Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [78]
Some of the most innovative approaches in marketing and planning and research have originated at Leo Burnett. And year after year, it is as close to a lock as one can get to win more Effie Awards than any other agency in the world.
Yes, but Has Anyone Ever Seen Ice Cubes While Looking at Sex?
Ben Kline doesn’t much look like a persuader, hidden or otherwise. Instead, the chief strategy officer for Leo Burnett Worldwide/Arc looks and, more important, acts like a listener. Which makes sense, since his job, as well as that of most of the people who report to him, isn’t to convince or persuade but to observe, gather, and interpret as much information as possible before distilling it down to a blueprint for creatives. So, in a perfect world, before a creative team floats the first feather of an idea into the air for any ad on any Leo account, Kline’s team has provided them with a concise plan that is a fusion of many disciplines.
“Ideally, we want the research group to guide the behavioral discovery. What is the behavior that is defining a business? This takes some time and some digging. We also want to know, how do people react to an experience? What do they want? What bothers or surprises them? An extra development in the modern age, because we have so many additional media components and potential canvases to create with than we used to, is that we now have experience planners. As much as possible they will observe consumers in their natural environments engaged in the behavior related to our brand, rather than a bad or sanitized focus group facility.
“For instance, for certain goods, we’ll do ethnographies in someone’s home, engaging in extended conversations and interviews, trying to understand what makes them comfortable and why. But for our Miller Brewing client, we’re much better off in a bar, observing and talking.”
In addition to chronicling consumer behaviors and desires in their natural settings, environmental planners at Leo take on some of the additional responsibilities of media planner. The task of the media planner used to be relatively simple: allocate print, TV, and outdoor spending in a way that would deliver the biggest bang (most impressions) for the budget. But now there are myriad new elements, seemingly every day: viral video and guerrilla marketing, YouTube and Webisodes, Facebook and other forms of social media, all customizable on a micro level. “Especially because of the digital component today,” Kline told me, “it’s important that we map out the context of the media, to determine where a message will have the most impact and meaning. So at this point we can determine: here’s the behavior, here’s the experience, and here’s the points that matter most where this person can come into contact with this brand.”
Finally, all of this information falls into the lap of the planner, and, according to Kline, “the art of planning is to drive the most relevant behavior into a powerful insight that creatives can work with. Basically, the planner says what she expects this work can do, what behavior it can change, and what the desired outcome is.”
It’s almost unheard of for an agency or client to cite real-world, in-progress examples of the planning process, especially at an agency this big, where mega-clients guard the management of their brands like state secrets, a strategic nuance has the potential to change a category, and the annual billings for most brands exceed the gross national product of many nations. But this abridged case history for a recent McDonald’s commercial has been given the Leo Burnett PR stamp of approval and demonstrates how various planning disciplines come together: