Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job

I agree with you the customer is not always right.

I think it is important to listen to the customers needs, but some people really do try and take advantage.

I know it’s not the bulk of what the post is about I wanted to offer a point of view related to your second point (and to the part of Rick Webb that you mentioned too), about how it would be ideal to take an agile & adaptive approach to every aspect of what agencies do.

As an overarching approach I agree it’s something to aim for, but both creative agencies and media agencies end by being centered around a “point” – or, as its usually called, a campaign.

Why? Well, the collected burst of massive marketing spend (ie the media budget) over one particular time tends to get people focused on one spike rather than a gradual, evenly-dispersed line. And despite the gradual shift away from broadcast, and the increase of fragmentation of media consumption, for some brands there is absolutely still a need for traditional mass media.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big (huge) believer in the opportunity and potential of social marketing models and social business approaches that the interwebs has made possible, but pragmatically brands still have a need today to advertise in the traditional sense. And when advertising, with a fixed budget, an ongoing iterative approach to the spend doesn’t give you the saliency that is (usually) needed. And if the media spend is not iterative, but spiked, that’s what the agencies tend to need to mirror in their workflow.

(Also, I definitely want to hear more about the agile contract idea from Stu)

Great post Tim. It really feels like there is a group of newer agencies working across the communications landscape that don’t just pay lip service to all of the changes that the evolved internet engenders, but really embrace and embody a revised set of ways of being and doing. It’s why I am leaving my current company and moving to Face, to help grow a research and strategy agency that can work along similar lines.

Hi Andrew

Thanks for your comment. Sure you’re right about the continuing need for mass media – and I’m certainly not arguing that everything should be digital. Rather that digital platforms are increasingly ‘the glue’ that makes the sum of the parts greater.

To be clear, neither am I arguing against campaigns – campaigns are delivered on platforms (think I called them ‘platform campaigns’ in the post) – but that’s a different approach to creating an isolated microsite to support each campaign.

I think this video of Bob Greenberg and Barry Wacksman giving a talk about the changing world as they see it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsRpXZML5YU
It’s a great video – quite long and worth looking at. What it shows graphically is the difference in long term value of a traditional, linear, approach to advertising and the resulting spikes versus the incremental value to be gained through a series of platforms running on the same campaign (in this case Nike+, which we must remember was also supported in many, expensive and traditional channels – and not just the digital stuff as you might believe from this video!). There are some interesting charts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsRpXZML5YU

I certainly don’t see digital ‘replacing’ advertising like that – technology usually adds something rather than replace something.

It would be interesting to know whether advertising must always be a linear process as opposed to an evolutionary and adaptive one.

Speak soon.

Saul

Thanks for bothering to make your comment.

I’m trying to find the website of ‘Face’. Google Search has not been a great help – mainly due to the noisy, over-optimised search-term combination options of “face” + “social media” + “agency”…

The point I was setting out to make – and I think failed to make – was that ad agencies should have a really good chance of “being the culture”. They are packed with smart people who are obsessed with ‘the culture’ – who are ‘living the culture’, in total isolation of their agency’s corporate-expressed agenda. They should be much better at this shi*t than most digital agencies – but they are retarded by big-co official agenda.

That’s a shame.

Jessica

Cheers for even being bothered to type a comment,

[not sure what the hell i was going on about in the previous fragments of comment and so I have deleted it]

Great read!

I agree with the vast majority of it. Just to riff a bit more… I think the most difficult hurdle agencies and advertising faces is getting the talent. As all four points are something companies like facebook, twitter, google, apple, etc. already have agencies are going to be hard-pressed to get great talent in the door. Plus, the above mentioned companies quite possibly have the best clients: themselves. Obviously, these are the top-of-the-crop companies but there are a lot more smaller ones doing just as interesting work.

So, advertising is playing catch-up to digital and IRL culture. But that’s not new, is it?

This has articulated in one place the argument for a (still) new type of company culture, thank you. I also like the Eye of Jupiter a lot – though I may be seduced by its looks – nice work, Tom (certainly I’d like to see it suspended on the wall, back-lit or at least glowing in some fashion ;-))

Slightly more seriously, I’m reminded of sitting in Russell Ramsey’s office back in the day talking about what it took to get to effective work. To paraphrase what he said then: “nowadays any ad needs to deliver strongly on every single one of about 10 different judgement criteria if it’s going to work or win any awards”. In other words, it wasn’t enough for it to look nice, it wasn’t enough for it to have a compelling message, it wasn’t enough for it to be well written or to be original. It needed to be ALL those things and then some.

