RazorfishOutlookReportVol10

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Outlook Report, Volume 10 — There’s no better time to start something.
The Year in Media
Forget Mobile — Think Multiscreen
A Wake-Up Call for Collaboration
It’s Time for Big Data to Improve Customer Experience
Humanity Check — What Consumers Really Think About Tech
How the Social Cloud Can Accelerate Brand Interaction
Beyond the Banner — Unleashing the Power of Digital to Drive Topline Growth
The Rules of Gamification
It’s Not Enough to Be Liked — Getting Serious About Social
Controlling the Retail Environment Through Digital Brand Immersion
Performance Marketing Must Die
Toward a New Global Digital Agency Structure
Limited Time to Prepare for Unlimited Potential of Mobile
How the Open API Movement Can Help Your Brand
Organizing for Digital Success
Authors and Contributors
Contact
GO tO razOrfishOutLOOk.razOrfish.cOm fOr an interactiVe VersiOn Of OUTLOOK OutLOOk REPORT repOrt, | VOL 10.
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There’s no better time
to start something.

As we gathered the data and spoke to clients and industry watchers to put together the Razorfish Outlook Report,
we once again found our business in the middle of tremendous global change. The conversation around digital
marketing — long the domain of digital agencies and technology companies — is now part of a much broader
conversation about social and cultural change, the global economy and business landscape.
In today’s world, social tools that started as communications
and marketing tools have become conduits for revolution.
Cloud-based services have finally emerged as viable methods
for increasing collaboration and driving greater efficiency.
And the investment world increasingly looks to start-ups
to once again push the global economy forward.
This means digital is now a lot bigger than agencies. In fact,
it’s bigger than marketing. It’s increasingly woven into the fabric
of our business and consumer culture. This inspires us more
than ever not only to optimize the status quo, but also to ignite
a business movement of sorts.
But how?
First, there is more pressure on our business to perform
creatively, stemming from the fact that digital ideas come
from more sources than just the agency. Indeed, as the new
generation of creators enters the workforce, we have observed
their natural tendency to put digital at the center of their process
and thinking, regardless of their chosen industry or employer.
As a result, companies like ours have to raise their game
creatively to deliver idea-led value to our clients, while creating
an environment for new ideas to thrive.
Next, there is a strong drive to leverage the power of technology
to increase efficiency and drive down the cost of marketing
and doing business. We are seeing tremendous opportunities
in the media marketplace, with the rise of ad exchanges, analytics
and marketing platforms, to do just that. We’re merely scratching
the surface of what’s possible.
Finally, efficiency alone won’t move business forward forever.
When I meet with CMOs, CIOs and CEOs around the world,
I continue to hear a call for innovation and see an ever-present
search for sources of incremental revenue. Marketers and
business leaders once tasked with spending budgets efficiently
are increasingly challenged with identifying new sources of growth,
as well as product enhancements.
The truth is, building an agency that fires on all cylinders — high
levels of creativity, innovation, efficiency and technology — is a
tremendous challenge. But it’s what agencies and great marketing
organizations will need to do to survive in the face of change.
Which brings me back to the Razorfish Outlook Report. I think
you’ll find it to be a little less theoretical and a bit more practical
than in years past. Why? Aren’t digital agencies supposed to be
the predictors of the digital future? There’s nothing wrong
with dreaming big, but first and foremost, in our view the next
12 months will be about doing.
We’re not just talking about the social media explosion, but
also scaling an organization and agency partners to execute
on a strategy. Not simply checking the boxes of media best
practices, but leveraging every tool available to plan, buy
and measure its effectiveness. Not just accepting the product
experience as it exists today, but using technology to improve
customer experience. Not just ideation, but also execution.
As we publish the Outlook Report, we hope it will inspire you
to think and act. It’s what we mean when we say Ignite.
Bob Lord
Global CEO
@RWLORD
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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WRITTEN BY
The Razorfish Media Team
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Media Research
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The Year in Media
Here’s our annual look at Razorfish ad spend, along with the results
of our media team poll to identify the “Best of the Web” and trends
for 2012. As we’ve done in the past, we polled the Razorfish media
team to discover the “Best of the Web,” asking a variety of different
questions to get a directional perspective of upcoming trends.
The questions revolved around creativity, performance, quality
and overall general satisfaction.
The past year in digital media was heavily influenced by the rapid adoption of new
channels like tablets, the explosive growth of new consumer platforms like Twitter
and new innovations in media buying such as ad exchanges. Overall, investments
in digital continue to grow year-over-year, playing an increasingly critical role in
our clients’ marketing plans. Consumer migration to digital media, the emergence
of new media powers and the sophistication of performance metrics made the
year in media one of the most dynamic in decades.
Ad spend in review
Razorfish ad spend is projected to grow by more than 25 percent in 2011, marking
the third consecutive year of more than 20 percent growth in overall ad spend for
the agency. The growth is a result of success in new business and from increased
investment from long-standing clients. After just two years, Publicis Groupe has
proven to be a great fit for Razorfish and our clients.
Now more than ever, the function of media planning is about understanding consumer
behaviors and needs — and how to craft experiences that deliver on the opportunities
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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Content is media.
Yearly media billings
index
200
150
100
50
0
presented by those evolving behaviors. This is fundamentally
different than simply accumulating reach and exposure through
mass media. Our paid media spend was distributed across five
main channels, illustrating the increasing complexity faced by
clients and digital marketing teams.
A closer look at the distribution of ad spend reveals several
emerging trends:
the Year in media
2008
2009
2010
2011(e)
Spend
4% 4%
13%
43%
43%
36%
36%
4%
4%
1. Growth in ad exchanGes
search
disPLaY
MoBiLe
sociaL
networKs/exchanGes
Razorfish has been active in buying through ad exchanges
since the early days of auction-based display media. We were
one of the first agencies to launch a trading desk to directly
access the growing pool of inventory and have continued
to be at the forefront of data integration through the creation
of client-side data mart solutions, now commonly referred
to as DMPs.

Our continued expansion into the auction-based media
marketplace has resulted in tremendous benefits for our clients
in terms of more effective pricing, better targeting and stronger
ROI overall. As we continue to grow and expand our efforts in
this area, we will be focused on integrating first- and third-party
data to build the most sophisticated targeting offering possible.
These efforts will, of course, be balanced by the industry’s
important and ongoing efforts to provide sound self-regulation
around data management and privacy.
Our investment in ad exchanges grew by 66 percent in 2010
and is projected to grow again by more than 60 percent
in 2011. Even with that growth, there is still plenty of upside
in this category since it represents less than 10 percent of our
total ad spend.
Total spend in ad exchanges
index
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
2009
= totaL sPend
2010
2. consoLidation oF PUBLisher Partners
2011
The emergence of new technologies and consumer channels
continues to provide opportunities for the emergence of new
publisher partners. In 2010, we purchased media across 598
sites, down from a high of 1,832 in 2007. While we expect
many of those buys to be consolidated through the growth
of audience buying across ad exchanges, we still see the
need to test new platforms and technologies.
Number of publishers vs. number of media partners
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1,832
2007
totaL
sPend
1,024
2008
However, we have continued to increase our concentration
on fewer and more strategic partners. This focus on more
complex, strategic partnerships has resulted in strong benefits
for our clients in terms of scale, price, innovation and access.
The breakout of our spend shows that 55 percent of our
aggregated budget goes to our top five strategic partners,
25 percent to the next 32 largest partners and the remaining
20 percent in our long tail of 584 publisher partners.
Spend breakout
nUMBer oF
PUBLishers
692
2009
598
2010
taiL
BodY
strateGic
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3. increased investMent in Paid sociaL Media
The rapid rise of social media has impacted digital and our
clients’ business in many ways. As social media platforms
continued their explosive growth in the last year to reach
massive scale, leading marketers adjusted their plans
accordingly to begin a two-way dialogue with current and
potential customers.
This has led to the emergence of Facebook as a leading
partner in paid media for Razorfish in the last year. Since our
early tests and inclusion in Facebook media programs in 2008,
the social network has gone from being in the lower tier of our
top 200 publisher partners to catapulting to one of our top five
media partners (as measured by total spend). The growth can
mostly be attributed to the fact that Facebook has innovated
in terms of media offerings and that these new opportunities
are helping our clients meet their marketing goals. Facebook’s
growing audience makes it a platform that our clients need
to include in the development of their marketing plans. Our
projections for 2011 point to continued growth and show no
evidence that the rise of paid media on Facebook will slow down.
the Year in media
4. shiFt FroM Paid to earned and owned
The scale of leading social media platforms such as Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube had a strong influence on the overall
marketing mix for our clients. However, the overall amount
of dollars invested against social media still pales in comparison
to search and display. The advertising models of these emerging
media titans are still evolving, but they will undoubtedly garner
a growing share of marketing dollars.
In addition, the investment in social media management on
third-party and owned platforms is not to be overlooked. The
vast majority of our clients now have earned and owned media
strategies to complement their paid media strategies. Over the
last year we’ve seen tighter coordination between the paid,
earned and owned channels. We now manage relationships with
close to 10 million fans and followers on behalf of our clients, not
including audiences on Web sites and microsites that we manage.
That’s roughly nine times what we managed just a year ago.
Our research into social media analytics has given us great
insight into the impact and the amplification effect of earned
and owned media. As we continue to refine our practices, we
fully expect that investments in content and relationships will
continue to grow rapidly.

“Best of the Web”
Most innovation in Media oPPortUnities
PreFerred MoBiLe Partner
5. acceLeratinG Growth in MoBiLe
Our mobile media and search business nearly doubled last year
and represented close to 10 percent of our total paid media
business. The major factors that affected this accelerating
investment represent trends that will continue to make mobile
one of the fastest growing categories:
increase in MoBiLe transactions. Our clients are investing
in fully functional mobile experiences where consumers can start
to transact and purchase in the mobile channel. While mobile
commerce is still small and nascent, mobile is becoming an
important touch point in the consumer experience. As marketers
increase the quality and quantity of mobile experiences, the
mobile media and search spends will follow. For example, one
of our clients is seeing pay-per-call increasingly drive significant
scale and ROI.
Growth oF taBLets. The proliferation of tablets in the marketplace
is creating an entirely new channel. As consumers increase their
consumption of media on tablet devices, it will provide a scaled
medium for advertisers to reach their audience. Innovations in
tablet computing will lead to advertising opportunities that differ
significantly from those on PCs or phones. The ability to bring
Best coLLaBoration
PreFerred video Partner
Partner where we Most want to sPend
MoneY, BUt can’t FiGUre oUt how
Most consistent PerForMance
(advertisinG.coM)
touch interactivity together with sound, sight and motion will enable
marketers to provide new, rich experiences to their customers.
aLwaYs-on Phones. Multitasking with mobile while watching
TV is driving higher consumption of mobile media and providing
new opportunities for marketers to engage with their audience.
Razorfish conducted a study in collaboration with Yahoo! to
understand consumer behaviors and marketing opportunities
across multiple screens. One of the conclusions from our research
is that mobile is emerging as an indispensable activation vehicle
for the massive investments in TV advertising. The complete
details of the study are covered later in the Outlook Report.
“Best of the Web” — A planner’s perspective
As we’ve done in the past, we polled the Razorfish media
team to discover the “Best of the Web.” We asked a variety of
different questions to get a directional perspective of upcoming
trends. The questions revolved around creativity, performance,
quality and overall general satisfaction.
Some of the “Best of the Web” results are listed in the
graphic above.
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Razorfish ad spend is projected to
grow by more than 25% in 2011, marking
the fourth straight year of 20%+ growth
in overall ad spend for our agency.
Themes that will shape the next year in media
There is no doubt that digital media continues to be the most
dynamic and innovative sector in marketing. One of the byproducts
of the rapid pace of change in digital media consumption is the
constant struggle for the industry to evolve traditional delivery
models. Over the next 12 months, agencies must focus on
adapting to the proliferation of new consumer behaviors and
new marketing tactics. In particular, next year will be dominated
by challenges such as how to manage video across multiple
screens, how to rapidly incorporate changes in social media,
how to plan in a cross-platform landscape and how to scale
mobile advertising.
While those trends will certainly dominate the conversation
around media and marketing, it’s our perspective that there
are also four major themes that will work to reshape digital
media in the next year.
1. content as Media
Most marketing professionals admit to having been in a vigorous
debate sometime in the last year about the classification of a
particular tactic as paid, earned or owned media. The construct
the Year in media
is very useful in helping marketers broaden thinking around
marketing strategies. But perhaps the real value is in helping
reinforce the notion that content is media. And content can exist
in many forms. The notion that agency planners are responsible
for content leads to strategies and plans that can have a much
greater impact. In the next year, progressive marketers will
be the ones that begin to integrate all their brand assets into
a single communication platform, creating a unified brand
experience that puts the needs of the consumer at the center.
2. data ManaGeMent
In the last five years, we’ve increased the amount of data that
we manage in our own servers from 3 terabytes to 90 terabytes.
The ability to manage large and complex data sets has shifted
from being a core differentiator to an absolute requirement.
Data sources are more vast and complicated than ever.
Building a single view of the consumer across all channels is
the only way that marketers can truly build effective marketing
programs. More than 80 percent of our media clients rely on
a data management platform that we have custom built to make
their digital marketing more targeted and more effective. Over
the next year, these platforms will continue to become more

sophisticated, taking into account an increasing number of data
sources. Data management pays off for marketers — we’ve
been able to improve return on ad spend more than five times
by serving personalized ads to dynamic segments enabled
by a unified marketing database.
3. reaL-tiMe BUYinG
In the last year, we have more than tripled the number of realtime
impressions we’ve purchased. On average, we’ve seen
performance improvements of more than 40 percent for our
clients. The real-time nature of digital data has simply changed
the way we buy media. Those who are able to understand data
and act upon it immediately — in real time — have a strategic
advantage over their competitors. Long gone are the days
when companies and their agencies could buy media months
in advance, then wait several more months to understand
how those media investments performed. Today, agencies
and brands have seconds in which they must respond, or
potentially leave millions on the table in lost value. Brands need
partners who can collect, translate and take action on that data
in real time. Agencies that are well-versed in bid-management
systems, and that invest in the tools and processes to manage
those systems, will become industry leaders. The real-time
and highly complex nature of digitized media allows marketers
to develop a sustainable competitive advantage.
4. attriBUtion
For the last decade, we’ve been building attribution models
for our clients to help them invest their marketing spend
more effectively. In the pioneering days, this type of analysis
was done infrequently and was limited in breadth and scope.
Today, with the data and processing infrastructure we have
invested in over the last 10 years, and the growth of the
marketing analytics group to more than 100 professionals,
we are actively building these kinds of models for our clients
on a regular basis. In fact, we’ve seen return on ad spending
improve by as much as 3.5 times through smarter allocation
of media investments. While it’s a discipline that demands
constant iteration and analysis, that type of improvement
makes attribution modeling a crucial strategy for marketers.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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WRITTEN BY
WITH CONTRIBUTOR
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VP, Emerging Media
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Forget Mobile —
Think Multiscreen
As is the case with many new technologies, consumers are moving
faster than brands. They’re already using smartphones and tablet
devices in front of the TV to communicate with friends and family,
look up information related to the show they are watching, or else
surf content that is completely unrelated to what’s on the big
screen. Razorfish partnered with Yahoo! to conduct a study
to better understand this rapidly evolving consumer behavior
and to provide guidance for how marketers should approach
the corresponding opportunity.
Mobile devices are used frequently in conjunction with other screens, including
the big TV in your living room. Anyone who has ever tapped out an email on their
iPhone, while checking a score on the VAIO balanced on their lap, while keeping
an eye on American Idol on their 40-inch BRAVIA knows this. Yet many marketers
today are ignoring this ubiquitous consumer behavior as they over-focus on mobile
as a stand-alone medium.
Media multitasking is not a new thing, of course. People have used laptops in front
of the TV since… well, probably since the first laptop entered someone’s home.
We’ve seen data on this behavior for years, and yet, beyond putting a URL on
screen or asking people to “like” a brand on Facebook, most TV spots don’t
acknowledge or attempt to capitalize on the fact that the consumer is watching
with a Web-enabled device on their lap or in their pocket.
At a minimum, multitasking adds another layer of complexity to the evolution of
media measurement. At most, it’s a massive disrupter to television, the medium
that receives the most ad spending. DVRs threw the industry for a loop, and
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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C3 ratings were born to begin to address a world where the
consumer is increasingly in control. 1 Now, add mobile and tablet
multitasking to the mix and marketers everywhere wrestle with
measuring the latest evolution in consumer TV viewing behavior.
On one hand, there is a potential distraction factor with
connected devices, and on the other, there is a much more
engaged viewer who is passionately chasing down more content
on devices beyond the TV. How do marketers account for that
with Gross Rating Points (GRPs) and Target Rating Points (TRPs)?
We don’t yet have a clear answer — give us six months —
but most marketers seem to be ignoring the question and
failing to capitalize on the corresponding opportunity created
by mobile multitasking.
Which leads us to this: Lots of data has been published about
the fact that consumers are using mobile and tablet devices
while watching TV, but little of it has gone deep enough to be
really useful in planning a multi-screen strategy. So Razorfish
of respondents are
mobile multitasking
while watching TV.
1 “C3” TV Ratings Show Impact of DVR Ad Viewing,” blog.nielsen.com, October 14, 2009, http://blog.
nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/c3-tv-ratings-show-impact-of-dvr-ad-viewing/.
fOrGet mOBiLe — think muLtiscreen
partnered with Yahoo! to conduct a survey among Web-enabled
phone owners with the goal of better understanding this rapidly
evolving consumer behavior and providing some guidance
for how marketers should approach them.
We found that a stunning 80 percent of respondents are mobile
multitasking while watching TV. Below are some highlights and
key implications for marketers.
MoBiLe MULtitasKinG is addictive. 70 percent of respondents
who multitask do so at least once a week, with nearly half (49
percent) reporting everyday multitasking. Furthermore, during
the course of a TV program, more than 60 percent check their
phones at least “once or twice,” and 15 percent stay on the
mobile Web for the full duration of the show.
MULtitasKinG is Both an enhanceMent and a distraction.
An equal percentage of multitasking respondents (38 percent)
agreed or strongly agreed with these statements:

• Using the Internet on my mobile or tablet device while
watching TV enhances my viewing experience.
• I find using mobile devices while watching TV
to be distracting.
This seems to be an opportunity for content producers and
advertisers alike. Some people find multitasking to be a boon,
and we have only begun to scratch the surface in terms
of providing an engaging dual-screen experience. It’s like the
early days of smartphones where it was remarkable that people
were making purchases from sites that were not mobile-optimized.
If folks were willing to go through that much effort, it stands to
reason that making the experience easier and more streamlined
will lead to even more passionate participants.
certain ProGraMMinG Genres Lend theMseLves to
MULtitasKinG. The top five categories that attract
multitaskers are:
1. Reality 2. News 3. Comedy 4. Sports 5. Food
While the top results may not seem surprising, what struck us
about the results further down the list were that drama edged
out genres like talk shows, music videos, how-to and others.
We thought drama and action/adventure shows would be less
likely to see multitasking behavior. Perhaps these intense
programs stoke multitasking as viewers get hooked and seek
ways to further immerse themselves in the show’s world. Think
about Breaking Bad, CSI, Dexter or True Blood — those shows
are intense but they also beg viewers to dig a few levels deeper
than what happens during those weekly 40-plus minutes.
coMMUnication and content are the Main drivers For
MULtitasKinG. 94 percent of multitaskers engage in some kind
of mobile communication. In order — text, talking, email, social
networking and IM. It’s somewhat surprising to see talking
so high and social networking so low; we expected the reverse.
On the content side of things, 60 percent of multitaskers
are accessing additional content of some type. 44 percent
is unrelated to what’s on TV versus only 38 percent related to TV.
Clearly there can be a distraction factor here when it comes to
TV commercial time, but the good news for marketers is that 36
percent of multitaskers use their connected devices for looking
up information on a commercial they just saw.
tv ad tiMe = MoBiLe PriMe tiMe. TV ad breaks are triggers for
multitasking because phones and tablets are, not surprisingly,
more likely to get fired up and accessed during regular
commercial pods. And, our survey respondents were more likely
to state that they frequently engaged in multitasking during
ad breaks. What people do during this time doesn’t change all
that much. It’s still communication first and content second.
An analysis of mobile Web traffic to the Yahoo! homepage
during this year’s Academy Awards broadcast indicated clear
spikes in traffic during TV ad breaks.
connected devices add FUeL to the Fire oF sPorts FandoM.
Almost half of respondents reported multitasking during sporting
events, with little difference shown between live or pre-recorded.
In fact, even when attending a live sporting event in person,
more than a third can’t stay away from their devices. Another
key difference between sports and other genres is that with
sports, people are driven more by content than by communication
(recall it was the other way around overall). Texting still rules, but
after that, other communication styles drop off — and various
content rises to the top. Leading behaviors include checking
scores and schedules of other games, and looking up team
and player information or statistics. Smack talking showed up
surprisingly low (20 percent) — maybe that’s because it’s not
as rewarding when you can’t see the look on the other guy’s
face — this feels like an opportunity for an inventive developer
(or enterprising marketer).
Again, an analysis of Yahoo! mobile traffic confirmed that with
sports content (in this case, World Cup 2010 and Super Bowl
2011), commercial breaks spark mobile usage. Even bigger
spikes are seen at halftime and after the games. For example,
during the Super Bowl halftime show, Yahoo! Sports saw a 305
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percent increase in mobile traffic. After the game, even more
users flooded the sports section, pushing overall increase up
387 percent. And, not surprisingly, Yahoo! saw massive spikes
in mobile search traffic related to TV spots, including several
movies and automobile manufacturers.
Implications for marketers
YoUr tv content strateGY MUst evoLve (aGain). It used to
be relatively easy. Crank out a few 30-second spots and call
it a day. But then came the Web, video on demand, basic
interactive TV capabilities and so forth. Most marketers are
still struggling to figure out how to truly capitalize on the
opportunities represented by long-form video and — more
recently — social content. Now, a new imperative is clear,
especially for those spending heavily on TV. Content and
experiences that move seamlessly from one screen to another
are an absolute must. This is bigger than simply having
a mobile- or tablet-optimized Web site. It means a cohesive
communications strategy where the spots and the experience
on mobile devices work together and build toward a greater
whole. It means a mobile-optimized site that knows what’s
fOrGet mOBiLe — think muLtiscreen
Content and experiences
that move seamlessly
from one screen to another
are an absolute must.
happening in the TV spots, and perhaps even what’s happening
in the current program — especially if it’s live. At a bare minimum,
it’s time to consider what kind of mobile call to action may be
appropriate in the brand’s TV spot.
Pepsi, Old Navy and Heineken have begun experimenting here.
Pepsi gave away a free bottle of Pepsi Max to users who tagged
the commercial using IntoNow, a Yahoo! social tool that allows
you to share what you’re watching with your friends. Old Navy’s
“Old Navy Records” campaign encourages users to tag spots
with Shazam to unlock related content like the featured looks,
and even download the music tracks for free. Heineken’s Star
Player app gives users the chance to play along with soccer
matches by attempting to predict which team will score within
the next 30 seconds. These efforts begin to show the possibilities,
but are only scratching the surface.
MoBiLe search is aBoUt More than LocaL. There’s no doubt that
local search is very important. After all, mobile users are accessing
local search 34 percent more than they were a year ago, according
to research from comScore and the Local Search Association.
But, with the massive amount of multitasking behavior highlighted
here combined with the various studies suggesting that anywhere
from 30-40 percent of mobile data usage happens at home, mobile

search isn’t exclusively about finding the closest taco joint.
Marketers must reconsider their search strategies. At a minimum,
they need to ensure that their mobile properties are properly
positioned in organic results. It may also be worth re-evaluating
the keywords they’re bidding on, perhaps to include terms that
link the brand to shows and events they’re sponsoring.
Let’s take an automotive company launching a new luxury sports
sedan, for example. Part of the launch is sponsorship of a live
awards show — several spots appear throughout the show and
the celebs hitting the red carpet arrive in the new vehicle.
Bumpers include “sponsored by” mentions and on-screen
logos. The spot closes with a URL. Some viewers might jump
to their phones, fire up the browser and enter the URL.
But a good portion of them will also take what they perceive
to be a shortcut: typing the brand’s name into a search box.
Organic and paid results should appear and direct a relevant
experience — perhaps the site’s homepage temporarily features
the new model as well as content related to the awards
program. Perhaps the red carpet reporter films a walk-through
of the vehicle, and that video is made available. To drive even
more traffic and engagement, the brand could bid on search terms
relevant to the awards show (and popular gossip sites). The call
to action could be something along the lines of “See your favorite
celebs arriving in the new XYZ car,” linking through to a series
of videos and also featuring the red carpet reporter’s overview.
connected devices are the new water cooLer. People aren’t
waiting until the next day to discuss what happened on their
favorite program anymore — it’s happening in real time now,
via text, email and social networking sites/services. Brands can
ride along here as well, but it requires a smart social strategy
that syncs the brand with the programs they’re sponsoring.
It’s not easy, but with more than half of multitaskers getting
active on social networks during TV viewing, there is a massive
opportunity to engage the audience on a new platform.
In the automotive example above, there are several ways
the brand might get involved in the real-time discussion.
Aggregating Twitter feeds on their homepage, for example, allows
users to explore the new sedan while staying connected. Perhaps
sponsored tweets could go out from a few celebs talking about
how much they liked the ride in the car. The brand’s social network
presences could all be talking about the show, perhaps launching
real-time polls asking users to predict who will win the next
category. And so on.
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MULtitasKinG MiGht FinaLLY KiLL (or at Least reinvent)
the GrP. The GRP debate rages on. The metric that has been
the currency of the offline world for decades has tried time
and time again to enter the digital world, only to be beaten back
by legitimate arguments that it doesn’t accurately account for
different levels of engagement, among other weaknesses.
But here’s the remarkable thing about multitasking —
increasingly, the devices are going to know what people are
watching, providing a potentially more accurate view into what
fOrGet mOBiLe — think muLtiscreen
Connected
devices are the
new water cooler.
large groups of people are tuning into. And, with so much
brand engagement happening on these connected devices,
effectiveness of spots may also be more accurately measured.
Lastly — and this is the silver bullet — with massive growth
expected in mobile payments and mobile wallets, the same
device that knows what people are watching and what people
are surfing will soon know what they’re buying, creating
the ideal closed loop for ROI-driven marketers. And who
isn’t ROI-driven these days?

