How AI, data, and platforms can converge to make brand interactions more human in 2024
“The world is changing faster than ever!”
“Tech is advancing at an exponential rate!”
“Robot overlords!”
We get it. Sure, if it’s mostly true, but what can we as marketers do to survive and grow in this ever-shifting environment? Of course you need to be more digital. You also need to be more human.
Humanity is the warm and fuzzy core of technology’s cold and crunchy shell. It’s what connects us with others, inspires us to create, and drives us to make a difference. It’s what sets us apart from the machines and platforms that are increasingly enmeshed in our lives. But humanity is also fragile. It can be lost, forgotten, or ignored in the pursuit of efficiency, convenience, or algorithms.
Brands that want to survive and thrive beyond the next 3, 5, or 10 years will be the ones that embrace both the gooey and the crunchy; those who use digital to be more human.
In working across a diverse range of industries across healthcare, pharma, tech, CPG, business process outsourcing (BPO), and sports, we at S50 see similarities to customers that others might miss. There’s a lot you can learn from observing a first-time homebuyer and people using genetic screens.
In a series of blog posts, we’ll share with you some of the insights, ideas, and examples of how to be more digital and more human, especially with AI, in 2024. We will explore topics such as:
Join us on this journey. We’ll explore how to be more digital and more human in 2024 together. Because the future belongs to those who can balance both.
Stay tuned for our next post, where we will dive into the first topic: How to use AI to enhance, not replace, human creativity and intelligence.
S50
More Digital. More Human.
What is Agile Marketing? Agile originated with software developers and tech companies like Apple, around the time that manufacturing companies pioneered “lean manufacturing.” The lean mentality started at companies, like Toyota, as a way to speed up production, promote collaboration, and identify cost efficiencies. And it’s a process that can be applied in a number of industries, more specifically, marketing and advertising.
Today, many brands and agencies still do things the old, traditional way (long lead times, high costs, modest success). That’s where Agile comes in…as a catalyst for the relentless pursuit of iterating and scaling to bigger, better ideas with efficiency and speed. A model much better suited to keep pace with the entrepreneurial spirit (and budget sizes) of companies today.
Here are ten reasons why companies of all sizes should embrace Agile Marketing:
1. Ongoing Engagement vs. Risky Big-Bang
Dumping all your money into a giant bet (unless it’s for a truly strategic reason) might take your brand to the cleaners…instead of to the bank.
The Agile Marketing approach calls for quick validation of ideas. Before launching full-scale campaigns, Agile allows you to learn early if the concept resonates. First, decide on an MVP (Minimal Viable Product)—this is the simplest essence of your final output. Then, get it in front of your audience. Your MVP might be a social post or an email, but its purpose is to gather immediate learnings. Ideally, test several versions in order to fail fast on the ones that don’t work and scale the ones that do. This process takes the opinion and subjectivity out of the equation, because crossing your fingers and hoping a concept will work for the market does not protect your investment, or guarantee success.
2. Scale What Works. Kill What Doesn’t
The beauty of real-time means you can dial up success and knock out failures fast.
One of the tenets of Agile Marketing is to start small, learn and scale. Once you understand what a customer responds and relates to, how you improve your output is critical. The Agile process allows teams to apply their learnings to a better and smarter version of their MVP—that’s when the real iteration begins. This fundamental approach allows you to keep up with and stay ahead of the rapidly changing marketplace.
3. Transparency, Collaboration and Trust
Daily rundowns make “agencies” and “clients” more like friends.
The Agile Marketing process inherently builds stronger teamwork between internal and external teams. Deep hierarchies have no place in Agile. Upper management must either be an active participant in the process, or empower someone on your team to make decisions on their behalf. It’s about making decisions quickly and not about watering down the ideas through internal gatekeepers. Success depends on the ability to get raw (but polished) ideas out to consumers quickly. Daily stand-up meetings keep the momentum going and foster an environment of self-regulation and responsibility. Key team members gather every day for 15 minutes to discuss 3 things: what did you get accomplished yesterday, what will you accomplish today and what barriers are in your way to accomplishing those tasks? This constant contact and collaboration creates true “community” within the workplace. Agile Marketing requires trust, face-to-face discussions, decisiveness and a general feeling of ownership across the teams.
