WHAT MAKES YOU tick?
That's a question that drives Laura Lang, president of Boston-based Digitas. “My MBA from Wharton was in finance, but as I looked at opportunities, I found I was much more interested in marketing,” says the Warwick, RI native. “I wanted to know what made people do things, and how you could [give people a reason] to do something different. I fell in love with understanding what motivated people.”
Lang, 50, began her career on the client side, in product and brand management at the Quaker Oats Co., Bristol-Myers and Pfizer Pharmaceutical Co.. She then spent time as senior vice president/group manager at Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. “That's where I first developed my love for analytics,” she says.
After that, she served as president at Marketing Corp. of America, where she did strategic consulting for clients in the retail, electronics and information, entertainment, travel, and gaming industries. In 1999, she joined Digitas and ran the company's New York office for several years.
“Coming here was exciting to me, because it was the only place I saw in the agency world that was pulling all this together,” Lang says.
Despite her background in analytics, she doesn't just see herself as a number-cruncher.
“I'd put myself squarely in the middle,” she says. “I love creative ideas, it's very energizing. I love that in today's world we need to not only have insights but also understand the technology and how to deliver those [ideas].”
We talked with Lang at her Boston office, only a few blocks from retail and historical landmarks like Filene's Basement and Boston Common.
It's communications almost that intimate that now interest Lang. The plethora of new media options means marketers can connect with their audience in a much more personal way. The key, she says, is to discover which is the most sensible way for each client. While some may want to hop onto a trend — blogs, for example — Lang feels a better approach is to really analyze the market's needs before jumping on a bandwagon.
“We're encouraging our clients to think about how they harness the trend of personal publishing,” she says. “Instead of saying, ‘We need a blog,’ we sit down and ask: ‘What kind of connection are we trying to make?’” You need places where consumers can generate a dialogue. Start with what you want to accomplish. A blog for a blog's sake probably isn't going to get anybody home anymore.”
The eternal challenge in direct marketing, of course, always has been to get the right creative and the right message to your prospect in a way they can relate to. “I can deliver a message in the right place at the right time but it needs to be the right engagement,” Lang says.
When asked about a client who's doing a good job of that, Lang smiles and immediately names American Express. A new card application is completed online for American Express every eight seconds, and 50% of its cards in the United Kingdom are acquired online.
Because of results like these, Lang says she's seeing ad dollars moving online. “But what's really happening is that clients are saying they need to shift their dollars where they get more return. And the Web is only part of it. It might be the integration of mobile and music and iPods. We're seeing clients shift dollars into channels that can get a direct engagement, that can get a direct, accountable experience.”
Many clients are swimming in the mobile waters, but no one is seeing mass-scale returns yet. “The hypothesis is that we will get there, so we have clients who are saying let me [start] now,” Lang notes.
And clients also are extremely comfortable with the world of online viral video. “Everyone's trying to get in on the YouTube bandwagon,” she says. “You can't control what other people post but you can control what you say about [your own brand].”
When Digitas' client Gillette launched the Fusion razor, the agency created a campaign based on the concept that women rejected scruffy-looking men. An unbranded Web site called NoScruff.org served as the online headquarters for a group of women taking up the cause of getting men to shave. The site featured a mini-movie called “In your Dreams, Stubble Boy,” where a man has a nightmare that his girlfriend and all the women in the world stop shaving. The video popped up on sites also over the world, and eventually the razor company branded the effort to link itself back to the campaign. “It was a great way to start a discussion,” Lang says.
Despite this obvious convergence of branding and direct, Lang doesn't necessarily feel clients are concentrating on finding a one-stop shop. Rather, they look for an agency partner that delivers “the absolute best outcome.”
According to Lang, they are saying: “I want smart, I care less about scale. If you come in and show me how to create those experiences and get returns, then that's what I want.”
And how does Digitas achieve that in a multichannel world?
“We partner with general agencies that tend to produce the large network commercials and those relationships are very positive for us and our clients. I think the roles are very blurred,” Lang adds. “Today it's hard to say one channel works separate from the other.”
