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.