4. Creates a “Culture of Doing”
We could spin in meetings all day long, but we all know that’s not how work gets done.
While you hope that all employees have the same spirit and personal stake in the work that you do, Agile Marketing encourages a sense of urgency among all employees to “get it done.” If the right people are empowered, there are less meetings, less wasted time and less roadblocks.
5. More Focus = Better Quality
Prioritized sprints without the churn and burn, make the work sparkle and the brand shine.
With daily stand-ups and project management tools (i.e. Trello, Slack, Jira, among others) designed to itemize tasks, assign owners and aid in real-time communication, all internal and external partners know:
An equally important piece to the workflow is splitting the work into two-week sprints.
Assigning a deliverable at the end of every single sprint cycle also ensures that the team feels confident it is getting value out of the process.
6. You can do more with less
We’re all expected to drive more growth with fewer dollars. Now, we can.
Brands have limited resources and Agile allows teams to focus on what’s important and impactful, letting busywork fall by the wayside. By breaking down all projects (large and small) into manageable deliverables, and creating a backlog of all tasks to be done, the team can work together to promote the most pressing or easily doable tasks into the sprints.
7. Test. Optimize. Iterate.
Let consumers decide what they like, then take those insights and build on them.
Brands can’t afford to be slow to market, nor is there budget to outspend the competition. But you can outsmart and outpace bigger, more cumbersome agencies and brands with Agile Marketing. It allows (more like demands) teams to stay on top of trends, and learn what customers think in real time so they can turn around and utilize those data-driven results.
8. Meet consumers where they are with tailored conversations.
You need to approach your target and break the ice with common interests.
The days of crowded lecture halls are long over. Consumers expect to be courted, and your opening line better be good.
9.0 It makes your brand interesting.
Small talk doesn’t cut it. You need to mine for content diamonds.
Brands often struggle to find a place in the constantly changing digital world. Successful brands make killer content, and killer content is created by digging deep for reader insights and unearthing smart, sometimes obscure, nuggets of subject matter.
10. Flexible and fast-acting.
Something huge happen? Jump on it immediately and create relevancy before you can say, “John Snow Lives!”
You’re either on time, or you’re late. Being agile allows you to move quickly with less red tape so your message can see the light of day before the night is over.
Agile Marketing gets your teams to faster, better, brilliance in half the time (or less!) than traditional approaches allow, so you can get to market and in front of consumers quickly. Because the reality is, having the right message at the right time (before your competition) is critical to standing out from the crowd and winning consumers hearts—and wallets.
It’s no secret that here at Scrum50, we’ve built our business on the changing dynamic of today’s fast-paced world. Thanks to the plethora of technology that makes it possible to speed up the exchange of information, we’ve got it all at our fingertips at any given time. Social media channels play a HUGE part in this shift in mindset. The immediate sharing of content, and the instantaneous engagement of brands with their audiences, make social platforms fertile ground for testing out new ideas and gathering real consumer feedback.
We pride ourselves on helping clients like Beech-Nut, Fusion Brands and Spark Modern Fires build a deeper connection with their consumers through their social media channels. Through it all, we’ve come to develop a set of universal best practices when it comes to customer engagement on social. We wanted to spread the love and share our top 5 social media rules that we live and breathe by on a daily basis.
Moving at the speed of light means lots of planning ahead. It all starts with a brand narrative. What story do we want to tell at a higher level? What does the editorial posting calendar look like? Who is responsible for what aspects – from imagery, content, feedback, monitoring, etc.? Taking the time up front to plan as a team so we’re all on the same page moving forward is ESSENTIAL to social media success. Having your plan and process in place from the start allows you to take on anything and everything that comes your way. For us at Scrum50, this allows our team to be nimble to tackle the unexpected.