It feels now more than ever we need to accept the same is true of successful businesses: they need to have everything lined up ready if they’re to fire off successfully into the future. ‘Everything’ means, as you say, having people with the right skills and optimal processes, but also a mix of like-minded clients and – the killer for me, because you can’t order it up like room service – the right culture.

It follows that the thing I am most struck by is the point you, Mike & Anjali make about immersion. In a period of constant flux a company culture can’t ‘be agile’ until there’s personal, on the ground understanding of the environment we’re in, at all levels in the organisation. Without this understanding at the most senior levels, it feels like trying to direct a city in Siberia from Moscow in the 1950s – as history recounts, it’s not very effective. Managers (not just clients / brand managers) currently high in agency organisations need to be prepared to roll up their sleeves and jump right in. Then, and only then, when we’ve personally swum the new straits, gone down the river & then back upstream a bit, maybe we can start claiming we’re ready to lead a company. Who knows, it might even be fun – learning new stuff usually is, even if it starts out feeling a little scary.

In the meantime, I’m taking this bit of your post and sticking it on my wall:

“The right culture – by which we mean (in a nutshell) networked, open, collaborative, impassioned, obsessive active participants in our rapidly mutating media convergence culture. You need a culture where people are encouraged to understand this stuff from the inside – not looking in down from another disconnected world. It needs to be shameful for people NOT to be devouring as many social technologies as they can eat… not the other way around”

Great stuff, thank you.

Working my way through this post but do you think you could expound on this line:

“the right kind of digital savvy creatives, service designers not graphic designers, technologists and creative technologists”

I’ve read it 4 or 5 times now and I’m still not sure I’m reading it correctly.

Yeah – no probs – it’s an unfortunate phrase. Try this:

“the right kind of digitally savvy creatives: service designers, not graphic designers (or mere Web designers), and both pure technologists and creative techies”

Does that make more sense? Thanks for pointing it out – I kept stopping there when writing it, but I think it made more sense late at night ;-)

Thanks Jeremy – and thanks for commenting!

Getting the right talent is something we all find hard. Here again, total immersion in the culture helps – we recruited the last four people at Made by Many through the community of like-minded people we got to know on Twitter and blogs. We found a project manager for BBH last year for Metrotwin.com in 15 minutes using the Twitters.

The real upside is never having to talk to recruitment consultants!

Thanks Mel. I’m thinking of getting a T-Shirt done. If we do I shall get you one done.

Tx

(another) excellent and important post, Tim. I’ve written a couple of times on how the ‘agile’ issue strikes at the heart of why and how the advertising process needs to change (or least adapt).
http://bit.ly/1cmsxo
and
http://bit.ly/ofuOg
When I wrote the last post, I had a couple of comments that (respectfully) suggested that I was confusing the medium of advertising with the advertising industry, that it was all about the mix, and that advertising is still meant to be a “one-way cyclical endeavor designed to drive awareness, not necessarily a tool to drive social interaction”. Whilst I do believe that a good mix of marketing activity is important, I also believe that all media streams are becoming socialised and advertising content is becoming socialised with it. If the agencies that produced that content are not set up to be agile enough to respond to feedback, or iterative enough to build on connections that the content facilitates, then I can’t help but feel that it’s an opportunity missed. Would be interested to know your thoughts…

http://bit.ly/1cmsxo


http://bit.ly/ofuOg

Great post. I Agree totally.

The thing that’s really interesting about this world is that no one has cracked it. That means that someone like Crispin can come along and, pretty much from nowhere, clear up. Love ‘em or hate ‘em you can’t deny their importance on the industry.

I think it’s always terrifying for a CEO to hear that their agency has to change completely overnight otherwise it’s doomed. I’m not so sure, of course you need support from all the big cheeses but I feel with a few key people and a few successful projects I think most agencies can do good work in this space. Recently Mike Gieger, from Goodby, said that only 25% of the agency really got digital. That feels about right to me.

