1.
Agile Creative
Malcolm MacGregor
The way we as the audience learn, share and consume
across our digital world is shaping content and the
brand – to sustain the new demand and successfully
grow brand requires a nextgen approach - Agile
Creative.
Contact
M. 206-434-1613
E. mscmacgregor2000@yahoo.co.uk
2/28/2013

2.
I’ve always gravitated towards people and situations that embrace innovation.
I started in interactive marketing in the 90's at Quadravision in Toronto, moved to SapientNitro
in San Francisco and then London, ran Blast Radius Europe in Amsterdam moved to Seattle to
support Microsoft/Razorfish and most recently co-founder Blab to pioneer conversation
prediction, to enable brands to seize the earned media opportunity.
I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with many great brands ranging for Facebook to Virgin
to Nintendo, Sony, Bank of America, GAP, Mikes Hard Lemonade to Vodafone to deliver
ecommerce, brand strategy, media, advertising.
Agile Creative
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits
him and sells itself… The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”
Quote: Peter Drucker
The way we as the audience learn, share and consume across our digital world is shaping the content
and the brand – to sustain the new demand and successfully grow brand we will need to move to a
process of Agile Creative.
We are at an exciting intersection where the brand is able to create content that the audience will seek
out and share. Now more than ever we have the opportunity to move from a selling to a buying
paradigm - sustainable through good process and insight that informs the creation of relevant and
informative content.
Red Bull has been a front runner in the creation of audience relevant content that people consume and
share while still being distinctly branded. When done well, people will embrace the brand and adapt it
as their own.
Author: Malcolm MacGregor

3.
I met this chap on a ski lift living the brand:
Red Bull set the bar with the Stratos Space Jump with a formula that pushed the consumption and
sharing of the brand to achieve both space and social records. In addition to braking viewer records on
Discovery it was also on You Tube live stream and viewed by over 8 million people, the impact on
Twitter and Facebook were significant as well:
Source: Digiday
The promise of the internet that we use to theorize about is being realized - we’ve moved beyond the
late nineties bonanza of walled web sites, portals shrouded in banner ads to embrace the social web.
We are now immersed in new ways of staying connected and the price of this capability necessitates an
economic model - advertising will sustain the new channel paradigm.
Welcome the digital mall – Facebook, twitter and the lot are the places that we live and interact and
much like television these channels require content for the audience to consume. The importance of
branded content is significant as it needs to stimulate sharing and as earned media it becomes a massive
driver of purchaser intent.
Timing of audience engagement will drive results – “Web visitors from social sites convert at 59%
higher rates to sales”
Source: Marketing Sherpa
Being able to watch the Super Bowl live via a network website was a true milestone this year as, we are
now able to broadcast our views to our friends and their friends and join the larger conversation
alongside the content in real-time. Twitter traffic was almost double the volume of last year at 24
million tweets. The Super Bowl has helped to usher in a new brand, content and audience dynamic,
welcome Agile Creative.
The ability to broadcast as an individual, across an open network to your friends, peers and beyond has
extensive implications for any b2c or b2b business be it the good the bad or the ugly that gets shared.
Author: Malcolm MacGregor

4.
Brands are faced with real challenges – where is my customer let alone who is my customer and how am
I going to earn their trust – how do you create relevant content in real-time?
The Super Bowl was game changing - there were 13 brands that jumped on the blackout during the
game. The event offered brands the chance to leverage a unique situation and a captive audience to
create and deliver topical ads during the game, in itself a milestone.
There is a big opportunity in what we’ve seen - delivering agile ads and content that engages an
audience to share and buy the brand. So, how does this approach work and scale in the absence of a big
event that has a high probability of viewership response?
The way we think about campaigns today has to change. Classic planning bears no comparison to the
way a brand’s audience lives and consumes – social and mobile have thrown the publishing calendar out
the door.
Adapt to your audience’s mindset, you audience will share ads as content that is relevant to their
interests, now the brand can trend with the conversation:
SETUP
Keeping it light and fun gets past audience filters
Think about the execution routine
INSIGHT
Play to the passions of your audience
Know what your audience is talking about
CREATIVE
Good creative speaks to the interests of the audience and gives them something to action
Copy and visual working together
TARGETTING
Know the conversation in channel
Profile the interests of the audience
“Interest targeting” gets the right message to the right audience (Twitter and Facebook)
Author: Malcolm MacGregor

5.
Clients are going to insist on ads and content that engages the audience to share and buy. We get
there with Agile Creative. Tips on the new routine:
 You are competing for time and mind share – what compels people is fundamental to an
outcome
 Think about your audience and how they interact in channel – Twitter is very different to
Facebook
 Make it easy for your audience to find the content by channel
 Promoting a community of sharing around the content will achieve outcome
 Optimize for a purchase by encouraging dialogue and sharing
Ideation and creative has to evolve from brand push to the brand in conversation. New tools are
entering the market as the cost of computing power drops, audience insights abound to take us past
passive listening to understanding. We need to use the right tools to listen to the right conversations
and manage execution.
And then we need to create new ways to build trust so we can join those conversations. Simply
shilling brand attributes won't cut it.
We’re now at the intersection of real-time advertising and content marketing.
To successfully monetize the intersection will require scale through process and insights. A profitable
game changer will require a systematic compliance-enabled approach of people and technology.
Building the right team and proposition:
 Hire people that can manage change and invent
 Engagement models parallel your audience habits and interests
 Define a commerce funnel that sync’s with your audience and sales
 Help your client bridge their marketing silo’s
 Create a single team of content development and social execution
 Set-up brand teams that track by audience
The model: real-time audience insights will inform the creation of relevant media; interest targeting will
deliver the right media by audience with a goal of optimizing earned media. Agile creative will require
the use of templates to manage content types by audience and channel baked into an execution routine
that a single insight informs the creation of a brand ads, featured content, sponsored stories, posts and
tweets that align with the audience trend.
Author: Malcolm MacGregor

6.
On the execution side knowing what conversation to join reduces time and effort around AB testing
while informing interest targeting and optimized real-time bids. As part of this model other applications
include:
Brand & Reputation Monitoring
Crisis Management
Gartner predicts that CMOs will outspend CIOs by 2017. Specifically, marketers will spend more on
unified, integrated technology solutions that eliminate data and business silos.
Source: Gartner Consulting
We’re at an important intersection that requires new thinking to sustain the increasing intensive process
of creating audience relevant content while aligning campaigns with sales. The brand now has a new
daily routine of audience engagement that entertains and informs through agile creative.
Social is fueling change and agile will work - understanding the new mix of brand and media by audience
will deliver KPI’s and ROI.
We can now focus on being great communicators, not researchers.
END
Author: Malcolm MacGregor