But that doesn't mean Digitas isn't diversifying its own capabilities. In 2004, the company acquired online marketing agency Modem Media, and this January it purchased the healthcare marketing shop Medical Broadcasting Co.
“I love pharma,” Lang says. It's such an untapped opportunity for both the health professional and you and I who need those drugs. Health professionals are important consumers. They're used to very interactive, engaging experiences. On the consumer front, virtually everyone goes online to understand their issue or medication, often before they're seeing their doctor. This becomes an opportunity for unbranded content, as well as branded, to create the right partnerships.”
But there are challenges in marketing pharmaceuticals.
“Under the laws of our country, even if you raised your hand on our site, I won't know if you ultimately got a prescription for a pharmaceutical, because that would violate privacy laws,” Lang adds. “But we can know what kind of people we want to engage with our content, how many people are going online to get questions answered and the trends in prescriptions.”
In July, Digitas Inc. reported fee revenue for the second quarter was $100.5 million, compared with $87.6 million for the same period in 2005. And total revenue hit $190.9 million during the quarter, vs. $134.3 million for the same period last year. Yet despite those upward-looking results, the company lowered its marketing guidance for 2006, reportedly citing spending cuts by two clients and account losses. At press time, the company's stock was trading at 9.58, down from a 52-week high of 14.99.
“There always are things we can do better,” says Lang. “We are in a growth market and we're a growth company.”
And client budget cuts? It depends on what's being cut.
“We're definitely seeing individual companies that are cutting marketing budgets,” she says. “We're seeing no one that is cutting from the channels in which we work. We have a pharma company that's cutting marketing spending. But that doesn't mean from the dollars left they're not shifting them to our channels. And if a client pulls a product, then they're not going to market it.”
Another challenge, says Lang, is finding new talent fast enough to meet demand, “because in the end, it's a very personal business. We need to get people who understand today's world. In the old days you made a few phone calls. Today, you have to understand portals and servers and telcos and how is this stuff going to get out. And then you have to optimize it.”
Her support of her agency is unwavering. “We are trying to marry a lot of different interactive experiences,” she says. “We're getting a lot of new business and there's a lot of opportunity. We need to be able to recruit and train fast enough. But the good news is that this is a very exciting place to be right now.”
Personal Best: American Express/Tribeca Film Festival
As our world moves from response marketing to responsive on-demand marketing, the rules of content creation have changed dramatically. Consumers move seamlessly across media channels and marketers must recognize and use this liquid media world. In addition to interacting with their brands, consumers increasingly want to be participants in the creative process. As a result, consumer-generated content is one of marketing's fastest-growing creative products. Smart brands know that this self-directed expression is at the very root of customer engagement. The American Express 15-Second CLIPS Competition stands as a perfect example.
For the fifth year of its founding sponsorship of the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) in New York, American Express hosted the “My life. My Card” CLIPS contest. The card issuer invited consumers to produce video clips launching from themes among the 13 questions posed by the “My Life. My Card” ad campaign. All of the original content was reviewed and 100 finalists were showcased in an online gallery — a “My Life. My Card” microsite featuring the 15-Second CLIPS finalists.
From there, consumers could view the clips, rate them, save them or share them through their media of choice: e-mail, phone, MP3 player, podcast, etc. Twenty-five film clips made it to a final selection round, which was reviewed by a lineup of celebrity judges, including Martin Scorsese and M. Night Shyamalan. The 100 finalists each received an iPod pre-loaded with the finalists' videos, and the winning entrant landed a VIP trip to New York.
Empowering individuals to create the content, American Express leveraged its existing “My Life. My Card” emblem and its sponsorship of TFF to create a mini-campaign driven by the very consumer collaboration that deepens engagement with its brand.
None of this is surprising. As one of the first brands to smartly and aggressively leverage the digital channel as a service platform, American Express has become one of the true icon digital brands because of its ability to understand the passions of its loyalists and its agility in playing across the increasingly liquid media world.
— Laura Lang
