Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Every Agency Needs An Innovation Lab

Safe adventure, investment marketing, risk marketing, measureable innovation. Call it what you will but the more I talk to agencies and clients the more I am convinced that to survive, the first/only rule we reallly need to adhere to is McKinsey's 80/20.

Spend 80% on stuff you know works and 20% on measurable innovation.

As the environment continues to be challenging clients are stripping back budgets and expecting those budgets to work hard. They and their agencies are shying away from doing anything that can't be very closely related to sales or is out of the ordinary. No real issue there but this will over time deliver diminishing returns, sacked clients and bored agencies.

To survive we all need to try new things and develop new ways of reaching our audiences. But it needs to be measurable. If the ideas work they are rolled in to the 80% if not we learn and move on. Rather than try and sell those in on an adhoc basis, fighting for budgets in the weeds, we need to all buy into this at a high level.

It keeps work interesting but most importantly keeps us moving, keeps us evolving...and we get to do stuff like this...




9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree with this more. Especially in this age of innovation and new media/technologies, it's more important than ever for agencies to keep up with emerging trends. Innovation labs are a must.

satrio said...

Agency not only need Innovation but the important point is to know what their customer need and how to full fill theri needs. it's just simple friend

Ven @ Money Making Tips said...

Rightly said, innovation as well as experimentation are more important to survey better, especially in meeting the needs of your clients !

Thanks

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot for 80/20 rule..i being a system admin use this rule to assign IP address and happy to see we can also use it this way..

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buy flashlight said...

Inovation lab nowadays is very important, that is why agencies and companies really need it.

air max 90 said...

Great post. I appreciate you bringing this forward.

Simon Bell said...

nice one!

Brandon Johnson said...

At my job, we call that the Google20 or the 3M 15... where Google gives employees 20% of the time for innovation.

This is also how the POST IT NOTES were improved and innovated, since their inventors were allowed time to go and innovate and research how college students used their products!

Raymeds.com said...

Hello,
Its great to be here... very interesting blog post. Thanks very much!