There's a new $50 billion industry emerging around the edges of the Internet of Things. The way that we advertise and the way that consumers purchase goods is about to change dramatically. Perhaps most interesting, it is about to become much easier for each one of us to act on our envy of what we see around us.
The Internet of Things is currently more hyped than any other emerging technology topic, according to Gartner. It's at the peak of promise, the top of possibilities, the solution to every problem... and about to start a nose-first dive right into the trough of disillusionment.
Don't get me wrong. The smart money is on IoT, and rightly so. The number of Internet connected devices is expected to increase 20% in 2014 to more than 16 billion. The total market for IoT solutions will be an almost incomprehensible $7.1 trillion by 2020. With that kind of money in play, even the trough is going be a lucrative place to live for the next decade.
Much of this insane growth is going to be in the Industrial Internet, to use a term coined by GE. Think connected jet engines, locomotives, fork lifts, air conditioners, security cameras, and millions of other types of industrial devices, all producing volumes of data to be transmitted, stored, analyzed, and optimized.
The consumer market is not being left off the dance floor, though. By the end of 2014, 13 percent of consumers will own an internet-connected device, and 69 percent expect to purchase one within the next five years. If you include devices that will have passive connectivity to the network (RFID and NFC tags, for example), the number of consumer devices that will be participants in the Internet of Things in the very near future is mind-boggling. Trillions of consumer items from your tighty-whities, to your Mykita sunglasses, to your Panerai watch, to your Izze will all beuniquely identifiable by brand, production lot, and serial number.
Pay attention now, because that last sentence is the key to the huge opportunity in marketing and advertising that is emerging as a result of the rise of IoT.
But what about envy? Envy, interestingly enough, is still a very inconvenient vice to satisfy via the Internet. Sure we can see the cool things that our friends own and amazing places that they go, but acting on our jealousy (e.g., making a purchase) is something else altogether. The ability to act on impulse based on envy of things that we see our friends and family owning in the non-virtual world still requires work on our part to identify, research, browse, shop, order, etc. That being said, 86 percent of consumers say that they are influenced by friends and family more than any other source for making purchases.
So here's where the Venn diagram overlaps. This is how it all comes together:
A fundamental feature the Internet of Things is unique identification of everything on the network, which really will be pretty much everything very soon.
Our phones have sensors that enable us to detect and identify all of the objects around us.
Our smart devices keep us connected to the Internet 100 percent of the time, which means that we can act on the things that we detect.
We're more influenced by our friends and families for making purchases than by any other source.
As an example, let's say you're at your aunt's house one afternoon, and notice her model 4200 hydrogen-powered liquid-cooled mixer on the counter. It's shiny and new, and you must have one. Pull out your phone, wave it near the blender, and Amazon confirms that it's on its way. At dinner later that night, you're impressed by the tableware: wave your phone, it's shipped. Love the bag that the lady in front of you at Starbucks has on her shoulder? Wave, click, ship.
Given the high value that consumers place on the opinions, habits, and purchases of their non-virtual friends and families, it's reasonable to expect that marketers and manufacturers would very quickly move to enable this kind of "real-world product placement" as the technology becomes pervasive. As part of the $500 billion world-wide advertising market, it's also not hard to imagine displacement of existing advertising revenues towards a medium such as this. If you combine the market sizes of social media marketing, product placement, and popular forms of real-world advertising, you start zeroing in on a market size larger than $50 billion per year. Yowzers.
Product placement is probably the best analogy for what we're talking about here, and that alone is already a $10 billion industry world wide. Generally, product placement is focused on TV, film, and compelling personalities, while this new approach happens as part of the natural sales cycle and your daily habits. The concept of real-world product placement has low barriers, a short path to execution, and can be used by literally every product out there without even trying once passive detection (e.g. RFID/NFC tags) is everywhere.
It's a fascinating way to reimagine product marketing. Everything, everywhere is for sale all of the time without lines, searches, or carts. It should be fun to watch the space mature, and it will most certainly be interesting to see the business opportunities shake out.
Millennial Marketing: It's all about me... three examples.
For those who are wondering how to crack the code on "millennial marketing" - this week you got a lot of data. To sum it all up, my friend whom I profiled in this past post about millennial marketing, again msgs me and says to me "you realize that this coke thing, and the ALS campaign, are the same - it's all about me." If true - this is a big deal - it should change considerably how you think about media, marketing, communications, and brand building.
I was somewhat stunned by the statement - but upon reflection - it's quite true. We are a culture that now evaluates messages first through our own interpretive lens, and then perhaps through another framework.
