Unique & Powerful

As we have mentioned so many times already, in this day and age we have to get out of the advertising clutter by using innovation and breaking away from old traditional methods to stand out and get noticed. Consumer threshold to messaging is already so low that if we are seen to be generic in any way, or the same as so much of what they have already witnessed before, it will result in the message being forgotten instantly and never acted upon. In this digital age, Content is King, and we are moving much more to imagery or video than text, when getting our messages across. It needs to be short and impactful, and very visual, telling a story that makes sense and does not confuse, in the quickest amount of time. After all we have to catch the consumer in the first 8 seconds. – see article on why we need to be different.

In everything we do, with every fibre of our beings, we live and breathe disruptive marketing. Even after being in the industry as long as we have, we never grow tired of coming up with new, fresh ideas. That is why we love to be the antithesis of traditionalism and why we have an inherent dislike of everything boring and “done before”.

Thanks to our experience with audio visual technologies we also know all the tools out there and how to apply them to take our clients’ communications to another level. There is a lot of ignorance around innovation and this gives us a huge edge in taking a brand to new places in a way that many others don’t know how to do.

Let us challenge the thinking and come up with new ways to attract attention.

We ask a lot of questions…like a lot.

But more importantly, we don’t just ask our clients a lot of questions for the sake of doing so, but rather, we ask the right questions. We concern ourselves greatly with our clients’ strategies and hence want to ensure that we ask all the right questions about their brand(s), their products or services, their clients and everything else that can give us further insight. The more we know about our clients, the better the outcome of our strategies and concepts, and the closer they will meet or excel expectations and results.

Questions form the foundation of good insight. This in turn leads to good direction, i.e. where the client is looking to take their product or service, where it has come from, what it has done, or what it is doing currently. These insights allow us to work on the right solutions to get the client’s marketing efforts to where they need to be.

Not all good ideas are good ones. We focus on concepts that show direct results and reach their objectives. Just producing good creative that doesn’t provide any measurable returns or links to the goals of the campaign or project is just not good enough any more. It may seem trivial, but so many concepts derive from creatives that have no real objective or drive for results, nor link to any strategy, merely seeking the “holy grail of ideas”. Ask your agency how many qualified strategic marketing people worked on your project before recommending creative.

To prove this point, we cannot tell you how many times in the past we have been engaged with by a creative agency to execute a concept, and we have had to turn around and admit that the concept neither made any sense for the brand, had any objective in mind, or had any practical application in the real world. More often than not, the exorbitant costs of executing such an idea would outway the possible returns. A number of those times the response is that the desire is to win a Loerie award, rather than to excel in achieving the client’s requirements and objectives, using their money to do so. Creative freedom is always welcome when thinking out the box, but this creative needs to be in a direction that will both achieve the required communications objectives and returns desired.

Many ideas are also created in isolation from other mediums which the customer is activating. In many instances there is a lack of awareness regarding activities in those mediums or the pertinent questions are not asked. This means that the messaging and look and feel confuse the audience and don’t ultimately align to the overall strategy. Therefore, integration is key for us to achieve great results. See article on the bottom-up approach and integration.

We control the supplier channels, ensuring the golden thread is kept. We have an invested interest in the supply chain. This means that we take responsibility and accountability, rather than just being a broker between clients and suppliers. Given our experience and skills from having been that said supplier ourselves, allows us to pro-actively manage the supplier network correctly and streamline systems and processes. The result: lower costs and increased budget control and transparency, as well as effective quality management through understanding of that medium.

Examples of our networks include companies through mutual ownership in event management, audio visual gear and technologies, furniture and décor, as well as a production company focusing on design, filming and editing, motion graphics and 3D animation.

We also have close ties to a network of manufacturing companies in the sets and exhibitions industries, an area in which we work frequently, as well as many other companies in the value chain such as digital and PR, media buying, and talent, to name a few.

How many times has an events company been briefed, separately from the digital agency, the production company, etc., with none of them being the wiser of what the other is doing, what the overall picture is, or even seen each other in status meetings or on the project itself?

We can tell you that this is a regular occurrence across the industry. And it doesn’t work. The chances that all will be magically aligned to a single goal, with a synced communication plan, is little to none. We have witnessed first hand the number of events we have worked on where we neither see, nor hear of the digital agency, nor that they are aware of what we are doing on the same project. And this goes across all activities.

For that reason, it is imperative that if you want the project to have the same look and feel across the board, with the same goals and objectives, that you integrate. If no one is taking strategic control of the project, then let us take care of it, ensuring the golden thread throughout. All parties need to be aligned to the same vision.