By Frederic Bonn
And
you re
satisfied
with that?
Are
you in
denial
?
So you’d
actually
rather work
with multiple
agencies?
Do you rely on more than one agency
to handle your communications and
marketing?
Is that single agency capable of mastering
integrated communications from social
media to mobile, event planning to media
buying, TV to digital?
And you have operational
flexibility and scale?
And they provide
ground-breaking
creative ideas
that deliver great
results?
Do you want a
consistent
communication
platform that
works across all
channels and is
relevant to the
consumer
behavior in
each?
Do you believe
consumers only
experience your
brand via one
media channel?
Do you have one lead agency creating
ideas while the others simply follow?
Have you defined your individual
agencies’ roles and responsibilities?
And they never try to
compete anyway?
Do you want your agencies
to successfully collaborate?
Your lead agency is probably the “traditional”
agency, right? Great, you now have a 30
second spot (or 60) and some print ads.
Did you develop an integrated brief that
incorporates all agencies, teams and
disciplines involved in your business?
Do your teams meet regularly
to develop an integrated brand
strategy and campaigns?
Do you know how most
agencies operate?
Here's a little more about how
agencies think.
They all love what they do,
but their love is blind.
Agency A thinks that Agency B is
clueless about digital, even though
Agency B said they had videos on
YouTube — “That’s digital, right?”
B dismisses A’s ideas because A
doesn’t know anything about the
brand, but come on, A had a video
on YouTube, too! — “That’s brand
building, right?!”
A and B think C should just follow
what they say — “Wait, you didn’t
get our memo?”
And D should just buy what they
all need — “Because we’ve
already figured it out.”
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
21

WRITTEN BY
WITH CONTRIBUTOR
READ MORE
Pete Stein
President, East
@pStEIN211
Frederic Bonn
Executive Creative Director
@fREDERICbONN
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A Wake-Up Call
for Collaboration
The ability to integrate creative, media and technology to meet
the demands of your always-on consumer is ideal. However, most
traditional lead agencies don’t have those capabilities just yet, nor
are most digital agencies prepared to handle lead agency duties.
Coordination of your agencies is not enough — you need to move
more aggressively toward true collaboration. We’ve identified five
big barriers to essential agency collaboration.
People now consume 12 hours of media in just 9 hours of elapsed time, according
to a recent Harvard Business Review study. 1 Consumers use a lot of media types
all at once and now brands need to catch up. To do so, marketers must change
how they work with their agencies.
If you are a CMO or a brand leader, you are probably using multiple agencies
to meet the demands of your always-on consumer. A lead agency that can integrate
creativity, media and technology would be a great solution, but traditional lead
agencies aren’t yet capable. In 2009, Forrester Research set off a mini industry
tempest when it reported that only 23 percent of interactive marketers felt
traditional agencies were equipped to handle interactive marketing work. 2 Fast
forward two years and Forrester still reports that only 30 percent of those surveyed
use their traditional agencies for digital marketing, and in fact 68 percent of those
marketers work with two or more agencies. Some reportedly have more than 15
1 “How Internet Junkies will Save Television,” Harvard Business Review, http://hbr.org/web/extras/
how-internet-junkies-will-save-television/4-slide.
2 Sean Corocan, “The State of Interactive Agencies,” Forrester, December 7, 2009.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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24
agencies on their interactive rosters. 3 By the same token, most
digital agencies aren’t yet ready to handle lead agency duties. In
three to five years, the landscape will look different, but for now
marketers have to deal with a patchwork of agencies that are
channel specialists and all the complexity that comes from that.
What can you do now to drive the integration of creativity,
media and technology that you need to truly engage consumers?
Coordination of agencies is not enough — you need to move
more aggressively toward collaboration. And guess what?
Agency folk want more collaboration — or at least they claim
they do.
So, what are you waiting for? If you are a CMO or brand leader
and you’re not pushing your agencies for deep collaboration,
you’re missing out on a big opportunity.
3 Sean Corocan, “How to Optimize your Interactive Agency Roster,” Forrester, May 27, 2011.
a Wake-up caLL fOr cOLLaBOratiOn
Coordination of agencies
is not enough — you need
to move more aggressively
toward collaboration.
We have seen five big barriers to collaboration:
1. cLient exPerience/conFidence
As a brand marketer, you probably have more confidence
in one area of the marketing mix or the other. Perhaps you are
a digital native who lives and breathes ones and zeroes, and now
you’ve been promoted to look after the whole mix. Or maybe
you’re a “traditional” marketer with a strong legacy of brand
building, but you’ve had your run with TV commercials.
You find digital exciting, but daunting and maybe even a bit
over-hyped. Wouldn’t life be better if your agencies were
bringing truly integrated ideas to you?
2. cULtUraL inertia
Success can dull the competitive edge. We have seen many
marketers and their agency teams not adapt fast enough because
they haven’t had to. Sometimes a great track record can put you

in a position for future failure. Similarly, agencies, particularly
account people, are protective of their turf. Unless they feel
their piece of the pie is protected, change will be difficult.
3. aBove-the-Line aGencY snoBBerY
Some above-the-line agency teams believe that: 1) digital agencies
don’t have anything of value to contribute to the conversation,
or that 2) their team is already leading the way in digital.
4. diGitaL aGencY Lives in a diGitaL BUBBLe
Digital agency teams tend to fall down in two places: 1) they
don’t fully respect the power of offline communications, or
2) they aren’t able to lift out of the tactical and into the strategic,
and they fail to put their work in this broader strategic context.
This leads clients and above-the-line agencies to keep them
in their digital silo.
5. cLient siLos
Clients are often organized into silos that make it very difficult
to plan with a focus on how the consumer and the brand should
engage. There are different client owners for traditional creative,
digital creative, media, PR and other elements of the mix, too.
When agencies report into different silos, true collaboration will
not occur.
Despite these barriers, we have had success with our clients
and our agency partners. We recently formalized our partnership
with BBH at Unilever, a client with whom we’ve had a lot
of success rethinking the model. Here are some lessons we’ve
learned on getting the best work out of the right people:
estaBLish the Process. In order to get the most out of each
agency, make sure you define a clear process for them to work
together. You need to clarify the boundaries of their engagement,
expectations and ownership. One exercise we went through
with a partner agency was to play the “what if” game. We talked
through all of the worst-case scenarios we could imagine
and how we would handle them when things went wrong.
It was a fun game and a great way to talk through problems
in an environment where emotions weren’t running high. While
you’re at it, examine your own organization. Agencies tend
to organize around their clients, so if your organization is siloed,
it’s likely that your agencies will be, too. Even if you don’t
change your structure, make sure your organization is aligned
and not operating in silos defined by channel.
deMand creative and Media coLLaBoration. Creative
collaboration starts with a solid brief delivered to all agencies
simultaneously. Unearthing an insight that reflects true audience
behaviors is critical to crafting a relevant message, no matter
who makes it or when it’s launched. The brief needs to nail the
business objectives, brand DNA and the digital behaviors —
with the goal of tapping into the rituals that are ripe territory for
the brand. We recently found that if we allow the above-the-line
agency to own the brand DNA, we can own the digital behaviors,
thereby making sure they are embedded into the ideas. This will
enable your creative teams to come back with a true creative
platform — not just a single execution that’s stretched across
channels. One-hit television campaigns or social campaigns do
not a platform make. Don’t settle for anything less than a robust
creative platform. Huge bonus points if your media agency is
part of the team. A successful channel plan is one that considers
how to leverage each channel in a way that makes the whole
greater than the parts. You’ll find that when media and creative
teams work together, you’ll get deeper consumer engagement.
And just to be certain that the ideas are inherently social and
engaging, we have found it beneficial to include explanations
in the brief. Use the brief to articulate why the insights point
toward engagement.
Protect coMPensation and Provide incentives that drive
aLiGnMent. Incentives are a powerful lever that should be pushed
to drive behavior. Agencies should be rewarded for collaboration.
Ultimately they need to be rewarded for great work and business
impact, but consider this to be part of a journey. They need to know
that their piece of the business is protected. While strategy
is shared, execution should be handled by channel experts so
that change is managed gradually. In addition to giving agencies
a safety net, give them a reason to jump higher. For one client
we (us and the ATL agency both) receive a bonus if we help
the client exceed key business targets.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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26
KeeP a sLUsh FUnd. A key to successful marketing is figuring
out how to integrate always-on and episodic (campaign-based)
communications. Great creative platforms should have plenty
of legs and should be responsive to consumer engagement.
This creates a great opportunity for agency collaboration,
but as the client you need to set aside some money in order
to create relevant content or utilities that can stoke a fire that
you may have created. When we created the Mercedes-Benz
Tweet Race last year, we saw that there was a lot of curiosity
about the tweet-powered vehicles. We jumped on the buzz
and created a spoof video of German engineers driving cars
with their mobile devices. It helped ignite a lot of interest.
You need to start planning for what you can’t plan.
create UrGencY. Without a substantial reason to change
behavior, it will not change. You, the client, have the greatest
a Wake-up caLL fOr cOLLaBOratiOn
To get the most out of
each agency, make sure you
define a clear process
for them to work together.
ability to create urgency. You need to set a high bar. For instance,
point to competitors or other brands that are doing it well.
And you need to shift the risk. Tell your agencies that if they fail
by trying something new and different, you will embrace it, but
if they fail by not collaborating, it will be a strike against them.
In the end, agency collaboration is rooted in something very
fundamental — trust. Your agencies need to trust each other
to produce great work. By setting up a clear process, demanding
creative collaboration, and planning for the unplanned, you can
go a long way toward setting up the structure and incentives
that your agencies need to build trust amongst each other.
With a solid foundation in place you can count on your
agencies to do their job exceptionally well.

WRITTEN BY
WITH CONTRIBUTORS
READ MORE
Mark Taylor
VP, Customer Insight Group
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/MARKChRIStOphERtAYLOR
Marc Sanford, PhD
Director, Customer
Insight Group
@MMSANfORD
Pradeep
Ananthapadmanabhan
Chief Technology
Officer, VivaKi
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/pRADEEpANANth
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It’s Time for
Big Data to Improve
Customer Experience
Channel-based marketing is dead. The increased amount of data
available at the individual consumer level, combined with the
proliferation of cloud computing, have allowed savvy analysts
and marketers to create a truly singular view of the consumer,
regardless of touch point. This single view enables a truly
enhanced consumer experience and more efficient use of client
and agency resources for decision making. All the customer
data out there is worthless if you can’t process it and turn it into
actionable intelligence.
Unfortunately, older data processing technologies (such as Relational Database
Management Systems, or RDBMS) are simply not capable of processing data
in volumes that the industry has collectively coined “Big Data” — volumes that
are in terabytes/petabytes. As such, we position the consumer as the only real
appreciating asset and we tie everything together through the use of Big Data.
Awareness of the challenges of a multi-channel world is nothing new, but each
channel touch point represents an immense opportunity for insight. An average
Razorfish client has billions of customer interactions a year across paid, earned
and owned channels. With so many opportunities for insight and learning, we
create a 360-degree view of each individual in the database.
Using integrated Big Data approaches, we are now informing the holistic data
view to gain the fullest understanding of consumer interactions, intent and value
possible. This current shift centers on how customer intelligence across channels
is not just used for insights, but actioned at great velocity to power multi-channel
targeting and personalization, made real through dynamic digital messaging.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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30
Paid
Earned Owned
Each touch point is an identifiable interaction
and an opportunity to build value.
From insight to action, we’re now finally implementing
consistent and relevant messaging approaches that provide
cohesive consumer experiences.
In our experience, each client using Razorfish’s Big Data-led
performance marketing approach takes a different path. Ultimately,
a client’s path is based on business priorities and what information
can be leveraged from the available tagging and data strategy.
Working with different clients has enabled us to determine
realistic roadmaps.
Holistic integration benefits:
• Common Data Marketing Platform (DMP) for reporting,
analytics, targeting and media integration.
• A channel and customer view of success.
• Metrics that measure end to end, not just in parts.
• Decision-making through actionable insights.
• A common language for performance across different
teams, brands and markets.
it’s time fOr BiG data tO imprOVe custOmer experience
Search
Web
Analytics
Platform
Social
owned
Paid
earned
razorfishoPen tM
Email
.com
Display
• Better use of the team’s time to focus on what matters
most to their business.
Mobile
razorfish-
OPEN TM
AOD
3rd PartY (AOR/Client/3rd Party)
3rd Party
Data
Reporting
Targeting
Modular approach to platform and services, by fully
integrating an organization’s owned, paid and earned
channels for insights and targeting.
Analytics
Media
Data enables us to understand customers and to manage
contact and content strategy. Data is a core component of
integrated marketing and, via an integrated approach, we can
speak with a single voice across channels and lines of business.
However, to succeed in a meaningful way at that level of
customer centricity, we have to manage all that data in a way
that holistically fuels customer engagement and experiences.
That effort requires a whole ecosystem of people, processes
and technology.
Even the most sophisticated and modern businesses today are
surprisingly ill equipped to manage even the most basic digital

marketing standards and activities, let alone jettison forward
into the new world of Big Data techniques.
Through a series of in-depth interviews and client experiences,
Razorfish found a common set of fundamental challenges
holding back meaningful data integration:
• Fragmentation of efforts between different teams, tools and
data sources across multiple channels, brands and regions.
• Political and fiscal turf protection.
• Multiple sales funnel constructs.
• Inability to identify the customer.
• Inability to quantify the value of customer experiences.
Let’s take a closer look at how our approach to Big Data, using
the razorfishOPENTM framework, can remedy these issues.
Fragmentation
We’re in an era where intelligent use of Big Data pays huge
dividends. Implementing solutions that improve integration of
data is very challenging and complex but not for the reasons
There’s a new game in town —
it’s cross-channel data
management and marketing.
you might think. Much of the technical and analytical challenges
for tapping Big Data have been solved — but failures today
often stem from attempting to use legacy small data solutions,
internal politics, effort fragmentation and failure to manage the
true value of Big Data-based solutions. While a lot of niche
players using Big Data approaches have stepped up to solve
parts of this challenge, building incremental capabilities in a silo
can by default push you further into a silo-based culture and
limit your understanding of the customer.
Any holistic Big Data solution requires a scalable measurement
plan and tagging strategy at its foundation so you can take into
account performance marketing efforts across channels, tactics
and disciplines, with a shared strategy of measurement and
tracking that is scalable across international regions and markets.
The end solution provides a subtle and intelligent approach
that can evolve by integrating and building upon other assets,
data sources and capabilities already in place. This approach
enables a modular and organic ability to evolve and grow, but
with a standardized core. These qualities are not always the
prerequisite in Big Data techniques, but without this there is
no foundation for growth.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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32
Display
Media
Metrics
Report
Media aGencY
oF record (aor)
DFA
Turf wars
Social
sociaL
Metrics
Report
MULtiPLe
aGencies
Buddy Media
Search
Media
Metrics
Report
search aor
Marin
Crossing organizational units can be tricky. Often clients are
not set up internally for a path to success based on complete
integration and use of available data. Organizations are formed
around channels — one unit owns the Web site and its data,
another owns CRM and email, another may own Web media
and yet another may be in charge of social media. Worse yet,
each silo may have its own analytics arm. The only way to be
part of this organizational conversation is to think big. We have
gained phenomenal success by leveraging Big Data-based
techniques as part of a modular, digital roadmap that directs
current and future business investment in the next 100 days/12
months/3 years. Be prepared to think big even while starting
small, and determine your starting point and roadmap — no
matter how audacious your goals.
A Razorfish global technology client decided their initial priority
was to gain cross-channel insights before embarking on targeting
it’s time fOr BiG data tO imprOVe custOmer experience
.com
site
Metrics
Report
diGitaL aor
Omniture
Example of a siloed view of data management and reporting.
Mobile
MoBiLe
Metrics
Report
diGitaL aor
Flurry
Email
eMaiL
Metrics
Report
in-hoUse
teaM 1
ExactTarget
Online
Retail/
Store
MerchandisinG
Metrics
Report
in-hoUse
teaM 2
ATG
Transaction
Data
tenUre and
ProdUct vaLUe
Report
in-hoUse
Custom
Profiles &
Segments
attitUdinaL
Report
research
aGencY
Custom
owned
Paid
earned
3rd PartY (Client and 3rd Party Data)
and deep analytics. This was the foundation starting point for their
organization and it ensured they gained political capital across
their business model through an evidence-driven, customercentric
approach that enabled financial modeling of return on
investment. Their next phase focus is on actioning that data for
targeting across display advertising and the Web site.
Another Razorfish client, a major global retailer, recognized
that they had a wealth of underutilized offline and digital data.
They decided to leverage Big Data approaches to integrate
multiple channels and power media, dynamic re-messaging,
analytics and more. The ultimate purpose is to enhance the
value of those relationships by aggregating information about
the customer and communicating with them in the most relevant
and engaging way. Previous iterations of this approach resulted
in a three- to five-time increase in return on ad spend, and a
significant decrease (about 65-70 percent) in cost per acquisition.
Each phase typically pays for itself in weeks, while providing the
funding for the next incremental phase. This becomes a sound

position to be in when convincing your peers of the rationale
and business case to fund such solutions.
Big Data can be organized without a major disruption or rearchitecture
of existing structures, internal teams, vendors,
agencies, platforms or focus. Instead, our approach to Big Data
utilizes an open standard designed to exploit existing assets
and fit the best custom solution for business environments.
This approach has an evolving set of modular relationships
managed as a single solution, resulting in a single and holistic
view of the customer based on all available data. Our clients
are using this common view to engage and encourage their
different teams to speak in the same language.
Description
Delivery
Option/
Channel
Benefits
Considerations
Typical ROI
razorfishOPEN TM targeting roadmap.
Multiple sales funnel constructs
Funnel management is where people are getting clever with Big
Data, however it runs the risk of solving only one part, rather than
the whole. We know that leveraging a single view of the consumer
drives value at all levels of the funnel. So why do many continue
to approach client problems and challenges as one-offs or focus
on just one area of the funnel?
Too many distributed engagements will lead to:
1. Single point-in-time solutions that require rebuild with
every new engagement.
2. An additional data silo that requires more time and effort
to manage and process.
Target 1.0 Target 1.1 Target 1.2 Target 1.3 Target 2.0
Heavy use of
CT with no
dynamic ads
Display or site
Low complexity
Some time to set up
the offer, strategy
and creative
1.5 X ROAS
Dynamic ad, last
action only
Display Display Display
Fast to market
Access to data
is limited
3.5 X ROAS
• Dynamic ad
• User history
• Segmentation
• Processing
Higher relevance
and full data access
Greater set-up
investment to ensure
platform is in place
5 X ROAS
• Dynamic ad
• User history
• Integration of
multiple data sources
• Segmentation
• Processing
Increased relevance
and huge long-term
incremental
data benefits
Time to market
is longer
~6.5 X ROAS
• Dynamic ad
• User history
• Integration of
multiple data sources
• Segmentation
• Processing
• Multi-channel
delivery
Display, site, email,
mobile, call center
Channel agnostic
Greater cross-channel
business coordination
~8 X ROAS
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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34
Funnel management is
where people are getting
clever with Big Data.
For example, the illustration on the right shows how an effective
re-messaging program will grow the bottom of the funnel. However,
if this becomes a one-off without integrated implementation and
access to the data, the solution becomes a very clever silo at the
expense of the broader opportunity.
The reality is that the rules and the data to enable an integrated
view and management of the funnel would need to come from
first-party data via a DMP solution and the organization’s data
assets, rather than a third-party data provider. Third-party data
intelligence can provide these larger insights into what’s working
and where there’s opportunity for more scale. Data providers
can be joined to first-party data, not the other way around.
Within Razorfish’s framework for integrating data and services
(described below as razorfishOPENTM ), targeted, dynamic ads
are combined with a Demand Side Platform (DSP), such as
Audience on Demand (AOD), to match impressions to users
identified in real time. This allows you to only reach users that
have been already “qualified,” and avoid upfront agreements
and negotiation by paying the market price for users meeting
criteria defined in the audience segmentation. By reaching the
right audience at the right price and allowing the ability to
control bids at a cookie level provides a great deal of efficiency
it’s time fOr BiG data tO imprOVe custOmer experience
diGitaL oFFLine
Awareness
Consideration
Retargeting
Conversion and remarketing is only
part of the answer.
and relevance. This integration also enables the ability to bring
a wide array of data at the bottom of the funnel to the audience
at the top of the funnel.
Inability to identify the customer
Razorfish implements a customer-centric approach through an
organized framework of measurement and tagging that tracks

all digital business activity and harnesses the full stream of
data as the core basis of the single view of the customer. From
day one we leverage all existing assets, people, agencies and
platforms, without a big, disruptive overhaul. Chances are these
existing components are there for a reason and are providing
value, but getting that cross-functional view and line of sight is
the first objective.
Inability to quantify the value of customer experiences
Organizations are increasingly demanding faster value return on
their marketing investments. Razorfish has found that businesses
now more than ever need a true, meaningful understanding
of what drives customer value. Rather than using Big Data to
improve one area of the customer experience, we need to build
Consistent data collection across touch
points enables analytics, segmentation,
targeting and reporting. For example,
a customer falls into segment 8, based
upon razorfishOPEN TM rules. Razorfish
then targets customer experience,
agnostic of channel (represented
by orange dots).
AUDIENCE/
PROSPECT/
CUSTOMER
Publishers
3 rd Party DSP and
Data Providers
Open & DSP Audience
Targeting Integration
PROSPECT/
CUSTOMER
Behavioral data captured by the razorfishOPEN TM first-party DMP on client-owned assets integrates with Media DSPs
third-party data to help build more precise audience segments and add to our clients’ audience buying capabilities.
toward meaningful interactions at a customer level and progress
the value of their brand relationships over time.
We have seen our clients quickly moving toward a culture that
understands customer data as one of its most valued assets.
Focusing on customer value helps companies move away from
channel performance and toward greater customer-centricity.
But to calculate customer value, companies must fully utilize the
recency of interactions, along with the required behavior, revenue
and relationship metrics. A key challenge businesses struggle
with is finding advanced analytical skill sets and analytics-based
approaches that can leverage and interpret that data to determine
the key levers that drive value within their organization, or at
least within a specific team’s control.
CUSTOMER
MANAGEMENT
Using an integrated DSP allows you to only reach customers
and prospects that have been "qualified" by razorfishOPEN TM .
Paid
Owned
Earned
.com
razorfishOPEN TM
1 st Party DMP
Enhanced Segmentation
& Data Provision
CUSTOMER
MANAGEMENT
Call Center
DM
Mobile
Email
Retail
Client
Proprietary Data
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
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36
*
Display
Media
Metrics
Report Report Report Report Report Report Report Report Report
Media aGencY
oF record (aor)
sociaL
Metrics
MULtiPLe
aGencies
*razorfishoPen tM tagging framework
*
* *
Social Search .com Mobile Email
* *
Media
Metrics
search aor
Media
it’s time fOr BiG data tO imprOVe custOmer experience
site
Metrics
diGitaL aor
Targeting
We define and value the segments of customers we want to
engage with and create Big Data-applied algorithms to create
a new type of value segmentation model that can operationalize
differentiated experiences at high velocity. We not only deliver
unique and consistent experiences to these customers, but also
MoBiLe
Metrics
diGitaL aor
razorfish-
OPEN TM
eMaiL
Metrics
in-hoUse
teaM 1
Analytics
Online
Retail/
Store *
MerchandisinG
Metrics
in-hoUse
teaM 2
Reporting
*
Transaction
Data
tenUre and
ProdUct vaLUe
in-hoUse
Silo reports provide a detailed view at a channel level and have a role in optimizing channel performance.
razorfishOPEN TM tagging framework that
tracks cross-channel business activity.
Ad serving tags provide a holistic view across the customer journey, at the unique customer level.
Profiles &
Segments
*
attitUdinaL
research
aGencY
leverage our knowledge about them to bid for the opportunity
to deliver those experiences. From the beginning, we value
the revenue and other business impact of the opportunity and
in the end we prove it.