As for the four things, I think the one thing you are missing – which is absolutely crucial – is luck. When you have all those other things a little bit of luck ie. right client, right time, right budget, right vibe etc etc can go a very very long way.

Great commentary Tim.

The big problem here is that in order to achieve what your suggesting, you really
need to start from scratch or from the ground up. The idea of creating or in most cases trying to retro-fit the current ad / digital agency model into a more agile, media convergence culture will be challenging.

Especially, when the key words are collaboration and agility. Most people within these current models have been only exposed to a silo’d way of thinking. Which unfortunately makes them very territorial when it comes to suggestions. So the idea of trying to change a culture or way of doing things becomes that much more difficult.

I’ve been involved in both an integrated design start-up and a .com. In both cases the culture was built around collaboration, speed and process. Allowing the ideas and solutions to come from anywhere or anyone.

Maybe what first needs to happen is we drop all specific title’s, and everyones title is the same: “brand advocate.” That way everyone is seen as an equal, with no set job description parameters. If anything, it’s a start.

Choice words, and as someone who has come from a pure digital world and is now tasked with getting digital into the heart of a global advertising agency, it’s clear to me that people, process and culture are the key issues that I live every day, and that without hiring the right customer (AKQA’s strategy from the beginning) it can all come to nowt.

What’s clear today is that if it was just about hiring some digital people and enforcing some process we’d all be writing about something else, because the problem would be solved.

The heart of it, I suggest, and what is perhaps eluding a lot of the traditional agencies currently trying to figure out digital, is spawning a new culture.

Acquisition (of digital, by traditional) failed because culture wasn’t taken into account. There was arrogance on both sides of the divide and nobody wanted to concede their culture. New culture comes from deep change in an organisation.

Change means letting go. And whether you’re a digital resident or a traditional storyteller, both have to give something up in order to create something new.

Hi Tim, just catching up on this over the weekend. Agree wholeheartedly with much of what is said here. Difficult stuff indeed with so much work to be done. Like anything, there is always a vast difference between theory and practice.

There are some essential truths that will remain important forever – engineering forward thinking culture in your company is critical and its always going to be about the right people. One thing I know from the experience of building something like lvhrd (lvhrd.org) inside an agency meant that cultural engineering actually connected us to great people, many of who we hired, so those two have a great connection I believe is too often overlooked.

The right processes vary from place to place so they demand constant analysis and are often ignored – especially at agencies – where most of the brain time of the top people is spent solving client problems. The right clients is the one of most frustrating areas for agency people I speak with because they feel its out of their control, and the pool of “good” clients seems to get smaller while the pool of “good” agencies gets bigger.

I think for those who have been working in the digital field for a while and especially those who have worked within the walls of small, nimble “digital agencies” agile development both on projects and internal processes is something that is always preached but not implemented successfully as much as we would all like. At bigger agencies its even more difficult as Andrew touches on in the comments with the inherent challenges of budget allocation and “campaign” culture that is embedded in clients mindset. It takes the agency to make a stand…but convincing the client while competing against others willing to say anything to get the account (while they simultaneously test out the process themselves) is hard when the bottom line is at risk and spending is down.

Even the last project to come out of the Barbarian Group (hboimagine.com) was still a “campaign”…a big flashy “cool” website. Seen by some but buried pretty quickly under the weight of the next days meme. Beautiful, entertaining and technically sound work but still raising the question about utility and return.

To me, and I know the guys at Barbarian and other shops think this way as well, the greater opportunities for real return are in “the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition” or more plainly put…what are the real problems throughout the organization. As changing media and communications platforms has an direct effect on more aspects of the business (CRM, internal communications, HR, production process, purchasing, manufacturing etc), all of sudden the worlds formerly dominated by management consulting companies start to need the expertise of people found at “digital marketing agencies”. This is a huge opportunity for those thinking about it and positioning themselves that way (Dachis Group etc)

There is so much self-analysis going on with “big” agencies right now and its such a hot topic among industry thinkers, but thats because it is critical that these agile ways of thinking are implemented. Agencies do have great people many of who get the culture and will be brought up to speed over time. I think they will need to get smaller before they can grow again though and the ones who take the hardest look now and make the most painful choices for today, will be the ones that succeed tomorrow.

