To achieve true digital transformation, organizations need to be open and inclusive to tap knowledge and ideas that reside both internally and externally in other companies and institutions. Partnerships, especially nontraditional ones, and collaboration are the basic elements of successful innovation. In its report Inclusion + Innovation: Leveraging Diversity of Thought to Generate Business Growth, […]

As part of Canada’s ongoing 150 celebrations, the Canada Games Council launched an emotive campaign this week for its 50th anniversary, inspired by and featuring the next generation of national, international and Olympic Champions, hoping to awaken the pride of the nation.

Developed by Vancouver creative agency Will, the multimedia campaign includes video, radio, social and digital ads to drive awareness and pride for the Games across Canada, by celebrating the untold stories of athletes on the road to greatness.

“In the Untold Story video, we had the opportunity to pull back the curtain on these quiet moments of preparation, dedication and hardship. It’s a journey that is both physical and emotional for these hopeful young athletes, and one they often experience alone before we all get to share in the pride of their success in world class competition,” said Creative Director Lisa Lebedovich

“This campaign shines the light on the role the Canada Games play in inspiring the next generation of national, international and Olympic Champions as we approach the 2017 Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg,” said Tom Quinn, Canada Games Council Chairman.

The national campaign is part of a broader program for the Canada Games Council including the 50th Anniversary Activity Challenge which promotes physical literacy in Canada’s classrooms.

Will partnered with media agency 6S Marketing to win the competitive pitch in May 2016. This adds to Will’s recent sports-related wins this past year, including HSBC Canada Sevens and Freestyle Canada.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Will Creative, Vancouver, Canada

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In the spring of 1902 the Hanoi governor was worried: a bubonic plague outbreak threatened to spiral out of control. The governor wanted to exterminate the city’s rats but he lacked the necessary staff. After puzzling over his conundrum he had a brainwave: a bounty for every rat’s tail handed in.

At first, his idea worked wonderfully – tails poured in. Hundreds each day in March, thousands in May, peaking on 12 June at a staggering 20,114.

But there was a problem. Despite the growing tail collection, there was no decline in plague victims. Nor was the rat population shrinking. In fact, if anything, there were more rats – but they were tail-less.

The bounty had unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of the populace. They were capturing rats, feeding rats, breeding rats and lopping the tails off rats. The one thing they weren’t doing was killing rats. Rats were too valuable.

The target had encouraged the specific behavior that was rewarded – handing in rats’ tails – but it had a counter-productive effect on the underlying intention – a reduction in rats.

From a safe distance, this tale of unintended consequences seems farcical. But similar examples have been recorded with alarming regularity. It’s so common that the German economist, Horst Siebert, coined the term ‘the cobra effect’, so called as the first recorded example was an attempt to cull snakes in Delhi that backfired.

Siebert discovered that whenever there is a sliver of difference between a metric and the objective then unintended consequences are unleashed.

Marketing Is A Victim Of The Cobra Effect

Advertisers, just like the governor, are trying to resolve complex problems with simple targets. Of course, the details are different – brands are grappling with unsatisfactory returns on investment rather than vermin infestations. But the consequences are equally perverse.

In order to boost campaign performance, digital advertisers set a range of targets. However, these metrics are almost invariably short term – visits, views or sales. That’s not speculation. Peter Field’s recent analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank found that the proportion of entries with a short-term goal had risen from 7% in 2006 to 33% in 2014.

Short-term metrics are popular as they’re straightforward to collect and interpret. This ease appeals to marketers as they must manage more data than ever. Since time-pressured marketers crave shortcuts, they put their skepticism on hold and will themselves to believe that messy, complex reality can be captured with a simple metric.

Once measurements are added to a campaign they take on a life of their own. It feels remiss, unprofessional even, to ignore data, so plans are optimized to the metric being captured. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, we shape our metrics, then they shape us.

Once short-term metrics have been collected it’s easy to generate improvements: dropping the worst performers quickly boosts results. In a world of uncertainty, that progress is addictive. In Martin Weigel’s memorable phrase, short-termism is ‘marketing crack’.

But we’re optimizing to a sub-optimal position: what works best in the short term isn’t ideal in the long term. Les Binet and Peter Field showed in The Long and Short of It, their earlier analysis of the IPA Effectiveness entries, that direct approaches outperform brand approaches by 50 per cent over one to two years. But brand approaches are six times more effective when judged on a three year-plus timescale.