We have seen our
clients quickly moving
toward a culture that
understands customer
data as one of its
most valued assets.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
37

WRITTEN BY
READ MORE
Brandon Geary
SVP, Strategy
@bRANDgEAR
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Humanity Check —
What Consumers
Really Think
About Tech
To get outside the digital marketing bubble, we conducted a series
of focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic sessions
in San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Ft. Lauderdale,
and Portland, Ore. The goal was to uncover what’s really going
on in the everyday user’s technology life. Among the insights
that emerged: people still need their physical space, brands get
points for effort, there’s a new kind of couch potato and there’s
plenty of tech-fueled confusion in consumers’ lives.
Talk to a few tech pundits about what’s next and you’ll very quickly see a calcified
conventional wisdom form. Facebook and/or Twitter are totally integrated into
everyone’s life and everyone wants to share everything. Quick Response (QR) codes
count as progress. Google and Apple are loved by all and the world is waiting
to see what both will do next.
But talk to real people and you get a different story. To get outside the digital
marketing bubble, we conducted a series of focus groups, in-depth interviews, and
ethnographic sessions in San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Ft. Lauderdale,
and Portland, Ore. The goal was to uncover what’s really going on in the everyday
user’s technology life. There were 56 respondents age 18-49, all of whom had
broadband access in their home, a smartphone and a computer. But they didn’t
identify themselves as super users or even technology enthusiasts.
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Five core observations rose to the top for us:
1. PeoPLe need their sPace
While much of the business news centers on the death or
decline of old retail models — bookstores, movie theatres,
consumer electronics and music — we found people continue
to express emotional attachment to the store experience,
despite the shuttering of former stalwarts like Borders. This is
backed up by a recent Accenture survey that found nearly
75 percent of consumers consider a storefront for digital
communications products to be important. 1 We found strong,
positive feelings about digital music, the rise of new content
delivery mechanisms like Netflix, and digital content delivered
on the Kindle and iPad, with limited longing for the old days.
“I don’t miss CD boxes to be honest, and lugging books around
wasn’t all that great,” said 29-year-old Cathy. The risk for
retailer disintermediation clearly remains high for media products.
But the desire for consultation and experiences — particularly
shared experiences — remains alive and well.
soLUtion: Give PeoPLe a new reason to coMe BacK. We found
an openness to reinvention of old models with reliance on physical
space. On music — “Why don’t they broaden the experience
to include more physical objects around the music or have more
events associated with the medium,” said Colin, 27. On movie
theatres, 30-year-old Lisa said, “I’d like to see the opportunity
to rent movie spaces for friend groups so that movies become
more like karaoke in Korea.” Big box retailers under pressure
from Amazon.com and disruptive models should consider
re-evaluation of space, not just the product in question.
2. More KnowinG, Less thinKinG
Apps, search and social media are rapidly changing human
interaction at the level of the conversation. Knowing stuff has
become easy, which has had a reductive effect on chats that
once might have been more discursive. “When we’re talking
about something we aren’t sure of, we all just look up the
answer and it’s over,” said Heather, 32. In-person interaction
has evolved to become more of an information sharing exercise
and less of a conversation around ideas where one person
1 “The Value, Role and Performance of the Physical Retail Channel for Communications Service Companies: A North American Perspective,” Accenture,
http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture_Communications_Research_Physical_Retail_North_America.pdf (2011).
humanitY check — What cOnsumers reaLLY think aBOut tech
Provide a small delight
for customers. You don’t have
to go big to get impact.

uilds on another’s thoughts, building on another’s thoughts.
“I check my friends’ stuff more to see what information I should
know now,” said David, 32.
soLUtion: the Brand has to taKe a stand. For brands interested
in using social media to join a conversation with their consumers,
they may find there is less conversation to join and that they
too are just sharing information or listening in on information
share. Or brands may need to spark conversations. In a world
of information sharing, consider asking a question, creating
a debate and offering an opinion in attempt to get engagement.
3. Brands Get Points For eFFort
While only a few big successes in North America appear to get
the majority of mainstream media coverage (Facebook, Apple,
Google, Angry Birds and LinkedIn), we have found the perception
of innovation increasingly comes from the trial of new things,
regardless of whether or not the new thing is a long-term
business success for the company that launched it. Google
is consistently praised in projective exercises as innovative,
despite an inability of users to pinpoint exactly what those
innovations are. “Google is like Apple,” said Steven, 41. “Just
always doing new things.” Companies like Starbucks and Nike
are thought to be more suitable for reinventing dying industries
like books and music, despite not being media companies.
“Starbucks could make a better bookstore than Barnes & Noble
could,” and “Apple could sell anything.”
soLUtion: KeeP on MaKinG. Companies don’t have to get
everything right to get credit. Perceived effort associated with
releasing products and services creates a positive cumulative
effect for the brand. For brands remaining on the sideline
or fearing a lack of focus, consider placing smaller bets on app
or development initiatives to provide a small delight for customers.
You don’t have to go big to get impact.
4. Meet the new coUch Potato
Historically, digital pundits have promised a more interactive
future, in which users move away from passive, couch potato
viewing to more active engagement. While the amount of usergenerated
content and sharing supports this movement, we
have found everyday users increasingly leaning back in their
digital consumption habits. Social media is described as a
more ambient activity. “[Facebook] is usually a drag. I just feel
lazy like I’m seeing the same old stuff and looking at people’s
profiles. I feel somewhat guilty about it sometimes, like I’m
wasting time.” Twitter, originally categorized as a social tool,
is described more as a curation tool. “I don’t really tweet
anymore. I just see what I should think about reading.”
And social media in general is making in-person interaction
increasingly difficult to motivate or organize. “It’s just so hard
to make it (an in person meeting) happen now,” said Tran, 29.
soLUtion: don’t Be aFraid to Be a PUsher. Brands that have
long viewed digital as an engagement medium should also
consider more opportunities and ideas that are more push
in nature: video- and photo-based status updates, viral shorts
and simple games and activities.
5. the rise oF diGitaL conFUsion
In launching new digital services in an app-filled, multi-device,
multi-operating system world, consumers have become
increasingly confused by messages. They’re less certain about
the difference between a browser and operating system, PC
and tablet, and OS and device manufacturer than ever before —
“I’m not sure what Chrome or a Chromebook is.” “I’ve used
Bing, but what does it do again?” While not every brand can
be Apple from a product perspective, few beyond them appear
to be delivering messages that are connecting.
soLUtion: ditch the strateGY and Get to cLaritY. As marketers
well versed in the creation of the emotional benefit look to new
services for old or new brands, it’s paramount they continue to
scrub their message strategies to get to the essential elements that
drive clarity. Even more than before, attention and/or emotional
attachment appear to be less of an issue than understanding.
Digital devices, social platforms, mobile and commerce are all
changing consumer behavior rapidly, but not entirely in the ways
many had predicted. In the future, it’s the brands that rethink
space, not just the product, take a stand in the social space,
push content that’s easy to consume and simplify the message
that win. This means the most surprising thing about the future
might just be its similarity to the past.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
41

WRITTEN BY
WITH CONTRIBUTOR
READ MORE
Ray Velez
Global Chief
Technology Officer
@RvELEz
Rafi Jacoby
Social Technology Lead
@RjACObY
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How the Social
Cloud Can Accelerate
Brand Interaction
From March 2010 to March 2011, Facebook online video and mobile
device consumption time were all up, but the rest of the Web was
down. This means that while these social areas have grown, they’ve
also taken users away from more established sites. Brands need
to take the conversation to where the users already are. Social
cloud services connect digital experiences with Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft and other social services.
We’ve identified some dos and don’ts to take full advantage
of these APIs.
The Web isn’t dead, but it sure has taken a hit. Wired Editor Chris Anderson’s
prediction that the free, interconnected world of the Web would be replaced
by the paid-for, walled gardens that are apps hasn’t necessarily come true.
Yet the Web is a changing place with fewer winners and more losers because
of audience consolidation around a few key platforms. From March 2010 to
March 2011, Facebook use was up 69 percent, online video consumption was
up 45 percent and mobile device time was up 28 percent. 1 The rest of the Web
was down 9 percent. This means that while these areas have grown, they’ve also
taken users away from more established sites.
With social and video sites, the users are already there — you don’t need to drive
them to your destination site. Instead, you can take the conversation to where the
1 Ben Elowitz, “The Web is Shrinking. Now What?” Digital Quarters, June 2011,
http://digitalquarters.net/2011/06/the-web-is-shrinking-now-what/.
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users are already. For instance, Facebook makes up 25 percent
of all page views, with users averaging 15.5 hours per month
on the site. This requires a rethink on how you spend your media
dollars to acquire users.
In order to acquire information about those users, all you need
to do is offer something small: a fun experience, chance to win
something or a coupon (which do amazingly well).
When you have reached the right audience, the users you have
acquired will continue spreading the message for you. According
to “Zuckerberg’s Law,” users share twice as much content every
year as the previous year. Your brand’s content will be disseminated
by real people to the people who trust them (high “earned” value).
In the future, the brand with the most compelling content wins.
Arguably this is already happening, but we need to develop new
metrics to understand this. What is clear is that users want
to share creative, fun and engaging content — not product
specs or regular marketing collateral.
Soon, more experiences will be connected: tweeting from inside
an Xbox game that they have unlocked a new level; sharing
the act of viewing a TV show on Twitter/Facebook/GetGlue;
leading other users on an augmented reality treasure hunt
on their phones while tracking the progress inside a Facebook
leaderboard and tweeting out results.
With the rise of social check-in services (Foursquare, Twitter,
Facebook), you can have trackable digital marketing tying into
brick and mortar. Then, you can build an experience around
that location with communities, discussions, deals and events.
You can learn exactly how far users will go to make a purchase,
which users are more likely to purchase where, and what
other locations they frequent that might be interesting for your
business — all without commissioning surveys or having to
integrate with many different point-of-sale systems.
Social cloud services provide your digital experiences or Web
properties with the ability to connect up with Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft and other social services. These
services come in the form of Application Programming Interfaces
(APIs) that your technologist can integrate. Whether your digital
hOW the sOciaL cLOud can acceLerate Brand interactiOn
experience is a mobile application or a traditional desktop site,
these APIs are available.
Marketing and business needs a blueprint for how these
all interact. The graphic, to the right, describes the key API
categories in the social space.
Three core areas make up social APIs
1. aUthentication
The first core API area is authentication or the ability to leverage
the services of a social network to help people gain access
to your digital property. You can now enable users to log in
to your Web properties without having to create a new account.
Registration through a social cloud service breaks down
the barrier to entry of creating an account. OAuth and OpenID
are the main technology standards for ensuring secure access
to digital sites and properties. Sites can support both or just
one, but ultimately these technologies can have a drastic impact
on the number of folks who sign up. Once authenticated, there
is the concept of profile data sharing or the sharing of data
elements about people — pictures, birthdate, email, etc.
Obviously, there are privacy considerations that have slowly
evolved. For example, when we first used Facebook Connect
profile sharing, anyone could grab a person’s picture, but then
Facebook evolved their privacy controls to give users control
of who can see their picture. Of course there are limitations
on what you can do with the identification, but at that point you
can grab more information from the person contextually to your
experience as needed. Lastly, it’s important to make sure you
use whatever the connection type is, whether OAuth, OpenID
or proprietary with secure sockets layer. This will ensure the
hacker hanging at Starbucks doesn’t steal your password.
After logging in, you can leverage locally saved tokens so
users don’t have to login to Facebook across every site they
go to during the day. One login will work. Letting users pick
their account type to log into (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) affords
the most flexibility, and you can leverage a lot of the same
development when you code to a standard like OAuth.

FaceBooK
GooGLe
twitter
LinKedin
windows Live
2. conversation and sharinG
oPen sociaL
ProPrietarY
Social
Graph
Sharing
The second core API area is commenting and message
boards — basically the ability to create messages around
a topic area. Let users drive conversations like comments
or message boards without having to write custom code to
support it. Consider a Twitter message a conversation around
a topic area, or a Facebook wall post a growing interaction
for your experience. A lot of the API needs in this area are
bringing order to the chaos. The Facebook plugins are pretty
easily implemented and high value. Replace your own comment
boards with Facebook comments — no additional sign-up
required, and content can be shared on a user’s wall. It’ll drive
traffic in and out of your Web property. Technologies available
in the Software as a Service (SaaS) approach such as DISCUS
or Echo enable you to bring the messaging to your site, while
still existing on Twitter and Facebook. Considerations down the
line include the ability to moderate and monitor posts, which are
especially important when considering branded experiences.
Social Application
Programming Interfaces (API)
Commenting
& Message
Boards
Authentication
FaceBooK
twitter
3. sociaL GraPh
oaUth/oPenid/
cUstoM
discUs
echo
Profile
Data
Sharing
FaceBooK
GooGLe
windows Live
twitter
LinKedin
data
PortaBiLitY
Lastly, one of the most important social API areas is sharing
of the social graph. That means not only connecting with the
current person, but with their friends as well. All of this is made
available through the API. Similar to OAuth and OpenID, there
is a technology standard for accessing this information called
OpenSocial. While this has evolved considerably over the
last couple of years, it still seems to lack broad adoption by
the major players, most notably, Facebook. For now it seems
proprietary API calls to social engines are still the norm.
Authentication, commenting and social graph sharing are
the three key social services, but there are lots of other social
services that can also power your digital experiences, whether
mobile, desktop or in-retail. These will continue to grow as
people innovate in the space. Social video services like Vimeo
and YouTube allow you to embed your videos in your own
digital experiences while still allowing the video content
to be accessible from the YouTube and Vimeo platforms.
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The obvious benefit is that you save on bandwidth costs, but
the even greater benefit is that you are where users are. You
create a branded experience on YouTube, and then extend that
experience through YouTube embed codes onto your branded
property. YouTube continues to grow their API to allow more
flexibility around how your player looks and whether or not ads
should show up on your videos.
Simple plugin buttons such as Facebook’s “Like” and “Share,”
Google’s “+1,” and Twitter’s “Tweet” and “Follow” dramatically
lower the barrier to users sharing content from your site out
to their entire social graph.
Data resources
Learn exactly how far users will go
to make a purchase, which users
are more likely to purchase where,
and what other locations they frequent.
If social cloud services accelerate traffic to your branded digital
experience, core cloud infrastructure services will enable your
social cloud services. Infrastructure as a service or rent-as-yougo
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service
(PaaS) let businesses like Zynga, Groupon, LivingSocial and
Airbnb go from nothing to $1 billion valuations with negligible
IT overhead, scaling when they need it, without overbuying
capacity. But make sure you architect for fault tolerance (see
hOW the sOciaL cLOud can acceLerate Brand interactiOn
AWS failure this spring). PaaS leaders make deployment,
database and background jobs easy: consider Heroku, AppFog,
Engine Yard, VMware and Cloud Foundry.
We can learn from the technologies, processes and concepts
that have enabled huge social cloud growth for those companies.
They are using PHP (Facebook), Ruby on Rails (Twitter, Groupon,
Airbnb), Python (Yelp), MySQL, unobtrusive JavaScript, serverside
JavaScript, cloud hosting, Scala, Clojure, MongoDB, CSS3,
HTML5, REST, JSON and WebSockets. These technologies
are being used by cutting-edge companies and they are
contributing their cutting-edge work back to the community.
Plus they are generally much more cost-effective than traditional
enterprise-based approaches, stuck within slow-moving,
expensive corporate IT data centers. Agile approaches have
pushed innovative approaches like continual builds of code
or continual releases of production code. Both approaches
are made practical through platform cloud services.
Cloud-based performance monitoring tools like New Relic can
identify performance problems in your application and give
you starting points for optimization. LinkedIn uses this kind
of information to identify functionality that can be replaced

with higher performance languages and frameworks, migrating
key services over to Node.js and Scala to take advantage
of their high degree of parallelization. If you need deeply
integrated analytics, a service like Mixpanel solves storage,
presentation, organization, querying and export problems,
and provides simple toolkits for instrumenting both the server
and client components of your Web app.
Build with multiple screens in mind. A single codebase can easily
support Web, Facebook canvas and mobile touch if you abstract
out your views well and use a framework that is designed for
such flexibility. Why not launch on three surfaces simultaneously
for almost the same price in development? There’s no need to
think of your site and your Facebook presence as completely
different animals. They can be two views of the same thing, with
slight differences. Platform cloud services can help you optimize
and speed delivery, regardless of the screen. Look at cloud-based
caching delivery networks like Amazon’s CloudFront or Google’s
Page Speed to accelerate delivery, regardless of targeting a
Facebook page or a traditional Web page.
Cloud services like Mashery or Apigee enable your brand to get
into more places than just your owned digital properties.
Razorfish’s Open Digital Services approach helps clients’
strategic view of services. Think about freeing some of your
data (product catalog, etc.) with a public API and see what
the community might build around/for you.
Cautions
There are many useful services available to build your
applications. Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) lets you query
a myriad of pieces of information against many of the Yahoo!
properties. Geocoding services identify user locations and
help you provide locally interesting content. It is important
to understand how dependent your application is on these
services and what their limitations are. Most will have limits
on the number of API calls you can make; it’s advisable
to build a layer into your own application to cache whatever
you can to avoid hitting those caps. A local cache will also
keep your application running and useable if the services
experience an interruption. Lastly, ensure that you are
subscribed and follow any announcements around APIs;
they have change deadlines and if you don’t update in time
you can be out of service.
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If you build something that depends on the major social networks,
your app will require occasional work in order to keep in sync
with the latest changes, as well as monitoring to make sure
that things outside of your app are live and working. During
one campaign on Twitter, the tweets were not all appearing
in the search feed and Twitter had to help fix an issue on their
side. Facebook has had several major changes on their API,
with the latest coming Fall 2011 — a security overhaul of the
application authentication system that will disable applications
that do not comply. In the past, Facebook switched from
its proprietary Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to IFrames,
but if you had an app that hadn’t launched yet, you had
to make sure to pre-provision it on Facebook or you wouldn’t
be grandfathered in and would have to scramble to do a rewrite.
Social conversations are hard to control. You may want to take
a fresh look at how you relate with your consumers. Some
brands have elected to be very hands-off. Others are very
engaged. Third-party social monitoring tools (Context Optional,
Involver, Buddy Media) and a community manager are a must
in that case for doing escalation, bad word filtering, auto delete
and more. This can be a recurring budget consideration.
hOW the sOciaL cLOud can acceLerate Brand interactiOn
Your Facebook page should be a destination with many doors,
not just a flat campaign. Engaged users spend more time
with your brand, and become your biggest advocates — often
jumping in to defend the brand on the wall before the brand
can respond. So give them a reason to stay and interact
with something more than a lead generation form. Consider,
“Why would someone share this with their friends?” when
designing your social presence.
Don’t oversaturate your fans with content. You’ve spent time
and money on earning them, so make your posts to their
streams or tweets compelling and not too frequent in order
to avoid them “un-liking” or blocking you.
Social isn’t a one-off. You’ve acquired lots of fans so keep
using them. Think of longer strategies, not just short campaigns.
You built an app that has 3 million users — don’t just end,
extend. Those people are linked to you now, so keep giving them
something. Add more content and create new ways to interact.
This probably involves a new way of looking at budget.

OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10

WRITTEN BY
READ MORE
Tim Perlstein
Group VP, Strategy
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/tIMpERLStEIN
Bethany Fenton
VP, Experience
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Beyond the Banner —
Unleashing the Power
of Digital to Drive
Topline Growth
Industry leaders have to reinvent themselves periodically to
maintain their preeminence. But as the rate of technology-driven
change continues to increase over time, the speed and frequency
with which companies must reinvent themselves also increases.
And unfortunately for industry incumbents, technology-driven
disruption tends to favor new entrants, who are often faster,
hungrier and unencumbered by legacy systems and processes.
We believe digital should be at the core of any industry leader’s
growth strategy, and we’ve identified three ways digital can drive
step-change improvement in topline growth — above and beyond
efficiency maximization of existing efforts.
The first wave of digital disruption came crashing into the business world about
15 years ago, when the Internet first exploded as a consumer technology. Since
then, leading companies across industries have been scrambling to master the art
of marketing and selling online. Most large companies now maintain multiple Web
experiences and marketing programs — all of which require periodic upgrades
in the form of redesigns and replatformings, as well as ongoing testing and
optimization. (All bread and butter for digital agencies, of course.)
Meanwhile, in what sometimes seems to be a parallel universe, pure-play digital
startups continue to spawn, swarm and thrive, often squeezing out weaker
competitors and overturning established industry structures in the process.
Industry leaders have had to reinvent themselves periodically to maintain their
preeminence. But as the rate of technology-driven change continues to increase
over time, the speed and frequency with which companies must reinvent
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themselves also increases. And unfortunately for industry
incumbents, technology-driven disruption tends to favor new
entrants, who are often faster, hungrier and unencumbered
by legacy systems and processes.
Now, as companies emerge from the recession looking to deliver
step-change improvements in revenue growth — and as growth
becomes harder and harder to find within existing markets —
digital channels, programs and agencies must do more than
deliver incremental improvements from evolutionary change.
Optimizing your way to greater efficiency is good, but not
enough. Digital can and must do more.
Digital should be at the core of any industry leader’s growth
strategy. In fact, given the relative maturity of established
platforms and programs — and the ever-increasing competitive
pressure from new entrants — now is the time to ignite a new
round of digital innovation within your organization. To begin
the conversation, we’ve identified three ways digital can drive
step-change improvement in topline growth — above and beyond
efficiency maximization of existing efforts.
1. new MarKets
As domestic growth in core segments becomes harder to come
by for U.S. companies — and as emerging markets continue
their dramatic expansion — we expect industry leaders to seek
new growth from markets that are new to the company and/or
broadly underserved by their industry. Digital can and should
be a powerful, cost-efficient method of reaching and serving
these markets.
That said, leveraging digital for new market entry isn’t as simple
as launching a version of your Web site in your target market’s
local language, although this might not be a bad start.
Localization means more than translation. For online retailers,
serving international markets means dealing with foreign
exchange rates, taxes, sizing systems and — of course —
1 Allison Enright, “Macy’s Goes Global,” InternetRetailer.com, June 27, 2011, http://www.internetretailer.com/
2011/06/27/macys-goes-global.
2 2011 Financial Performance Report, PWC/Grocery Manufacturers Association, page 43.
BeYOnd the Banner — unLeashinG the pOWer Of diGitaL tO driVe tOpLine GrOWth
fulfillment. Despite the complexity, retail giants Macy’s,
Barneys New York, PBteen, and JoS. A. Bank all extended
their ecommerce operations internationally this year. Macy’s
now has an ecommerce presence in 90 countries, although
its physical stores are all within the U.S. 1 The logic is
obvious: With domestic growth stalled, foreign markets offer an
appealing opportunity to extend brands and capture growth while
requiring only minimal capital investment (compared to rolling
out more brick-and-mortar operations).
Of course, overseas growth isn’t just for retailers. Even
manufacturers for whom digital is not a direct sales channel
are using digital tools and partnerships as a cornerstone
of market entry strategy. As always, deep knowledge of local
players and local infrastructure is key. For example, given
the relatively high adoption of mobile phones (versus desktop
PCs) in developing countries, some Consumer Packaged
Goods (CPG) companies are looking to advance by partnering
with local telecom operators to expand mobile coverage —
in exchange for marketing access to consumers. Other firms,
such as General Mills, leverage digital for insight and customer
collaboration, as well as outbound communication. In China
and other markets where standard retail channel data
is inconsistent or nonexistent, General Mills is building
a proprietary database of consumer households, and using
real-time digital communications tools to allow consumers
to voluntarily share data on their preferences and behaviors. 2
These are just some of the ways in which digital can support
successful new market entry — well beyond the banner ad. We
expect to see much more innovation in the coming year, as early
initiatives prove successful and best practices begin to emerge.
2. enhanceMents For existinG ProdUcts and services
“Digital” can be more than a marketing or sales channel; it can
fundamentally transform a product or service by providing
additional functionality and consumer value. Even companies

accustomed to delivering tangible, “real world” value propositions
should treat digital as a core component of product strategy —
not just marketing or sales.
The most obvious example of this dynamic is the ongoing upheaval
within the media industry, where traditional core “products”
have been entirely digitized, radically expanding the dimensions
of competition and dramatically increasing the importance
of distribution channels and the overall “experience” of content
access. The list of recent digital product innovations within
the media industry seems endless. It encompasses multiple new
access platforms, ancillary or “exclusive” premium content
options, user-generated or participatory content development,
sharing, commentary, other social features, and on and on.
A more subtle but equally interesting evolution is happening
within the hardware and networking industries that typically
support content delivery. Digital TVs are becoming “smart,”
adding Internet connectivity and their own application platforms.
Network providers are delivering increasingly integrated digital
3 See for example: M2M and Embedded Strategies, Juniper Networks, May 2011, page 81-85.
services with new, digitally enabled functionality (set TV
recordings from your smartphone, view caller ID on your TV,
manage call routing and voicemail settings from your PC,
etc.). Add in a host of innovative new hardware options (Roku,
Boxee, Slingbox, Apple TV, Xbox 360) and service providers
(Netflix, Skype, Google TV), and you have a full-on battle for
control of the digital home.
More established providers of “traditional” products and services
cannot help but be affected by this domestic, digital landscape
and the new consumer behaviors it generates. Home security
and automation providers must inevitably develop new strategies
and products to compete within the increasingly networked
home. (ADT’s Pulse product is a good, early example of this
trend.) Consumer electronics manufacturers may find ways
to embed digital “smarts” in appliances beyond TVs. Even
supposedly staid utility companies may get in on the act,
with more efficient and convenient controls, monitoring
and service solutions. 3
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Now is the time to ignite
a new round of digital innovation
within your organization.
For service providers outside the home, digital enhancements
are becoming just as commonplace — and perhaps even more
important. The ability to conduct secure online banking
or day trading from our smartphones is something many
of us already take for granted. (Can you even imagine opening
a new checking account that didn’t offer free online bill pay?
We can’t.) Travel providers, from airlines to cruise lines, are
scrambling to provide ever-more convenient digital applications
for booking, trip management and customer service — both
during and after travel. Even brick-and-mortar service providers
are finding ways to integrate digital add-ons within their core
experiences, whether it’s providing access to a vastly extended
assortment (JCPenney’s in-store kiosks) or free, premium digital
content (Starbucks’ “Digital Network”) while on-premises.
The lesson behind all these examples is the need to view digital
as an arena for fundamental product innovation, not just
marketing communications. Rapid technology change continues
to open up vast, uncharted whitespace for products and services
yet to be invented. And as new and established players across
multiple industries continue to extend their offerings into the
digital realm, the consumer’s digital ecosystem becomes an
ever-richer environment within which to innovate.
BeYOnd the Banner — unLeashinG the pOWer Of diGitaL tO driVe tOpLine GrOWth
3. entireLY new BUsinesses
This brings us to the third major digitally driven growth
opportunity: the development of entirely new business lines.
Although it’s still early days, we’re seeing more and more
companies in “traditional” industries using digital to launch new
businesses and ventures that are adjacent (or even outside)
their core comfort zones. An even greater number of companies
now maintain digital innovation skunkworks, with a mission
to identify and pursue promising opportunities outside the
umbrella of the main organizational structure and brand.
Just a few examples should help paint the picture. GameStop,
the leading physical retailer of video games, made a splash
this summer when it announced its move into online streaming
of console games — clearly a hedge against declining physical
retail sales of a fundamentally digital product. It’s a move that
requires fundamentally different capabilities and processes
from the core retail business, and will likely benefit if managed
separately from store operations. Additionally, GameStop
maintains a vibrant portfolio of digital properties, including
Kongregate.com and GameInformer.com, which could form
the seeds of future all-digital ventures.