This is pretty important, actually, because it signifies a major shift in how we might go about understanding communications. Briefly, let me explain.
Before the Advent of the Internet - Civil Society Mattered More
As a former political scientist, I spent a fair amount of time studying how to study political groups. Seems silly right - studying how to study politics. The exercise is important, however, because you find that based upon the lens of your analysis, you can explain various aspects of behavior. It is somewhat like a lens in a camera - you can either see things great at a distance, or great up close, but you can't usually see both at the same time (the depth of field problem in photography). Similarly, in understanding political trends, there is usually one level of understanding that is better at explaining what's going on then competing theories. Generally, political scientists use one of three levels to explain political behavior - they either look at a system level (the highest least granular structured level), they look at institutions (more granularity, less generality), or they look at individuals (hyper granularity, almost impossible to see connections or trends, or make predictions).
Prior to the internet, I would argue that the system and institutional factors were dominant. We all watched the same shows, and talked about it the next day. Churches held more sway over society. Government held more sway over society culturally. There was greater cultural homogeneity. Civil society and structures conditioned us. Choosy moms chose JIF because otherwise you were a harlot. Don't squeeze the Charmin! Only You can prevent Forest Fires. The list goes on and on. Mass medium held sway because mass medium spoke through the institutions and the structure of communication. The individual mattered less, because, the individual did not really have much of a voice. There was very little in the way of what someone could do to make their voice heard.
Now, everyone walks around with a radio station and a television studio in their pocket. They have the ability to broadcast directly to millions. What's the result? Charlie bit my finger. Dump icewater over your head. Kim Kardashian complaing about how her butt is too big. Coca Cola with your name on it instead of theirs, everyone talking, broadcasting, tweeting, in a jumbled sense of nonsense.
The system is totally broken because essentially it's overloaded. Mass communication was never designed for mass communicators - only mass listeners. Which is why now the only lens that works is the individual.
Enter the Individual Analysis
The individual frame of analysis looks at events and structures through the individual's perspective. This type of analysis focuses on the motivations, dreams, goals, pressures, triggers, etc., of individual people, to explain social behavior. From a mass media perspective, it would be nearly impossible to explain why the ALS Icebucket Challenge is popular. Similarly, it would be hard to argue why the Coca-Cola campaign is so popular (but possibly not profitable). Understanding the likes of how Kim Kardashian gets to be a celebrity, let alone this fascination and fixation on her posterior, would be equally impossible to understand.
As CMOs, as brand leaders, however, that's how you're attempting to analyze the situation. Using the instruments of reach, frequency, clicks, etc., you're attempting to understand campaign success or failure through structures, systems, and institutions. It's potentially entirely the wrong lens. The closer and closer you get to Generation Y - the millennial generation - I argue with definitive zeal - the structural explanations break down entirely.
Consider this - Kim Kardashian, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Coca-Cola. They all seem disconnected - but they're not. They're all perfect examples of the same thing - popularity as a result of entirely focusing on the individual.
Millennial Marketing Study #1: ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Unless you've lived under a rock - surely you've seen people dumping buckets of ice water over their heads to raise awareness for ALS. The campaign has been remarkably effective - it's raised 38 million dollars thus far.
Think about the campaign - what's it really about?
I didn't really come to the conclusion until I saw this status post: "How come no one will challenge me to the #icebucketchallenge - I guess I'm not popular."
I thought - what? If this guy wanted to help ALS - he could just write a check. But that's not what this campaign is about.
Instead it's about this:
And not to pick on my friend Scott Monty, but clearly then there is the genre of the "anti-Ice Bucket" videos - where people talk about how they're donating instead of ice-bucketing (Scott's was by far the best done and the most genuine I think):
All of these videos, and more, are all about the individual. Yes, ALS benefits. Yes, ALS has raised a ton of money. But in the end, every one of these videos - the celebrity ones, the not-so-celebrity ones, are all about the people. I challenge so and so. I got challenged. See how cool I am, I was challenged. I'm so cool, I didn't even do the ice bucket thing - I did something else. I'm so nuts, I had the icebucket fall on my head and almost kill me.
It's voyeuristic. We even have now the Ice Bucket Challenge Fails:
And people who don't even exist... take the challenge:
The interesting thing about this one - Kermit challenged Ricky Gervais - who replied "FFS, I've already done it." (FFS - in internetspeak is "for f*cks sake".)
