Kevin Tumblrmel

Building data into the stuff agencies make

Bud posted about putting a physical “like” sign in their agency that lights up whenever someone “likes” their new website. around the agency to remind people to make sharable things. I really like the sentiment around why they did it: 

The first challenge for all of our work, interactive or not, is how far our reach can extend beyond our paid placement. If we can’t create experiences that are actively passed along through networks of consumers, we likely won’t be successful in achieving business results

We built this sign to be a reminder to ourselves that the measure of our work begins at how it’s passed along. It’s a physical manifestation of our goals. We thought it would be a nice touch to put the sign in front of our webcam for curious visitors to see, but the sign is really for ourselves. The idea is to build a sign for every client team in the building, to host in their section of the office (we sit in teams now, not by discipline) so that we’ll all think more consciously about designing things that people want to share. If the signs create a bit of internal competition, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

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We’ve talked a lot about doing things like that in our office. There were the things we never did, like using giant tickers to display real time conversation about brands in the respective brand rooms. And things that we did for a little while, like Tweetdeck up on the big screen in the atrium with columns about clients and other useful things. Creating physical manifestations of a collection of digital interactions. 

The difficult thing with all of this is making all of this data useful for people. Amongst other things, this means creating experiences that are simple enough for people to notice and to process, and it means making sure that the data is properly focused and filtered. Bud’s Like Sign does a great job of all of that. Our ideas however, were the digital equivalent to opening a fire hydrant and watching the water violently spray out.  

Ultimately, we’re going to have to figure out how to bake data into the heart of everything we do. A couple of years back I wrote about the idea that marketing has turned into jazz, and I still believe that to be true, but we need to get better with data before we can really embrace that philosophy. It needs to inform the work we create, work within the work we create, and help us to understand if the work is working and how it could be working better. The days of analytics being an optional add on have to come to an end. It’s becoming like selling a submarine and only offering sonar as an expensive optional upgrade.  

The point is that I really love that they are trying to push for everything that they make to be something that people share. I like the Like Sign.