Ahh Mr Perkin,

Thank you so much for bringing both of those posts to my attention. The first, on the subject of ‘Agile Advertising’ contains some thoughts that I think anyone trying to create a long-term platform for clients should have a very serious conversation with them about. It’s absolutely spot on and I honestly think that this goes over many people’s heads when they’re inn the market for ‘a social’. Here it is, as it’s so perkinent (arf) to this discussion:

“Tough perhaps, to keep focused on the long-term when the average tenure of a Marketing Director is 18 months and when, now more than ever, it’s all about hitting the next quarter’s number. But the structural change that needs to happen in marketing and advertising works to a different set of rules. In an environment that is participative it is rude to start a conversation and then walk away. In an environment where your audience have contributed to the success of your idea by building on it, and helping it spread, it is rude not to acknowledge that contribution. In an environment where your audience demand interaction with your brand at their convenience, rather than yours, it is rude to ignore that demand. Conversations can strike up at any time, with anyone, and will last for as long as they are interesting, fun or useful.”

I do believe that although (as you rightly also point out in that post) traditional advertising is “not set up around continuity. It is set up around campaigning” advertising is also full of very smart people who have bot failed to see what is happening to this world. Last week’s joint post at BBH Labs by my brother Ben and Greg Andersen, the MD of BBH NY, shows how some agencies ARE experimenting with new and more agile ways of working. Ben and Greg take this on a step further as well by highlighting the challenges to brands:

“We believe marketing communications are already being forced to become increasingly agile; particularly for more youth-oriented brands… it’s our view that communications for certain types of brands must make a dramatic shift from highly polished epic launches to a continuous and diverse stream of messaging and content designed to ride hyper-current cultural trends, consumer attitudes and competitive maneuvering. The performance of this diverse activity continuously monitored and optimized like a portfolio of stocks…”"

I don’t agree with your commenters that “advertising is still meant to be a “one-way cyclical endeavor designed to drive awareness, not necessarily a tool to drive social interaction”.”

Sure, it is still possible to spend a lot of money and reach a lot of people (probably more money for less people, with less effect) but what is that really worth nowadays. It’s a race to the bottom isn’t it? Spiraling, diminishing returns. I also wonder what kind of people go home at the end of a day thinking they’ve done a great job? I suppose some must – but they must be feeling more and more like spammers.

All that said – I see there are some interesting points of view below, notably:

Mike Scheiner: “The big problem here is that in order to achieve what your suggesting, you really need to start from scratch or from the ground up.”

Matt Spangler: “Agencies do have great people many of who get the culture and will be brought up to speed over time. I think they will need to get smaller before they can grow again though and the ones who take the hardest look now and make the most painful choices for today, will be the ones that succeed tomorrow.”

Is ALL advertising content becoming socialised? I’m not sure I would go that far. I am grimly fascinated with the £11m Kingsmill Confessions campaign (http://www.kingsmillconfessions.com). It’s taken the form of a social campaign – but there’s nothing authentically social there… and so it feels like a lie, which is perhaps even more damaging. It’s like a very expensive microsite that won’t die. Check out the value exchange – I love this: “We’ll pay you to say something nice about us [pretend you have a bread confession, and make it as cringe-worthily, arse-licking as possible…] with the CHANCE to win £250 of Red Letter Day vouchers [another brand and product – not Kingsmill]… but it doesn’t stop there… no sirreeee, we’ll make you FAMOUS.. [i.e. we’ll print your name on a bag of bread so everyone can see what a weak-minded idiot you are, and that that you’ll utterly debase yourself and say anything to be in with a chance of driving a car round a racetrack].

http://www.kingsmillconfessions.com

Bit of a rant – but you get my point!

Thank you James.

Maybe we should re-draw the Eye of Jupiter as The Four Leafed Clover of Jupiter to represent “luck”? ;-)

If only 25% of a big company gets it I guess they might find it hard to “clean up”?? Although, I guess it depends which 25% n’est pas? The 25% most influential might work…

Hi there Mike – thanks for taking the time to comment.

Emotionally, I am totally with you on the “starting from scratch”, but I realise that (1) that is because I have a tendency to be an extremist; and (2) that’s what we did two years ago.. so of course it’s the correct answer!

