Thanks, Collaboration
Collaboration: another business-bingo buzzword of the day? Or the key to survival for brands and agencies through times of uncertainty? Chris McCarthy, Head of Creative Strategy at Google Zoo, explains how structured collaboration breaks down silos, integrates purpose into teams and delivers outstanding innovative results.
“It’s amazing to see silos fall and the creative possibilities open up as different teams – digital or retail departments of a client – start to imagine new user experiences that are neither ‘your idea’ to resist, nor ‘my idea’ to defend, but ‘our idea’ to nurture and bring to fruition together. Emotional commitment matters in getting stuff done.”
The first key area of collaboration is people and process
Today we recognise that value can come from many places and be delivered by various media channels, in a way that yesteryear’s model didn’t allow. It’s commonplace now that we operate in a far more cross-functional, multidisciplinary way, so it’s only normal that we all sit together to imagine and deliver user experiences that work together, wherever someone chooses to engage with a brand.
But sometimes inspiration comes by including a more diverse perspective, beyond the one-person-per-agency regulars. I remember learning this lesson, twice.
The first time was in New York, 2001. My agency regularly used a clinical psychologist to conduct in-home interviews with our target audiences. Walking out of one interview with a millionaire luxury cruise traveller in her penthouse overlooking Central Park, the psychologist turned to me and said: “It’s called inflation, what she felt back there. It’s how you feel when you’re in love. The sky is bluer, the sun is brighter. You’re taller, more beautiful. Everything’s somehow perfect, like your fondest memory. Talk to that feeling.”
We ran back to the agency and briefed the team based on that human insight. It saved us a month of research and I still remember the beautiful, resonant copy that was crafted for the campaign.
The second time was in a brand equity workshop for a L’Oréal skincare brand in Paris, where by far the most useful person in the room was the architect. He allowed us to appreciate and evaluate brand ideas and concepts through his architect’s understanding of shape, form and volume. He forced us all to think in a different way, re-appraising and revisiting our earlier assumptions, stepping out of the boundaries of our own, familiar disciplines.
Beyond the diverse skills and perspectives we need to draw on today, how we work plays a huge part. To avoid drowning in the collaborative pool of confusion, how can we best inspire and guide teams to get to better outcomes faster? And how do we make sure that ‘many collaborators’ doesn’t lead to projects fizzling out because ‘no-one owned them’ once the exhilaration of the workshop subsides and everyone goes back to their day jobs?
Our team at Google Zoo tried to answer this question. We took the design sprint model used by many teams today (including Google Ventures and engineering, product and UX), and tailored it specifically to the work we do with brand advertisers and their creative partners. We call it Machine SprintTM – ‘from problem to prototype’.
The key ingredients are working on a specific brief in a focused Sprint format, with all the key decision-makers from the brand, creative, media and production agency teams, plus our own teams with deep skills in Google tech (from analytics and insights to product and creative technology expertise). It’s nothing if not collaborative – cross-functional, cross-agency teams, cross-product and platform scope. Cross-everything. It’s amazing to see silos fall and the creative possibilities open up as different teams – digital or retail departments of a client – start to imagine new user experiences that are neither ‘your idea’ to resist, nor ‘my idea’ to defend, but ‘our idea’ to nurture and bring to fruition together. Emotional commitment matters in getting stuff done.
So beyond bringing in the voice of the user, we use prototyping and user testing in the Sprint, which fast-tracks the creative process so we can get live feedback on what works. For instance, we’ve involved children’s writers to craft stories for the Google Assistant; video editors to edit ad versions in real time; and YouTube creators to imagine formats and content ideas in one of our YouTube Spaces. This has proved to be one of the best forms of collaboration and we are able to move to tangible outputs in record time.
One Marketing Director walked out of day two of our Machine SprintTM with a working prototype of a Google Assistant experience, to help urban runners choose the best trainers for their needs. It’s now built into the product pages of Nike.com.
By thinking together about how we’ll build and produce things after we leave the room, we up our hit rate. It’s that simple. We end each Machine SprintTM with a session anticipating the barriers to success in getting the work live, then align an action plan to overcome these obstacles and a timeline with clear owners for each task.
So far it’s working well for us, for our clients and for their creative, media, and production partners – other teams will find their own collaborative models that work for them. The more innovative thinking, piloting and testing here, the better.
So more collaboration across skills and perspectives equals better work, with more chance of getting live. So far, so good.
The second major area of collaboration? Technology.