There are plenty of other examples of companies launching
new virtual or cloud-based business models. Microsoft, reacting
to the market’s move away from boxed software, launched
Office 365, the cloud-based version of its dominant office suite,
available on a subscription basis. In a completely different
category, Gourmet magazine was shuttered as a print magazine
but resurrected as an online-only publisher — a fundamentally
different business model for parent company Condé Nast.
And in the world of financial services, H&R Block has found
value in monetizing free online tax prep services, which, despite
living under the same brand umbrella, involves digital skills
and tactics that are quite different from the company’s traditional
brick-and-mortar business. 4
Finally, it’s worth remembering a “classic” example of digital
business innovation: Gap Inc.’s creation of the Piperlime
brand in 2006, as an online-only shoe retailer. While not
a primary revenue engine for the parent company, the Piperlime
4 H&R Block 2010 Annual Report, page 4.
5 “Piperlime Brand Adding Zest to Gap,” Marketwatch.com, September 17, 2010, http://www.marketwatch.com/
story/piperlime-brand-adding-zest-to-gap-2010-09-17.
experiment was deemed successful enough to remain a separate
branded entity, and has grown beyond shoes to include branded
women’s apparel and accessories and, as of this summer,
menswear as well. It was also no doubt a key reference point
in Gap Inc.’s decision to purchase Athleta (another onlineonly
retailer) in 2008. 5 We view this as a model for successful
experimentation with online-only business models and digitalonly
brands, and are aware of similar trial ventures in the works
within the retail sector and others.
For companies willing to experiment in this way, we see
significant potential to create new profit centers. Of course,
we also recommend that these initiatives be managed closely
and nurtured carefully, as beta is high. Of the three digital
growth strategies presented here, this “new business” category
typically carries the highest risk, as well as the highest
potential reward.
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Getting started
If you’re now sold on the power of digital as a driver of growth
outside your current core, here are some general recommendations
to keep in mind as you’re plotting strategy and laying the foundation:
LooK aroUnd. Given the rampant, technology-driven innovation
happening across industries, you’ll want to keep an eye (or
several) on developments outside your own category — as well
as a constant focus on the ever-changing technology landscape.
Network with colleagues, partners, and functional peers to get
real-time insight into what’s working now, across many types
of organizations. This kind of insight should help drive shorter
cycles and higher hit rates for innovation initiatives and other
kinds of change programs.
LooK ahead. When it comes to both business strategy and
technology, evaluating the current landscape is rarely sufficient
to inform plans and roadmaps with a time horizon longer than
six months. It’s essential to take a longer view, and include not
just competitors but also disruptive factors — which, defined
broadly, should include technology-driven substitutes as well
as potential new entrants.
LooK within. Take a fresh look (or ask a genuine outsider) to
help identify “buried treasure” within your current business —
underleveraged assets that digital technology can help unleash
in unexpected ways. This could include products (lesser-known
SKUs, niche offerings, an extended “long tail” assortment),
processes (ancillary services, product development or innovation
capabilities, insight generation), people (internal experts and
influencers, underexploited partnerships, underserved customers,
etc.), IP (contents, patents, other forms of internal knowledge)
and who knows what else. New, unexpected connections
between assets and markets are often areas where digital
can help unlock additional business value.
BeYOnd the Banner — unLeashinG the pOWer Of diGitaL tO driVe tOpLine GrOWth
Partner earLY and oFten. No single team or company can do
everything well, all the time. To build new capabilities quickly
and share risk, look within and across industries to find
unexpected partnerships that unlock new value by creating
entirely new value propositions. By partnering with companies
in adjacent — or even seemingly unrelated — industries you
may gain access to new pools of assets such as content,
technology, or data (always fulfilling commitments to protect
consumer privacy, of course). These can help power new kinds
of digital experiences — or even full-fledged new ventures —
while leveraging your own internal assets and capabilities in
more productive ways.
consider BUYinG. Sometimes it just makes more sense to
purchase assets, capabilities and talent outright, rather than
partner. (Allstate’s pending acquisition of Esurance, as of August
2011, is a particularly good example of this as it applies to
digital strategy.) Establishing a solid strategic foundation, with
a shared internal vision and a clear view of your desired future
state, can help reveal your most critical current gaps and aid
in evaluating possible acquisition targets for digital initiatives.
Hopefully we’ve convinced you that “digital” is much more than
your Web sites, banner ads, search keywords and mobile apps.
At its core, it is technology-enabled growth, innovation and
transformation of existing business models. As the other articles
in this report make clear, we believe the next major cycle of
technology-driven disruption has only just begun. And the future
belongs to those companies who look beyond the importance
of near-term optimization — as important as that is — and move
decisively to put digital at the center of their strategies for longterm
business growth and differentiation.

“
Digital” can be
more than a marketing
or sales channel —
it can fundamentally
transform a product
or service.
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The Team at Denuo
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The Rules of
Gamification
Gaming is embedded in us as human beings. We’ve already seen
the effects of applying game mechanics to individual marketing
campaigns, to every loyalty program in existence, and to tons
of Web sites where you might not think “game” at first glance.
This is “gamification,” and to make it work, there needs to be a
focus on the very human benefits that make games successful:
challenge, recognition, tracking, competition and cooperation.
Human beings love games. If you look hard enough, you’ll find game dynamics
in everything we do, from education to careers to relationships. We’re all about
establishing rules, defining winners and losers, competing and cooperating.
So while it’s no surprise we see all of these things in marketing campaigns, it’s
also nothing new. For decades, loyalty campaigns that instill customer loyalty
by awarding points and prizes have been a mainstay of establishing customer
relationships. Now the rise of social media is bringing a different kind
of gamesmanship to bear. Facebook is flooded with FarmVille and Mafia Wars
achievement. Foursquare is turning everyone into the mayor of somewhere.
And Twitter, though most are loath to admit it, is all about the accumulation
of followers. Then there’s Klout, which has managed to make a game of all
these games, awarding badges and small gifts to those who are best at playing
the social game.
Brands want to play, too. And some are doing a good job of it. Pepsi, Starbucks,
Hallmark and Nike are just a few examples of marketers who have gamified
their customer experiences. “Gamification” — the application of gaming
principles, mechanics or concepts to efforts that aren’t necessarily “games,”
has everyone talking.
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But games aren’t all fun and, um, games. While they might appear
to be a safe way to earn engagement for your brand, they must
be integrated in an authentic way in order for consumers to want
to participate. When considering the prospect of a program
using these principles, it’s important to focus on very human
benefits that make games successful — challenge, recognition,
tracking, competition and cooperation.
These five benefits are the lenses through which we’re approaching
any gamification effort:
As marketers, we’ve been taught to make communication
frictionless, easy and direct. But for games, that’s a recipe for
boring. The artful application of difficulty to games is what makes
them fun, and there exists the same opportunity to create fun
in marketing using this principle. Don’t be afraid to challenge
your audience but, of course, that’s not the same as miring
them in complexity.
the ruLes Of GamificatiOn
We humans are all about establishing
rules, defining winners and losers,
competing and cooperating.
1. chaLLenGe
2. recoGnition
A lot of people go through life without being recognized very
often — that’s one of the reasons we have birthdays and
Facebook. Games can change that. They recognize achievement,
scarcity and excellence in a context that matters to the player.
Taking that understanding of context and what truly matters
to a consumer creates a flood of creative marketing ideas.
Badges, mayorships, little gifts — they can all go a long way
to make your consumers feel special.
3. tracKinG
The notion of the Quantified Self has taken deep root in our
culture. We’re tracking more and more of our lives via sensors,
apps and Web sites than ever before. Our workflows, diets
and sleep schedules are all now quantifiable using the latest
technology, but games have a long history of giving players
feedback about their progress and when they’ll finally reach

the end. It’s easier than ever before to harness data to enrich
any experience and deepen the engagement one has with it, be
it entertainment or marketing — or both. Using games can help
you help your consumers better understand their performance
and help them improve.
4. coMPetition
This is the most obvious lens to consider when applying game
thinking, because games produce winners, losers and everything
in between. The rub with marketing is making sure that the
audience cares enough and that there are enough relevant
rewards to warrant real competition.
5. cooPeration
Throw “teams” into a competition and all of a sudden everything
is more intense. As much as people like to compete, they like
to achieve things together even more, and social games have
taught us lessons about that fact for several years now. Marketers
offer things consumers want — making them participants in
a gaming experience, and encouraging them to work together
toward those wants can be a powerful motivator.
Together, these five lenses create some really interesting programs.
We’re using them to bring lively connections to family dinners
(www.eltacodor.com), create hunts across America for hidden
prizes (www.thanksabilliongiveaway.com) and power a Twitterfueled
race to the Super Bowl (awardshowsubmission.com/
mercedesbenz/tweetrace/the_race.html). Beyond marketing,
businesses are using these lenses to aid them in everything
from training to customer service to logistics.
Can gamification get in the way? Of course. But it can also
be a profound tool in the marketer’s toolbox. Consider adding
game design to the marketing skill set — and treat it like
creativity, flexibility, tenacity and any other must-have
in the marketing superpower set. Applying what we’ve learned
from games to advertising creative, the tracking of marketing
efforts and the brand itself is interesting. If it’s also fun, then
it becomes very interesting.
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WRITTEN BY
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Chris Bowler
VP, Social Media
@bUCKEtQUIz
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It’s Not Enough
to Be Liked — Getting
Serious About Social
We know from eMarketer that nearly 90 percent of U.S. companies
will be using social media in some way by next year. (80 percent
already do.) But according to a recent PRWeek report, more than
a third of all companies don’t have a point person responsible for
social media within their organizations, let alone the commitment
that calls for more than a solitary person for social media. We’ve
outlined three areas of focus around strategic social media for
marketing organizations, some immediate ways to get there
and how to integrate agencies with an in-house staff.
All CMOs want the same thing: to make their organizations much more customercentric
rather than focused on products and channels. But to embrace the
customer today means getting much more serious about social media. As we
continue to see, social media transforms not only the way brands communicate,
but also encompasses other marketing functions including customer service,
research, social databasing and product development.
Social media continues to rapidly evolve. We know from eMarketer that nearly 90
percent of U.S. companies will be using social media in some way by next year.
(80 percent already do.) 1 But according to a recent PRWeek report, more than
a third of all companies don’t have a point person responsible for social media
within their organization, let alone the commitment that calls for more than
1 “Social Media Survey 2010,” PRWeek, September 1, 2010, http://www.prweekus.com/
pages/login.aspx?returl=/social-media-survey-2010-the-social-connection/article/177511/
&pagetypeid=28&articleid=177511&accesslevel=2&expireddays=0&accessAndPrice=0.
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OVER
a single person to manage social media. The reality is that many
companies are still experimenting and delegating social media
to junior staff and a patchwork of agencies. That has to change
if brands are going to take full advantage of the power of
social media.
Here are three areas of focus on strategic social media for
marketing organizations, some immediate ways to get there
and how to integrate agencies with an in-house staff.
1. eMBrace YoUr new strateGic asset — a FaceBooK
Brand coMMUnitY
The last few years of social media activity has rightly centered
on Facebook, the largest platform. We’ve progressed from
the creation of brand pages as an experiment and come to
the understanding that today these pages are strategic assets
in the form of large-scale communities. Among the top 100
brands today, the average fan base amounts to over 7,000,000
2 “PageData,” Inside Network, August 2011, http://pagedata.appdata.com/.
3 Sean Corcoran and Christine Spivey Overby, June 2, 2011, “Accelerating Your Social Maturity,” Forrester,
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/accelerating_social_maturity/q/id/59690/t/2#figure3.
it’s nOt enOuGh tO Be Liked — GettinG seriOus aBOut sOciaL
of companies say they
lack the people on their
teams to manage channels
in the social space.
“likers,” which is something truly remarkable in such a short
time. 2 And while fan count isn’t the best gauge of an effective
social media program, it offers a great head start for a brand
to activate this new strategic asset.
Consider how shabbily most brands organize around this
asset. Many outsource this increasingly important platform
to an outside agency. And it’s not just Facebook. Management
of Twitter profiles and YouTube channels are also being
outsourced. What should be a core in-house function,
is relegated to the periphery, with only half-measures to deal
with ongoing customer service, fan activation and ultimately
product and service innovation through community co-creation.
Of course, many brands find an agency to offer these services
because the brand can’t staff these social media channels
properly. According to Forrester, more than 50 percent of
companies say they lack the people on their teams to manage
channels in the social space. 3 And agencies are all too eager

to sell-in another service offering. (Full disclosure: Razorfish
provides community management services and currently
manages several types of social media platforms on behalf of
our clients.) But the nature of this outsourcing needs to evolve.
Philosophically, a brand should manage its own community —
providing transparency and authenticity to its customer base,
as well as operational efficiency. Agency community managers
can get in the way, creating a barrier between the brand and
its customer.
It’s not as difficult today for an organization to hire seasoned
community managers as it may have been just a few years back.
We are seeing resumes from candidates who manage social
media channels for small companies now looking to step up
to bigger brands. Posting an opening on Monster or Mashable
is often a way to get things started. The big decision in hiring
the right resource centers around a candidate’s ability to blog/
post/tweet in the right social voice for the brand — this skill is
an art, not a science, and shouldn’t tilt all the way to an overly
polished and copy-written approach.
Another consideration is where within the organization these
resources should reside. We see lots of different configurations
here. To be truly serious about social media, we advocate dedicated
roles, starting within the marketing team, for community managers.
DeVry University, a client, has created a successful model where
three community managers — each aligned to key audiences
of students, alumni and prospects — reside within the marketing
department and report up to a director of social media.
Even though an organization may have an in-house social
media team, an agency still has an important role to play.
But this role should be strategic and creative, acting behind
the scenes as a force multiplier, rather than replacement for
a brand’s direct participation.
Here are some key ways in which an agency can shift from tactical
community management to strategic community development:
strateGic activation. By representing the consumer, the agency
is in an ideal position to define the role that social media can play
for the client’s brand and business. This process gets beyond
using Facebook as a channel for communication, where content
and interaction is aimlessly posted and fan accumulation becomes
the mere end goal. The real purpose is to identify and develop
the unifying concept for why a consumer should and would
interact with the brand in a social way. Sometimes this is obvious,
especially for high-interest brands, but it’s much more challenging
for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands where getting
beyond the product is essential for true success. And typically
this approach not only defines a brand’s social media efforts,
but also their digital marketing efforts as a whole.
oPPortUnistic oversiGht. While brands should focus on
ongoing community management, the agency shadows the
brand team looking for strategic and tactical opportunities
to add value to the conversation and content. Taking advantage
of in-the-moment opportunities, such as a brand mention by
a celebrity on Twitter or a relevant video that’s getting traction
on YouTube, are a few examples where agency resources
should provide another set of eyes and ears for the brand team.
A framework for this “and pounce” approach can easily be set
up immediately.
2. inFUse sociaL research into the MarKetinG orGanization
The social research space is still in its infancy, but brands
need to rapidly infuse the various elements of social media
intelligence into their marketing and business process.
Let’s start with listening. While conversational monitoring
around a brand’s products and competition is standard
operating procedure, true listening hasn’t impacted most
organizations yet. At Razorfish, we are testing listening research
to inform a number of different types of marketing functions.
Take media planning, for example. While the traditional
approach to developing a media plan is first to analyze how
a specific audience can be targeted across a range of media
options — including TV programming, print vehicle and digital
channels — listening research provides a whole new approach.
Armed with listening data, the media planner can determine
where conversations around an industry category is taking
place, and therefore where a paid message may find more
receptivity, or where launching a social media program might
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Which is worse: a brand starting out
with few fans and followers, or a brand with
millions who are treated as if they are
indistinguishable from one another?
spur engagement for the brand. For Best Buy, social listening
techniques were used to identify partnership opportunities
in the gaming space such as Comic-Con. Razorfish gathered
insight around hardcore gamers — determining what events
and game titles drove the largest spikes in relevant discussion.
By partnering with such events, Best Buy was able to create
brand affiliation with gamers and generate authentic gaming
content that could then be redistributed through earned
and paid channels.
Another way we are testing listening research is rapid insight
development. A recent poll conducted on one of our client’s
Facebook pages yielded more than 1,000 comments in less
than 24 hours. These comments provided a wealth of insight
into how customers use this product, which strategists and
planners can use to inform future marketing programs and
even product innovation. We know we’ll see rapid insight
development evolve into research dashboards, piping this
real-time information directly to the planning and strategy
teams and allowing follow-up questions back to the community.
How to make this happen in your organization? Here are some
key ways in which social research can be infused into the
marketing process quickly:
it’s nOt enOuGh tO Be Liked — GettinG seriOus aBOut sOciaL
start with a Basic ListeninG aUdit. This can be a brief report
that determines who is talking about your brand, category and
competitors over a short look-back window of, say, three months
to a year, in order to capture seasonality of conversation. This
isn’t rocket science, rather a tried and true way to get grounded
in the conversation. Even for socially established brands, ask
yourself: When was the last time you conducted a point-in-time
listening audit?
Use a hYBrid aPProach to ListeninG. The growing need for
conversation monitoring measurement and mining has led to
a flurry of new social listening tools, many of which have very
unique capabilities. For example, Radian6 has access to one
of the largest data pools and satisfies monitoring requirements,
but NetBase takes a conversation quality approach and uses
natural language processing to identify key themes and categorize
sentiment. However, neither tool is effective without the analysis
of a subject matter expert. The most important tool when trying
to distill millions of pieces of social conversations is a pair of
human eyes. We recommend taking a hybrid approach to social
listening by choosing tools like NetBase, which can categorize
content by sentiment and discussion theme, while also employing
an analyst who is immersed in the brand to put the findings
into context.

anaLYze FaceBooK insiGhts. Compare Facebook to your other
communication channels and you might find that your fans
are different than the consumers you think you’re targeting.
And then solve for why. For a Kellogg Company brand, we
discovered that the audience the brand wanted to target —
men, ages 18-24 — was very different from the fans of their
Facebook page, which was skewing 90 percent female. This
naturally leads to a shift in social voice and content creation.
3. Get on the Path to trUe sociaL inFLUence MarKetinG
Day by day, brands continue to fine-tune ways to engage their
customers in the social space. But too often this process involves
throwing content against the proverbial wall, and just seeing
what sticks. Even when the best social editorial calendars
are developed and deployed, we still aren’t starting from
a place of strategic insight and personalized engagement.
However, it’s not as if brands aren’t successful with this
generalist approach — they continue to grow their fan base.
Ask yourself which is worse: a brand starting out with few fans
and followers, or a brand with millions of fans that are treated
as if they are indistinguishable from one another?
What’s missing is an understanding of the customer’s needs,
why they became and continue to be a fan of the brand and
how they influence one another. This is as simple as social
personification. Armed with this information, brands can tailor
their interaction more specifically. Yes, it’s difficult to segment
today, but this is going to change as social networks evolve.
Case in point: Google+ and its model of Circles. Over time,
this characterization of a person’s social relationships may allow
a closer, more personalized interaction between customers
and brands as well. We aren’t there yet, but the concept behind
Circles is our future.
Waiting around the corner, then, is greater intelligence on
a brand’s social graph, which quickly leads to an understanding
of what the most important influencers are. More importantly,
we will be able to have granularity around influencers in
a segmented way. For example, we will have ways to activate
the “deal-seeking influencers” looking to make noise about
a promotion, or the “category enthusiast” influencers, hungry
for new product news and willing to share it with their circle.
How to start down this path for your organization? Here are
some key first steps:
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Fan cateGorization. At a basic level, this is about how
a customer wants to interact with a brand in social media.
Do they want help with customer service issues, receive product
information or get special offers? Start by stepping back
and look at customer behaviors that inform how to structure
community content. A great first step might be to assess user
posts and comments and categorize them by interest. Next,
design polls to further gauge areas of interest to the fan base.
sMart data coLLection. Another way to understand your fan
base is to ask for user data when appropriate. Signing up to
receive special offers or exclusive content is a no-brainer, but
it’s surprising how many brands don’t take advantage of this
opportunity. By providing different opportunities to collect
an email address, users begin to self-categorize by interest.
Having opted-in to a particular interest — for example, new
product information — you can now deliver more relevant
communications. In turn, as users talk and share this information
across their social networks, you have the beginnings of a
tagged influencer database.
it’s nOt enOuGh tO Be Liked — GettinG seriOus aBOut sOciaL
Get FaMiLiar with GooGLe+. While user adoption and usage
is still an issue, Google is re-architecting how we group our
friends and colleagues through Circles. If you haven’t tried
it yet, give it a test run.
Three listening tools to watch:
• netBase: Best-in-class natural language processing that
helps categorize sentiment by theme and intensity.
• evoLve24: Strong social listening capabilities — large data
pool, topic categorization, trend analysis and the ability
to merge digital and traditional media data, which is a very
unique feature.
• sentiMent 360: Semantic AI-based sentiment analysis
that provides a high degree of accuracy (industry leader),
while also automatically ranking content for relevance
and conversation type.