With my rational head on on, I understand that it is not possible to start from scratch for most companies – but more than that I genuinely don’t believe it to be necessary. Undoubtedly, it would make it easier in some respects but no-one can afford to throw away the accumulated value – the wisdom, culture, smart people, breadth of creativity, scale and breadth of communications planning etc etc – all of the things that start-ups crave and find very difficult to ‘get’. My prediction (for what it’s worth, which quite frankly isn’t much) is that we’ll see the smartest agencies – or at least the ones where the smartest people wield real influence – get this pretty quickly. The dumber ones will die.

I missed your suggestion of dropping titles, which is interesting because it’s something we are ‘sort of’ in the process of doing here at Made by Many. We realised 18 months in that there is a natural tendency if the majority of people have come from agency backgrounds, for you to settle into an ‘agency’ way of thinking over time… it’s a kind of inertia force. There isn’t much you can do to stop it happening – other than recognise it and re-commit to being more radical periodically (or “radding it up” as we say internally). So we are currently “radding it up” – and doing away with job titles, and replacing them with this thought:

“Job titles are limiting for employees and clients. No-one has a job title, you are the sum of abilities in disciplines”

Still working out what this means practically – but we think it might have pretty exciting implications for recruiting, training, measuring utilisation and billing. We’ll keep you posted – Stuart said he’d blog about it at some stage…

Thanks David,

I love your point:

“if it was just about hiring some digital people and enforcing some process we’d all be writing about something else, because the problem would be solved.”

And your observation that everyone has to give something up to move on is an excellent one that really rings true for us. We’re not an ad agency – but we are living inside one (totally independently) – and that experience has, I think and hope, been challenging in all the right ways for both parties. It’s not always without its tensions – but that’s a really constructive tension and has certainly made us better. It’s absolutely about negotiating your way ahead.

Wow – great comment Matt. Thanks, there’s a lot in there.

I wonder if tomorrow’s ad agencies should be more like consultancies? It feel like there’s a big chunk of ‘change management’ required if we are to help some client organisations achieve what they want. I’ve always been interested in the question, “Is it easier to get the right clients than turn the wrong clients around?” I honestly don’t know the answer – maybe it’s the wrong question.

You are definitely right to identify the gap between the ‘ideal’ we’re all aiming for and the reality of what gets delivered. I’m certainly not going to bullshit you that we always get it 100% right first go – but isn’t that the point of committing to the permanent beta…? As BBH Labs say over at their related blog on “So what exactly might ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’ be?” (http://bit.ly/2lvZNG) “To Fail Is To Learn”. We move on our thinking about process with each job – it is never good enough, and there is always a new challenge.

http://bit.ly/2lvZNG

I’m very interested in your point about ‘social business design’, as Dachis have coined it. It feels like clients are going to become more like agencies in some respects, while some agencies will become much more like a cross between management consultants and talent agencies… and the recession is the perfect excuse to take the gloves off and try this difficult seismic-scale change out stuff out properly… in fact, maybe a lot of people have been waiting for this moment.

Good stuff here, Tim. Easier said than done as you know. None of us would build the agencies we have no if we were starting from scratch. Too many shops have models that will be hard to change, clients who are there for a different kind of work and the real challenge of muscle memory when it comes time to change the process. There are two options: 1. Build a skunkworks group designed to put the big shop out of business, a hedge fund if you will. Change up the model, build alliances, create a very different product offering. Or, 2. maintain what you have but try and slowly evolve by changing up the people the processes the stuff you bring to clients, etc. That takes more than a few devs; it takes passionate, contagious, visionaries with real power and influence inside the organization. At my shop, Mullen, we are doing the latter (that would be me and a few other bandits try to effect change) and we’re actually thinking about the former. Yet every time a client says give me a plain old regular campaign, it’s easy to default to that. Meanwhile, clients are hearing all kinds of conflicting info. R/GA claims its platform model is the only way to go. Integrated shops are simply saying that it’s about taking brand messages and content to the digital places. Consumers are insisting on their own form of participation. And, from what I know, while Razorfish and AKQA are doing well, Barbarian is hurting. One thing’s for certain. Everything will be digital. The consumer’s demand for control will never go away. Interruptive advertising will become more and more irrelevant. And branding needs to be baked into products, which are as often as not,the content and utility defines what they stand for. Glad I found your blog via Ben Malbon. I’m the guy that suggested UX belongs in everything.

