Paul Gunning on Real-Time Marketing

In the current issue of Think Quarterly, Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB, extols the virtues of marketing at speed. “Real-time marketing is set to dominate almost every facet of our industry,” he says. We followed up to dig deeper into the concept and how marketers can best implement it.

TQ: What exactly do you mean by ‘real-time marketing’?

PG: It’s the notion that we observe consumer behaviors as they happen, such as searching, playing, sharing, and purchasing, then adjust our marketing to be a direct reflection of that information. This might mean a message change, a placement change, an immediate offer, etc. The point is that all of marketing (PR, advertising, promotions, shopper, etc) has to bring this "just-in-time" type of strategy to their services to some extent.

TQ: Who will this affect most?

PG: Everyone. In fact, it must impact everyone for it to be as successful as possible. For example, it does us no good to be able to manipulate our messaging and placement in real time if legal requires four weeks of review time.

Clients will need to see if their own procedures can change to react faster. Some of our clients only review creative one time a week, on a set day. Is that plausible if you want to react to a situation overnight? Relatedly, some clients have a three-week legal clearance process. That would need to change. Moving on, our media teams are finalizing 2013 plans. You heard right, 2013 is locked. If that is the case, how can we ever have material efforts and budgets available to react in more real-time?

I have found planners are naturally quite good at synthesizing data and turning it into information in real time. We are seeing a lot more of the planning departments work with listening tools like Radian 6 and Sysomos to do just that. These tools not only need to continue to get better (broader, deeper, and more automated), but the craft of filtering real leading indicators from the noise needs to be more scientific on our end than serendipitous.

Creatives have the hardest job in this scenario. Yes, they need to just plain move faster (developing headlines, copy, imagery changes in hours), but more importantly we need to redefine their value proposition so that speed, or lack of time, does not automatically equate to commodity. Creative Intelligence is a term I think we will start to hear more of. A creative who knows how to solve the business problem as well as the creative brief will be the rock-star of the future.

TQ: You said the smartphone will make the world change at a scale you are intrigued by. What other game-changing technologies should marketers be looking out for, both on the consumer side and on the business side?

PG: We have not even scratched the surface of the interplay of tablets to TV viewing and what this means for content providers, consumers and advertisers.

It is becoming clear both by the behavior changes as well as the sheer numbers of tablets being sold, that consumers clearly use them while watching TV. As a result, we are now starting to see the emergence of ideas that marry the two devices. Apps are being developed by show creators to be launched during an episode with added content and interactivity intended to draw the consumer further in. The result of this, of course, will be TV ads doing the same. In Singapore, we ran a television campaign that instructed the user to hold up their smartphone to the TV during the commercial airing. Via the company distributed app, the commercial appeared to come alive on the phone with added content and clues to a game (which is what the TV spot was messaging). In the US, we saw a Super Bowl commercial for Cars.com do the same thing. We are in talks with many brands and many content owners about other creative ways to link tablet and phone use with TV watching.

TQ: What changes need to take place within a company to create this real-time environment and enable a more iterative work process?

PG: We need to embrace the power of real-time marketing and not fear that it detracts from our strategic thinking or creative product/. Rather, it makes us better at connecting with consumers and selling clients’ products.

As I mentioned earlier, all the roles that exist currently need to be re-examined. Not all of the current processes will be abandoned, but new ones will be added and a path for how they will be adopted requires mapping. For example, real-time bidding for media space is happening, but it will not replace the annual upfronts — both are required for different reasons. Well-planned, deeply researched and strategically bulletproof campaigns will still be developed and will take months of time. In addition, though, dynamically generated creative will be assembled and flighted automatically to generate the most revenue possible. Both need to happen in order to build a brand as well as sell goods and services

TQ: What are some things a company can start doing tomorrow to go faster?

PG: Here are my top four:

• Deploy some media weight into a trading desk.
• Make sure your owned platforms are properly staffed and empowered to handle customer interaction.
• Find out if your agency has access to your sales data.
• Map out your consumers purchase path and identify where the leverage points exist.