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VP, Emerging Experiences
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Controlling the
Retail Environment
Through Digital
Brand Immersion
Although touch screens have dramatically altered consumer
expectations, retailers have mostly struggled to deploy innovative
digital experiences at scale beyond basic store navigation or
the occasional integration of tablets. In a world where everything
is increasingly available everywhere, wowing customers to drive
sales is more important than ever. As a result, innovative digital
experiences are increasingly challenged to move from the lab
or the presentation deck to the sales floor. We have identified five
factors to drive implementation and move from prototype
to improved customer experience.
Retailers have lost control of their stores. For that, you can blame the smartphone.
The proliferation of the iPhone and Android-based devices has dramatically altered
consumer expectations and behaviors. Life is increasingly lived online and mobile
devices act as always-there, always-on valets. In just about any environment,
people want to be online — communicating, sharing and researching. This is
especially true in stores, where consumers can use their mobile Web browsers
and apps to compare prices and products across retailers. When threatened
with commoditization, retailers see their margins come under pressure from being
the lowest price option or price matching. And what’s strange is that the store
owners are letting this happen by not giving shoppers the digital experiences
they so clearly want. Some of the more progressive retailers and brands have tried
to regain some control and become more digitally interactive in-store. However,
in talking with our retail clients, they often cite past failures and/or implementation
constraints as primary reasons why they haven’t made much progress.
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To be successful, retailers and brands must
value the creation of an experience
over the enabling of technologies.
A big distraction that keeps some retailers from making progress
is their Apple Store envy. Almost every retailer we’ve worked
with cites the Apple Store as best-in-class, the benchmark for
what they aspire to be. This is a head scratcher. While there’s
no doubting that the Apple Store model gets many things right,
it also has its shortcomings — There are no immersive digital
experiences in the Apple Store. Customers interact directly with
the products, which is good, but there’s no way to compare
Apple computers to PCs. There is no way to digitally configure
and personalize products, and no articulation of the Apple value
proposition or how Apple makes your life better. This leads
many retailers to conclude, “If Apple doesn’t feel immersive
digitally in-store then why should we?”
So how does Apple get away with this? Because they’re Apple.
Cupertino has several advantages over the average retailer:
strong brand affinity, sexy product lines, knowledgeable,
enthusiastic and digitally-enabled sales associates and strong
customer support. The cold, hard truth is that the vast majority
of retailers can never be like the Apple Store. But retailers can
deploy immersive digital experiences to inspire customers,
elevate their products and educate consumers. Wannabes
need to forget the Apple Store and create their own digital
retail identity.
cOntrOLLinG the retaiL enVirOnment thrOuGh diGitaL Brand immersiOn
To help get there, we’ve identified five factors for driving adoption
and dealing with implementation constraints while creating what
we call the “brand wow effect” within the retail environment.
1. LeveraGe the PhYsicaL
For retailers, brick-and-mortar stores still have two big advantages:
physical space and sales staff. Physical stores offer a huge
home-field advantage and, even though consumers are more
informed and digitally connected, they still seek out the in-store
shopping experience. Why? Because there’s no better way
to tangibly experience a product prior to purchase. There’s
also social and entertainment value that consumers place
on shopping experiences. So retailers should look to digitally
enhance, not replace, the shopping experience.
For brands, differentiation is difficult when similar products
are compared side by side. Immersive digital experiences are
a great tool for educating consumers on the value proposition
of products as well as cross-selling accessories. We have
observed that digital experiences can lead to an 11 percent
increase in the average basket and a 20 percent increase
in accessory sales.

One of the best uses of immersive digital in-store is to serve
the demand for personalization. Consumers want configurable,
personalized products but they struggle with complex buying
decisions. Interactive touchscreens and gestural experiences
are excellent for providing customers with the ability to configure
and personalize products to fit their needs. That’s something
smartphones don’t do well. These experiences create a deeper
affinity for a retailer or brand, leading to up to a 10 percent
increase in customer satisfaction.
One of the biggest myths about immersive digital in-store is that
it’s focused on self service. Actually, the opposite is the case
in the retail world. Retailers in general are not looking to add
staff, but almost every retailer is looking to make their sales
associates more effective. Burberry has equipped associates
in China with iPads to provide better access to online and offline
inventories, while JCPenney has done the same to assist with
complicated bridal jewelry purchases.
Whether it be arming sales associates with tablets or providing
touchscreens for consumers to co-experience, the results have
averaged a 4 percent increase in sales associate satisfaction
and less turnover. According to Deloitte, retail leads all industries
in adopting tablets. Their study predicts that 25 percent of all
tablet computers will be bought by businesses this year and
the number will continue to rise. 1
2. vaLUe the exPerience over the technoLoGY
It’s the customer experience — not the technology — that
makes the difference. Customers shop in stores for reasons
ranging from pure utility to entertainment. Customers shopping
out of necessity don’t care about technology, they just want the
experience to be easy. Customers shopping for entertainment
are seeking pleasure, and technology must enable that
experience. A retail experience done right is an experience
that takes advantage of ubiquitous computing; where technology
fits into the human environment instead of humans being forced
to use technology. Put another way, it’s when consumers know
1 Jeffrey Grau, “How the iPad is Transforming Retail,” eMarketer, May 1, 2011.
they’re engaging in an experience as opposed to experiencing
a technology — a key to driving adoption. It’s surprising how
many companies get this wrong.
A good history lesson in getting it wrong is the failure of the
first-generation kiosk, one of the most cited reasons why retailers
that have failed at digital in-store are reluctant to do it again.
Most kiosks were simply an idea the online channel teams —
not the retail teams — dreamt up to gain a Web site presence
in stores. The draw of easy implementation and the repurposing
of the online investment was irresistible. So they packed their
stores with cheap kiosks made of pressboard and Formica
that were outfitted with a browser-equipped PC, a low-res CRT
monitor, mouse and keyboard. Then, they waited for the orders
to flow in. They’re still waiting.
Why did they fail? Customers didn’t use them. Why didn’t
customers use them? Because the experiences sucked. Lesson
learned, successful implementations of technology do not
determine success — customer adoption determines success.
Many retailers never stopped to wonder why a customer would
stand in front of a Web site in a store when they could surf the
Internet from the comfort and privacy of their own home. They
ignored the fact that the retail experience is unique and special.
There are specific reasons why customers are there in the first
place. The chief result was thousands of ugly kiosks sitting
in the corner unplugged and collecting dust.
To be successful, retailers and brands must value the creation
of an experience over the enabling of technologies. Even today,
there is a wide disparity between retail technology spend and
experience spend. Large retailers and brands budget tens of
millions of dollars on hardware and technology to outfit their
stores, but only spend tens of thousands of dollars on the
experiences. Since adoption is the primary key to success,
the imbalance between technology and experience budgets
must shift. Customers don’t care what technology is under
the covers. If an experience provides value, they’ll adopt
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it. According to eMarketer, “Retailers are looking to digital
technology to help influence consumer decisions at the shelf
level, while also aiming to streamline and ease the shopping
process. Consumers are also receptive to digital technologies
deployed in-store when they receive a tangible benefit.” 2
3. Be as cooL as (iF not cooLer than) a sMartPhone
These days, digital in-store has to be at least as cool as the
device your customers are carrying in their purse or pocket.
This might seem contrary to the statement above; valuing
experience over technology. On the contrary, it’s not what the
technology is or how it works; it’s what the technology does.
The smartphone does a hell of a lot for a device that costs
a few hundred bucks. It’s a portable communication device,
data store and entertainment platform with tons of utility.
So why not just enable mobile apps in stores? Because customers
did not go to the store to use their mobile phones. They’re there
to shop and experience shopping. Digital needs to complement
and enhance the retail shopping experience, and to do so
2 Tobi Elkin, “Shopper Marketing Insight: Embracing Digital Touchpoints,” eMarketer, January 7, 2011.
cOntrOLLinG the retaiL enVirOnment thrOuGh diGitaL Brand immersiOn
effectively, it needs to be more immersive and more engaging
than your customer’s mobile device.
Size does matter — attraction and engagement are more keys to
adoption. Big, high-definition digital displays are hard to ignore
but they must enable an experience that helps customers connect
with a brand. For example, JCPenney’s in-store deployment of its
Findmore smart fixture experience inspires customers to digitally
shop by look — leveraging a 42” high-resolution touchscreen,
rich content and an extended online and offline assortment.
Immersive digital experiences have a 53 percent higher attraction
rate over traditional digital signage. To be clear, we’re talking
about inspiring customers in order to drive sales, not servicing
customers like they’re at an ATM. (That said, it’s worth noting
that digital is great for servicing customers as long as the
experience is private and optimized for the relevant task at hand.)
For driving sales, it’s all about digital experiences that attract
and engage customers. However, that’s not to say every retailer
needs to panel the walls with HDTVs. First, focus on getting
the experience right: Immersive digital experiences need to

e discoverable and unfold through rich and pleasurable paths.
Then, test and measure different form factors to see what produces
the highest payback.
4. hiGh tech is not aLwaYs Good tech
A big distraction that keeps
some retailers from making progress
is their Apple Store envy.
Another often-cited reason why brands and retailers don’t have
immersive digital experiences in-store is due to IT infrastructure
limitations. Every business wants an elegant, service-oriented
IT infrastructure where all data is available in real-time but few
have it. The digital ecosystem is changing too quickly to wait
for IT to get their ducks in a row. To make progress quickly in
the digital space, companies need to embrace some oldie-butgoodie,
low-tech solutions and leverage cloud computing.
One of the most low-tech, yet innovative, approaches to system
integration came from a large retail telecommunications brand
that recently went through a major acquisition. The IT integration
price tag of enabling every digital order to seamlessly flow
through the system was $125 million. A quick cost-benefit
analysis showed that it was much less expensive to hire staff
to manually process digital orders that fall out of the system
over a 10-year period. The process is nicknamed “swivel-chair,”
referring to how an associate pulls an order exception off
a printer, then swivels their chair to manually enter the order
into a couple of other systems. In today’s IT world, this oldschool
approach is cost effective, if not innovative.
Cloud computing also offers an IT shortcut in many situations.
In the past year, Razorfish leveraged the cloud to successfully
launch 5,000 Windows Phone 7 touchscreens into the global
retail market in eight countries and nine languages. Working
against severe retailer infrastructure constraints across the globe,
the solution hosted analytics and content management in the
cloud and the experience was deployed in a six-month period.
The moral of the story is that retailers shouldn’t be afraid to kick
the IT integration can down the road. The low-tech solution is
often the right one for businesses, and there are plenty that are
tried and true, from batch processing to manual intervention.
The only must-have system is a solid measurement framework
where performance and success is measured — and hosted
in the cloud, if necessary.
5. PiLot don’t PrototYPe
The ideal approach to getting immersive digital experiences
into retail stores is to align against a well-defined, overarching
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strategy or vision. Since the digital retail landscape is evolving
quickly, any vision needs to be mapped out quickly — a matter
of weeks, not months. However, the realities of the retail business
and the need to get something done quickly often outweigh
the luxury of developing an overarching strategy. We commonly
we hear from our retail clients:
• “We want to get innovative ideas to market quickly.”
• “What we need is a clickable prototype to show our
executives.”
• “If the prototype is successful, we may get buy-in for
a large-scale rollout.”
It’s true that most of our clients need to introduce innovative
digital experiences into the market quickly, but it’s not true
that they need a prototype. What they need is a pilot.
Following a prototype methodology is the most time-consuming
and costly path for getting digital retail experiences to market.
Prototypes are usually exercises in technology and since they
never enter the market, there’s not a lot to learn and business
effectiveness is not measured. Another disadvantage of prototypes
is the risk of someone beating you to market. If you’re onto a good
cOntrOLLinG the retaiL enVirOnment thrOuGh diGitaL Brand immersiOn
If the goal is to get something
into market quickly, then you
should pilot. Don’t waste time
and budget on a prototype.
idea, chances are someone else is too — probably a competitor.
Our point of view is that prototypes are only useful for proving
functionality that: 1) is absolutely critical to success and
2) carries a sufficient risk of failure. If neither of these are true,
Razorfish strongly advocates piloting over prototyping.
If the goal is to get something to market quickly, then you
should pilot. Don’t waste time and budget on a prototype.
Pilots carry higher upfront costs because the experiences must
be developed to the point where it starts and ends logically for
a customer. And pilots have to be fully tested. However,
only pilot experiences provide learnings from real customers
interacting in retail environments. The costs of pilots can
be limited by keeping the scope to core functionality and
a statistically significant number of stores. For example,
a 1,000-store retailer may be able to limit a pilot to only four
or five stores for six weeks and still provide sufficient learnings
in which broader conclusions can be drawn.
The Razorfish approach for getting immersive digital into retail
is to do so quickly, with the goal of learning and generating
buzz. Since it’s just a pilot, there’s no need to boil the ocean
right out of the gate. Keep the experiences concise and aligned

to key success metrics where performance is measured. Take a
low-tech, low-cost approach to integration and kick the systems
integration down the road. It’s usually much more cost effective
Dos and don’ts
Quickly pilot experiences in real stores with
real customers.
for a sales associate to manually update a few pilot experiences
via “sneakernet” for six weeks, than to integrate to retailer
back-end systems.
Dos Don’ts
Pursue low-tech, low-cost integration methods for
pilot experiences.
Keep experiences focused and aligned against
success metrics.
Focus on the experience more than the technology.
Wow customers with kick-ass experiences better than
what they can’t do on their smartphones.
Waste time with prototypes unless there’s a high risk
that critical functionality won’t prove out.
Wait for IT or elegantly integrate with retail systems
until a pilot proves out.
Try to boil the ocean, solve every customer problem
and answer every question in a single experience.
Confuse technical implementation success with
overall success.
Overly rely on mobile or put the online experience
in store as-is.
Admire the Apple Store. Try to be the Apple Store.
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WRITTEN BY
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Adam Heimlich
VP, Search and
Performance Marketing
@ADAMhEIMLICh
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Performance
Marketing Must Die
Digital technology has rendered the sales process transparent.
Brands that can recognize this fact have an enormous opportunity.
How the brand wants consumers to feel, what it wants shareholders
to believe, the government to do, the news media to report —
are all revealed in a single set of search results. To effectively sell
within this churning ecosystem of overtly targeted and obviously
unintended messages requires organizational confidence and
openness. Methodically insulated from ideas and salesmanship,
the performance marketer is positioned to distract organizations
from the imminent threat of a revolution in consumer perception,
caused by digital media.
Have you ever received an email offer that looked good until you searched
the name of the product? Ever visited the site of an iconic brand and found it
cheap? Have you seen a funny commercial from a company with an infuriating
online application process? Have you had trouble finding a brand on your mobile
browser because sales affiliates masquerade as it? Can you name a brand that
interacts in the same personality it broadcasts?
The source of all this dissonance: Digital technology has rendered the sales
process transparent.
Brands that can recognize this fact have an enormous opportunity, and no use
for what we call performance marketing, which refers to DR, search, display
advertising and social media. However, it actually describes a set of activities
inadvertently designed to deny the reality of a transparent sales process.
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Introduce the right motivation,
the right skills and the right process
for media optimization.
The problem with the performance marketing organization is
its separation from the sales, service and merchandising teams —
which is to say, from everyone directly involved with customers
in any capacity. The performance marketing team is also
traditionally walled off from second-hand research into
customers and their preferences, which features insights
of value for creatives, whose task of connecting emotionally
is widely perceived to be the opposite of performance marketing.
Methodically insulated from ideas and salesmanship, the
performance marketer is positioned to distract organizations
from the imminent revolution in consumer perception caused
by digital media.
The reality
Today, everyone sees brands naked, except their marketing
executives, who praise the lavish new clothes of performance.
Sales transparency means the end of efficacious channel
marketing. The salient point of a channel is physical
confinement — as a metaphor for media, it makes as much
sense as “dialing” a phone. Because messages spill out
of their containers in a manner more un-channel-like than
perfOrmance marketinG must die
previously imaginable, smart brands assume any consumer
might see any message, regardless of whether a message is
intended for them. These brands aspire to sell with nothing to
hide. The assumption behind performance marketing, in contrast,
is that inconsistent, inferior or irritating online communications
are no more dangerous than a bit of junk mail.
Brands that issue communications for specific purposes are,
in fact, mostly creating awareness — not of the brand’s “story”
but of its value, which tends to make for a more interesting
narrative. How the brand hopes consumers will feel, how it
actually regards them, what it wants shareholders to believe,
what it wants the government to do and what it wants the news
media to report are all are revealed in a single set of search
results. To effectively sell within this churning ecosystem of
overtly targeted and obviously unintended messages requires
organizational confidence and openness.
Performance marketing teams, on the other hand, sustain
antiquated beliefs in messaging and measurement, separate
from sales and service. They reenact a historical drama of
sequenced stimulus and response, pretending that their
audience is playing within the arbitrary rules they’ve created.

The word “performance” itself accidentally attests to the
theatrical nature of digital media “roles.” The ostensible actor
is not prospects or customers, but a featureless outline of their
activity captured in data. It’s a shadow play, designed to fool
and delight a willing audience.
For example, every Razorfish client has goals around customer
acquisition and retention. But almost no Razorfish clients task
their performance teams with optimizing media toward these
goals, though the data is always accessible. Similarly, every
Razorfish client wants their Web site to engage visitors, yet
nearly all performance managers ignore their bounce rates.
And all performance clients want more digital sales, but none
try to discover the optimal context, sequence and content
of messages that lead to digital sales.
Brands’ willingness to buy into performance marketing despite
its inability to harness the power of digital gives the game away.
Their function is to keep the problem under the rug for now,
and to carry the blame for “underperformance” should a more
adaptive competitor enter the market.
The solution
Replacing performance marketing with something that can
impact the bottom line is a matter of three corrections: Introduce
the right motivation, the right skills and the right process for
media optimization.
Motivation can only come from the top. If the one or two leaders
responsible for all the customer interactions influenced by or
measured in digital media don’t acknowledge that transparency
makes performance counterproductive, no one can. That’s the
first step toward dismantling performance marketing’s regime
of specialized expertise and fragmented accountability.
To supply the right rationale, leadership must specify goals
for all media — paid, earned and owned, online and offline.
Note that a CMO’s request to assess how its various media
efforts function together cannot be met under existing corporate
structures. Generally, the performance team has broadly applicable
data, while its people function as a specialized machine focused
exclusively on online sales or some other isolated measure of
activity. Brand affinity, customer retention and creative teams’
ability to influence and persuade are optimized separately and
slowly, with data sets less fresh or actionable than what is
collected constantly through digital channels.
To retool the optimization process to account for all marketing
goals simultaneously, a CMO must task channel teams with
expressing shared goals in compatible — which usually
means chiefly digital — terms. That is, if reach is a proxy
for effectiveness, the effect should be validated. While paid
search collects sales, its brand impact can’t be ignored.
It may seem easier to manage against baseline costs and
conversions, but customers aren’t as numb as marketers
are to the sense that a company is chronically undervaluing
digital operations or brand building. They know when the
company Web site is useless, or they’re getting hit with 10
discount offers a day. Transparency means that biased or
arbitrary communication choices will play out in public. Without
consistency of measurement, there is no justification for valuing
any marketing action over any other. Additionally, there is no
basis for optimizing marketing actions in combination across
channels, which is how they are always experienced nowadays.
This requires big change. And there will be chafing.
A performance marketer veering away from the usual charade
is like a retail cashier reallocated to the sales floor, only worse.
Although no VP is responsible for addressing total brand
perception in a customer setting, brands’ service staffs effectively
have that job. Compare their qualifications for meeting customers
in their space to those of the performance marketer, whose
putative value is rarified “expertise” with spreadsheets
and software.
Implementing the right skills starts with a reassessment of
the value of quantitative experts to digital marketing efforts.
There is no doubt that data analysis and predictive modeling
are important. No less certain is that a feel for what’s
behind activity data and a knack for imagining scenarios not
explicitly supported by the numbers are also required for
media optimization. Many marketing organizations staff for
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targeted digital media as if its challenges were linear, and the
optimization process mechanical. Early successes in social
media have clarified how unspecialized and playful in its
approach even a very serious interactive brand should appear.
That comes from an appreciation for the softer side of digital.
Get started
A good place is to start is including people with sales and
creative experience on the optimization team. However, the
turning point in digital marketing skills correction comes from
leadership that is as engrossed in misses, as it is in hits.
Brands that want marketers to automatically deal out optimal
responses to customer actions task them with learning above all
else. It’s in the broad application of patterns of consumer action
to brand operations that marketing results can be dramatically
improved, so aspire to replace performers with teachers.
A necessary casualty of a shift from expert posturing to reflexive
learning should be in the performance marketer’s toolset. If the
performance data software is too old to support channelagnostic
feedback for holistic optimization, it should probably
be scrapped. The good news is the replacement can be much
more user-friendly. Software built for performance marketers
tends to be opaque because performance marketing itself was
designed to deny visibility.
perfOrmance marketinG must die
The right process for digital media optimization features universal
accessibility to data feedback and common knowledge of goals.
A marketing organization in which teams keep secrets from
each other is unlikely to optimize transparent communications.
On the other hand, shared responsibility for published results
sets good teachers free. Where goals are intertwined, such as
brand perception and retention, site engagement and product
awareness, or SEO rank and social campaign adoption,
collaboration is easily incentivized. Where interests compete,
such as share of voice versus lead conversion efficiency,
leadership must be accountable for balancing power, and for
trade-off decisions aligned with current business strategy.
Automatic optimization, far from a mechanical specialty,
is mostly engaged marketers entitled to act.
An organization so adapted to current media reality would find
it hard to ascertain where its digital optimization team begins
and ends. Like its customers, the marketing department
would be constantly aware of what it’s trying to do and why.
Competitors who place accountability for digital success
in a dungeon where no idea or insight can penetrate will start
to look shackled indeed.

WRITTEN BY
WITH CONTRIBUTOR
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Ken Hong
Managing Director,
Razorfish China
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William Lidstone
Executive VP,
Razorfish International
@WILLIAMLIDStONE
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Toward a New
Global Digital
Agency Structure
While digital efforts are increasingly integrated into the core
duties of global marketers, Razorfish has found marketing
executives continuing to express a high degree of frustration
with the number of partners and complexity associated with
managing digital programs globally. Razorfish has identified
the disadvantages of traditional models, driving factors that put
those models under intense pressure and potential solutions
to the problems, including the centers of excellence model.
Matching luggage might be a good travel strategy, but it comes up short as an
organizational principle for a global ad campaign. That desire to have all the
creative around the world look like it’s part of a set created in the same factory,
by the same designer, is an old one. And yet, it lingers as digital efforts are
increasingly integrated into the core duties of global marketers. The effect,
we’ve found, is that marketing executives are frustrated with the number of
partners needed to manage global, digital programs and the complexity it breeds.
Old structures created to localize traditional media like print and out-of-home
often create mediocre digital creative, inefficiency and quality control problems.
Clearly, a new model is needed. It has to be lean, yet with a big enough footprint
to ensure global brand consistency. And it needs to be efficiently organized so
it can deal with one of the biggest challenges facing digital advertising — global
scarcity of talent. We believe that the centers of excellence model that’s popping
up more and more is a viable replacement for the bloated structures of yesterday,
but before we get to that let’s examine the shortcomings of current models.
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Old models
There are three traditional models, each with major disadvantages:
1. GLoBaL controL with LocaL transcreation/LocaLization
While this helps ensure brand and message consistency, it largely
ignores the often vastly different ways consumers engage via
digital channels in local markets — both in terms of content and
context. As a result, digital campaigns become less impactful
as they are rolled-out across geographies. For example, not
only will social media have a larger portion inside the marketing
mix in China, Western markets are not familiar with local social
media properties. A campaign cooked up in the U.S. or Europe
and then localized for China might not account for this.
2. FULL LocaL LeadershiP
This clearly makes marketing programs more relevant in local
markets, but runs the risk of losing out on building a consistent
global brand experience, and it often leads to a high degree
of inefficiency due to duplicated efforts and investments. In
addition, the availability of digital talent varies between markets.
It is not uncommon, for example, for Russian brands to request
tOWard a neW GLOBaL diGitaL aGencY structure
global, digital executives to be assigned to local markets, or for
marketers in India to request an equivalent standard of digital
creativity and quality as they see in the U.S. or Europe.
3. hYBrid
When implemented well, the hybrid approach allows local
flexibility to react to local market needs, while maintaining
brand consistency and countering some of the redundancy that
comes with the purely local approach. However, the shortage
of experienced digital talent beyond the realm of production
is a real challenge for this model in many markets. As a result,
locally driven digital campaigns tend to be fairly tactical in
nature — particularly in emerging markets — and miss the
impact they could have by fully leveraging global digital
expertise to amplify the campaign.
These models are under intense pressure. First, there’s a shortage
of talent and diversity in local markets. Even in the most mature
markets where agencies not only compete against each other,
but with clients, media owners, start-ups, technology firms,
etc., the pool is dry. The challenge in emerging markets is even
more severe. In addition, the types of talents and skills that
are available in different markets can vary significantly. It doesn’t

Global hubs
Seattle
help that a broad spectrum of digital expertise is needed. The
fragmentation within the sector is enormous and, combined with
the speed of change in media, technology and consumer behavior,
is confronting marketers with a high degree of complexity.
Another challenge is finding the balance between commodity
services and true differentiating offer. Given digital’s relative
youth, marketers often struggle to draw the line between
technology/creative production and innovation. Finally, there
are vast differences by markets. The digital media diet, digital
media properties, technology adoption and content preferences
frequently vary by country and need to be factored into
campaign planning and execution.
A new model emerges
London
Shanghai
Australia
In response to the shortcoming of the traditional structures
and the challenges in designing and deploying impactful digital
programs, we see a new model emerging; a structure around
centers of excellence — such as emerging experiences, social
media, media creativity, analytics, etc. — often in support of the
hybrid model. In other words, a center of excellence as a unit
based on a clearly defined vision and goal, such as becoming
a market leader in cloud computing worldwide. There is no
fixed formula for how to set up such an entity and its size and
organizational structure will depend on the subject, the local/
regional market needs and its geographic scope.
Step one is to analyze existing talent in key markets so that
there’s a basis to extend and build from, and so that there’s
a well-respected leader to attract talent. Assess the availability
and diversity of talent in the respective local markets before
deciding on a hub location. Once the hub is established,
a concerted effort is needed to bundle activities there so as
not to undermine the efforts of building a scale in certain areas.
China is a good example. While it’s a well-known fact that
China lacks local, digital talent in general, thanks to its fast
growth and abundant opportunities, it has become a talent
magnet for the region. More and more talent from markets like
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore are flowing into China and
making up an ever-increasing portion of the workforce. In fact,
the most successful marketers and agencies in China today
are those who can construct effective teams that consist
of talent from different markets in the region.
This approach allows agencies to attract specialized talent
at scale into core locations around the globe. These regional
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centers in turn partner closely with local market teams to design
and build breakthrough campaigns. It goes without saying that
local offices still need to employ key digital talent locally but it
alleviates (to some extent), the massive shortcomings in skilled
digital marketers and increases the ability to manage complexity.
The new digital model also builds on the learning that designing
and implementing global campaigns no longer mandates physical
presence in every single market; this is particularly true for tier-two
marketers. When Tourism New Zealand set out to launch its
digitally driven global marketing campaign, it initially engaged
multiple Razorfish offices to plan and execute the campaigns
in parallel. While they had great results in some markets, others
were more challenging. Throughout the process, several offices
emerged with strong and complimentary skills. We both realized
a “hub-n-spoke” model with distinct centers of excellence
probably made more sense. Working together, we established
hubs in Seattle, London and Shanghai to manage their global
campaign. Success no longer depends on the number of people
per market; having physical presence does not equal local, digital
skills. We have already seen improvements on multiple fronts like
communication efficiency and integrated campaign planning.
tOWard a neW GLOBaL diGitaL aGencY structure
A new model is needed.
It has to be lean, yet with a
big enough footprint to ensure
global brand consistency.
So next time when choosing a global digital agency partner,
remember to ask the following questions:
• Where are your centers of excellence globally?
• Why did you select those locations?
• What talent and skills do you have in key local markets
and how do the centers partner with local offices?
• How have you delivered digital innovation —
with positive impact to the bottom line — for clients?
• What are examples of digital campaigns you executed
with significant impact on brand level metrics?
Regardless of what new approach wins, the increased spend
in digital, combined with ongoing shifts in the technology,
consumer, and media landscapes will likely lead to more
pressure on traditional models in the foreseeable future.
The jury is still out on the center of excellence model, but there
is increasing evidence that it’s an efficient way to manage
the complexities of a global campaign.

