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It’s been a few days since Bruce Sterling‘s keynote closed SXSW Interactive, where a bunch of us from the agency spent a whole week. All of us were SXSW virgins, so you can imagine that we were completely overwhelmed by the scale of the event – eclectic crowd of 30,000 participants, more than 300 panels and sessions, gaming and trade exhibitions, startup boot camp and what not.

No wonder it is unofficially dubbed as a geek’s spring break – the whole city was completely taken over by people with eyes on their smartphones, constantly tweeting, Instagraming, discussing implications of 3D printing, wearing all sorts of mobile health-tracking devices. Like one of the panelists joked, it’s a surprise that we weren’t constantly bumping into each other.

Five days and 25 sessions later, it’s rather difficult to summarize everything we saw and heard. Bloggers and journalists called it right, the focus was on 3D printing, space travel, wearable health monitoring devices and big data. For us it became even more clear that technology is just an activator or an active point. That’s why my key takeaways are not about the newest devices or apps. Here are just a few of them:

> Eliminating friction: Marketers should aim to make technology a seamless part of people’s lives and continue to bridge the gap between online and offline worlds. Mobile devices and apps should become more open and interact with each other. (e.g. Wallgreens mobile app or Nike Fuel band)

> Real-time participation: People are using two screens while watching TV more and more, they interact with one another or like to engage with brands in real time. Consumers are way ahead of marketers in mobile and social. Brands still have a long way to go to catch them up, to adapt to new rules and become a part of these interactions. A couple of promising examples are the Oscars backstage pass and Chevy’s #gametime:

> Big data: Is still complex and brands haven’t really cracked it yet. They should focus more on bringing great experiences to their customers by turning consumer driven data into useful intelligence.

> Instant localization: Our data should follow us so we are able to get truly personalized solutions and services, no matter where we are. Solutions that will help consumers to explore and discover things in a comfortable way will emerge victorious.

A lot of people said that there wasn’t really anything new this year and SXSW is getting too hyped. But it was my first time in Austin and I for one came back home rejuvenated and energised. And that’s all that matters.

A while back LEGO handed us the assignment to produce a 22-minute Hero Factory special. Such an awesome job demands an awesome team so we’ve assembled a formidable squad of some of Denmark’s most talented storyboard artists.

Pictured from left are Anders Hulgaard, Jørgen Klubien together with our very own Zdenko Santini, Kim Hagen, and Snorre Krogh. The special will premiere early next year.

At Advance, we also like to get some young creative blood in once in a while. So for the past few weeks, we’ve had three energetic and inspiring interns roaming the premises. We are getting a bit attached to them already, so we thought it was time you got to know them too.

Nanna Dahl

Nanna is studying business economics and corporate communication at Copenhagen Business School. She has some experience under her belt when it comes to project management, but at Advance she is part of our insight and strategy team.

She likes to smile a lot, and thinks Jude Law is delicious, though she says Advance’s Thursday cake day tradition is a close second.

After graduation she wants to continue in advertising, either as an account planner or a project manager somewhere in the world.

Sasha Ribalsky

Sasha is our copywriter intern. She was born in Uzbekistan, has an Israeli passport and studies at Miami Ad School in Hamburg. She chose Advance for the great Danish weather and will be mostly working on LEGO concepts with us, adding the toy manufacturer to a long list of big brands in her portfolio, including BMW, Google and Louis Vuitton.

In 10 years, she wants to be on the front page of Advertising Age, posing with five Cannes Lions next to a real-life version she keeps in her backyard.

Steen Houmøller Jensen

Steen is Sasha’s creative sparring partner at Advance. He grew up in Solrød Strand and made the move to Copenhagen a couple of years ago. He also studies at Miami Ad School in Hamburg where he is making his mark as an art director.

When he was seven, a photographer took a picture of his naked bum. To this day, Steen is convinced that that was the start of his interest in photography and advertising.

Steen really enjoys the warm and friendly atmosphere here at Advance, and since he got a taste of it with a task we gave him, he sees himself getting more and more into product development.

Nanna, Sasha and Steen will be with us until the end of March and we hope they’ll learn as much from us as we can from them.

A new year has started and if 2012 was hard to predict, 2013 may be even harder.

One of the major shifts happening right now is the movement from social media to social business. I think there are at least two good reasons why this is happening. The major players in the social media space have been focused on building their platforms and adding users (Google+, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook etc.). Now they’re all looking for ways to make money. Secondly, brands are looking for ways to use the channels as more than just media, but as platforms for direct or indirect revenue streams.