Social media can be a very reactive channel. As everyone knows from public figures on Twitter (or Snapchat or any other network), whatever you put out on social is there for good. Even if you delete it 30 seconds later, you can be sure that the post isn’t going to just die. Good or bad it will take on a life of its own. At Scrum50 we make it a point not to be reactive. Even though we are Agile (note: Agile doesn’t mean purely speed), we still make sure to take a breather and fully think through any potentially controversial posts to understand the different reactions that may occur. Sometimes you want that controversy to create a stir and other times you don’t…just make sure you think it through because that post is living on whether you want it to or not.
In this sense, we mean specifically the number of different channels. Many times we see companies that want to have a presence on each and every social media network out there. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat…the list is endless. But, if you are leaving these channels empty and not engaging thoroughly enough or the right way for that channel, it’s not a good look for your brand. We believe that it’s a much more efficient use of your time and budget to create great content for one channel vs. mediocre content for several. It’s best to focus on the channels that make sense for your brand, are popular with your target consumers and that you have time for. Add on when and if you are ready, but keep it simple to highlight your brand most effectively.
Social media is inherently Agile. Pretty much right away you can see what’s working and measure the images getting the most likes, messages with the most comments and overall understand what concepts are most engaging to your audience. The more you know, the better you can be. So, set aside time to look at results and compare the best posts getting traction, creating conversations, and driving website traffic. Then you know what’s working and can only to continue to improve from there.
We consider social media an ongoing conversation between the brand and their core audience. The best advice that we can give for social media is to create great content and keep it going. Continue the engagement and create a dynamic conversation that you actually want to be a part of. These are the types of conversations that build trust and keep your customers interested and engaged in what your brand has to say, because they actually like you and enjoy the conversation.
So, there you have it. Plan ahead, learn, build, create great content and your social media channels will continue to grow.
Here at Scrum50, we’ve been creating content since our inception in 2014 for clients like American Express, Xerox, Nestlé Waters, Conduent, Beech-Nut and more. Our clients love our strategic approach and methodology to create effective content to promote their brand message. We’re excited today to formally introduce you all to our Agile Content Lab. We’ve formalized our process, fortified our structure, and even hired a snazzy new content lead to strengthen our strategic approach.
Now we know what you’re saying… ‘sure, every agency has a content studio of some kind’. But not like this one. Our agile approach to content creation is what makes us different. We start with lots of little germs of content and messaging ideas, push them to market at lightening speed and with our proprietary algorithm, gauge which content and message gets the most traction with consumers. Then, we quickly grow those messages to bigger, better and more brilliant content, ideas and campaigns. We place smaller, less risky bets out there in an effort to scale the sure things.
Part of our process includes our Narrative Architecture approach that we employ for our clients that essentially defines their authority within their space in an engaging way. Think of it this way…we’ve all been to cocktail parties where there’s that guy who only talks about himself and how great he is without actually engaging in conversation with others. Let’s call him Bob. Well, Bob becomes boring really fast. He stands and holds court amongst unsuspecting party-goers who just came to have fun and meet some interesting people. Don’t be like Bob. We help your brand find the common interest with your customers and build a narrative approach to keep those customers interested in you because they like you, not because they’re held captive.
As part of the Scrum50 creative department led by Executive Creative Director and Partner, Jen Miller, Brady Coffey, VP Content Director, was brought on to run the Agile Content Lab overseeing a fulltime and contract editorial team along with video capabilities and executive producer. Coffey joins Scrum50 from past agency tenures at Digitas, Epsilon and Ryan Partnership, where he created work for the NFL, NASCAR, Abercrombie, MasterCard, Dove, Dove Men+Care, Hellmann’s and Simple. While he may not know a hooker from a line-out, he did rock a rugby shirt with wide-wale cords back in college. It was the ’90s. You know, back around the same time the Internet was being invented. So that means he’s been there since the beginning. Back when content was nothing more than HTML text littered with blue, underlined hyperlinks. We’ve come a long way since then, as have Brady’s fashion choices.
