Innovation: Hardest Thing To Get Right

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 “I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has.  That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.” -- author Jarod Kintz. 

This quote pretty much sums up how I think about “innovation” in marketing. How do I experiment with cooking without messing up my dinner?

If you think hard about marketing innovations over the last 10 years, you’d think of gamification, group buying, social networking, location based marketing, video, user generated content, mobile device technology and such. Innovations in pure marketing technology include  things like cloud computing, digital billboards, predictive technology, HTML5, High Resolutions Displays, social analytics,  and business-ready storage (or cloud storage, as we like to term it).  

However, innovation is not just new technology or new ways to do things. True innovation must be marketed, or adoption will lag and scale in your operation will never have a chance.   I remember years ago when I was with a large agency, we had the coolest toys -- but the problem with new toys is that in many cases the ideas don’t accompany well-thought-out strategy. Delays, technical limitations, inexperienced teams and in some cases reckless experimentation can be as bad as not taking risks at all.

As Greg Satell wrote in “How to manage innovation,” a very good article in Forbes: “Go to any conference these days and some whip-smart technogeek will declare that you must, ‘innovate or die,’ and then dazzle you [with] a wide array of case studies to illustrate the point.  You’ll feel inspired, then scared and then have a few beers and go about your business.”  

Before this writer tries to scare marketers from testing new toys, let me tell you a few that I believe will shift our email and eCRM space.

Video:  Not video as we know it today, streamed and user-generated.  I’m talking about intelligent video in email that is highly personalized, available on any device and any automobile that has electric locks.  Today, I get email in my car and projection navigation is built into windshields.    Video will be how brands connect all four screens, and will virtualize the inbox as we know it today.  Tomorrow’s email will be as visual as television is today.

Artificial Intelligence: This will process your email for you, as an all-in-one smart email virtual administrator.  The time you spend in email sorting, filtering, and scrolling will be greatly minimized.   It will manage your preferences, your permissions and be the optimizer for brands to connect with you.   As I’ve said many times, “all innovation in mankind has been based on the need to compress time and space” (think transportation, phone, Internet, etc.)

Both these innovations will better connect individuals with brands and networks in a smart, efficient , dynamic manner that will bridge every active generation using electronic devices. It will connect the Silent generation to the Gen Z’ers.

Since these innovations will change the role of marketing, I advise all of you with marketing in your functional job description to do two things.   First, commit your time to a couple of innovative areas. Test video, learn new ways to contextualize email for more than direct response.  Test real-time!  Test offers on demand! Test mCommerce!  Go heavy with mobile experiences, as that user experience will personify the future digital engagement model.  If you aren’t a quant geek, you’d better begin playing with some pretty savvy decisioning technologies or you’ll never keep up, and decisions will be 30% substance 70% aroma. 

Innovation in marketing is about great ideas that can scale to improve your business.  Some of the best innovations we will see over the next 10 years may already be upon us. We just haven’t figured out how to operationalize them.

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5 comments on "Innovation: Hardest Thing To Get Right ".

1. Bruce May from Bizperity
   

   commented on: March 18, 2013 at 12:45 p.m.
   Please tell me that you don't read email in your car and God forbid you ever watch video projected onto your windshield! I guess you mean that this will all happen once we have Google driverless cars. Got to get that anyway if we are going to run around wearing Google glasses. Either way you managed to scare the hell out of me. I'm going to go have a few beers and go about my business.
2. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited
   

   commented on: March 18, 2013 at 3:02 p.m.
   It's not when it is illegal to do what you will while driving that will get you to stop doing that; it's when the insurance companies have standard policies that they will not pay for accidents you cause by reading while driving. With a few examples of what happened to people's lives losing so much financial security and home will be scary enough for more people to PAY attention.
3. Dan Greenberg from Impossible Software, GmbH
   

   commented on: March 18, 2013 at 10:02 p.m.
   Two comments regarding your video email: 1) The capability to have individualized video in email campaigns already exists. We've already enabled email marketers to do just that with our technology. You are right -- more of this will be seen in the future (pun intended). 2) As with all Marketing, what counts is the content. Is it targeted properly? Does it capture and hold the attention of the viewer? Does it deliver the brand message? Does it have a call to action? This all matters more than the type of media. We've enabled both successful and unsuccessful campaigns. Our technology is the same - the difference is content.
4. David Baker from Acxiom
   

   commented on: March 20, 2013 at 9:54 a.m.
   :),,, yes, let's not lecture on the principles of distracted driving.. My point is, your device will be where you are. Video in email, I was doing in 1999 with Radicalmail, first video email technology. Yet, what I'm speaking to @Dan is interactive video and dynamic video that is by far efficient to manage, produce, deliver and be data driven at scale. as I finished the column with, innovation is upon us, we just haven't operationalize some of it yet. I would challenge all the purists, that "timing" is going to be the most important factor in the CRM vision (right person, right content, right channel and right timing).. and most innovation will focused on optimizing this and the experience. With the trend in time and place shifting of email and the inbox, and the parallel technologies that serve us today "out of home", book mark this email and read it back in 2 years.
5. Dan Greenberg from Impossible Software, GmbH
   

   commented on: March 20, 2013 at 12:10 p.m.
   Agree with you, @David. What I was saying is that the technology to deliver personalized video content, at the time of the impression, time-shifted or not, on any format (web, email, OTT, mobile), at scale, is available today... from us. We've even done interactive streaming campaigns where the content changes at the request of the viewer. Within your two years, we know that some significant partners will use this as a base from which to create real-time data-driven video experiences.

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