WRITTEN BY
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Paul Gelb
VP, Mobile Practice
@pAULgELb
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Limited Time to
Prepare for Unlimited
Potential of Mobile
Mobile offers unprecedented reach to marketers, providing
access to consumers anywhere and anytime. Mobile is now
driving a pace of change that is so fast that projections beyond
two years are so unreliable that they can only be considered
conjecture. But make no mistake, mobile will one day surpass
television’s ad spend. Marketers’ greatest challenge in this
decade will be to prepare their companies for a shift in their
business that is unparalleled in terms of speed and scale.
Mobile media has reached a crossroads reminiscent of Bill Gates’ famous insight
from 1996, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years
and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be
lulled into inaction.” This trend was evident in the evolution of online media and
appears to be repeating itself with mobile. Unrealistic short-term expectations aren’t
met and that leads to dismissive attitudes and underinvestment in preparing for
significant long-term change. The unprecedented, dizzying pace of mobile technology
advancement and consumer adoption will make mobile the most disruptive mass
medium, with wide-ranging effects for both advertisers and consumers. Mobile’s
unique functionality creates the potential for more effective and efficient advertising
than ever before. Yet, marketers are still struggling to find operational models that
can execute effectively and efficiently across traditional media and online. In the face
of these difficulties, marketers must learn from the mistakes made a decade ago,
because future consequences will be more severe.
We believe that mobile spending will surpass not only Internet ad spending, but
also television, and have calculated a forecast for when this could occur based
OUTLOOK OutLOOk REPORT repOrt | VOL 10
91

92
on reasonable assumptions. Our analysis is described in detail
on page 97. The conservative estimate was 12 years and the
aggressive estimate was 10 years. However, we don’t believe
that identifying the date has any inherent value.
Mobile forecasts have consistently been unreliable and
underestimated. For example, in 2008, the projected number
of Apple mobile operating system (iOS) app downloads by 2010
was 200 million. 1 However, the actual number of downloads
reached 14 billion, 70 times the amount forecasted just two
years earlier. The worst predictions are inaccurate predictions.
More importantly, it won’t matter if this transition occurs in 10
years or 20 years. Recommendations for individual clients have
never been contingent on mass adoption by the industry
at large. Our decision making process is consistently focused
on identifying the right opportunities, allocating optimal resources
and executing at a high level to generate the best measurable
return on investment. The greatest challenges in mobile have not
been related to decisions about if and when to invest in mobile.
Rather, our goals have been to enable clients to keep up with
Annual $ ad avenue growth — first 14 years
$ MiLLions
$24,000
$21,000
$18,000
$15,000
$12,000
$9,000
$6,000
$3,000
$0
Year 1
Broadcast
caBLe
1 Horace Dediu, “More than 60 Apps Have been Downloaded for Every iOS Device Sold,” asymco.com, January, 16,
2011, http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/16/more-than-60-apps-have-been-downloaded-for-every-ios-device-sold/.
2 A.K. Palit, “Internet Ad Revenue Data Shows Signs of Re-Acceleration,” www.iab.net, April 13, 2011,
http://www.greencrestcapital.com/blog/internet-ad-revenue-data-shows-signs-of-re-acceleration/.
Limited time tO prepare fOr unLimited pOtentiaL Of mOBiLe
internet
rapid shifts in consumer behavior toward mobile usage.
If the pace of growth for the mobile channel is higher than
it was online, it is more important to determine how to be better
prepared this time to execute effectively and efficiently than
to focus on an arbitrary industry juncture.
Assessing comparable impact of Internet ad spend
One of the most important parts of preparing for change is
identifying what is different and what remains the same. Online
growth is a valuable base upon which to assess the potential
long-term impact of mobile. Any discussion about the real or
perceived impact of mobile must address skepticism of its
predecessor. Declarations in the late 90s that the Internet would
rapidly disrupt traditional media channels and capture their ad spend
are still considered by many marketers to have been unfounded.
However, after just 16 years, Internet ad revenue was $26 billion
in 2010. An apple to apples, inflation adjusted comparison shows
that in their sixteenth year, broadcast and cable only generated
$16 billion and $7 billion, respectively. 2 In 2010 a more significant
$9,626 $9,766
$8,087
$8,188
$8,859
$5,030
$6,557
$7,885
$7,134
$6,010
$7,267
$4,621
$2,787
$3,698
$2,495
$3,180
$3,654
$358 $55
$147
$1,012 $267 $2,162 $907
$295 $499
$1,920
$745
$1,190 $1,580 $1,853 $2,080
Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6 Year 7 Year 8 Year 9 Year 10 Year 11 Year 12 Year 13 Year 14
soUrces: iaB internet ad revenUe rePort, PricewaterhoUsecooPers LLP, UniversaL Mccann
$12,542
$10,870
$4,059
$16,879
$11,717
$4,816
$21,206
$13,259
$23,448
$6,501

milestone was reached. Internet ad revenue surpassed several
traditional media segments, including newspapers, magazines
and radio. It took more than 40 years for TV (broadcast and cable)
to surpass newspaper advertising revenue. 3 (See chart at left.)
Its growth was as responsible for Internet’s rise in advertising
market share as the decline of other media channels. Ad spend
on local TV, syndicated TV, newspaper, magazine, radio and
directory decreased 35 percent, more than $43.8 billion, between
2000 and 2010. 4 Newspaper advertising had a particularly sharp
decline, decreasing 54 percent in just five years. Much of the
investment in these traditional media channels has shifted to online
ad expenditures as well as digital marketing initiatives that aren’t
even included in ad spending figures like email marketing, digital
coupons or digital promotions. When these additional segments of
digital marketing are counted, online investment nearly mirrored the
decline of major traditional channels, totaling $47.6 billion in 2010. 5
Despite significant growth in online ad spend, traditional media
will still account for an estimated 80 percent of advertising dollars
in 2011. 6 Cable and network television were notable exceptions
to online’s disruption of traditional media. In 2010, TV captured
the largest ad spend market share — two times online’s market
share. Marketers that could not effectively shift budget to digital
retained traditional media channels alternatives. Consequently,
even though Internet accounted for 25.2 percent of adults’ daily
media consumption time in 2010, it received just 18.7 percent
of U.S. ad spending. 7 However, the rate of ad spend shift
to digital is growing and TV has become increasingly vulnerable
to disruption. Estimated growth in 2011 for Internet advertising
is 20 percent compared to 4 percent for TV. 8
Where subscribers frequently access Internet
on their mobile device
Why mobile is different
By almost every metric, mobile outperforms online advertising.
Mobile will be the first truly mass media, offering unprecedented
reach efficiency to marketers. Advertisers can also generate
greater effectiveness from brand engagement and conversions.
The increased value of mobile for advertisers should lead to higher
growth rates and larger budget shifts from traditional media.
Mobile subscriber penetration is now 101 percent (average
person has more than one mobile phone) compared to 75
percent for Internet. 9 Users are rapidly adopting smartphone
and tablet devices, which support consumption behavior and
ad formats required for significant ad spending. Apple’s iOS
devices have become the fastest adopted consumer electronics
products in history. By early 2012, there will be 54 million tablet
users and 50 percent of mobile subscribers will have smartphones
in the U.S. 10 By 2014, the number of mobile Internet users is
3 Nieman Journalism Lab, http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/can-newspaper-publishers-survive-this-revenue-freefall-perhaps-if-theyembrace-a-digital-future/.
4 Harold L. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics, Cambridge University Press.
5 Jack Myers Media Business Report 2020 Vision: Media, Advertising and Marketing Economic Health Report 2000-2020.
6 Nicole Perrin, “Traditional Media: Dollars and Attention Shift to Digital,” eMarketer, May 18, 2011,
http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Reports/Viewer.aspx?R=2000792.
7 “Ad Dollars Still Not Following Online and Mobile Usage,” eMarketer, March 31, 2011, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R
=1008311&dsNav=Ntk:basic|internet+25.2+adults%E2%80%99+daily+media+consumption+time+in+2010|1|,Rpp:50,Ro:-1.
8 “Comparative Estimates,” eMarketer, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/EssentialMetrics.aspx.
9 “Comparative Estimates,” eMarketer, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/EssentialMetrics.aspx.
10 “A Portrait of Today’s Tablet User,” Online Publishers Association (OPA), June 2011, http://onlinepubs.ehclients.com/images/pdf/
MMF-OPA_--_Portait_of_Todays_Tablet_User_--_Jun11_(Final-Public)3.pdf.
100%
75%
50%
25%
0%
89%
From home
66%
At work
66%
In the car
69%
Outdoors
71%
In retail locations
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
93

projected to surpass desktop Internet users. 11 Recently, several
carriers began offering smartphones for free with a two-year
contract, eliminating any price impact on the smartphone versus
feature phone purchase decision. Thus, smartphone growth
will continue, making the ownership of smartphones or tablets
nearly ubiquitous in the U.S.
Mobile offers unique access to consumers; capable of reaching
them anywhere and anytime. Subscribers frequently access
Internet on their mobile device from home (89 percent), at work
(66 percent), in the car (66 percent), outdoors (69 percent) and
in retail locations (71 percent). Smartphone users spend 100
minutes a day on mobile Web and apps, a 100 percent increase
since December 2010. Tablet usage varies, but a reasonable
estimate is two hours a day. Thus, mobile is rapidly approaching
two and a half hours of daily Internet usage. 12 Mobile already
accounts for 20 percent of marketing emails opened in 2011
and is projected to generate 20 percent of searches in 2012. 13
Mobile’s share of email and search should grow as smartphone
and tablet adoption increases.
Mobile devices also enable the addition of location targeting
to demographics, content and time of day. This creates the
opportunity to significantly increase contextual relevance with
dynamic ads. And touch screen interactivity provides a unique
and entertaining lean forward experience. Mobile outperforms
online across all of the major brand engagement metrics,
including ad awareness, aided awareness, unaided awareness,
message association, brand favorability and purchase intent.
The average click through rate on mobile ads is 8.7 times higher
than online advertisements. 14
94 Limited time tO prepare fOr unLimited pOtentiaL Of mOBiLe
Mobile and online advertising’s effect on brand
metrics in the U.S., Nov. 2007-Dec. 2010
Message association
4
Purchase intent
3
Aided awareness
4
Brand favorability
3
Unaided awareness
11 “Internet Trends,” Morgan Stanley, April 12, 2010.
12 “Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-View Mirror,” Flurry, June 20, 2011, http://blog.flurry.com/
bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-Rear-view-Mirror.
13 “Jack Myers Video Report: $54 Billion in Digital Advertising and Marketing: Where is it Coming From?”
Jackmyers.com, June 15, 2011, http://www.jackmyers.com/commentary/jackmyers-think-tank/Jack-
Myers-Video-Report--54-Billion-in-Digital-Advertising-and-Marketing-Where-Is-It-Coming-From.html.
14 “Mobile Ads Outperform Standard Banners,” eMarketer, July 13, 2011, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/
Article.aspx?R=1008494&dsNav=Ntk:basic|mobile+ctr|1|,Rpp:50,Ro:-1.
averaGe deLta* aBove controL
Ad awareness
3
* deLta deFined as a Point diFFerence in exPosed vs. controL GroUPs
soUrce: insiGhtexPress, “MoBiLe insiGhtnorMs,” Jan. 7, 2011
8
8
8
8
Assessing potential of budget shift from TV
Network and cable ad spend resiliency has not been based upon
their superior value for marketers. Rather, cable and broadcast
networks leveraged large audience inventory scarcity to generate
significantly higher prices. From 1980 to 2008 the average
number of households viewing TV per minute decreased 71
percent while the CPM increased 692 percent, according
to Nielsen. TV achieved this unique advertising paradox by
reducing lower paying advertiser categories through attrition and
increasing the share of revenues from higher paying advertisers.
The remaining advertisers place a considerable value on being
able to reach a broad national audience in a time sensitive manner.
11
14
MoBiLe norMs
onLine norMs
23

The increase in price has been larger than losses from audience
decline. This tradeoff cannot be sustained indefinitely. Even the
least price sensitive marketers will eventually become unwilling
to pay for annual TV CPM increases as the audience size of the
networks and their shows decrease. The 0.8 percent annual rate
of decline from 2004 to 2010 clearly shows that TV ad economics
are approaching a breaking point. 15
Mobile is better positioned than online to capture market share
from TV. However, it is important to note that this discussion
of mobile and TV ad spend is limited to the context of devices.
Many of the leading networks and cable Multiple System Operators
(MSOs) are well positioned to capture ad spend that has shifted
to smartphones and tablets. By 2020, digital revenues are
projected to generate 26 percent of total broadcast network
advertising, compared to only 4.1 percent of total network ad
revenues in 2010. 16
Mobile consumption is increasingly aligned with TV consumption.
More than 86 percent of mobile Internet users surf the mobile
Web while watching TV. 17 Consumption while watching TV now
accounts for 20 percent of smartphone use and 30 percent
of tablet use. 18 Tablet consumption in particular aligns with
traditional TV viewing behavior. Just as households often share
the TV watching experience, 50 percent of iPad owners share
their iPad. 19 Remarkably, 30 percent of applications on mobile
phones owned by parents were downloaded by their children. 20
In addition, primetime occurs during the same hours for both
channels. Mobile traffic, search volume and click through rates
now peak from 7p.m. to 11p.m. 21
The most compelling support for mobile engagement superiority
over TV comes from multitasking behavior. Admittedly, there
have been just as many studies that claim that mobile has the
highest engagement rate as there are studies that make the
claim for TV. However, when mobile and TV are consumed at
the same time, mobile appears to capture the user’s attention.
An Interpublic Group (IPG) study found that 94 percent of
TV viewing is distracted by multitasking with another media.
Notably, smartphones were the largest distraction, accounting
for 64 percent of user attention diversions from TV. It appears
that a significant share of the attention decline occurs from
distractions during commercial breaks. For example, Yahoo!
measured 5 to 20 percent increases in traffic during ad breaks
for large TV events like the Academy Awards. 22
As the scale efficiencies decline on TV, advertisers will increasingly
look for opportunities to reach the most consumers where
engagement is highest. As users continue to integrate mobile
devices into TV consumption, the engagement and thus the
ad spend will shift from the TV screen to mobile devices.
Priority preparations for the long-term shift to mobile
reassessinG incentives. Most organizations have established,
over many years of traditional media-focused marketing,
15 “U.S. Advertising and Marketing Spending, by Media, 2005-2011 (billions),” eMarketer, April 14, 2009, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Chart.
aspx?R=84272&dsNav=Ntk:basic|US+Advertising+and+Marketing+Spending%2c+by+Media%2c+2005+2011+(billions)|1|,Rpp:50,Ro:-1.
16 “Jack Myers Video Report: $54 Billion in Digital Advertising and Marketing: Where is it Coming From?” Jackmyers.com, June 15, 2011, http://
www.jackmyers.com/commentary/jackmyers-think-tank/Jack-Myers-Video-Report--54-Billion-in-Digital-Advertising-and-Marketing-Where-Is-It-
Coming-From.html.
17 “Mobile Internet — Delivering on the Promise of Mobile Advertising,” Yahoo!, March 2011, http://advertising.yahoo.com/industry-knowledge/
mobile-internet-whitepaper.html.
18 “In the U.S., Tablets are TV Buddies while eReaders Made Great Bedfellows,” May 19, 2011, Nielsen, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/
online_mobile/in-the-u-s-tablets-are-tv-buddies-while-ereaders-make-great-bedfellows/.
19 “Tablet Opportunities for News Publishers,” INMA, January 26, 2011, http://www.inma.org/modules/store/index.cfm?action=store_
detail&pubid=107.
20 “U.S. Parents Say Almost a Third of the Apps on Their Phone Were Downloaded by Their Children,” Nielsen, April 27, 2011, http://blog.nielsen.
com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-parents-say-almost-a-third-of-the-apps-on-their-phone-were-downloaded-their-children/.
21 Kunur Patel, “When’s the Prime Time in Mobile?”, TVWeek, http://www.tvweek.com/news/2011/07/whens_prime_time_in_mobile_sam.php.
22 “Mobile Internet — Delivering on the Promise of Mobile Advertising,” Yahoo!, March 2011, http://advertising.yahoo.com/industry-knowledge/
mobile-internet-whitepaper.html.
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
95

incentives for internal marketing departments and external
agencies to promote behavior that maximizes performance.
These incentives may not reward behavior required to execute
on mobile or across an increasingly fractured landscape. Internal
and agency incentives must be evaluated and changed to align
with the new marketing objectives.
evaLUatinG taLent. Many marketers and agencies have
spent decades focusing their expertise on cost reduction.
Traditional media has become commoditized and the benefit
of a commodity cannot be increased. Also, the gains from
a marketing campaign are harder to measure than a reduction
in cost. Thus, ROI increases on these channels have come
predominantly from reducing costs. However, the selections
of internal team members and agencies that will be accountable
for a strategic shift to mobile marketing must take into account
the required skills and expertise needed to create a completely
new marketing product. Individuals and organizations must
be creative, entrepreneurial and capable of working in an
unstructured environment. Thus, mobile teams must have
expertise in increasing the benefits side of the ROI equation.
reaLiGninG orGanizationaL strUctUre. Brands and agencies
are often large organizations, which consist of specialized,
siloed departments. This structure is intended to increase
the efficiency of executing an unchanging workflow process.
However, determining how to execute a new type of marketing
in a dynamic environment requires more information sharing
across disciplines and the flexibility to respond to unforeseen
challenges and opportunities. In a rapidly changing industry,
horizontal integration, rather than vertical siloes, increases
efficiency and speed. An internal cross-disciplinary leadership
team should be created to facilitate information sharing.
However, a decision maker must be selected. Input is
valuable but accountability is essential. Similarly, marketers
are best served by a single agency that has a large number
of experienced professionals in each discipline required to
engage consumers on mobile. The value of this structure was
substantiated in the early years of TV, when creative and media
services were provided by the same agency.
96 Limited time tO prepare fOr unLimited pOtentiaL Of mOBiLe
secUrinG resoUrces. Marketers will undoubtedly face
organizational resistance to the uncertainty that accompanies
a transition from the familiar traditional media to a transitional
state of mobile media. Convincing stakeholders of the value of
a shift in budget to mobile is not sufficient to initiate action. Even
if every executive agrees in principle, action is not guaranteed.
Taking funds away from one part of the organization requires
indisputable evidence of an increase in ROI. The best process
to provide a performance-based case is through an iterative
approach. Mobile executions should not be experiments. Each
mobile initiative must be viewed as a potential proof point in
support of mobile. The ROI calculation of the performance from
the campaign or development project should be outlined before
it begins. This output is an essential requirement for maintaining
momentum and obtaining access to larger investment resources
as mobile needs increase exponentially over time.
identiFYinG UnKnowns. At this stage in the evolution of
mobile, knowing what you don’t know is just as valuable as
what you do know. It is important to measure and obtain as much
information as possible. Not every result can be predicted by
a model, and many gains will not be immediately measurable. Yet,
it is important to identify what you want to know, so that you know
what to look for as measurement capabilities improve, processes
are established and infrastructure is created. The pipes of the
mobile ad industry aren’t broken — they are in the process of being
built. In many instances new ways of calculating performance
must be created as intermediary solutions. For example, it may
not be possible to determine the value of a lead generated from
mobile. To ensure that this outcome from the marketing program
is included in the ROI, the cost of generating the lead on another
channel can be used instead.
The speed of change in media, technology and marketing has
redefined the causes of uncertainty, from doing something new,
to doing nothing at all. In this dynamic environment, success
will not be the product of accurate short-term and long-term
market predictions. Rather, industry leadership will come from
companies that made sure that they didn’t have to. As Ray
Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, prophetically said, “I don’t
know what we’ll be selling in the year 2000, but whatever
it is, we’ll be selling more of it than anyone else.”