In our ever-more-interconnected world, technology, data, signals, information, rich human stories hiding as numbers, our dreams, hopes and heroines... all these now flow across borders of physical and digital, across devices and platforms, across senses, as never before.
In his excellent book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur tells us that ‘technologies are put together or combined from component parts or assemblies’ – the combination principle where technology 3 = technology 1 + technology 2.
“Brands can’t survive outside of culture. Culture’s changing fast, and it’s enabled by technology.”
This core idea of technologies combining (collaborating) together is, I think, more at work today than ever before. Open source, open platforms, open programming languages. APIs, the way programmes interface with each other, allow collaboration with fluidity at scale.
Take one humble, publicly-available technological data stream that we got the grip of in 325 BCE (AKA what time is it?) then combine it with another publicly-available technological data stream (the schedule of aeroplanes flying over Picadilly Circus in London) and bingo! You’ve got a Cannes Grand Prix-winning piece of magic on your hands for British Airways. Make tech collaborate the right way and you can create magical experiences that delight and inspire wonder, as well as inform.
Think of tech in three buckets, if it helps. Input. Process. Output.
On the input side we can now collect, collate, compare, contrast – collaborate with – ever more data. This helps us decode the human stories hiding in the numbers, so we can inform the strategic choices we need to make.
Data is creativity’s best friend, because it makes creativity smarter. Better understanding our users compels us to craft content and experiences that are more relevant and meaningful for them.
Being able to serve video content on YouTube based on someone’s individual Google Search queries means we can deliver the content that users love the most.
If Content is still Queen, then Context is certainly a senior royal of some sort.
We can now analyse more data than ever, at scale and simultaneously in a hyper-local way. We’re able to ask one question at a national scale, but get answers at street level, thanks to creative new approaches in our data analytics where first-party data collaborates with Google’s data perspective, unlocking new value for brands.
Next up, process: how do we make sense of all this data when there’s so much of it? How do we get the tech out of the way to let the magic happen? One answer is to use the Cloud. The processing power of open source Cloud platforms like TensorFlow or Google Cloud Vision let us create seamless user experiences that can feel magical: just point your Android phone at something and your phone recognises what it is, invites you to find out more, watch a video or even click to buy it. These technologies help us interact – collaborate – with the physical world around us in new and exciting ways. Our environment becomes our interface.
As for output technologies, this is now our creative toolkit. In a given week, our Zoo teams work on many products and tech platforms: YouTube, Display, Google Assistant, and more. The silos here are disappearing: we can go from watching a YouTube ad for Assassin’s Creed to playing the game on Stadia within five seconds, at one click. Livestream it back on YouTube at another. Life’s smoother when technologies collaborate like this, from the structure of technology itself all the way through to fluid UX.
Collaboration involves a wider, cultural context.
If some brands thought they could soldier on by hammering home the old models of push marketing, one-size-fits-all messaging and scaled physical distribution deals, while ignoring the culture their consumers (that’s you and me, real people) live in and co-create, they’re rapidly wising up now.
“Data is creativity’s best friend, because it makes creativity smarter. Better understanding our users compels us to craft content and experiences that are more relevant and meaningful for them.”
They’re having to, not least because people now connect their purchasing habits to issues like sustainability, diversity and inclusion, social and even political causes. Transparency via social media means that many more people care about, and are knowledgeable about, things that should concern brand owners. The doormen at the Dorchester Hotel may claim to be only the friendly face of an inclusive brand, but the crowds outside beg to differ. Our collaborative cultural and media landscape now connects the retail or media property to brand purpose, and corporate practice, far more directly and rapidly.
This should encourage brands to stop talking at people and do more enjoying with them – based on understanding them better. You can’t collaborate with someone if you don’t know them or get their values. Collaboration here means better connections with culture and communities. With human beings. With purpose. The big stuff.
When we bring more diverse perspectives and skill sets together, and guide everyone through the process using an effective methodology, we foster emotional buy-in among teams and create more powerful, more relevant work with more chances of going live. When we align and combine the right technologies for our specific challenge, we build more compelling and fluid experiences, and can fast-track from ideation to user testing to production. When we connect brands with people and culture in a way that’s empathetic and feels genuine, we’ll forge more meaningful, longer-lasting bonds, with individuals and communities, at scale. Thanks, collaboration. Works for me.
Author: Chris McCarthy, Head of Creative Strategy at Google Zoo
Chris has spent over 20 years working as a creative strategist in digital and traditional creative agencies, connecting some of the world’s biggest brands to people via culture. He now leads Google Zoo’s team of creative strategists and analysts.