Schooling by Silicon Valley
What happens when cynical UK agency leaders head to California for a Silicon Valley education? Dino Myers-Lamptey reports.
Late last year, the IPA together with the UKTI set out on a mission to Silicon Valley with some of the UK’s finest agency leaders, media luminaries and agitators. The mission, which we chose to accept, was to meet some of the most talked-about enterprises and tech start-ups making waves on the west coast, and to come back with gold – insight, learnings and, even better, algorithms! A creative heist, of sorts.
The schedule was packed. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Virgin Galactic, to name a few, all stole a moment on the programme. But we also visited smaller start-ups, with scarily large funding, such as Turo, Fullcircle, and the amazing, but perplexing, Blockchain.
We were fed, watered and wooed to new heights, and only our British cynicism brought us back down to earth. There was a lot to be impressed about, respect, and try to ‘borrow’. Here are five nuggets and a few gems which I managed to smuggle back:
Think vertically
While privacy concerns and advertising bombardment threaten the fabric of the most popular social networks, Snapchat should be admired for its counter Silicon Valley culture. It believes passionately in social privacy, the idea of not spamming networks by broadcasting everything to everyone, but rather, carefully telling content stories to relevant individuals.
Snapchat believes in vertical video, as that’s how we experience our mobiles. It believes in storytelling with pictures, and in completely reimagining local events and moments by curating geo-fenced content created and submitted to be edited by users.
The platform, like its users, is seeing things from a completely different perspective, and while the concept seems puzzling for many over the age of 25, it is quietly creeping up on the likes of Facebook and YouTube with 6 billion daily video views. Media publishing partners from BuzzFeed, to Vice and Mail Online are making significant investments in Snapchat channels.
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The fact that Snapchat’s platform is ad fraud free, and its primary source of income comes in the form of user ‘micro payments’, makes you quickly see how and why it turned down Facebook’s $3bn takeover, and is now valued at five times that.
Find moments with purpose
Pinterest, besides having salubrious offices, had a beautifully unique and valuable positioning.
The platform is attracting users as they journey through key life moments. Having a baby, planning a wedding, a holiday or buying a home, all moments where people are focused and goal driven – a decisive point in the consumer purchase journey that brands invest heavily in targeting.
Pinterest offered a real confidence of product and clarity on the most important task at hand, making it more useful for the users on those ‘life moments’. So innovations such as Visual Search and Buyable Pins, are able to go straight to brand without any affiliate charging structure. A smart strategy perhaps only afforded with $762m raised in seven healthy rounds of funding.
Look around, and change while you’re hot
Facebook has a difficult task on its hands. Its growth rate is unprecedented. You only need to look at the 6000 employees commuting to their campus each day, with 1,500 of those people joining in the past three months, to see the explosive expansion.
But Facebook isn’t resting on its laurels and continues to exceed expectations, in large part thanks to social media darling, Instagram.
We heard about the photo-sharing platform’s rocket-speed growth (its monthly US user base increased nearly 60% in 2014 to 64.2 million people) but most exciting was the next wave of features. 360 imagery is going to completely re-imagine how we see the world through social media. UK media companies should take note that even when at the top, they should still concentrate on innovation.
People matter
Virgin Galactic was the company that turned the party into gawping school children. The ambition of it all was humbling and inspiring in equal measure. While we sat there, understanding very little about what they were doing and how they were doing it, we were offered a nugget of information as to the inner workings.
Just as we were leaving, Virgin Galactic told us that success wasn’t about the skill of the individuals in the building or the tools they had to their disposal. It was about having the right culture. A culture where people collaborate, at all levels, to help solve problems and innovate. A simple redesign of the office put the canteen on the construction floor which soon meant lunchtimes became collaborative sessions, and the success followed.
Be culturally aware
At the recent IPA Presidential Address for 2016, diversity was highlighted as an industry mission. I’d like to think that Mitu, one of the companies we met in LA, had a little something to do with that.
Mitu is a company making culturally relevant content for the Latino population in the US. That’s roughly 17.4% of the US population (in 2014). It had rightly identified the ignorance gap that was present in content makers and broadcasters around the US, who worked off outdated stereotypes and clichés.
Mitu drilled down into the clear distinctions of its audience’s values, dreams and the status symbols. Mitu now commands an audience capable of deciding on the next president of the United States – now that’s a Trump card if ever there was one.
Dino Myers-Lamptey is head of strategy at the7stars