Mobile and television ad spend estimates
Below is a prediction of mobile and TV ad spending. We used
two methodologies to calculate future mobile ad spend to
ensure that we’ve made reasonable assumptions, and then
calculated and compared an estimate of TV to see when mobile
ad spend could surpass TV. (See chart below.)
The first methodology is based on year-on-year growth rates
for the next 10 years, encompassing years 7 to 18 for the mobile
ad industry. From 2012 to 2014, we used Forrester’s projected
average mobile ad spend growth of 50 percent per year. We
used SNL Kagan’s projected mobile ad spend growth of 40
percent for 2015 to 2020. For mobile advertising’s years 16
to 18, encompassing 2021 to 2024, we’ve assumed 20 percent
growth, online’s current and projected growth for years 16 to
18. Based on Forrester’s estimate for mobile ad spend in 2011,
$1.652 billion and the aforementioned growth rate assumptions
for the next 12 years, mobile ad spend in 2021, 2022 and 2023
would be $50.4, $60.5 and $72.5 billion, respectively.
To confirm the accuracy of this mobile prediction we recalculated
it with a second methodology, projecting mobile’s share of ad
spend by media segment. Email marketing spend is projected
to be $34.6 billion in 2020. If mobile currently accounts for 20
percent of opened marketing emails, that rate should at least
double when smartphone adoption increases. Mobile email
spend in 20 years would be $13.84 billion, or 40 percent
of the total spend. Search ad spend is projected to be $40.9
billion in 2020. If mobile search is estimated to account for
20 percent of searches in 2012, then a 40 percent share of ad
spend can also be applied to search. Mobile search ad spend
would be $16.36 billion in 2020. 23 Finally, display advertising
is the last segment. Internet display is projected to be $12.33
billion in 2011. 24 Since current growth trends support time
spent and penetration numbers for mobile that are equal
to or surpass online by 2020, mobile display ad spend should
at least be equal to Internet display ad spend in 2011. The sum
of these mobile ad spend segment projections for 2020
is $42.53 billion, which is only 1.3 percent higher than ad
spend calculated for 2020 using the first methodology.
Over the next 10 years, TV ad spend should decline.
ZenithOptimedia estimates mobile ad spend will be $58.9 billion in
2011 and increase to $61.85 billion in 2012. The 4 percent growth
in 2012 will be attributed to the Olympics and the presidential
election. However, we believe TV will decline 3.5 percent annually
from 2013 to 2023, the same average rate of decline of local TV,
syndication TV, newspaper, magazine, radio and directory from
2000 to 2010. 25 Based on ZenithOptimedia’s estimate for 2012
TV ad spend and the aforementioned rate of decline assumption
for the following 11 years, TV ad spend in 2021, 2022 and 2023
would be $44.88, $43.31 and $41.79 billion, respectively.
Based on the above assumptions and projections, mobile ad
spend will surpass TV ad spend in 10 years. Even if TV retained
its 0.5 percent average ad spend growth rate from 2000 to 2010,
ad spend in 2021, 2022 and 2023 would be $64.68, $65.01 and
$65.33 billion, respectively. 26 This scenario has mobile ad spend
surpassing TV ad spend in 12 years, only a two-year delay.
23 “The Social Commerce Economy,” Jack Myers Media Business Report, August 23, 2011, http://jackmyers.v.reutersinsider.com/.
24 David Hallerman, “U.S. Online Ad Spending: The Floodgates Are Open,” eMarketer, June 29, 2011, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Reports/
Viewer.aspx?R=2000787.
25 Harold L. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics, Cambridge University Press.
26 “U.S. Advertising and Marketing Spending, by Media, 2005-2011 (billions),” eMarketer, April 14, 2009, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Chart.
aspx?R=84272&dsNav=Ntk:basic|US+Advertising+and+Marketing+Spending%2c+by+Media%2c+2005+2011+(billions)|1|,Rpp:50,Ro:-1.
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
aGGressive conservative aGGressive conservative
Year sPend Growth sPend Growth sPend Growth sPend Growth
$1.65 125% $1.65 125% $58.90 4.0% $58.90 4.0%
$2.48 50% $2.31 40% $61.85 5.0% $61.85 5.0%
$3.72 50% $3.24 40% $62.15 0.5% $59.68 -3.5%
$5.58 50% $4.53 40% $62.46 0.5% $57.59 -3.5%
$7.81 40% $6.35 40% $62.78 0.5% $55.58 -3.5%
$10.93 40% $8.88 40% $63.09 0.5% $53.63 -3.5%
$15.30 40% $12.44 40% $63.41 0.5% $51.75 -3.5%
$21.42 40% $17.41 40% $63.72 0.5% $49.94 -3.5%
$29.99 40% $24.38 40% $64.04 0.5% $48.19 -3.5%
$41.98 40% $34.13 40% $64.36 0.5% $46.51 -3.5%
$50.38 20% $47.78 40% $64.68 0.5% $44.88 -3.5%
$60.45 20% $57.34 20% $65.01 0.5% $43.31 -3.5%
$72.54 20% $68.81 20% $65.33 0.5% $41.79 -3.5%
*sPend in BiLLions
Mobile Television
OUTLOOK REPORT | VOL 10
97

WRITTEN BY
WITH CONTRIBUTOR
READ MORE
Salim Hemdani
Group VP, Experiences
and Platforms
@ShEMDANI
Basel Salloum
Group VP, Technology
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/SALLOUM
Scan the QR code
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How the Open API
Movement Can Help
Your Brand
In an analysis of innovative companies, Razorfish has found that
it’s not just the organizational culture or leadership that creates
innovation; it’s the willingness to allow consumers and developers
to identify new uses for existing data and infrastructure via open
digital services. Whether the goal is adding new revenue streams
or extending global reach, embracing an open digital service
model is an imperative step.
When executives are challenged to innovate, they often try to take old routes to
new business ideas. While analyzing innovative companies, we’ve found that it’s
not just the organizational culture or leadership that creates innovation — it’s the
willingness to allow consumers and developers to identify new uses for existing
data and infrastructure via open APIs. Innovation leaders like Google, eBay and
Twitter process billions of digital service calls every day, adding real business
value to more categories and brands than once thought possible. Whether your
goal is adding new revenue streams or extending global reach, embracing open
APIs is a step you must consider to help ensure success.
Scan the QR code on the left to view the video “What is Open? A simple description
of APIs.”
For brands steeped in technology — like Best Buy, Netflix, eBay or Amazon —
this is easy. In the last few years, open API adoption has grown many times over.
According to Programmableweb.com, in 2010, more than 2,800 brands offered
data or service over open API. That means 25 times more brands are taking
advantage of the open API movement than five years ago. But let’s not be fooled
OUTLOOK OutLOOk REPORT repOrt | VOL 10
99

100
There’s a major opportunity
for more traditionally minded brands
to take advantage of open-source
software development.
by this growth. Razorfish’s analysis shows that this growth
comes mainly from Internet/social brands, and not from those
that are considered traditional. Others may be scratching their
heads as they think about how open APIs and community
participation can help their traditional businesses.
We are living in a fast-changing environment with steady
proliferation of applications, platforms and devices. Data
is growing, as are the number of transactions, and cloud
computing is making things easier and faster. On top of these
shifts, user expectations and behaviors are changing, too. This
calls for rapid and continuous innovation to maintain competitive
advantage. Keeping up with change is necessary, but shifting
the focus of your workforce can be a major distraction. Opening
data and/or services to the larger community provides greater
access to community brainpower, thus, more opportunities.
There’s a major opportunity for more traditionally minded brands
to take advantage of exposing their data and/or services through
open API. For evidence, look no further than a company
engaged in one of the most traditional of business activities:
gold mining.
hOW the Open api mOVement can heLp YOur Brand
Thar’s gold in them thar hills
In early 2000, businesses were breathing a sigh of relief after
the non-event that was Y2K, and the Internet bubble was still
at its peak. On March 10, 2000, NASDAQ reached a record high
of 5132.52. Stock investments were lucrative and the gold market
was depressed. In that economic environment, gold producer
Goldcorp Inc. was not only suffering from market trends, but also
from internal organizational issues. CEO Rob McEwen knew
his mines had great potential, but lacked resources to identify
where to mine in the vast, 55,000-acre Red Lake area in
Northwestern Ontario. Having learned about technological
advances during a seminar at MIT, he was fascinated by the
open-source code movement and the success of Linux operating
system, which programmers across the globe had built for free.
This concept of community involvement caught McEwen’s
attention, after which he knew exactly what he needed to do.
At an industry meeting in March 2000, McEwen unveiled the
“Goldcorp Challenge,” an open invitation to experts around
the world to participate in a competition to help Goldcorp
identify where to mine. About 400MB of Goldcorp’s confidential,
proprietary geological data was made available to more than

1,400 scientists, engineers and geologists from 50 countries
around the world who downloaded the data and started virtual
exploration. Within days Goldcorp started to receive entries.
The winner was a collaboration of two groups in Australia —
The firm formerly known as Fractal Graphics, and Taylor Wall
& Associates, which together suggested five specific locations
to mine and developed a powerful 3D, graphical depiction. Each
one of the locations yielded gold, and the Goldcorp Challenge
changed the company’s fortune. In exchange for a small award
to the winners, Goldcorp found metal worth more than $6 billion.
Since then Goldcorp has seen its share price increase from the
single digits to more than $50, and it has become the secondlargest
gold mining company by market capitalization. With
mines in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, and a pipeline that
includes other spots in Latin America, it’s widely considered
an industry leader. How did it get there? By opening itself up
to a community that could help it improve. The lesson here is
simple — You don’t need to be an e-tailer or a country whose DNA
was twirled together in Silicon Valley in order to take advantage
of the wisdom of the crowds. When you recognize the value in
that wisdom and find a way to leverage it, the benefits are clear.
Open API benefits
new revenUe streaM. Using open APIs can create a new sales
channel. For instance, Best Buy’s platform, BBYOpen, allows
a worldwide community to freely access product information,
store details and reviews via a set of RESTful APIs. This enables
developers to create apps that facilitate purchases from Best
Buy. The BBYOpen initiative started as a small IT venture —
today it is one of the primary sales channels for the company.
cost savinGs. New device proliferation demands different
digital experiences around products across different interfaces.
However, creating unique experiences for each interface can
prove costly even for big brands. Open API allows developers
to create those experiences free of charge. Twitter, for example,
didn’t launch its first official application for iPhone until 2010,
but a multitude of Twitter apps for the device have been
available in the App Store since the launch of iPhone in 2007.
The developer community filled the gap.
Brand eqUitY. Utilizing open APIs can engage brand evangelists
in a meaningful way, creating stronger community and as
a result increases equity. Once the community is engaged,
the cycle of innovation grows exponentially. Facebook’s total
user base increased four times in less than a year after May 24,
2007 — when the company announced the open platform for
the developer community to build social applications.
Brand GoaLs. Finally, open API allows staff and talent to focus
on brand goals because staff is less distracted by continuous
noise in the technology landscape. Additionally, feedback from
the community helps facilitate better product roadmap planning.
How to do it
Despite hard facts and evidence, traditional brands are wary
of sharing proprietary data. There’s often an organizational
inertia that slows the pace of change but, while change is
hard, it is the only constant. There has been some progress,
especially in the healthcare and financial services industries —
which traditionally resist such ideas — but the progress is minor
at best. A model of crawl-walk-run can help:
• Start small. Open up one data set or service.
• Engage with the community and give people the freedom
to express their needs and wants.
• Seek feedback and track progress. Community feedback and
the experience that community creates can help make a case
that can help move the organization in the right direction.
Open API initiatives will not make you glamorous overnight.
It is a slow process of energizing brand evangelists. In the next
few years, it will be de-facto to have a http://developer..com entity. Smart brands will get there faster and
laggard brands will follow. It is up to you to decide where your
brand falls.
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WRITTEN BY
READ MORE
Tim Perlstein
Group VP, Strategy
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/tIMpERLStEIN
Bethany Fenton
VP, Experience
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/bEthANYfENtON
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Organizing
for Digital Success
Deep down, even digital agencies know that it takes more than
a few flashy new experiences to build real, long-term competitive
advantage through digital. It’s not enough to deploy a suite of new
platforms and programs; to reap the benefits, you’ve got to be
able to manage and evolve those assets over time. This requires
a set of new capabilities — and those capabilities don’t come from
technology alone, but from the right combination of technology
and human expertise, properly deployed and managed. We’ve
outlined five common pitfalls to avoid on the way to digital leadership.
We digital agencies should do more to help clients build these new capabilities.
Our visibility into many types of organizations gives us real-time insight into
what’s working and, more often, what’s not. For this reason, savvy clients
are increasingly seeking our advice as they consider how best to organize
and manage the digital function. Most are hoping for a set of clear-cut best
practices. But for such a young and rapidly evolving business discipline,
obvious answers are few and far between. Defining a “correct” structure for digital
requires a tailored solution that accounts for each organization’s unique structure,
culture and existing practices. To date we’ve collected far more cautionary
tales than genuine best practices, but looking across multiple industries and
organization types, a few general patterns start to emerge. Specifically, in
debating how best to structure for digital, we’ve seen many organizations get
stuck on solving one or more intractable problems that are actually less relevant
to long-term progress than they initially seem.
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Here are five common pitfalls to avoid on the way to digital
leadership:
1. oBsessinG aBoUt ownershiP
Many organizations fret about which senior executive should
“own” digital. Usually this comes down to the CMO or CIO.
And while this is indeed an important, sensitive decision, we’ve
seen that it can work both ways. The CMO versus CIO debate
is a bit of a red herring, and if it goes on too long, becomes
a dangerous distraction from the real work at hand. For most
organizations, digital’s organizational home is ultimately less
important than the strength, capability and cohesion of the
digital team itself — regardless of where it resides.
Furthermore, in either scenario we believe digital should be more
different from its parent organization than it is alike. In general,
IT organizations value stability and security, while marketing
emphasizes speed, creativity and customer-centricity. The ideal
digital organization combines the technical capability of IT
with the customer sensitivity and agility of marketing — without
getting bogged down by the legacy mind-sets, processes
or politics of either function.
OrGanizinG fOr diGitaL success
Digital is best understood
not as a subset of
marketing or IT, but as
a new, separate animal.
At the end of the day, digital is best understood not as a subset
of marketing or IT, but as a new, separate animal. With strong
team leadership and an effective executive sponsor, digital
can, in theory, thrive under either umbrella — depending on
the specifics of the organization, of course.
2. PoLishinG the PLan
As with the CMO versus CIO debate, most organizations spend
an inordinate amount of time defining and refining their digital
roadmaps. We love these roadmaps and consider them an
invaluable tool for communicating long-term plans and aligning
effort. However, we also know that technology moves quickly,
and that today’s brilliant three-year roadmap may start to look
pretty silly around month 17. Yes, it’s essential to have a plan
to work and measure against. But it’s equally important to be
able to track the market, react quickly and adapt as necessary.
Over the long haul, the ability to support rapid deployment,
testing and optimization of new experiences is far more important
than perfect planning — and a far more important determinant
of long-term digital success.

3. chasinG the shinY oBJect
It’s unavoidable that as digital technology becomes more and
more complicated, digital organizations become more specialized
and functionally fragmented. The advent of significant new
technologies often requires new organizational capabilities,
and additional people to handle specialized tasks. Think about
how social media has made social listening and influencer
outreach must-haves. However, there’s a limit to the amount
of subspecialization any team can afford to take on. More
people means more management overhead — recruiting takes
time, integration can be complex and specialists are always
in short supply.
Instead of building sub-teams around every hot digital technology,
smart leaders identify emerging capabilities that will be important
in the long term, and find ways to bake these abilities into the
broader team’s DNA. Sometimes, this may require adding new
people; in other cases, new kinds of cross-training or smart
partnering may be more appropriate. Bottom line — If you build
your organization around long-term capability requirements
rather than current trendy topics, you’ll be better positioned
for long-term success (and won’t have to reorganize every time
a hot new technology emerges).
4. steerinG BY coMMittee
A surprising number of organizations still try to coordinate
digital activity via cross-functional steering committees that
only meet periodically. These are good forums for keeping
multiple functions informed of digital trends and initiatives —
and to solicit their input on relevant tactics, such as compliance
policies. However, they’re not an efficient vehicle for establishing
strategy or managing day-to-day operations. Think of them
as the “C” and the “I” in a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted,
Informed (RACI) chart — not the “A.” Digital teams need to
move much more quickly and decisively than cross-functional
committees usually can. So while it may be politically difficult
to consolidate digital leadership under a single team leader
or executive sponsor, the operational benefit is usually worth
the pain.
5. waLLowinG in LeGacY IT environMents
Here’s an all-too-common scenario: The digital or marketing team
wants to deploy a new platform or program, but can’t do so
without changing or potentially destabilizing existing enterprise
architecture. IT wants to help, but the needed changes are part
of a bigger enterprise IT roadmap with multiple dependencies
and competing priorities. The requested digital changes may
happen this year… or they may not, depending on how budgets
and other projects shake out. So the digital team gets stuck
in an unwinnable tug of war with other enterprise priorities.
If this sounds familiar, the good news is you’re not alone.
The bad news is, the only real way out of this trap is a
fundamental replatforming that separates digital experience
technologies from other enterprise IT systems as much as
possible. For the most part, enterprise IT roadmaps are simply
not fast enough or predictable enough to support customercentric
digital programs.
The key takeaway here is that technology architecture affects
organizational effectiveness. Fortunately, there are ways
to divorce the Web presentation layer from other IT systems,
and to develop an applications layer and APIs that allow the
digital team to quickly deploy changes and experience upgrades
without causing harm to underlying enterprise systems with
which they have to integrate. Creating this separation within
the technology stack can be a difficult, painful process, but
worth the investment. And without this kind of architecture
running in the background, your digital team will be working
at a competitive disadvantage right from the start.
So what does work?
Every organization is different, and the “right” answer for your
business will depend much more on specific personalities and
individual skill sets than on any theory of organization. All that
said, we find most organizations need to do at least some
of the following:
• Implement some greater degree of centralization for
digital across the enterprise to better coordinate strategy
and realize platform efficiencies.
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Long-term, the ability to support
rapid deployment, testing and optimization
of new experiences is far more
important than perfect planning.
• Improve connections between digital and the broader organization
through effective cross-functional governance structures and
enlightened executive sponsorship.
• Build a more balanced, integrated skill set within the digital
team, encompassing both creative (marketing, user experience,
design, content) and technical (presentation layer development,
analytics) expertise.
• Find a strong, versatile, articulate leader to head up the
digital organization.
• Allow C-level reporting (or at least visibility) for the digital
team’s leader, in order to fully realize the transformative
potential of digital as a growth driver for the total business.
OrGanizinG fOr diGitaL success
In defining solutions for specific clients looking to maximize
digital success, we analyze existing organizations across
multiple dimensions, including leadership, structure, strategy,
funding, roles and skills, processes, incentives and more.
Our experience across multiple industries and companies
allows us to offer an impartial, comparative perspective that
often helps clarify and resolve long-running internal debates.
However, at the end of the day, we usually find that defining
an organizational plan for digital is actually the easy part.
Implementing that plan successfully within an existing structure,
culture, and business environment can often feel like the most
challenging digital deployment of all. But for organizations truly
looking to leverage digital for long-term competitive advantage,
the rewards are worth it.

Managing Digital at Delta
Q&A with Bob Kupbens, VP, eCommerce at Delta Airlines
rF: Tell us a bit about your digital team. What is its charter,
and where does it “live” within the broader organization?
BK: Our digital team is a key part of our larger commercial
organization and is responsible for: 1) generating customer
sales revenue, 2) driving “effortless” customer service, and
3) improving the airport travel experience overall. Working
across multiple areas of Delta, our team is dedicated to
providing our customers with digital options for getting “out
of line and off the phone” and headed to their destination.
rF: What’s working well within your current team, what have
been some of the keys to success?
BK: We have moved from a mind-set of having channel-focused
technology project managers to one of cross-channel product
owners over the years. This shift allows us to better view
travel from a customer’s point of view and we look
at competitors, other industries and changing customer
expectations while also focused on driving consistency
across channels.
rF: How does your company do strategic planning for digital?
Who’s involved and what issues are typically considered?
BK: We are fortunate to have many sources of customer feedback,
from daily verbatims to internal and external studies to our
closed community of Delta digital advisors. We use all this
feedback as the starting point for where to focus our strategic
planning, and then leverage our broader corporate goals
to determine how digital can best help Delta meet them.
We recently held a strategic planning session, which included
representatives from ecommerce, airport customer service,
product development and reservations to discuss where
we’re headed in digital — a truly cross-functional effort.
rF: How do you keep digital initiatives aligned with activities
in more traditional/non-digital businesses and channels?
BK: In our business, it is essential that customers are provided
the same functionality across digital and non-digital channels
to avoid confusion. So we’ve designed our architecture to
support all channels. Our customers get the same information
and service for activities like checking in for a flight,
regardless of whether they choose to see an agent at the
counter, use a self-service kiosk at the airport, visit delta.com
or use one of our mobile applications.
rF: How does your team collaborate with related functions
(including marketing and IT) in your organization?
BK: We have a number of business metrics that drive our
shared success and promote taking ownership both within
and across divisions. Our airport operations, marketing,
IT and ecommerce teams all have a commonly shared goal
of getting our customers through the experience quickly
and easily and we all share in our collective successes.
Also, Delta has a very lean organization, so collaboration
across functions is relatively easy.
rF: How do you see your team evolving over the next one
to two years?
BK: As consumer technology and customer expectations continue
to evolve, we will have to add expertise in developing areas
to ensure we remain fresh. Currently, we’re focused
on tablet and mobile, near field communications and
merchandising. In addition, we’re always looking to add
talented individuals from other industries to make sure
we aren’t overly airline-centric.
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Authors and
Contributors
authOrs and cOntriButOrs
Adam Heimlich
VP, Search and Performance Marketing
@ADAMhEIMLICh
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/ADAMhEIMLICh
I love to make the line on the chart go up and to the right. It’s
fun, it’s rewarding and sometimes the power that comes from
being able to do it for clients brings a chance to make the world
just a little bit more awesome.
As vice president of search and performance marketing in New
York, I’m fortunate to lead part of the world’s greatest marketing
team (if you measure by results): Razorfish Search. Check us out
at razorfishsearch.com.
I joined the agency in 2006 to help tackle the challenge of
servicing Capital One. Previously I’d learned digital marketing
at smaller agencies and a startup. Before that I spent a decade
in print, mostly newspapers. At Razorfish, I’ve been a member
of the Victoria’s Secret, Ralph Lauren, T. Rowe Price, Schering-
Plough, Forest Laboratories, Starwood and ADT teams. I enjoy
the beginning of campaigns, when we’re establishing relationships
and identifying problems, as well as the mature stages, after
the easy problems are solved and we rely on the strength of
relationships to help brands adapt and not just adjust to the
digital realm. (Like they said in the commercial — You’re soaking
in it.)
In Razorfish’s New York office, I’m active in trying to cultivate
a learning environment, not only because it makes our people
better, but also because it seems to be the best way to market
nowadays. The most popular of the courses I designed is
“Search & Sips,” a consulting/wine appreciation course based
on McLuhan’s theory of “Total Involvement” and my personal
belief in wine as media. It’s very nearly as pretentious as it sounds.
When I’m not obsessively optimizing, I enjoy bicycling, traveling,
cooking and otherwise partaking in the futuristic, global village
lifestyle of Planet Brooklyn — it’s the next media capital, mark
my words.

Basel Salloum
Group VP, Technology
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/SALLOUM
When I first arrived in America 24 years ago, one of my primary
goals was to become a “computer expert,” so I followed the
logical path of academia and set out to receive a BS in computer
science from Northeastern University. My “professional career”
began during my first year of college, when I held various senior
positions in the fast food industry that ranged from baking
bread to restocking bars. However, during my second year
as an undergraduate, I landed a job as an associate software
engineer, coding kernel-level programs using my least favorite
programming language: assembly. This changed everything.
Soon after, I worked as a software engineer at Sybase, and then
made the leap from the product side to the service side by joining
Cambridge Technology Partners as a technology architect. There,
I designed and built a number of transactional client server- and
web-based systems before joining Scient as a senior technology
architect, helping companies join the digital movement.
The path from Scient to Razorfish can be traced to mergers
and acquisitions where I played various roles from technology
director to discipline lead to vice president of technology to
my present role.
As for my hobbies (and what’s a bio without hobbies?), I hit
the mountain biking trails whenever I can. I also enjoy honing
my driving (and sometimes racing) skills on the weekend while
transporting my kids to their many activities on time (something
that requires a great deal of precise event planning and time
coordination — and often negotiation).
Bethany Fenton
VP, Experience
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/bEthANYfENtON
I started frustrating my parents and teachers with “why” and
“how” questions about everything at a very early age. And the
answers were frequently followed with more “why’s.” I may
have discovered the “five why’s” by the age of 10. It wasn’t
insolence — it was curiosity. I loved understanding why and
how things work.
That curiosity combined with my experience working for one
of the first interactive agencies in the world, Fry Inc., led me to
an emerging discipline now known as user experience. While at
Fry, I worked with premier retailers to establish some of the first
ecommerce sites including Spiegel and Crate and Barrel.
When I joined Razorfish, I had a mentor who exposed me to
“user research.” We went into peoples’ homes to observe how
they put outfits together. While that seems like a menial task,
the struggles, behaviors and emotional investment that went
along with every outfit decision was striking and game-changing.
Physical or digital, people’s needs were not being met.
So a fork-in-the-road moment for me was the realization that
you can be in the business of best practices, live by analyst
evaluations and one-up the competition, or you can make things
better — in a way that’s meaningful for businesses and people.
They’re not mutually exclusive.
As vice president of experience for Razorfish, I work with clients
and teams to find meaningful solutions for businesses and people.
It’s exciting, frustrating and heartbreaking — but at the end of
the day, it’s rewarding.
Having been in the industry for 16 years, I’ve also realized the
importance of down time. It’s all relative though — my vacation
primarily consists of bi-annual fitness adventures in places like
Brazil and/or Costa Rica where I get to challenge my fear of
heights on a daily basis. Oddly relaxing in context.
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Bob Lord
Global CEO
@RWLORD
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/MbAhbS1990
As an engineer out of college, I was very much intrigued by the
promise that marketing holds. I decided to go back to school to
study business, specifically marketing. After getting my MBA, I
joined the consulting business. Little did I know that marketing
and technology would eventually collide.
After stints in leading positions at consulting firms, I landed at
Razorfish in 1999 as chief operating officer. Back then, technology
wasn’t advanced enough to deliver on brand promises and the
bubble burst. But the past decade has truly seen the convergence
of marketing and technology and in hindsight my early career
experiences primed me for this shift.
My job has evolved over the years; from chief operating officer,
I became president of our east region for six years, before
becoming global CEO in 2009. The best part of my job is working
with clients and our teams. I love selling new work, challenging
ideas and driving innovation within the organization. Making
a difference to our clients and their bottom lines, and helping
them communicate with consumers like never before — that’s
where I get my energy.
In addition to leading Razorfish globally, I’m a member of Publicis
Groupe’s Strategic Leadership Team, and have a seat on the
board of directors for Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi unit. I also sit on
the board of directors for the Advertising Research Foundation
and I’m an active member of the TED community. Whenever
I can, I also enjoy biking, surfing and spending time with my
family. I hold an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS
in engineering from Syracuse University.
authOrs and cOntriButOrs
Brandon Geary
SVP, Strategy
@bRANDgEAR
As the leader of strategy for the Americas at Razorfish, I’m
tasked with combining the insight of user experience, strategy
and account planning to deliver strategic recommendations for
a variety of Fortune 100 companies, while helping shape the
future of the Razorfish business. It just sounds like a big job.
I love working with Nike, Best Buy, Levi’s, MillerCoors, Microsoft,
HP and Nintendo. I’ve helped them pull their digital strategy
together and have guided them to early uses of social media,
behavioral targeting and mobile.
Prior to joining Razorfish I was senior vice president of strategic
planning at a division of McCann Worldgroup, where we won
Effies in 2003 and 2004 for Washington Mutual’s New York launch
and home loan campaigns. Prior to McCann, I was marketing
director at Fatbrain.com, an online seller of technology books
and training, which was acquired by Barnes & Noble. I also
held senior account management positions at McCann A&L
and GMO in San Francisco. Despite my digital orientation,
I do indeed read printed matter, and often use my phone for
calling my kids.