It’s a natural maturing, but it’s also a consequence of the way many brands think. I have met many CMOs who have grown tired of being presented with yet another social media activity, just because it’s something everybody else is doing. Instead, they’re looking for social ideas that tie in with the company’s business goals.

Personally I’m a bit reluctant to only think about how social channels can add to the bottom line. My gut feeling tells me that if there’s too much business and not enough value for people, it can reduce the attractiveness of the platforms, which will obviously backfire on both the platform owners and the brands using them – a social suicide. Not to say that the brands shouldn’t think business, just that they should make sure that what they do makes sense for their brand and offers value to consumers/fans and potential customers. And by value I mean things like entertainment and utility as well as attractive offers.

I still think social media has a lot to offer in terms of branding. As social creatures, we love those stories about truly caring brands (and employees) reacting to complaints or making up for the misfortune of a loyal customer. One of my favourites right now came from one of our clients, LEGO. To me ,that shows the potential of social and also supports the strong belief we have at Advance that a company’s people are the key to building stronger relationships with customers. Employees are the brand.

I’m also hoping to see more relevant CSR in 2013. Since it’s something a lot of companies have already experimented with, it’s much harder to have an impact from CSR – basically because people are sceptical thanks to the “green washing” that has taken place. Fortunately, there are still examples of brands getting the credit they deserve simply because it’s in their heritage to do the right thing, or because of the passion of the owners.

It’s my hope that the right CSR initiatives will keep having an impact, not because they are marketed, but because they spread. Advance supports cancer initiatives and has done so for many years because our founder and several great employees have died from the disease. We have never really marketed our support because that’s not why we do it and never will be. But maybe it will spread and tell a story about the agency. And if it doesn’t, well I still think we’re doing the right thing.

Whatever 2013 will bring, you’ll be able to follow our progress on different channels. So give us a like on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, have a look at some of our work on YouTube or, better yet, drop by and meet us in person. We reckon we have the best agency coffee in town.

You may remember that the WheelMate app we created for Coloplast was a finalist in the Global Awards. Well, although we didn’t win, neither did anyone else this year. That meant we were awarded this lovely Finalist certificate.

We also narrowly missed out on victory at the recent Danish App Awards where we were shortlisted for the Heatlh & Fitness category. The accolades keep rolling in for this piece of work, so a big thank you to the Coloplast team!

I was an extremely proud man last Thursday when I learned Advance had won its third Advertising Effectiveness Award. This time the award was in recognition of the work we did on the extremely successful global launch of LEGO Friends. For the record, our first two effectiveness awards were both for LEGO Bionicle. Given that we’ve only entered three times, we can actually boast a 100% hit rate!

Putting the cases together is extremely hard work, especially when it comes to getting the facts and figures. Clients have different ways of tracking, different ways to analyse data, and are sensitive about giving away information to the competition. That said, if you win, it’s definitely worth it!

The beauty of Effectiveness awards is that they unite the Agency team and the Marketing team in a mutual understanding of the objectives. And even more importantly, it pinpoints what has led to the effect – the old cliché that only 50% of advertising works, you just don’t know which half, can finally be buried in a cause/effect study. I’m also extremely happy to see the way the award unites the account people and the creative staff in a joint battle for effect.

On the other hand, when seeking to develop effective communication, we as agencies need to visit areas that may seem ineffective at first glance to challenge the solutions of the future. I believe it will be a dead-end just to copy last year’s effective campaign, which can be tempting for clients to save cost. Instead of just copying the successful campaigns we need to learn from them and bring this new understanding into the future solutions to clients’ problems.

Huzzah! Great news yesterday – we won a DRRB Effectiveness Award for our LEGO Friends work. We are really proud of the guys (most of them are captured in the picture above) who worked on this project together with the team at LEGO.

The challenge to develop and market great products for girls has been one of LEGO’s biggest issues for many years. Which is why it’s so cool that our 360º big/bang marketing campaign has become one of the LEGO Group’s most successful product launches ever. The campaign results beat anything LEGO had ever experienced before:

> 25% recruitment of girls who had never played with LEGO products before.

> 48% of LEGO Friends sales from purchases made by girls themselves.

> A 29-fold increase in sales of toys to girls aged 5–8, compared to the average annual turnover for LEGO Belville (another LEGO product line for girls).

> Turnover 255% greater than the original target.

However, the most important part of the story is how millions of girls around the world have now made friends with Stephanie, Olivia, Mia, Andrea and Emma – the main protagonists of the LEGO Friends universe – giving the LEGO Group a firm foundation on which to build a healthy, long-term, sustainable business in toys for girls.

In the second of our occasional series of intra-agency dialogues, Concept Developer Chris and Insight and Strategy Developer Monika discuss the challenges agencies face when seeking to move clients into the realm of digital product development.