Nowadays we expect content that is more engaging, contextually relevant and intrinsically valuable. That’s the type of stuff we spend our time on, and that’s exactly the type of work Brady is leading at Scrum50. With his deep understanding of what motivates people to connect with brands, Brady is poised and ready to unleash Scrum50’s agile marketing ninja skills on an unsuspecting, content-hungry public.
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
My favorite quote is from the “Wizard of Westwood,” John Wooden, the UCLA head coach who won 10 NCAA national basketball championships in a 12-year period, including seven in a row:
“Never mistake activity for achievement.”
— John Wooden
Everybody loves to learn from winners, and there was nobody better than Wooden in his business. His teams won a men’s college basketball record 88 consecutive games. Wooden’s unbelievable streak of seven consecutive NCAA championships needs to be considered in context: to this day no other coach or school has won the tournament more than two consecutive years.
Wooden’s wisdom teaches that:
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
People pay attention when they hear Google is applying agile marketing to its creative processes. Google’s process is a six-step methodology called, “The Design Sprint.” It’s a way for designers to attack a marketing project and gather comments and quickly integrate that input.
Google “Google Design Sprint” and you will see at the top of the Google results in an article titled “How To Conduct Your Own Google Ventures Design Sprint.” There are a number of articles in the results below that article.
I like to point out that agile methodology is spreading beyond the marketing industry, but the impact is large, deep, and, may I say, “tectonic” in the marketing field because big brands are hustling to embrace it.
As Google pointed out, agile marketing’s technique of the “sprint” gives marketing teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching.
The interesting thing is the resistance level that agile methodologies are continuing to encounter at terminally traditional advertising agencies and old-school companies since this “lean mentality” was introduced.
Sooner or later, even the dinosaurs among us will need to embrace the agile movement…it’s the way the world is heading.
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
Agile Marketing eliminates the need for traditional market research because there is an inherent feedback mechanism woven into the fabric of the movement Here’s why:
With help from MarketerGizmo along with other trusted sources, we’ve collected a glossary of terms used in Agile Marketing.
Be sure to check back. New terms will be added as we learn and discover them.
* Items are terms created by Scrum50
Agile: A tactical marketing approach in which marketing teams collectively identify high-value projects on which to focus their collective efforts. Teams use sprints (short, finite periods of intensive work) to complete those projects cooperatively.
Adaptability: The ability of a marketing team to adjust to changes in the market, feedback from their customers, the competitive landscape, and data from their campaigns. The goal of adaptability is to avoid being trapped in a pre-established marketing plan even when it becomes clear that changes need to be made.
Backlog: An evolving list of product requirements, prioritized by the customer (or customer representative), that conveys to an Agile team that features to implement first. Agile projects typically employ a top level backlog, known as a product backlog. Each Agile team working on a project usually creates a backlog for each development iteration, known as an iteration backlog or sprint backlog.
At either the release level or iteration level, a backlog typically comprises features or requirements, often expressed regarding user stories, that may be assigned estimates (e.g., in points or hours) by the development team. The customer or customer representative prioritizes the items in the backlog (and may assign them business value).
Burn-down chart: A visual chart showing the daily progress of tasks during a sprint.
Burn-up Chart: A chart showing the evolution of an increase in a measure against time. Burn-up charts are an optional implementation within Scrum to make progress transparent.
Business owners: A small group of stakeholders that has ultimate responsibility for the value delivered by a sprint. Their primary role is in sprint planning and review to help with prioritization.
Decomposition: The process of breaking user stories down into a) smaller, more executable user stories or b) tasks. Epics may be broken down into user stories, and tasks may be organized into more laser-focused tasks.
Development Team: The role within a Scrum Team accountable for managing, organizing and doing all development work required to create a releasable Increment of product every Sprint.