Chris Bowler
VP, Social Media
@bUCKEtQUIz
bUCKEtQUIz.COM/A_hUNDRED_thINgS
I believe social media doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s really
just about being you — And that goes for brands and businesses,
too. The key is to offer something of value that others will respond
to and share.
I started my own version of social media a dozen years ago,
with a Web site that inspires others to create their own bucket
lists — the milestones and activities one wants to complete
before they die. On the passion scale, this goes straight to the
top. Today, check out my blog and daily tweets.
I bring this same fervor to my everyday work and believe that
each client has something valuable to share that can also make
a difference. Whether simply to provide some fun, offer a “deal”
or provide a valued service, the key is to find the elements that
make a true connection.
At Razorfish, I lead our clients forward in ever-evolving social
media channels — 85 percent of the time, this is acting as
a cheerleader/evangelist/therapist/trailblazer to drive idea
development and test-and-learn programs. This all started wayback-when
with online services like AOL and Prodigy, whose
first online ad campaigns I launched, and later, on the burgeoning
Internet, where I introduced the first new product launch for
a major appliance company. (What can I say? I like being first.)
My background is in media. I started in offline advertising with
Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis, before jumping into the digital
pool at Agency.com, where I led the digital media and search
engine marketing practice. And occasionally, I’ve talked about
my circuitous experience at industry conferences such as
SXSW, ad:tech and WOMMA.
When I’m not working, I run. Nine marathons — so far. But running
a marathon is just one of those bucket list items many of us
have on our list of things to do before we die. I’ll ask you if
I get a chance: What’s on yours?
Frederic Bonn
Executive Creative Director
@fREDERICbONN
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/fREDERICbONN
I started my career at Publication Design, a firm that redesigns
publications in France and the U.K. During that time I was
immersed in the firm’s efforts to guide readers through content,
grab their attention through copy and images, establish clear
hierarchy and provide a flow through the experience — so moving
to digital in 1997 was a logical transition. With a number of
colleagues and in partnership with Roger Black I opened the
Interactive Bureau office in Paris.
Since then, I’ve been traversing the Atlantic, working in New York,
London, Paris then New York again. I moved from Euro RSCG to
Ogilvy to Razorfish, and have led a wide variety of projects ranging
from global digital platforms to innovative digital campaigns for
the likes of IBM and Volvo. Diverse experiences driven by great
creative ideas, from advertising to Web site design, from mobile
apps to branded content, from out-of-home to social media,
have helped me think about communication as an integrated
brand experience for users to engage with through entertainment,
services and conversations.
My work has been recognized at the most prestigious creative
award shows (including Cannes Lions, Webby, Eurobest, Epica,
LIA and FWA) and I’ve been a speaker and juror at various
industry events.
I live in Brooklyn with my wife and two sons, and keep
a photographic report with other photographers
(crossatlanticreport.posterous.com).
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Jeremy Lockhorn
VP, Emerging Media
@NEWMEDIAgEEK
Between my title and my Twitter handle (@newmediageek),
it’s pretty easy to guess what I do. It’s a bit of a dream job
sometimes — I monitor trends, meet with fascinating media
technology developers, and help our teams and our clients
see, plan for and adapt to the future of media. And yet, as
I heard a young entrepreneur once say, “Innovation is not a clean
sport.” Truer words were never spoken. Media innovation can
be messy, ugly, and laced with equal parts risk and uncertainty.
But it’s also incredibly rewarding, both for me personally, and
for clients that get it right and see the massive returns.
I’ve been at Razorfish for most of my career, having joined an
agency startup called i-FRONTIER in 1997. Working out of a
spare bedroom in founder Brad Aronson’s condo was a unique
experience — as was the opportunity to get involved in nearly
every side of the agency business as we grew from the two of
us to over 100 people before we were acquired by Avenue A and
ultimately became Razorfish.
Making the move from Philadelphia to Seattle has been yet another
adventure, and I’ve since embraced the outdoor nature of the
“Pac NW.” When I’m not at work, you might find me hiking,
skiing or camping. In fact, I sort of aspire to retire as a ski bum.
Music is my other passion, and I just hope that all these years
of pounding on the laptop keyboard doesn’t give my guitar
fingers too much trouble.
authOrs and cOntriButOrs
I like the word “ass.”
Jonathan Hull
VP, Emerging Experiences
@hULLjON
EMERgINgExpERIENCES.COM
I try to work it into every conversation I have. “That’s bad-ass,”
“That was a cool-ass experience,” or one of my favorites,
“Oh, that tastes like ass.”
My first couple of jobs after getting my undergraduate degree
were in big-ass IT consulting — Oracle and IBM Global Services.
I love technology and was riding the crazy-ass IT train of the 90s
but something was lacking — the human element. The question
then changed from, “What can people do with computers?”
to, “What can computers do for people?”
So I took a break from databases, app servers and integration
architectures to get my MBA. Upon graduation I switched my
focus to interactive marketing and joined Razorfish to ride the
.com wave.
Having survived the dumb-asses responsible for the .bomb era
I moved past the browser a few years back and refocused on
immersive digital experiences. Why? Because the nature of the
Web is device agnostic; a primary value proposition is to serve
up exactly the same experience across any device. The problem
was I like the technical gadgetry and gizmo-ness of devices
almost as much as saying the word “ass.”
As vice president of emerging experiences (EE) at Razorfish
I lead one of the most innovative teams within any agency.
We’re a cross-functional team of strategists, designers and
technologists. The EE team is constantly looking at new
technologies, devices and digital design paradigms. But
while we love research and development, we also keep it real.
The biggest impact we’re making is helping our clients get
immersive digital experiences into the market. We get to
work with the best people and the best clients in the world —
it’s simply kick-ass.

Ken Hong
Managing Director, Razorfish China
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/KENLIzhOUhONg
I am probably not your typical ad man. Although I’ve spent
more than 13 years in marketing, eight of which have been in
digital, I approach marketing from a strategy and analytics
perspective rather than the typical creative angle. Over the
years, I’ve helped many clients including Microsoft, Nike,
Unilever, Best Buy, Expedia and L’Oreal develop and execute
global and local digital marketing programs. I have also held
various positions in marketing and finance functions within
Fortune 500 companies. I currently lead Razorfish in China,
where I set the strategic direction for the agency, and manage
day-to-day operations.
Originally from Shanghai, I have spent 17 years studying and
working in Switzerland and the U.S. Before returning to
Shanghai to run Razorfish, I was the vice president of strategy,
analytics and innovation in Razorfish’s Seattle office.
When I’m not trying to figure out how to bring more digital
innovation to our clients, I love playing golf and traveling. So
I’ve concluded that playing golf in Hawaii is the most efficient
way to spend my vacations.
Marc Sanford, PhD
Director, Customer Insight Group
@MMSANfORD
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/MARCSANfORD
I have been with Razorfish for more than four years and
specialize in delivering custom analytics solutions to both internal
and external clients. While the insights and analytics group has
many standard approaches to solving clients’ problems,
sometimes these issues don’t fit neatly into these approaches.
I delight in working directly with clients, learning about their
business challenges and designing business and analytics
solutions. Examples of such innovation come from leading the
development of the personalization offering within our agency,
building a team of skilled folks to create the generational tag for
tracing and measuring social behavior through the spread of
social applications (patent pending), and partnering to help
develop and implement the razorfishOPENTM framework across
several clients. During the past four years or so, I’ve worked
with a wide range of clients including Microsoft, Best Buy,
Levis, CLEAR, Disney and others.
Prior to joining Razorfish I received my PhD in Sociology from
the University of Chicago and worked at the University of
Maryland as an adjunct professor of sociology. My dissertation
was a study of purchasing patterns of roughly 800,000 people
over a two-year time period in the city of Chicago. I revealed
unique patterns of similarity in consumption through cluster
analysis, logit and probit regressions, adjacency analysis and
other statistical and ethnographic techniques.
Outside of work I am a new father enjoying the special moments
a new father has with his son, and learning to cope with less
sleep. I enjoy watching the University of Washington Huskies
and spending time with my wife. I also try to play bluegrass
guitar when I am able to find some free time.
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Mark Taylor
VP, Customer Insight Group
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/MARKChRIStOphERtAYLOR
I’m a big believer in customer-centric marketing to solve our
clients’ business problems and help them bridge the gap
between their brands and customers.
Since swapping tea bags for coffee beans as part of my
relocation from London to Seattle in 2007, I’ve learned the
inner workings of ad-serving data, advanced analytics, and Big
Data-led solutions to address client challenges for the likes of
Microsoft, Best Buy, Staples and Intel.
As vice president of the customer insight group, my team and I
collaborate with other disciplines to translate business challenges
into holistic and market-first solutions for our clients across the
network. Part of this team’s role involves architecting actionable
insights and implementing dynamic, targeted marketing strategies
that deliver measurable results.
Prior to joining Razorfish, I headed up customer experience at
Homechoice, the first U.K. IPTV platform owned by Time Warner,
Sony, Disney and Chris Larson (Microsoft co-founder). I’ve also
worked in senior management roles for Centrica, Organic Inc.
and SITEL Corporation, leading a variety of customer strategy
engagements with Fortune 100/FTSE 100 companies.
In my spare time, my wife does her best to get me to do more
yoga, and I’ve embraced U.S. MLS football (that’s “soccer”
to you Americans) as a season ticket holder at the mighty
Sounders FC. I also serve as an advisory board member for
the University of Washington Business Extension Program.
authOrs and cOntriButOrs
Paul Gelb
VP, Mobile Practice
@pAULgELb
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/pAULgELb
I’ve had one of the more unique career paths at Razorfish; I
started as an MBA intern in the strategy group and now I head
up the agency’s mobile practice. My trajectory is undoubtedly a
testament to Razorfish’s ability to support personal development
and unconventional entrepreneurial pursuits.
In my current role as vice president of mobile practice, I oversee
a team that includes strategy, site/app development, messaging
programs, media, search and ad creative. But mobile is more than
my job; it’s a personal passion. I am, almost without exception,
carrying at least four mobile devices: three smartphones and
a tablet. This contagious desire has led to an unrelenting output
of groundbreaking mobile work for almost every Razorfish.
Specifically, we’ve developed 16 applications that were listed
as a top app or featured in the iTunes App Store, including the
top branded application of 2008 and an iPad app that became
the number one free download. We’ve also designed some of
the most successful mobile commerce sites to date, generating
more than 15 percent conversion rates and more than $2 billion
in annual revenue.
Our success has not gone unnoticed; our clients have won mobile
marketer of the year, luxury mobile marketer of the year, and
several min and Digiday awards. In 2010, I was the youngest
person awarded Mediaweek’s Media All-Star Award. My point of
view and industry projections have been sought out by The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Advertising Age,
Forrester and Mobile Marketer. I’ve been identified as a thought
leader in the industry with speaking engagements at SXSW, MMA,
IAB and OMMA conferences. I have an MBA from the Anderson
School of Business at UCLA and a BS in International Business and
Macro-Economic Theory from the ILR School at Cornell University.

Pete Stein
President, East
@pStEIN211
I have always believed that the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts. That belief, along with a thirst for exploration, has
guided my decisions throughout life.
When I found the Internet, I knew that my affinity for being on high
performing teams would be satisfied. This is a business where
technologists and marketers, creatives and project managers,
math geniuses and account people all must come together to
crack codes and solve riddles. Creating an environment where
the best ideas can rise from the mosh pit is part art and part
science — and always interesting.
As for that thirst for exploration, I’ll never forget my first encounter
with the Spyglass browser in 1995 — it was love at first sight.
I knew that the browser would open a whole new world and
luckily for me, it keeps on changing. Every few years, the playing
field dramatically shifts, and to succeed you need to completely
re-orient yourself.
As the president of the east for Razorfish, I am lucky to be able
to tap into my passions every day. I’m surrounded by talented
people who share my belief in the power of collaboration. We
get to work with some incredible brands like Mercedes-Benz USA,
Unilever’s Axe, Citibank, Starwood and Ford Motor Company —
brands that have all embraced winning through digital.
You can find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter. And on the weekends
you can find me coaching the power of team play to one of my
kids’ sports teams.
Pradeep Ananthapadmanabhan
Chief Technology Officer, VivaKi
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/pRADEEpANANth
As the chief technology officer for VivaKi, the division of
Publicis Groupe that oversees digital and media, I’m responsible
for envisioning and executing the engineering strategy that
supports our suite of data-driven applications. This includes
our digital advertising trading desk as well as one of the world’s
largest data warehousing/BI operations. Both are targeted at
increasing the ROI on advertising spend through the strategic
use of technology.
Before joining VivaKi in 2010, I was with Razorfish for more than
six years, most recently as the group vice president of technology
for the west region. In that capacity, I led a team of 30+ engineers
who brought to life digital strategies for brands such as Singapore
Airlines, the National Football League (NFL), Intel, Microsoft
and Westfield.
After completing my Master’s in Information Systems Management
from Carnegie Mellon, my first job was with NEC Solutions.
My Web 1.0 portfolio includes developing and launching initiatives
for Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo, among others. Nowadays,
the technologies that interest me most are enterprise content
management, cloud computing, touch frameworks, mobile
platforms and Web performance management.
While not thinking about terabytes and petabytes, you’ll find
me watching long Bollywood movies, hiking some of the most
beautiful trails of Northern California, or reading about time
and space and wondering if we do exist at all.
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Rafi Jacoby
Social Technology Lead
@RjACObY
As an engineer, I always think there must be new and better ways
to solve a problem. I like to work end-to-end — building servers,
designing databases, working with asynchronous queues, and
creating dynamic HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript URLs. I have been
working with the major social platform APIs since they became
available, and am a co-author of Koala, the leading Ruby Gem
for Facebook’s Open Graph. I’m very much a practicing geek —
if you ask me if something can be done, I’ll likely throw together
a Sinatra app to do some testing. I wrote this biography using Vim.
Before joining Razorfish, I was director of engineering at Context
Optional, where I guided the development of a leading social
monitoring and publishing platform, architected custom
applications, oversaw operations, and built highly scalable
infrastructure and statistics components. I grew the business
using cloud deployment services, and spoke on the experience
at GigaOM Structure, as well as seminars for Oracle/MySQL and
Joyent, and an in an interview in Cloudbook magazine. My prior
experience includes experimental embedded consumer devices
work at Sun Microsystems Labs, mobile telephony infrastructure
and several digital music services.
At Razorfish, I work with our offices and clients across the
country (and sometimes the world) to help guide conception and
implementation of projects that integrate with social networks.
I’ve worked on custom applications, mobile-social crossovers,
site-wide Open Graph implementations and Twitter hooks. I also
track platform changes and evangelize new developments.
Even though I faced the cold as a kid in New York and a computer
science student at Oberlin, I’m preparing for the shock of my first
Chicago winter after spending 13 years in San Francisco. You
can follow my tweets about it, interspersed with my thoughts
on social tech, cloud computing, open source and more.
authOrs and cOntriButOrs
Ray Velez
Global Chief Technology Officer
@RvELEz
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/RAYvELEz
When I wrote my first basic program on my Atari 800 I was
hooked; I’ve been spending time with computers ever since.
I studied computer science and philosophy at Boston University,
looking to bring the answered and unanswered together. The
thing that keeps it exciting is that it’s constantly changing and
always fresh. That’s something I’ve always loved about this
business, and something that’s certainly growing at a faster
pace than ever before.
As the global chief technology officer for Razorfish, I manage
the agency’s capabilities in Web technology architecture and
development, overseeing all of the company’s technologists.
A core part of this role involves looking to the community for
collaboration, and I’m consistently amazed by technologies like
good old message boards and wikis. (In fact, I was fortunate
to help Razorfish build our internal, award-winning wiki.)
My professional experience has been in the application
development life cycle, from inception to rollout, working with
clients ranging from Citibank to Ford Motor Company to the
National Football League (NFL). Most recently, I was the startup
CTO in Razorfish’s role as incubation partner for Bundle, a
personal finance start-up. I also enjoy training and creating
curriculums, and recently led the development of the Razorfish
Agile Process. I’ve been in the industry for close to 20 years,
having worked previously at Cambridge Technology Partners
and Scient.
Anything outdoors is my passion, whether biking, skiing or hiking
with the family. Over the years I’ve enjoyed mountain bike and
ski racing, and was fortunate to ride across Costa Rica in La
Ruta de Los Conquistadores. I also find the DIY culture very
inspiring; I’m looking forward to hacking some Arduino with
my son someday soon.

Salim Hemdani
Group VP, Experiences and Platforms
@ShEMDANI
ASKDUDE.COM
For 13 years I have been developing and deploying digital
experiences. I’ve spent eight of these years with Razorfish. I love
solving hard client problems on a ubiquitous medium — the
Internet — because its ability to provide a level playing field to
everyone around the world fascinates me. Even more fascinating
is that I live and breathe this digital world, despite the fact that
my first encounter with television was at age 11; my first
computer was at 19.
I started with Razorfish as a developer. Ecommerce and
community development are my fortes — building cutting edge
experiences is my passion. My principal is simple — “Engineering
enables experience.” In other words, “Let’s build an experience
that is not constrained by technological limitations.” At Razorfish,
most of my time has been spent on-site with clients, learning
their processes and culture. Digital consulting requires a unique
blend of expertise, adaptability and agility. I have learned a lot
working with brands like Microsoft, AT&T, Nike, Dell, Best Buy,
Costco, Fujitsu America, Nintendo, Safeco and Wells Fargo.
I have also worked with several start-up companies.
I currently serve as group vice president of experiences and
platforms. I oversee the creative, user experience, delivery
and technology disciplines for Microsoft business and also act
as executive sponsor for all digital experiences executed by my
team of incredibly talented and passionate people.
I am an executive MBA graduate from the University of
Washington in Seattle and I earned my engineering degree
from VNIT Nagpur in India. I am proud member of Beta Gamma
Sigma International Owner Society.
Thomas Sudassy
Media Research and Publisher Relations
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/SUDASSY
Duke Ellington delighted in saying, “Music is my mistress,”
and I share his sentiment. From the days of brandishing a Sony
Walkman II as a teenager, to hosting radio shows today, I’m
enthralled with the lasting impressions and lessons of music.
The constant evolution of music draws upon the past and
present to create the ideas of the future.
These same qualities are what have attracted me to digital media
and research for the past 11 years. I thrive in fostering relationships
with the most popular of publishers to promising startups to ensure
our clients get the best service and opportunities. And I constantly
roam the research landscape for best-in-class partners and
products that will provide our teams and clients insights for new
ideas and confidence to execute on them.
You can catch me on LinkedIn or occasionally hosting one
of the Saturday Latin shows on KBCS 91.3 FM (kbcs.fm)
in Seattle, Washington.
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authOrs and cOntriButOrs
Tim Perlstein
Group VP, Strategy
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/tIMpERLStEIN
StRAtEgY tEAM bLOg: StRAtEgY.RAzORfISh.COM
I lead the strategy practice within Razorfish’s central region.
We’re a small-but-mighty consulting team dedicated to helping
clients use digital to maximize business performance, unlock new
growth opportunities and — where needed — drive fundamental
transformation of business, marketing and organizational models.
It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Fortunately, we like to solve hard problems — the harder the better.
We like big-picture thinking, rigorous planning and basic arithmetic
done exceptionally well. (Preferably with charts.)
I feel lucky to be part of this talented team and fortunate to have
worked with, and within, so many other terrific organizations. Prior
to Razorfish, Yahoo! let me play two completely different roles:
One focused on customer-centric innovation, the other on the
tactics of online marketing. At Knight Ridder Digital (remember
newspapers?), we tried to save American journalism through better
online ad products (and very nearly succeeded).
I seem to have an affinity for highly disrupted industries and
companies — which these days is pretty much all of them —
and have worked deeply across media, retail, financial services,
high tech and consumer goods sectors. In past lives, I’ve been
a marketing director, product manager, copywriter and editor —
and in the very early days, even a Webmaster, community manager
and HTML coder. If there’s a digital job to do, I’ve probably done
it at some point… or learned a lot from someone who has.
Speaking of learning: I earned my MBA from Stanford and a BA
in Art History from Harvard (senior thesis on Tibetan thangka
paintings). All of which, believe it or not, has been relevant in
some way to my current work in digital strategy.
To find out more, come look me up in Austin, Tex., where I can
usually be found hanging out by the pool with my wife and son…
planning for the future while still very much enjoying the messy,
ambiguous, disrupted present.
William Lidstone
Executive VP, Razorfish International
@WILLIAMLIDStONE
Everyone has a favorite teacher, who at some point during their
education, sparks an interest, or even a life-long passion.
In my case, it was a visionary art teacher who introduced me
to the world of design — the intersection of ideas, art, science
and technology. Twenty years ago, this fascination with ideas,
problem solving and product design also became my career —
coinciding with the timely and meteoric rise of digital media.
In early 1995, I led the design team of the U.K.’s first online
shopping mall. A few years later I became head of business
development at OgilvyInteractive, and later head of digital at
Foote, Cone & Belding. Since then I’ve spent almost a decade
at AKQA working with Daniel Bonner (chief creative officer,
Razorfish International), delivering ideas, technology and
products for the likes of Coca-Cola, Ferrari, Fiat, Heineken,
Nike, Unilever and Xbox.
As well as client work, I’ve also been involved in a number of
important initiatives: developing competency frameworks to
nurture expertise, establishing professional development and
leadership programs and finding ways of supporting employees
with young families, despite the demands of digital agency life.
Inspired by a great teacher myself, I’ve recently had the privilege
of educating the next generation of digital product designers, most
notably on Jonathan Ive’s industrial design course at Northumbria
University, as a visiting lecturer. It’s through teaching that I’ve
learned that a truly world-class product requires a blend of
only two key ingredients: The highest standards and the most
capable talent.

Obrigado. Gum xia.
Merci. Ta. Danke.
Arigato. Thank you...
... to the 20 Razorfish team members who we asked to capture and share moments
of inspiration from their everyday lives. Their photos illustrate how ideas ignite at
the intersection of technology and people.
Adam Trimble
Presentation Layer Developer
Behan Gifford
Account Director
Cameron Cooper
Copywriter
Carol Monk
Group Creative Director
Carsten Lindstedt
Senior Concept Developer
Claire Reeve
Designer
Gaurav Bhandari
Strategy Analyst
Jamie Feola
Associate Designer
Kevin Byrne
Analyst
Melvin Hale
Associate Creative Director
Natalie Rodic Marsan
Research
Patrick Kernan
Senior Art Director
Robert Stribley
Senior Information Architect
Sara Giessen
Senior Designer
And special thanks to Liz Stevison for her illustrations of our authors and contributors.
Shivani Mohan
Researcher
Thomas Guy
Senior Designer
Tim Pethel
Art Director
Toby Past
Creative Director
Todd Ziaja
Associate Creative Director
Tomoko Kuwahara
Designer
Will Fikes
Art Director
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cOntact
Contact
For Additional Information:
outlookreport@razorfish.com
Media Inquiries:
press@razorfish.com
About Razorfish
Razorfish creates experiences that build businesses. As one of the largest interactive
marketing and technology companies in the world, Razorfish helps its clients build
better brands by delivering business results through customer experiences. Razorfish
combines the best thought leadership of the consulting world with the leading
capabilities of the marketing services industry to support our clients’ business needs,
such as launching new products, repositioning a brand or participating in the social
world. With a demonstrated commitment to innovation, Razorfish continues to cultivate
our expertise in social influence marketing, emerging media, creative design, analytics,
technology and user experience. Razorfish has offices in markets across the United
States, and in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Singapore
and the United Kingdom. Clients include Carnival Cruise Lines, MillerCoors, McDonald’s
and Starwood Hotels. With sister agencies Starcom MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia,
Denuo and Digitas, Razorfish is part of Publicis Groupe’s (Euronext Paris: FR0000130577)
VivaKi, a global digital knowledge and resource center. Visit www.razorfish.com
for more information. Follow Razorfish on Twitter at @razorfish.