Is it that they’re bored or is it if they do it they know it’s not going to win an award?
Because I’m wondering if the award process has actually overcome the creative process?
Adam:
It is the latter I think. When you’re a young creative your career is built through winning awards and showing how you think and so forth. Not many creative directors will employ a creative to say I’ve seen this idea two years ago and I think I can make it better.
Which is a shame because I think those sorts of people are pretty good to have around.
Darren:
I remember way back when I was a copywriter there were a couple of creative teams that were well known for going back through older award books in the days when they were books and looking for ideas there that they could apply to a new client in a new category.
Adam:
That still goes on. Good creative teams have got ideas on the bottom shelf and bring them out when they need to and try to keep applying them. I think the creative process is changing. I think it’s got a lot more collaborative.
Creative directors have the team structure where the teams birth an idea and if they don’t like it they kill it at a later date. I think there are creative directors who are more accepting and will look at ten different ideas and grab one idea and give it to another team and they go off and change it.
I’ve been very blessed to work with some incredible creative directors; Nick Worthington at Colenso BBDO, James McGrath, Melbourne, Ted Lim here at Dentsu—they’re wonderful to work with.
I’m a meddler compared with them. I’m blessed to be in the room with these people because I meddle with ideas. That’s what digital tends to do. You want to meddle with it and then work out how can I turn this into an experience?
The big idea as a succession of smaller ideas
Darren:
So, one of the things that is the cornerstone for creatives is the big idea. One of the things I’ve noticed is that in the digital world we live in, big ideas are actually executed in a succession of smaller ideas. That’s such a fundamental difference for creative people to get their heads around:
That you do need the big idea but it may not end up being executed in the big cinema, TV or even the big long form video for online.
It will be executed in a 1,000 small ways that build to the idea.
Adam:
Yeah, and I think that’s a positive. If you look at Pixar and what they were able to do, they were the first to really crack that. They got a big idea, it was called Toystory—here’s the story.
But the way they had to bring that to life was 1,000s and 1,000s of very difficult little problems and ideas to make Woody do this and to make animation do that and to make this part of the story work.
But their whole collaborative process was ingenious. When they held those meetings, it was a huge town hall with a lot of different people that needed to come in, understand the problem, animators—the way they had to render up graphics in those days were very difficult initially—and have to work through a process.
But nobody ever went to a meeting not understanding the problem and where the challenge was at that particular point in time because you weren’t even allowed to be at that meeting unless you really understood something.
And you would only articulate if you had a solution to it and I think those learnings from how Pixar worked you could take more into our agency. I think there are agency meetings where people don’t quite know the full story and they feel as though they should actually talk.
Darren:
We call them meeting fillers and the reason they exist is because there is usually a retainer somewhere with a number of FTE counts but that’s just our cynical view of the world.
Adam:
Yeah, it is and it can cause a few problems especially if you want to work fast. But overall, I think the idea of 1,000s of little ideas and that’s going to happen more and more because we’re making 1 second, 3 second, 6 second content.
Darren:
Unfortunately, we’re running out of time and I’m really enjoying this conversation, Adam. You’ve worked agency and client side. You’ve also worked in many, many different markets; you’ve worked in Australia and New Zealand but also now in Singapore, San Francisco and you’re also in Hong Kong with Tribal.
So, of all the different markets is there one that you really, really enjoy working in above the others?
Are you planning your technology transformation strategy? Or perhaps reviewing your existing technology implementation? Find out how TrinityP3 can help here