Epic: A large user story, goal or objective that needs to be tackled over multiple sprints and/or broken down into smaller, more manageable increments.
* Epic Platform: The essence of a brand that gives it a voice in marketing, advertising, and social platforms.
Fail Fast: A strategy of trying something, getting fast feedback, and then rapidly inspecting and adapting. In the presence of high levels of uncertainty, it is often less expensive to start working on a product, learn whether we made a good decision, and if not, kill it fast before more money is spent.
Fans: Other employees that, while not players in the sprint, may have projects that are impacted by sprint objectives. They typically observe and do not participate in sprint planning or review.
* Field Guide: A document that outlines the channel and content strategy for a brand.
Framework: A collection of values, principles, practices, and rules that form the foundation of Scrum-based development.
Hypothesis: A possible source for a sprint task/objective, this is something your team wants to test and evaluate. For example, by moving our introductory video so that it’s adjacent to our call to action we can improve the both video views and action completion rates.
Impediment: Any obstacle preventing a developer or team from completing work. One of the three focusing questions each member of a Scrum team answers during the daily Stand Up Meeting is: What impediments stand in your way? Impediments can include: A meeting to attend, a lack of technical expertise, a technical issue.
Iteration: A repeating instance or occurrence. Sprints are said to be iterative because they are repeated over and over with new tasks/goals/objectives. Waterfall marketing plans are not iterative because they are done only once.
* Path-Through-Purchase™: The journey a consumer takes from awareness, consideration, purchase, “use” and social sharing.
Persona: A fictional character with individual needs, goals, and habits, created by an Agile team as a representative user, to serve as a reference point for usability during product development. Agile teams may refer to a set of personas as they develop a product, to test whether or not the product meets these users’ needs and desires.
Players: Those taking part in a sprint by owning particular tasks.
Product Owner: Person whom holds the vision for the product and is responsible for maintaining, prioritizing and updating the product backlog. In Scrum, the Product Owner has final authority representing the customer’s interest in backlog prioritization and requirements questions. This person must be available to the team at any time, but especially during the sprint planning meeting and the sprint review meeting.
Retrospective: A meeting held at the end of a sprint cycle to determine what worked and what did not work with an eye toward continuous improvement.
Scrum or Stand Up: A daily meeting during which team members stand up and report to one another on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and any obstacles they are encountering.
Scrum Board: A physical board to visualize information for and by the Scrum Team, often used to manage Sprint Backlog. Scrum boards are an optional implementation within Scrum to make information visible.
* Scrum Circles: A series of visuals that outline key brand values and what those values mean to the brand or company.
Scrum Master: The person responsible for running all sprint plannings, sprint reviews, sprint retrospectives and daily scrum meetings. This person ensures that things stay on task during these meetings. They are also responsible for helping remove impediments to progress brought up during daily scrum/stand ups.
Scrum Team: A self-organizing team consisting of a Product Owner, Development Team, and Scrum Master.
Sprint: The length of time allotted for achieving particular marketing goals. Software development sprints tend to run about 2 weeks; marketing sprints may need to be longer if statistically relevant data on current objectives will take longer to gather. Feel free to adjust the length of your marketing sprints based on what you’re trying to test/achieve for that particular sprint, but don’t go any longer than six weeks.
Sprint Backlog: A prioritized list of tasks to be accomplished during the sprint
Sprint Goal: A short expression of the purpose of a Sprint, often a business problem that is addressed. Functionality might be adjusted during the Sprint to achieve the Sprint Goal.
Sprint planning meeting: A meeting held at the beginning of a sprint. Attended by players, business owners, scrum master, and fans. During this meeting, you should determine what you want to achieve during the sprint using the product backlog and dialog with the entire team to determine the time that work will take. This will form the sprint backlog.
Sprint Poker or Planning Poker: How the team estimates the relative effort required for addressing user stories in the backlog.