Chris: Hi Monika, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot recently, especially in light of some of our ambitions as an agency. We’re all familiar with new products and services that augment a company’s existing product line such as the Nike Fuelband, the ‘Help, I’ve cut myself and I want to save a life’ kit and the Life Of George as well as initiatives of our own such as WheelMate – all dreamt up by creative agencies. The question is, is the traditional agency/client relationship conducive to these type of projects? Can we shift this relationship and should we even expect to?

Monika:  For me, the examples you mention indicate that marketing is changing its shape and form. I think it comes down to the fact that consumers perceive branded content differently today. Rather than being seduced by brands, people want something that is relevant for them – whether it’s entertainment, convenience, knowledge, social status, etc. These new products (and just to give a few lesser-known examples – Heineken Star Player app, Red Tomato VIP fridge magnet, Nowness by Louis Voutton, and Gothenburg’s Tram Sightseing app) provide companies with an opportunity to connect with customers in more lasting, meaningful ways. And what makes them successful is that they are usually based on human insights.

As advertising agencies, it has always been our job to create demand for products by understanding what consumers want. And if consumers want relevance and personalization, perhaps advertising agencies need to extend their thinking and expand their offering to clients. Imagine, if Kodak’s advertising agency had come up with an idea to develop something like Instagram, maybe Kodak wouldn’t have gone bankrupt today.

Chris: I think you’re definitely onto something when you mention the idea of insight. This is a part of the process that advertising agencies are already well configured to provide and the kind of input that clients are used to receiving. The question remains, then, how do we encourage this kind of thinking? Is it merely a question of providing case evidence to our clients in the hope that they will see that a change of organisation is in order, or is there a way to take a gradual approach where their risk is diminished? One method could be to spend spare agency time solving what we interpret the client’s business problems to be and then present this work ‘on spec’ in the hope that they’ll see the light. I know this is something that has been discussed at Advance recently. But how far do we go and how much time should we spend on doing this? Perhaps it’s a case of picking our battles and trying to demonstrate the need for this kind of work by showing our successes.

Monika: Isn’t it a little bit of both? As Made By Many co-founder William Owen puts it, the future of advertising is not advertising. Consumer media habits have shifted so there’s no doubt agencies have to make an extra effort to pinpoint the areas where they can create additional value. For the most part, I believe we should stop treating a client brief as a starting point, but dig deeper and get to the core of their needs.

There are already plenty of examples that can be used as inspiration or a starting point to encourage this type of thinking. Marketing-as-a-product (or service) thinking is no longer a groundbreaking trend. Nevertheless, it is a bit unrealistic to anticipate that clients will dive straight into product development. As with other changes, the companies that are early adopters will lead the field, the others will need more convincing and a more gradual approach. The question is, however, how to deal with a marketing budget that is intended to be spent on advertising? Will we largely fail because our point of contact with the client is their marketing department?

Chris: Well, I think one way in – one place where we can legitimately talk about services in a context within which the clients are expecting to hear from us – is with social media. All brands say they “know they need to be involved in social media” but they’re either nervous about the ROI, don’t have the resources or simply don’t understand what’s involved. The agency has a clear role in helping with this and a huge part of social media is monitoring and responding to consumer feedback which actually is a product – it’s customer service. This a product that we can help them develop, it’s one where they’d expect our help and, in terms of starting conversations about projects that don’t fit into campaign cycles/budgets, it’s ideal. So, is social the starting point for a strategy to get a foot in the door for broader, product related conversations? Perhaps it’s also the world of apps which clients view in a very similar way – they all want one, but they don’t know why. It’s product and, as a tool, it shouldn’t be constrained by a campaign-based ecosystem.

Monika: Being where your customers are and listening to them is always a good place to start, especially since customers do expect a response from companies on these platforms. Social media is particularly useful when it comes to helping companies gather insights about their products and services, which could potentially lead to product development. For example, American Express has created Open forum for small business owners, where they can exchange insights, get advice from experts and build connections. They then took that thought further and created Small Business Saturday to support small businesses all over the country. Even though, it’s not a product in itself, it ties in many additional products that AmEx can offer to its clients.

So yes, a social media presence can be the right way in, but only if done in a proper way. I am not convinced that campaign-based thinking is entirely over – marketing budgets are still largely structured around campaigns, whereas product development (be it customer service or a mobile app) not only requires long-term commitment, but also financial back-up. Taking that first step is necessary, but it’s not enough and it is an ad agency’s responsibility to make sure that our clients understand what it takes to be a part of this new kind of marketing.

Chris: Which maybe brings us onto a topic for another conversation – is it even marketing?!