It's a little club. See I get to challenge Steven Spielberg, because I'm cool - I'm Oprah. And I challenged so and so...
For those of you old enough to remember, the king of the name droppers was probably Dick Cavett. This is basically the Dick Cavett of marketing - people can hardly fall over themselves fast enough to dump water over their heads to be part of the club of the cool kids who know people and who got challenged.
This isn't a societal critique of it - but rather to point out - the entire event is invidiualistically oriented. The challenges are made by individuals. The filming, etc., it's all voyeuristic. Essentially, this is a super bowl ad combined with Truman Capote's "I like to watch."
The entire campaign is set from the individual's perspective. What they gain, how to spread it, how to disseminate the message.
Imagine if as an agency I pitched this to a client. Ok, here's the deal, instead of buying media, doing a commercial, etc., what we're going to do is demand that people dump ice water over their heads, and challenge their friends to do that too, and put it up on Facebook, and YouTube, and Twitter. Then, they'll be shamed enough either to do the stunt, in which case we get free publicity, or to cut us a check.
I'm pretty sure they'd have laughed me out of the room. That's not how agencies think. Maybe they SHOULD think that way - but that's not how they generally think.
Eventually all this silliness will end. Like a virus - either everyone will wind up challenged - or there won't be any sport in it anymore. However, ALS will probably raise 50M dollars.
Brilliant campaign from that perspective.
Millennial Marketing Study #2:
Kim Kardashian - the Rear End Challenge
So from ice buckets to posteriors, I saw this cover at the grocery store, and the headline was basically, "yes, my butt is big" and it was allegedly a quote of Kim Kardashian.
Apparently both this woman, and much of pop culture, is infatuated with her rear-end.
I'll be honest, I'm completely at a loss to understand Kardashian. Yes, I get it - she's attractive. But basically it's this weird mix of Sophia Lauren, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and a porno. Kardashian comes to being popular because basically she made a porno video. From there, she parlays that into an empire.
Now you may have sour grapes about that - but again - the entire routine is because she understands (perhaps instinctively) of how you sell a brand in an age where everyone has a camera, everyone is a video star, everyone can make a message that gets transmitted to millions. It's again through the individual lens.
This woman has 23 million followers on Twitter. Let's presume half are fake accounts, or whackadoos, or whatever. Fine - 12 million REAL BONAFIDE PEOPLE living off this woman's every utterance.
What? I mean seriously. It goes on and on - the silly stuff. But here she has a huge audience (and a huge rear end according to her), and the taglines she writes became headlines - Kim Upset about huge Butt.
It's beyond silly.
But again, she seems to understand that her popularity and her cultural swag is entirely dependent upon the people who view her. That audience was built through the eyes of her audience, not the other way around. She's hardly a good role model, or a bad one even. It's just kind of bizarre - people are attracted to her. What's she eating. What's she doing.
Again, all through the voyeuristic lens. It's about the individual.
Millennial Marketing Study #3: Coca-Cola - Forget teaching the world to Sing... my name is on the freaking bottle!
Imagine I'm the ad guy and I'm pitching Coke. The pitch goes something like this - yeah, we know you have your 200 year old brand or whatever, and you sue the pants off of anyone who tries to use it, derive from it, or do anything unlicensed with it. But hear me out for a second - I want you to take your name off - and put my name on the bottle.
I'm sure after they stopped laughing - I'd be fired.
Kronauge said the campaign puts a modern, youthful twist on the brand’s 128-year legacy of bringing people together and making them feel special. “For teens and Millennials, personalization is not a fad, it’s a way of life,” she adds. “It’s about self-expression, individual storytelling and staying connected with friends. ‘Share a Coke’ taps into all of those passions.”
Initial response across social media has been strong, according to Jennifer Healan, group director, integrated marketing content and design, Coca-Cola North America.
“‘Share a Coke’ is designed to get people talking and sharing,” she said. “When teens see that the iconic Coca-Cola logo has been replaced by their name or their friends’ names, they can’t help but take a picture and post it online.”
Coke will amplify and curate the #ShareaCoke conversation via its social channels.
“We’ll not only be talking about the names on bottles, but also putting a great deal of focus on celebrating real moments of sharing and the stories behind them,” Healan adds. “We’ll highlight the best examples to encourage sharing among our fans and followers and inspire teens to recreate these sharing moments with their friends.”
If you go back to what I posted a few days ago about the campaign - it works not because of sharing, but because of being self-centered. It's all about me. OH LOOK! It's my name on the bottle!