Integration not only refers to the bringing together of various external resources from a client’s coordination perspective, but also the right combination of elements, services and mediums that work well together to form the success recipe (1+1=3). When Ideology is charged to activate all the mediums, knowing what to spend and where, ensuring the required touch points are reached, it has huge impact on returns – greater than the sum of the parts.

Our collective experience in areas such as audio-visual and content production, manufacturing sets and exhibition stands, full event management, agency work, promotions and activations, and even sponsorships, gives us a distinct advantage over our competitors and provides a huge benefit to our customers. Simple fact is, we can assist with the entire marketing spectrum, not just event management or BTL, but the full 360 approach.

Many of our fellow agencies, when looking at their infrastructure and team make up, have only been trained or focused in one particular field – oftentimes in creative fields. This means that many agencies firstly don’t have any trained marketing staff in their stable, and more over a lack of strategists, who are the first essential step before creative can be started. As we delve deeper, finding non-traditional marketers is even harder still, and then ones with an understanding of innovation are a rarity indeed. See article as to why the current market landscape has made having a strategist so important.

With our varied experience, and more importantly having worked in the trenches ourselves, we have seen first hand what works and what doesn’t. One particular area that the industry is grossly ignorant in is the field of technology. Thanks to our years of experience promoting and executing audio visual technologies, we have a bag of tricks that many others do not. It has also allowed us to apply the right technology in the right areas – something we have witnessed agencies have great difficulty doing due to unfamiliarity with the medium.

Don’t be alarmed though – if you’re company utilises separate ATL or BTL agencies, or has on-going retainers with other agencies or providers, we are more than happy to collaborate (integrate) with them in order to give you the best outcome possible. Many of our customers (especially the larger ones) only give us portions to work on, like an event or an exhibition or even content production for instance, as long as it fits into the bigger picture and achieves the overall strategy. And thanks to our experience it doesn’t hurt to have this background in the overall mix.

Given our varied experience in previous companies, we have learnt most of the do’s and dont’s of this business and industry. We’ve had the opportunity with Ideology to formulate our offering and apply strategy to circumvent those issues to provide a better and more successful solution – what we call our marketing science. – see article on marketing science.

The idea being to better, or improve on, what competitors are currently doing by understanding the process and using the inherent weaknesses of that process to provide something for customer that is more successful than the norm. Each and every aspect is reviewed and ways to improve that aspect in whatever way possible are formulated. We would include the use of innovation or other techniques to complete the task.

Examples of working against weaknesses appear in several sections of our profile. These include the lack of marketing strategists in marketing communications, breaking away from traditions and norms, ignorance around innovation and technology, lack of understanding the bigger picture by not asking questions, not just blind doing but thinking before we act, experience and control over the value chain, lack of integration with other key touch points, lack of focus on actual results, a commitment to those results, or even reviewing results to begin with.

We invest heavily in our clients in terms of our energy, time and resources. We therefore don’t desire to have too many clients but rather a select few which we can focus all our attention on and grow with that brand simultaneously. This way we feel as much a part of it as the client does. What we mean with that is we not only understand our clients’ brands, we live them..

This doesn’t mean we only focus on small boutique accounts, as we have worked with some of the biggest brands and marketing projects on the continent.

What we won’t do is start a new project we don’t believe in and can fully commit ourselves to. Until we have satisfied our search for perfection and borderline manic OCD on any existing projects and we feel our existing workload is well and truly handled, we won’t move on to other projects.

In everything we do we are results orientated, so that no activity is conducted or money spent without a goal or objective to achieve – one that aligns itself with what the client really wants, and one we commit ourselves to. An easy example of this in usual business is when a client has briefed a certain activity to take place and providers move straight to that activity without ever asking what the objective of that activity is and what the client’s expectations are at the end of that activity (i.e. how often do exhibition companies for instance take a brief on building a stand without ever asking what the client wishes to achieve at that show in order to align their designs and ideas to meet those goals).

Ensuring that we interpret any data and learnings from our previous projects is as paramount to our success as that of our clients’ marketing efforts. We put in place measurements tools for every project we engage in so that no activity goes unchecked or without review.

We find it incredibly important that we can give our clients measured outcomes and learnings that they can utilise to improve their marketing efforts effectively and proactively. If you cannot measure your successes and failures, or determine what went right or wrong in your project, then frankly you are flushing money down the drain. We have seen all too often where the outcome of a project has not been reviewed at the end its life span and the job is merely closed, filed and forgotten. We want to ensure that you know what you spent why, where and how, so you can best adjust your efforts for the next project.