The short-term focus creates an illusion of success. But illusions tend to end abruptly. Marketers are like the man in the old story who jumps from a skyscraper. As he’s falling, as he passes each floor, he reassures himself: ‘So far, so good,’ he says, ‘so far, so good.’

Unless marketers change, they’re in for an unpleasant landing.

So What Can We Do?

First, insist on balanced metrics. If metrics are flawed because they give a partial view of the problem, then capturing a single type of data will be misleading. Instead, campaigns need to track a variety of genuinely different types of measurement.

Every digital campaign needs to complement short-term tracking with analysis of how longer-term brand metrics have been affected. The costs for exposed versus control brand tracking have dropped far enough now, that this aim is feasible.

Second, we need to recognize, as the sociologist William Bruce Cameron stated, that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

No metric, or range of metrics, can fully capture a complex problem. So we should avoid giving undue deference to metrics. They need to be given the importance they deserve – but no more. Even in a world of limitless data there is a crucial role for human intuition and judgement.

Unless we recognize this, we’ll continue to deliver rats’ tails, not rats.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Richard Shotten, Deputy Head of Evidence at Manning Gottlieb OMD.

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FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

By Mia Dand In the constantly changing world of digital and social media, Influencer Marketing is the new black. However, due to the nascency of this space, it’s plagued with hype and chaos. In our latest report, we reviewed the current state of influencer technology in 2017 and highlighted critical considerations for CMOs as they […]

By Gary Larkin, Research Associate, The Conference Board Governance Center With a flurry of executive orders in his first two weeks in office, President Trump made one thing absolutely clear. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed by Democrats in 2010 will soon be reformed itself by the current Republican majority. But […]

The working versus non-working spend ratio is controversial among brand advertisers and agency leaders; here’s why there is no real benchmark for the measure and six ways to make better budget decisions.

Some journeys define a man. But with Old Spice Odor Blocker, a man defines the journey. And with a dictionary, he can define himself. And with a Gorilla-to-English dictionary, he can teach Chuck how to write YouTube descriptions.

Axel: Sometimes the search for answers takes us on a journey.
Sometimes those journeys never end.
With Odor Blocker, Old Spice’s most powerful antiperspirant, I escaped sweat’s curfew on my body and I was free to break down barriers between man and beast.
But how do you measure success if you’re doing something that’s never been done?
Gorilla Signing: You’re so funny.
Axel Signing: Thank you. I’m surprised you got that. You know… with your simple animal mind.
Axel: And how do you respond to a question that’s never been questioned? Good question.
When you’ve pushed the limits of success further than they’ve ever been, sometimes it smacks you in the face. But I’d rather be smacked in the face by success than tickled weirdly by failure.
Axel Signing: Hello… Old Friend.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland

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By Alex Parkinson A new study assessing the business impact of online communities has found that 92 percent of community leaders believe online communities have an impact on business. Conducted by Leader Networks, and co-sponsored by the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR) and Higher Logic, the study also reveals that online […]

Bounding up on stage with the energy of 1,000 suns and his special extra-long pointer, Swedish professor Hans Rosling became a data rock star, dedicated to giving his audience a truer picture of the world. Photo: Asa Mathat

Is the world getting worse every day in every way, as some news media would have you believe? No. In fact, the most reliable data shows that in meaningful ways — such as child mortality rate, literacy rate, human lifespan — the world is actually, slowly and measurably, getting better.

Hans Rosling dedicated the latter part of his distinguished career to making sure the world knew that. And in his 10 TED Talks — the most TED Talks by a single person ever posted — he hammered the point home again and again. As he told us once: “You see, it is very easy to be an evidence-based professor lecturing about global theory, because many people get stuck in wrong ideas.”

Using custom software (or sometimes, just using a few rocks), he and his team ingested data from sources like the World Bank (fun story: their data was once locked away until Hans’ efforts helped open it to the world) and turned it into bright, compelling movable graphs that showed the complex story of global progress over time, while tweaking everyone’s expectations and challenging us to think and to learn.

We’re devastated to announce that Hans passed away this morning, surrounded by family. As his children announced on their shared website, Gapminder: “Across the world, millions of people use our tools and share our vision of a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We know that many will be saddened by this message. Hans is no longer alive, but he will always be with us and his dream of a fact-based worldview, we will never let die!”

As President Trump—the first sitting executive of a company to become commander in chief— begins to roll out his agenda, many in political circles are asking the question, “how did we get here?” Prior to Election Day, The Conference Board’s Governance Center held a meeting of its Corporate Political Spending Committee in Washington, D.C., that […]