Coke may wish to say it's fueling these discussions, connections, etc., however the evidence doesn't support that. What it fuels is narcissistic behavior and sharing. It's basically Kardashian's butt meets the ALS challenge. Everyone gets to be part of the in crowd by knowing they have their name on the bottle, and they get to be the celebrity for showing it in social media.
What's it all mean Alfie?
I'm not suggesting we're suddenly a self-absorbed culture. However, it is an interesting trend that "what's popular" and what "resonates" all begins with the individual. I think that's unique to this period of time, and I think it's unique because of the technology available. Thus the meaning for the CMO trying to acquire customers is this - start thinking through the eyes of the customer.
You really can't copy these techniques - that's too ham handed. It won't work. But all three of these case studies are all based, and all succeed, because the focus is not on the end state, but the individual. That's somewhat of a scary proposition I think for most marketers. You're asking the customer to carry the ball into the end zone. Makes people uneasy.
In a world, however, where everything is being generated so quickly - content flying around like a blender - pushed messages don't appear to be so effective. This is why TV is dropping. It's why radio is losing out to podcasting. It's why print is slowly dying in favor of on-demand publication.
It's why Kim Kardashian's butt has an audience roughly the size of the Tonight Show at the height of Carson.
Fathom that one for a moment why don't you.
Copyright 2014 - Clickafy Media Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We live in unprecedented times. Any entrepreneur today can develop or source products from one of thousands of manufacturers and suppliers, open an online store and reach a global audience of buyers -- from anywhere in the world!
Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? It is, but it’s a dream come true if you know how to design your business for maximum flexibility and leverage.
The following are seven secrets my colleagues and I have used to build businesses that give us the ultimate flexibility to decide when, where and how we want to work.
1. Choose your business wisely. Certain business models allow for much more freedom than others, so you must choose a business model that matches your desired level of freedom.
Many entrepreneurs start their business with freedom in mind, but then choose a business model that gives them anything but.
After three years of hard work, they are miserable because they feel like they can’t step away. The easy-to-grasp example here is the person that opens a restaurant with the conflicting goal of being able to travel the world whenever they’d like.
Sure, there are globetrotting chefs that live a glamorous lifestyle of travel and celebrity parties, but that’s very rare. Most restaurant owners are there at 6 a.m. to receive the morning delivery of food, and there at midnight to finish cleaning and close the place down.
Be careful to choose a business that has the ideal characteristics to provide the lifestyle you are after.
2. Automate everything. The software that is available to help you run your business today is like magic.
Software systems such as Infusionsoft have eliminated so much manual work and cost from building and running a business that it almost feels like cheating when you know how to use it to your advantage.
Consciously work to find how you can automate every task possible at your business.
3. Only use online systems. When it comes to creating a lifestyle business, nothing has done more to make it possible than the Internet. To completely leverage the potential of the web, you should only use business systems that live on the Internet and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Not only does this allow you to operate from any place with an Internet connection, but it also makes it much easier to integrate your business systems together, and integrate with your various suppliers and vendors.
Doing so means less manual tasks and processes, faster communication and increased flexibility.
4. Outsource instead of employ. Not everything in every business can be automated (wouldn’t that be nice?). For those things that still need to be done by a living, breathing human being, you should be aggressive about outsourcing everything that doesn’t absolutely, positively need to be done by employees.
Employees are expensive, can require a lot of hand-holding and are hard to get rid of once you have them. You can find outsourced help for every imaginable task, at prices that will shock you.
5. Empower front-line decision-making. If you want to truly have a sense of freedom from your business, you can’t be glued to your email and phone all day long answering basic questions for your team. You must learn to delegate the “front-line” decision-making -- things such as customer support, refunds, minor operational changes, etc. -- as effectively as possible.
We give everyone on our team three simple guidelines to work from when making a decision. We have them ask the following:
Is it good for the company?
Is it good for the customer?
Are you willing to be held personally accountable for the decision you are about to make?
If they can answer "yes" to all three of these questions, they should go ahead and make the decision.
6. Market and sell online. There is nothing cooler than the first time you wake up to a customer order from someplace on the other side of the world. Marketing and selling online makes this possible.
By being able to market and sell online, you give yourself the gift of a much, much larger potential customer base, and the ability to reach them at a cost that is unheard of in history.
If you master marketing and selling online, you’ll never have a shortage of qualified prospects and customers in your sales pipeline, which means more consistent revenue for you.
