Some great recent posts on the next evolution of branding, marketing, and digital:

Ben Malbon and Greg Andersen from BBH get the ball rolling on what it will take to implement Adaptive Brand Marketing.

We believe marketing communications are already being forced to become increasingly agile; particularly for more youth-oriented brands. In such a fast paced and dynamic media environment, relevance is increasingly determined in the moment. Recency matters. Audience and attention are fleeting. Fame spikes … even for the famous. For brands to achieve and maintain fame in this context, it’s our view that communications for certain types of brands must make a dramatic shift from highly polished epic launches to a continuous and diverse stream of messaging and content designed to ride hyper-current cultural trends, consumer attitudes and competitive maneuvering.

Tim Malbon from Made By Many writes about what your business needs in order to become a truly digital company.

...You need more than [an agile, adaptive, evolutionary approach] to deliver the kind of long-term living platforms and platform-campaigns – and value – that clients need and agencies must get better at creating. I’m starting to believe you need four things, the first two of which are well-known and increasingly often quoted: The right people, The right processes, The right culture, The right clients.

Helge Tennø shares his thoughts on breaking out of the campaign ROI mindset.

Earned media is becoming more and more important in the mechanics of the marketing eco-system. People don’t share stuff because they notice it, they share stuff because it’s valuable.

and

People will share their version of a brand’s story with other people, but they don’t care to listen to the brand’s own story.

I think we'd all be happier, and do better work, if we adopted an approach to measurement that was focused on creating proven value for the business.

"You get what you measure." I found this wonderful adage in this paper on measurement for agile development (PDF) (h/t Tim Malbon). And it helped me to put my finger on what I want to change about digital measurement.

The way we approach digital measurement needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. I propose that the experiences we create and the metrics we use to measure their effectiveness should be in service of creating proven valuable outcomes for the client's business.

It's a simple idea, and something that feels obvious. Yet, much of digital measurement as it's conducted currently, fails to meet that standard.

The single biggest failing of digital measurement over the past decade is that the measurements used are disconnected from results that actually have proven value for the business. Measurements are used to prove that we did what we wanted to do, but not that we necessarily did something that created value for the business. Creative agencies and their partners on the client side end up in situations where it's impossible to judge success because there's no way of proving that the objective has been achieved.

It's time to adopt a Valuable Measurement approach.

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In this alternative approach, the single overriding business objective is articulated by the client at the outset of the process. Then the client explicitly defines specific measurable outcomes that have been proven to be valuable in helping to achieve the business objective. These goals are then used to inform all decisions from there on out.

The creative agency designs an experience in service of achieving those valuable outcomes. And in collaboration with the client and any necessary numbers and measurement partner, a small number of key metrics are defined and agreed upon as the design comes into focus. What measurable aspects of this experience will contribute to achieving the agreed upon valuable outcomes?

And finally, temporary diagnostics can be used to adjust and optimize the experience once it's up and running. These diagnostics should be used to solve a specific challenge, and be discarded once the problem is solved.

There are a few key tenets at the heart of this approach:

• Measurement should be in service of business goals.


• Clearly defined, measurable, valuable outcomes that can be affected through digital experiences should be used to guide decisions about what experiences to invest in.


• Key metrics should be defined during the initial design phase, in order to inform design decisions in service of creating valuable outcomes.

What do you think? Where are the holes or problems with this approach? What would you change or add? Comments welcome.

Sources and inspiration:
Deborah Hartmann and Robin Dymond - Appropriate Agile Measurement (PDF)
Tim Malbon - Agile measurement
Sean Howard - The Myth of Social Media Monitoring
Anjali Ramachandran - Engagement vs. measurement
David J. Carr - Social Media monitoring and the spectrum of online relationships

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The hipster culture/mindset is the result of two basic values that the parents of hipsters instilled in their children:

1. Everything is cool.


2. Everyone is unique.

The hipster lifestyle is a quest to find out if these tenets hold true.