What's Your Digital iQ

About the speaker:

Gregg Heard is the VP of brand identity and design at AT&T. Gregg has been in the branding game for 22+ years on both the corporate side at AT&T, prior to that at Philips, and on the agency side brands including Logitech, Sony, IBM, Harper Collins, Caterpillar, Revo Sunglasses and UPS.

Smartphone adoption is now at ~50% in the US and dominate new phone purchases. This handheld technology has changed the way we interact with places, things, and one another. Greg believes that there are 4 types of digital interactions spurred by smartphone technology.

Digital Intimacy: Simply, it means we are closer with our friends and family even when we are apart.

Digital Kinship: Creating new connections and new types of shared interests that allow us to break down barriers between generations, interests.

Digital Guardianship: We’re more productive, even when we are pressed for time. It’s a simple message “Hey, I just landed, I’ll be home for dinner”

Digital Heroism: We have high-quality content available to us at any time. It allows us to create learning moments.

People ultimately love their handheld technology, but don’t have the same affection for the carrier. In fact, Greg compared it to the relationship between buying a car and then purchasing insurance. Buying a car is fun and sexy, much like getting a new phone. On the other hand, the interaction with purchasing insurance is not quite as exciting, similar to that of working with your mobile carrier. There’s a couple of reasons for that:

• Overwhelming and confusion
• A neccessary inconvenience
• Lack of transparency
• Unclear added value

In an effort to change this paradigm, AT&T is working to “humanize” their marketing approach. There are 4 key ways they hope to humanize their brand:

Look: Starts with a focus on the look of the brand. AT&T has announced new plans for a flagship retail space on Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

Speak: AT&T moving away from generic, impersonal text marketing. One example includes a text message alert that is sent when a customer leaves the country to alert them of potential charges begins with “Hey Globetrotter…” versus “You are now subject to…”

Sound: AT&T is beginning to brand sounds. Sonic accents that you will recognize in ads and in the technology. Think audio

Behave: The new branding strategy is also focusing on how tech can bring possibility to people’s lives: “it’s what you do with what we do.”

About the speaker:

Daniel is a 26 year old technologist who started his first company 1997 at the age of 14. Currently he is the CEO and founder of Spotify, a legal music service that helps people discover, browse and play music. Daniel has also founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler, as well as been a part of the nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay).

Follow Daniel on Twitter: @eldsjal

Tweets and conversation around Daniel Ek’s, CEO and founder of Spotify, presentation to Ad Age Digital about how brands using music and Spotify as a platform, not a service.

About the speaker:

Randall Brown has been bring innovation in marketing to Gatorade for nearly 10 years now. Today, as Senior Brand Manager for digital, social and marketing innovation, Randall leads Gatorade brand strategy and planning across all digital and online platforms including advertising, branded & custom content, social media, search & SEO, measurement & analytics and gaming.

Follow Randall on Twitter: @RandallB3

In 2010, 500K consumers were connected with the Gatorade brand. Unfortunately, these were not their core audience. More times than not, the conversation happening in social media around Gatorade looked something like: “Ahhh…it’s Monday and I’m hungover. Orange Gatorade, please.” <– Not Ideal!

Today, the Gatorade brand is connected with nearly 5M people…many of which are core athletes that use their products everyday. How did Gatorade in such a short period of time use social media to grow their brand? It was a very purposeful effort with a few key stages:

Define Social Purpose & Brand Behaviors

Your social purpose must equal your brand purpose. What is it that your brand is about and how can the brand portray that purpose? At Gatorade, their purpose is to drive athletic performance from the inside out. That means helping their core audience understand what should be put into their body, why, and the effect it will have on their performance.

The rest is simple…Brand Purpose = Social Purpose.

Living Your Ethos Daily

How does the brand’s social team go about planning and executing a systematic approach to engagement? What actions must happen everyday to live the brand. As individuals, when we wake up each morning we know what we are going to do. It’s intuitive whether it is scheduled out or not. The brand purpose must be that intuitive. From there, brand managers must figure out how to scale and operationalize the brand’s social acitivities?

Purposeful Experimentation & Measurement

Remember 6th grade science? Remember the scientific method?

1. Form hypothesis
2. Define your variable
3. Test and experiment

Social media works the same way. We can formulate hypothesis about how consumers will respond to specific brand behaviors, define variables that could alter actions, and then continue to test and experiment to optimize the results.

Randall shared the 2-pronged approach Gatorade uses to track brand behaviors:

1) Tracking your inputs

Quantify the scale and qulaity of your behaviors in the social landscape.

2) Tracking your outcomes

Quantify the scale and quality of your outomces impact with customers.

From there, we can understand the value and ROI from a multi-dimensional perspective:

• as “media”
• as an insights tool
• as a brand equity builder
• as a sales tool

Final Thought

Social media is indeed a new place. But, people haven’t evolved over the last 50 years, we are all fundamentally the same over time. If you are able define your brand’s purpose while still keeping the same understanding of people, everything else falls into place.