7. Create recurring revenue. The ideal business doesn’t just sell something once to a customer and then say goodbye. The ideal business creates revenue that comes in multiple times, and ideally very consistently.
It takes a lot of hard work to find a new customer, so once you do, you want to make that relationship as lucrative as possible. There is nothing more liberating than knowing that you have predictable income coming in, month after month.
In some businesses, this is more difficult than others and you have to get a little creative to generate a recurring relationship, while others are naturally recurring in nature.
But you’ve no doubt seen businesses that have taken normally one-off purchases and turned them into recurring revenue models. Businesses such as Dollar Shave Club and MeUndies.com come to mind as two recent and successful examples. If underwear can be turned into a recurring revenue model, just about anything can!
Get creative with your business model. Recurring revenue is quite possibly the best thing you can do for your business, so make this a priority.
I’m a big believer that building your ideal lifestyle doesn’t have to wait until you are done building and selling your business. Follow the seven secrets outlined above and do both at the same time!
Sometimes the best discoveries are the simplest observations…
Whether you know it as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule, the definition of this famous business rule simply states that, “20% of your priorities will give you 80% of your production IF you spend your time, energy, money and personnel on the top 20% of your priorities”.
Pareto : A Quick Background
The Pareto Principle was created byManagement consultantJoseph M. Juran who first suggested the principle in 1941 and named it after Italian economistVilfredo Pareto. Back in 1906, Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto went on to develop his ‘principle’ after discovering that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.
Back in 2005 I met John C. Maxwell. John is a New York Times best-selling author of over 80 (excellent) books and a leadership coach to presidents, world leaders and Fortune 500 executives. He spoke to me about the Pareto principle and he gave me some advice I’ll never forget…
“If you make a list of the 10 most important things you need to do each day (prioritised in the right order), and then concentrate only on the top 2 items, you will likely receive 80% of everything you ever want to receive out of life.”. John C. Maxwell
The Pareto Principle can also be applied to other areas of life:-
TIME: 20% of our time produces 80% of the results.
COUNSELING: 20% of the people take up 80% of our time.
PRODUCTS: 20% of the products bring in 80% of the profit.
READING: 20% of the book contains 80% of the content.
JOB: 20% of our work gives us 80% of our satisfaction.
SPEECH: 20% of the presentation produces 80% of the impact.
DONATIONS: 20% of the people will give 80% of the money.
LEADERSHIP: 20% of the people will make 80% of the decisions.
EMPLOYEES: 20% of a team usually produce 80% of the work
From Pareto to 60:30:10...
While the 80/20 rule is a long established principle that has I have seen proven many times over the last 10 years since I spoke to John, I have noticed a formula which I have found to be even more powerful – especially in the world of industrial marketing and brand management.
Let me explain...
After leaving my agency to work for the Phones 4u Group in 2010, I was given a very limited budget to build a social brand for the UK’s largest phone retailer, aimed almost entirely at 13-24 year olds. Having limited resources, over-worked team members and many agencies wasn’t the problem, my biggest challenge was speed. Once a deal with a manufacturer or a network was finally in place (the deals were always last minute), I was usually given between 7 and 10 days to create a campaign, brief the creative teams to build a game in less than a week (usually a Facebook app with data capture and a competition mechanic), plan the media budget and launch the campaign.
Brands are no longer competing against each other. They are competing against speed". Marc Benioff
More out of necessity than any clever thinking, I split the budget for my first campaign 60:30:10. The first 10% of our campaign budget was spent on strategy, planning and insights. This helped to make sure that whatever we were going to create resonated with our target audience. Once we had a plan, 30% of our resources were allocated towards creative – at Phones 4u this usually meant a Facebook connected game and an app. 60% of the budget was then allocated for paid media on the appropriate channels, to reach the audience demographic that we had already identified
“Things need to be made simpler, but not simple”. Albert Einstein
The first time I employed this formula was to build a game called Face Invaders, to launch the Sony Experia Playstation phone in the UK. It was a huge launch for Sony but we had no time at all the go through the lengthy agency planning processes. Using the 60:30:10 split, we quickly came up with the idea to use Facebook API’s to build a game. In the style of Space Invaders, it pulled in the names and faces of your best friends (!), who you had to shoot in order to try and win a phone. The game was so successful that Facebook security teams stepped in thinking that it had been hacked. It went on to have millions of plays and from that moment on, it became a winning formula I used on every campaign. 60:30:10 also helped us to launch quicker (and with more success) than all of Sony's other media partners, many of whom had substantially bigger budgets and resources.
