Brands should be brave, bold and continuously experiment: Bianca Best, MediaCom

MediaCom’s thought leadership and innovation lab BLINK_live recently made its debut in India. Also on her maiden visit to India was Bianca Best, Global MD, Blink and Strategic Partnerships, MediaCom who talked us through what Blink has to offer and how it helps businesses grow with their step by step process to tackle challenges.  She also shared her mantra on technology-enabled marketing and how brands to need to continuously experiment if they want to say relevant in the long run. Her advice to brands is simple and straight forward- Be Bold.

You have now launched in India, can you tell us what you have on offer for businesses here. How can they benefit from Blink?

The blink premise is a new frontier for the agency –brand partnership. Blink is evolving the traditional media partnership that we have, to say we understand your landscape, your teams and we can help you identify new ways to achieve growth by harnessing emerging technologies. The way we do this is by sourcing the world’s new technology startup businesses and looking at how they can potentially solve your particular business challenge or enable us to activate an experiment that can potentially drive growth for you and your businesses. The whole premise for driving the accelerated scale of growth and doing it fast.

It’s a five-step process that starts with consultancy where we deeply immerse into the brands world and we invite brands to bring along stakeholders from, marketing, data, ops, products, so the whole realm of the business is represented and from our side we bring strategists, business analysts, we bring Blink innovation experts, we bring expertise around that sector from a futuristic perspective for trends and predictions, we come together to consult and to explore the potential opportunities of ways that we can bring technologies into that business to start dabbling with what has the most potential in terms of growth.

That’s the consultancy phase, once we identify strategic opportunities, we start sourcing who are best partners, with them, we hold demo days where we bring in six of the most suitable potential tech partners. We then select the partner and then activate a pilot that will be running an experiment with one partner in one region, one market for one set time frame to just see what happens, to just see the salience of that technology on that particular business and if it works at the end of the experiment then we work out how to scale , how do we roll it out regionally, potentially globally, depending on who the brand is because if there has been an impact through that take then let’s make sure we roll it out and if it hasn’t been effective then we share the learnings internally because we are trying to infuse businesses with this culture of experimentation to say curiosity is great , be bold , keep trying, keep trying, and even if you fail that’s okay because that’s the way to succeed in this day and age. We in a way are holding our clients' hands as they step into innovation in a more structured way.

What do brands need to do better in the present digital landscape, how can agencies contribute more value?

To be brave, to be bold and to continually experiment and to shift away from thinking about digital marketing which by its very nature is very short term and step into technology-enabled marketing to really deeply understand how consumers are using technology, how technology is changing and just step into a place of thinking about how brands will be visible in those places. So Voice for instance, not building a skill for skill's sake but actually thinking about Voice as an ecosystem play for the brand because understanding new intimacy that a brand can develop and evolve with a potential customer through Voice is incredibly empowering but the strategy that goes behind actually understanding how Voice is going to become king is instrumental to how effective that will be.

Talking about Voice, it is being touted as the next big digital trend. Are brands doing enough to keep up with Voice technology?

Not yet, I don’t think so. We’ve seen a lot of brands that have gone out and built a skill, they’ve just employed an agency and they haven’t thought macro, what is the Voice about brands and the sonic logo, now the sonic logos are being thought about. Brands are confused, brands are a bit befuddled about how to get into this and how this is ever going to be valuable because ultimately when you build a skill, if it’s just a gimmick it may be popular for a little while, but then it just disappears, so the skills that have longevity are the ones that have repeated value.

Brands need a lot of help in understanding how to step into Voice and actually under Blink we are doing a lot of consultancy now that does that; ecosystem planning that really starts thinking what is the Voice strategy before we even get to the scale, let’s think about what our voice strategy is, so we have started to do that and are having a lot of fun doing that.

In times of slowdown, what do you think marketers should do? What would be your advice to them?

Not to be afraid of it and not to step into pessimism but recognise that with challenging times always come opportunities, so it’s really about harnessing those opportunities. There is a lot of marketing innovation that is available so it’s about exploring it. We don’t know what tomorrow holds but that’s fun and that's experimental, so really building a culture of entrepreneurialism is something that I would say is absolutely key for brands to succeed.

Brands tend to hold back advertising and marketing spend in times of slowdown. Is that a good strategy?

I am going to say no because I think it’s about releasing budgets to try new areas and the traditional innovation pot that’s often the first thing that tends to get cut, it disappears so I’m going to fiercely say that needs to stay because to survive you absolutely need to be experimental.