Brad Brinegar
with
Don Schechter
Brad Brinegar, CEO at McKinney, talks about the importance of using online and mobile communication while maintaining the elegant complexity of the conservation between the consumer and the brand.
Transcript: Brad Brinegar
I do have a Facebook profile, but it has no content other than my picture. I think at this point I have maybe three friends. I'm doing it mostly to make sure that I know what my son is doing, as opposed to any interest in the social interaction myself. I know that they only bought a percent and a half of the company, but I m sure that Microsoft hopes that Facebook is around next year. I think there are a lot of great experiments out there. We like to make a joke around the shop that Second Life is for people who haven't mastered first life. But there is a level of complexity and a level of engagement that I don't think that is sustainable on a mass basis the way that Facebook clearly is.
Assuming the iPhone can go beyond one carrier then it will be a game changer. We look at predictions of every kinds of tech coming and going over the years and clearly the phone is going to be an important platform. We got into the digital space at McKinney 3 years ago because we say a tipping point in household penetration of broadband. Up until then it really wasn't a creative medium for us. As we can now bring rich content to the cell phone, there's no question that it's going to take off.
What I like the best is that everything is up in the air. It's the Wild West all over again, but with a lot more grounding than the first time around. There's serious money going into the space, one of the things that we've seen is that it used to be was that the online thing is what we would do at the end of the year when we needed to do something. Now people are realizing to do it right, it's no different investment than building brands in the off line world. It's just a different paradigm of how to go to market. For us to be able to go from purely traditional creative shop to having over a third of our revenue driven by the online space, I think is a great indication of just how quickly things have changed just over the last three years. Every day there s something else to work our way through and think about.
I think if you look at the traditional agency model, we've been through three phases. The first phase was kind of the same netting, you go out in the ocean and you drop this big net and hope your tuna will fall in there with all the other dolphins you catch, a very much a broadcast out model, we are all very familiar with that. Most companies are still kind of caught in phase two, where you have broadcast, plus a little bit of narrow cast, plus a little bit of interaction with consumers. But it s still fundamentally the same model. What we are going to see, and the FB of this world is certainly going to push us there, and creating the opportunities, is a far more fluid conversation between consumers and brands. For us that means really mastering two things, 1 is what we like to call elegant complexity. There is an awful lot out there right now, sorting through it and figuring out the part of it that are important, where you need to show up and where you don t need to show up. How the brand and consumer come together, which is something that if you try to simplify it too much, you loose the richness. And yet you need to keep it coherent enough to be able to move forward. The other category is defining brand ideas. In a world of this complexity, there s nothing like an amazing brand to help people navigate their way through categories, through life. We see those two things as lynch pins of creating a rich conversation between people and brands. That's what we are pushing to structure our agency around.
