One of the biggest news items in the ad world at the end of July was the fusion of Carat USA, the general media agency, with Carat Fusion, the digital agency, in a move that heightened the landscape for digital advertising. There’s been talk that the move elevates digital to the forefront of advertising and transforms the way the agency will work. Sarah Fay, who joined Carat in 1998 as the managing director of Carat Business and Technology and became president of Isobar USA, the network of digital agencies that includes Carat Fusion, is the CEO of Carat/New York (part of the UK-based Aegis Group). She speaks about the merger and the important role digital and video advertising will play in it in this week’s iChat.
iSPOT: A few comments about the Carat USA and Carat Fusion merger have been that it reinvents the agency model and indicates a major shift in the importance of digital marketing.
Fay: You have to understand the way the market is shifting–and digital is infused into consumer lives and essential in the marketing programs because of that. The need here is to speak strategically about client services. If you back up a little, you’ll see we’ve had all these parts and pieces all along. We’re not building a digital offering. We’ve had two companies, a full service digital marketing company Carat Fusion and a traditional media specialist Carat USA. It won’t be new for these companies to work together. The way we’ve been working for clients is parallel tracking. We’ve provided two different services that go together but they’ve been oriented in different ways. One side is fully digital and looks at the full scope of digital strategies including creative, technology, CRM and search. It’s been holistic in the digital space and we have a traditional media side but there hasn’t been a tight connection between the two strategies, they’ve lived apart except in special situations. Now we’re bringing the two organizations together and it’s not just about planning online and offline at the same time and making sure they hit together. That’s synchronization, not strategizing. It’s about making sure the media points to each other and make sure they develop the same strategy.
ISPOT: How will Carat alter the way an account works in the types of advertising that are used?
Fay: At the most basic level our strategies will be unbiased in terms of which media we’ll be bringing to bear. I have to give you an example to fully explain the reasons why they need to coexist. We just launched a program for Reebok in a way that’s exactly how we want the organization to work together. People broke through the barriers of their P&Ls to make sure strategic things happen. The teams collaborated extremely well. It’s a model of how we want the teams to work. We launched a program for Reebok called Reebok Run Easy. Their position as opposed to “Just do it” is more about casual runners, someone who’s more interested in enjoying the experience, not killing themselves. They’re zigging while everyone else is zagging. We decided to make it a digital centric program, very me oriented about the consumer and it’s all about participation, running with people at the speed of chat was the offline message. It’s a holistic program where we used TV, outdoor and print, but they were orbiting around the online experience which we made a very social experience. We developed a site for Reebok, www.goruneasy.com. You could go on the site and use Google maps to post your run, upload photos through the Flickr application, show pictures of yourself or your running group, connect to iTunes so you can share your running play list, connect to YouTube where you can do mashups of run easy videos and incorporate your own videos into it. We posted on Facebook so it takes on a life of its own, it’s extremely viral. In order to make it happen we had a lot of things that needed to be invented. We had to tap into pieces of the Isobar network, including Molecular and Carat Fusion, which played a role in devising the look and feel of the site and all digital elements from a creative standpoint because it needed to be envisioned not just from the media level but the content level. We worked hand in hand with McGarry Bowen, the offline creative agency. It had a mobile element so you could upload photos to the site using Flickr. In order to pull it off all the digital elements had to come together to hit a deadline for the media. If we weren’t all connected to one organization making it happen it would have fallen down. We did a lot of all nighters to pull it off but it happened because we were one organization. If the media side of the company had given direction to a digital agency that was separate from the organization, we wouldn’t have met the deadline and there would have been an element of risk for the client that we might not have pulled it off.
iSPOT: When did the campaign start?
Fay: In April and it continues to run live on Facebook and you can see it at www.goruneasy.com. It’s carried over into countries where we didn’t have media against it, because it’s being broadly passed around.
iSPOT: How do you measure a campaign like this that’s digital centric?
Fay: It’s interesting you asked that because measures of a social media program tend to be the digital metrics. Things you can tell happened in terms of how many people came to the site, how many posted a run, uploaded pictures, passed it along and participated in a blog. We can look at those elements and use them as benchmarks. We actually just sponsored a major piece of research with MySpace that talks about value creation in using social networks to advertise. It goes far beyond those metrics so if people are incorporating their runs into their own social network sites, the level of exposure is increased significantly. In the study called Momentum Effect, we found that 70 percent of awareness and brand metrics like purchase intent were created through the consumer-to-consumer effect of the program versus business to consumer so you get more from the pass along viral nature than you do from straight media purchased.
iSPOT: What elements of the Reebok campaign involved video?
Fay: We took a lot of video material from the TV shoot, the :30 spot is highly produced, with people running together and talking, it’s a montage. We incorporated lots of different running and talking snippets beyond the :30 so we had a lot of material to include. We created an opportunity for people to play off it and post their own videos.
iSPOT: How will you use video in other campaigns and what kind of future do you see for it?
Fay: A ton. It really is our opportunity to create that emotional connection with consumers. It’s really something we’re starting to incorporate into almost everything we do. We’ve done some work for Schick, Adidas, Reebok and Pfizer and it’s run the gamut, everything from actual reproduction of TV spots at the most basic level to material that we’re having consumers participate in submitting.
iSPOT: Will you be using video in different ways beyond repurposing TV?
Fay: It has to get well beyond that. For Isobar network, the sister organization to Carat, video has been a huge element that companies have been using. One organization called Glue in the UK used two hundred shoots of different video segments and allowed consumers to customize a piece so it seems like a person was talking directly to the person they sent it to. You could choose from a list of names so they would incorporate elements that are personal. So it’s a completely non-linear way of using video that becomes much more about the consumer. Also, what Farfar did for Diesel with the Heidi videos that won the Grand Prix award. The underwear promotion was so campy, they went out of their way to make it look like anyone could have been filming it. Two women wearing underwear in a hotel room who kidnapped the Diesel salesman. It was more like episodes or stories in a series of videos they posted on YouTube. When you watch it, it seems so silly but it got so much pass along with participation that it took Diesel in a new direction. They stopped competing in the jeans space and it gave them a different aura.
iSPOT: How does this kind of work differ from traditional advertising?
Fay: It’s more content than advertising. That’s where things are moving toward. We have to think in terms of not advertising, we have to develop things for the consumer that are highly entertaining and incredibly interesting. It’s okay to use product advertising messages in high involvement categories to people who are showing interest in the products and services. But I imagine a day when we do search engine advertising and you roll over a search link and a video will pop up.
