The Egotist Briefs: Troy Kelley of Arnold

Arnold EVP/Chief Digital Officer Troy Kelley recently answered some questions about the growing importance of digital technologies among clients. Check out his thoughts below.

1. What is the number-one business challenge you are asked to solve by your clients?

With the rise of social media, clients are asking us to define tangible, measureable ways that their businesses can benefit from the myriad conversations that are taking place in the social space. The social revolution has changed the face of communication, not just marketing and advertising, so we believe that an enterprise-wide approach to social media is needed. Two years ago, we created SocialBrand, a strategic methodology that allows us to take a brand-centric approach to social communication. We analyze five key areas of insight (brand positioning, consumer social media habits, competitive trends, technology innovations and conversation analytics) in order to determine the opportunities and the appropriate “social voice” needed to govern a brand’s communications planning in all areas – advertising, relationship marketing, sales and customer care initiatives. We develop a strategic roadmap and establish operational criteria and a measurement framework that can help them create sustainable organizational change. In addition, our social moderation and conversation analytics offerings help clients to identify and harness the power of their most active brand loyalists.

2. What differentiates your company from other agencies who provide similar services?

All agencies strive to deliver great digital creative ideas, but one of the ways we offer distinction is through our reputable Brand Experience group, which has won PROMO magazine’s Promotional Agency of the Year honors. The group strategizes and executes promotions, events and shopper marketing, and gives us the activation capability to deliver campaigns that transcend the offline and online worlds. Two years ago, we took significant steps to integrate our digital services and our Brand Experience capabilities: we sat the groups together in a collaborative workspace. We leveraged our R&D group to bring new and immersive technology platforms like human-computer interaction and mobile to event marketing and retail activation. We evolved our User Experience (UX) practice to establish a consumer journey that brings the campaign to life in real and virtual worlds. Our Integrated Analytics group then created campaign measurement frameworks to capture the new cross-channel consumer interactions that these campaigns produced.

The result is work that defies categorization. For example, we created the “Carnival Interactive Aquarium,” which was set up in vacant storefronts throughout major cities. Consumers used their mobile phones to create a fish, allow it to interact with other fish, and send it to an online account where they could feed it and show it to others. The campaign was part event marketing and part digital out-of-home, becoming a huge PR story for Carnival Cruise Lines and a winner of multiple technology innovation awards.

3. Are there any trends among those clients that focus more on the digital channel versus the traditional?

Clients in categories like financial services, retail, healthcare, travel and tourism tend to be leaders in the digital space and more adventurous with experimentation. Their online efforts are focused on maintaining a persistent dialogue with multiple consumer targets and existing customers for the purpose of direct selling or to provide an always-on platform for relationship management. These types of clients use every tool that we have to offer – ad targeting, database marketing, analytics and constant website content development. Their familiarity with marketing technology gives them great confidence and experience to experiment with nascent media platforms and devices. They were the first to approach us to assist them in the development of social media and mobile platforms and have since used them to gain a competitive advantage.

4. Where do you think digital will be in five years?

Five years from now, mobile will be the predominant tool for communication, entertainment and social connection. Mobile phones will prove to be more important to consumers than TV or PCs could ever be for three reasons:

Consumers “heart” their mobile phones: Our phones have become PART of us. A Pew Research Report recently revealed that 90% of Millennials they surveyed sleep with their phones. And another survey has 40% of the general population saying they would rather lose their wallet than their phone.

Computing power in your pocket: These devices are more powerful than the laptops of five years ago. They give on-the-go consumers web access, social apps, GPS and payment platforms.

Mobile phones connect the global economy: Consumers will take their social network with them, even in areas where there are no paved roads. At Nokia World 2010, Mary McDowell, Executive Vice President for Mobile Phones stated that “80% of the world’s population is now within range of a cell-tower – people aren’t going to use PCs to connect [to the Internet]; they’re going to use affordable mobile devices.”

At Arnold, we’re evolving every facet of our business for a mobile future. All areas of our digital discipline are adding development and testing platforms to meet the demands of the multi-OS/multi-device mobile ecosystem.

5. How has technology impacted what clients are asking you to do and your solutions for them?

Clients are looking to technology to deliver “earned” and “owned” media opportunities that maximize the efficiency of their paid-media campaigns. To develop digital solutions that deliver on all these fronts, we’ve changed our way of thinking about digital and the team that we engage to define our creative ideas.

We see our clients’ online assets (banners, email, website, social content, customer data) as a “digital ecosystem” where all of the parts work in concert to deliver an “always-on” brand-building presence. We look to multi-disciplinary teams to inform creative solutions that harness this ecosystem. Our traditional “art director/copywriter” partnership still serves to develop great ideas and engaging content. Our UX group defines user needs, maps out the parts of the digital ecosystem and illustrates the optimal consumer journey for each brand experience. Our Creative Technology group builds the infrastructure needed to support user interactions across multiple platforms and mobile devices. Our Community Managers run conversation analytics to identify the influencers and social venues where they can begin spreading the word. Analytics has a seat at the table to measure our efforts and provide optimization ideas to always improve upon the end product. These collaborative parties make up the creative team of the future and, together, they’re helping us deliver groundbreaking digital work for our clients.

Thanks again to Troy, as well as Eric Robertson over at Arnold.