Interesting debate. Tim, in actuality, there has been very little advertising to support Nike+. There was absolutely none for over a year after the product launched in August 2006. In 2007, Nike hired Crispin Porter to develop a campaign which ran briefly around holiday 2007 — almost a year and a half after the product was launched. The campaign was not viewed favorably, and CP+B was quickly dismissed from the Nike account. In summer 2008, the Nike+ Human Race was conducted in 28 cities around the world. There was a bit of traditional media in support of this race, mostly outdoor. But the “traditional media’ was in support of the race event, not specifically Nike+. So it’s incorrect to say that Nike + was supported in “many, expensive and traditional channels” as you mention in your post. This is simply not the case. The product garnered millions of dollars of unpaid media (massive amounts of PR coverage globally). Even three years after launch, it was featured in a Wired magazine cover story, for instance. Additionally, we built Nike+ to include a wide variety of social media hooks that enable the users of Plus to scrape content, post their runs, etc. garnering a massive amount of “earned” media along the way. The same has been true of most of R/GA’s Nike platforms — NIKEiD, Nike Football Head2Head, Nike Basketball Baller’s Network. These are all successful platform initiatives that have had little to no traditional media support (not that it wouldn’t have been welcome!).

Hi Barry. Thanks for taking the time to comment at our blog.

First of all, let me just say that I think the Nike+ platform, and all the work R/GA have done with Nike, is brilliant.

The truly groundbreaking Nike+ platform is cited in nearly every meeting I have been to where people are discussing the future of advertising or what they’d like to do with digital – and this has been the case for three years. So, in no way do I seek to take anything away from that.

However, I’m not sure it is correct to say that:

“There was absolutely none [paid-for advertising] for over a year after the product launched in August 2006.”

There are these two from November 2006:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHDw5uQvK5Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEs8NIRRyYc&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHDw5uQvK5Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEs8NIRRyYc&feature=player_embedded

And there’s this one from December 2006:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHDw5uQvK5Y

And then there are these three from 2007 (before August 2007):
April 2007 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9yn_3fromg
April 2007 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTd2vEkWTj0
July 2007 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WVN6xULZqo

So – that’s six different ads that I found in fifteen minutes on YouTube from the first year. There were a further 3 or 4 plus localised ads in September 2007 – a date that is only relevant because, as you say, there were none for OVER a year…

I really don’t mean to split hairs, but the point that I was trying to make (obviously, not well enough) was that Nike+ was supported with traditional paid-for channels – and not just earned media – and that the paid-for support was undoubtedly relatively expensive when compared to most people’s budgets for digital platforms… and that this makes a like-for-like comparison difficult.

In summary, I hope you don’t feel that I was in any way detracting from the value that the Nike+ platform has created, its business impact or the significance of R/GA’s innovative model. I totally accept that the platform is the thing that makes what you did work, that drove the earned media attention, and that the value of the earned component is much greater over time. But, traditional advertising played perhaps slightly more of a role than you claim in establishing the platform.

Tim,

Thanks for the kudos!

You’ve uncovered a treasure trove of videos on YouTube, but to the best of my knowledge none of these ever ran as paid media (at least in the U.S.). The only spot that ever ran as paid media was the Crispin spot developed for Holiday 2007 that showed a character being chased throughout history, then ending up on a boring treadmill. There have been tons of promotional videos created for Nike+ over the years (many of which were featured on NikePlus.com as promotions for the product and also seeded on YouTube), but there was very little “paid” media support. The strategy was heavy on PR and earned media until last year’s Human Race, which was supported with paid media in all of the major race cities around the world. As I said before, we would have loved to have more paid media support, but Nike struggled to develop spots it felt did the product justice (which is why the assignment initially moved from W+K to CP+B in the first place, and then back again).

Edward, R/GA’s model is called “Platforms + Campaigns” — not just platforms. We are strong believers in the power of platforms and the power of campaigns, but when both work together it can transform brands (as we tried to do together during that little pitch last year…). It’s becoming nearly impossible do either solely today.