Whenever I have worked on campaigns since then, I have used the same ratios. £100,000 for a campaign? Easy, we’ll spend £5,000 on planning and strategy with an agency or in-house team, £30,000 on creative and build, £60,000 on media and £5,000 at the end of the campaign to measure and report on campaign performance. Brands could never believe I was so certain of a ratio that worked so well, because they usually had to wait days just to get a budget proposal back from their agency. 60:30:10 meant that I could always provide numbers on the spot and start planning immediately.
Whilst I have seen 60:30:10 work many times over for campaigns I have worked on, I have also seen this model work for brands such as Nike, Samsung, Rovio (Angry Birds) and Zynga (Farmville) - all of whom seem to use roughly similar splits. Rovio famously built the $1 billion+ Angry Birds franchise for just over $100,000 having had their previous 40+ games fail, using a similar formula, proving that good strategy wins (eventually)!
60:30:10 works in many other areas too;
Writing a Book
Seth Godin spends 10% of his time planning a book, 30% writing it and 60% of his time promoting it. He often does this in blocks of 100 days. Leadership coach John C. Maxwell has a similar process. Both of them have written over 100 books, many of the New York Times best-sellers and they put their success down to this process.
Social Media Listening
I have noticed that the most successful social brands (KLM, Red Bull, Disney, Burberry) spend 10% of their time creating content, 30% of their time listening to their audience and 60% of their time having meaningful conversations with them, or engaging quickly for customer care. Gary Vaynerchuk refers to this as his 90:10 rulein this video, which I have shared many times over the last couple of years.
Personal Finances
I once heard an interview on Oprah with Bill Rancic (first winner of the Apprentice with Donald Trump), and Bill encouraged people to be financially secure with his 50:40:10 model for personal finances. Not quite 60:30:10 but close. He stated that most people can live off 50% of their income with the right planning. 40% can be saved or invested. And if you are that way inclined, 10% can then be given away to charity or church.
Influencer Fan Engagement Programs
NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a metric used to assess customer satisfaction for many global brands (especially retail or CPG brands). An interesting observation I’ve seen over the years is that many of the fastest growing brands seem to have around 10% superfans – the evangelists who tell everyone about you. These are the ones that PR agencies and outreach programs love to target. 60% of consumers are usually passive. Happy enough to buy but not so excited as they tell all their friends. 30% of consumers are unhappy for one reason or another, especially if it is a new product or fast growing brand with operations or logistical challenges during accelerated growth periods.
Presentations
Steve Jobs' iPhone launch keynote in 2007, arguably one of the best business presentations of all time, was split 60:30:10. 10% on industry trends and background, 30% talking about Apple as a business and 60% revealing the iPhone and talking about the product. All Steve's keynotes had a similar formula, with a certain narrative and method of storytelling ~ something he picked up from the way stories were made at Pixar. In many of my own presentations, I often spend 60% of the presentation on industry trends, 30% on specific use cases and 10% on marketing cloud products.
Team Time Management
When you have big goals and small teams, it is often difficult to organise time management within a team, in a way that aligns with your core business goals and objectives. I did an exercise at Salesforce recently where I split everyones time into 3 core areas; the main goal (promoting the commercial side of the business), our secondary goal (raising brand awareness), and our long-term goal (industry thought leadership). I could have added as many levels as I needed depending upon the size of the team. Using this simple model below in Excel, once I moved across all the tasks that we needed to do (prioritised in the correct order), it became clear exactly who needed to do what, in which order, and how many hours a week that person should be allocated to each task. It is a process that brands like Disney use to manage their hundreds of digital media and social executives and one which I think works for teams small and large. It is processes like this that help tech companies such as Salesforce, Facebook and Google move so fast (without breaking things!).
Let me know what you think in the comments below. Whilst I have obviously over-simplified some complex processes, the best ideas are often the simplest ones. As a foundation for building a campaign, creating your next project or managing your team ~ I think the 60:30:10 model is as solid a base as any other concept I've ever come across.
Illustration Credit: the most awesome dahlig on deviant.
The Pareto Principle was created by
More out of necessity than any clever thinking, I split the budget for my first campaign 60:30:10. The first 10% of our campaign budget was spent on strategy, planning and insights. This helped to make sure that whatever we were going to create resonated with our target audience. Once we had a plan, 30% of our resources were allocated towards creative – at Phones 4u this usually meant a Facebook connected game and an app. 60% of the budget was then allocated for paid media on the appropriate channels, to reach the audience demographic that we had already identified