Sprint Review: Business owners, players, scrum master and fans re-assemble just as in the sprint planning meeting, this time to see what goals were completed and which ones were not. Team members get to show off what they have completed and/or learned, such as new email campaigns, blog posts, or metrics. Incomplete goals may be moved into the product backlog for consideration in future sprints.
Success Criteria: Criteria used to determine if a task is complete. Typically evaluated by a product owner.
Task: In Scrum, a unit of work estimated in hours. During the iteration planning meeting, user stories are decomposed into tasks.
* Try Pyramid: A three-tiered triangle that outlines a brand’s entry stakes, valued attributes, and differentiating characteristics.
User story: A sentence that states in plain language what a customer or consumer may want or need from your product. They are used to drive what goals and tasks are addressed during a sprint based on their priorities.
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
Lockheed’s Skunk Works became legendary for its ability to create impossible flying machines in no time flat. As Matthew E. May explains in his Fast Company article, “the term skunk works has come to refer to any effort involving an elite special team … usually tasked with breakthrough innovation on limited budgets and under aggressive timelines.”
When you look at the compressed timelines, lean teams, and simplified approvals process of the classic skunk works project, it all reminds you of the creative forces that shape agile marketing. What Lockheed’s Skunk Works did to aviation speed to market, agile methodologies promise to do for marketing agencies and departments.
What is agile? Agile originated with software developers and tech companies like Apple, around the time that manufacturing companies pioneered “lean manufacturing.” Lean started at companies like Toyota, as a process to speed up production, promote collaboration, and identify cost efficiencies.
Agile practices that grew out of the lean philosophy have spun off into agile marketing, which modernizes old school marketing and advertising habits.
Agile is a process that uses small, self-sufficient teams to work on projects meant to be completed in an abbreviated time-scale. Agile methodology delivers in three ways:
Instead of the traditional campaign development cycle in which you’re briefed by a client, go through a lengthy planning process, formulate ideas, mull them over, and finally present a concept, agile identifies a selection of smart ideas and quickly puts those concepts out into the marketplace to validate which ones work.
Agile marketing places great value on feedback from the field versus relying on traditional market research. Agile tests ideas, so they sink or swim. The key is securing real-world feedback.
You start by determining what a “minimally viable product” (MVP) may look like, and then you examine how quickly you can:
In each iteration, the agile practitioner is making a bet, with the idea of scaling up those ideas or programs that do work. But you’re placing a lot of small bets rather than one big high-risk one. Naturally, not every bet will pay off. But some will. Failure occurs only when the bets are limited, i.e., below the radar — limiting any damage to consumer relationships — not to mention brand reputation.
Agile marketing flattens agency hierarchies. It identifies the essential team members at an agency and leaves agencies lean because layers have been cut and the nonproductive removed. A traditional agency has multiple tiers of approvals; an agile agency has one. The agile agency model is compact, streamlined, and dynamic. Is it any surprise agile is attracting more and more attention — and assignments — from brands big and small?
Agile agencies are the skunk works of the marketing world.
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
I like what Jae Goodman has to say in her article about dealing with clients titled “The Client Is Often (but Not Always) Right, and 11 Other Rules to Work By — Including Only Do Business With People You Respect” in which advises, ” Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Yes, it’s the personal connection you make with your client that will always make all the difference.
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
Resist the impulse to vet your marketing concepts through the “dream crushers” at your agency (or client) because they always seek consensus. And consensus is creative death.
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
There is no shortage of experts promoting agile marketing.
But how many have put it into practice? Talk is easy. Agile is rigorous. The difference between the practical and theoretical is why you are seeing such widely differing definitions of terms like “agile metrics.”
By Michael LeBeau
CEO, Managing Partner, Founder
Scrum50
In real life, conversation happens naturally. Nobody stops to dissect it. In forgetting that consumers are in a conversation with brands, brands can make the same mistake. Brands that aren’t introspective can see themselves as one thing while consumers perceive them as something else entirely.