Taking to the stage in Cambridge

For someone who constantly craves time at my desk to tackle my 'to do' list this blog contains a lot of tales of my travels! So, this week I've been out and about continuing to promote our latest campaign 'Shaping Your World'.

With the amount of work it took to get us to this point the fact that's it's grown legs around the business, and beyond, has been very satisfying. One of the main strategic goals of our central marketing function is to provide integrated campaigns that the entire business can utilise. With 21,000 colleagues across four divisions this is no mean feat and required months of planning. But we have already proven that this adds value not only to winning work but also to existing contracts.

I was the only non-Anglian Water van in the car park!

This is why I spent two mornings this week presenting to 400+ colleagues on the Anglian Water contract. This is a big one for the utilities business with the challenge being that Kier employees are so embedded with the client they sometimes hear more from them than their actual employer. By hosting a two day event (at the Hallmark hotel in Cambridge) it allows them time off work to hear about our latest benefits and initiatives.

Given that I have presented on this topic, to different audiences, on many occasions it was still a challenge to fit it all into 15-20 mins. Especially as I was all that stood between the audience and their lunch! However, it was really well received and started the conversation with many colleagues volunteering to be Kier Ambassadors.

Go team!

My second trip out this week was definitely for a much larger audience as we took 'Shaping Your World' to the World Skills Show. This is a first for us on this scale being held at the Birmingham NEC over three days. The amount of preparation to get us there was immense with all of us working until the final hours on stand designs, t-shirts, freebies and staff rotas.

I had oversight of the technical elements of our stand in the build up. We asked visitors to complete our avatar quiz in order to receive a personalised notebook. All they had to do was enter their name and have a printout of their avatar affixed to the front!

It was great seeing our target audience
interacting with our Virtual World Plaques

I managed the team on the Friday so arrived bright and early to get setup and deliver the briefing. We had helpers from all areas of Kier, from graduate to director level, and they were amazing at speaking to visitors about the opportunities in the built environment. Whilst it started quite slow the coach loads of school children all descended on us around 11am with swarms of them invading our stand! In fact, the personalised notebooks were so popular that we could barely keep up with demand!

Design-wise our stand did definitely look the busiest but in some ways this worked in our favour. It stood out from the crowd by presenting a traditional career in a modern way. It wasn't just school children who approached us as we spoke to teachers, parents, the cabinet office and even the girl guides.

After three days of this there's no doubt that our campaign has now been bought to the masses and it's my job to ensure that this is measured. Whether it be avatars built, or jobs searched, I'll now be crunching numbers to prove this activity was worth our time and investment.

It’s been an excellent 3 days for all involved @SkillsShow. The future of the built environment is looking bright thanks to the amount of people to #visitvibe https://t.co/m64XKkFh4R

— Kier Group plc (@kiergroup) November 18, 2017

The favourite bit for me is seeing how well 'Shaping Your World' is received by all audiences. In particular the target audience of 11-15 year olds loved the avatars and their notebooks had them grinning all the way back to their coaches.

The next possible step for this campaign is our shortlisted entry at the Construction Marketing Awards. Win or lose I'll be covering the further adventures of my, now vintage, Matalan dinner suit in my next blog post...

There are countless examples of companies who pertain to be 'digital first' thinkers but this merely amounts to them having a Facebook presence. Almost every company can boast of this now - even very traditional trades such as funeral directors or shoe menders! Simply having a digital marketing strategy is not enough to make a company innovative.

Having worked in construction now for nearly three years I've seen a very traditional industry commit to the innovation agenda by embracing digital pretty much across the board. This was no easy feat but now conversations all being by at least paying lip service to 'testing and learning' and 'user experience'.

But are companies with digital strategies actually implementing them properly? I've seen many examples of companies who have a very light-touch digital presence but still continue to be successful and forward thinking. Apple, for example don't even have an active Twitter account.

I've attended many meetings in my career where the internet has been addressed as a problem. It's seen as something which has to be addressed in the marketing mix but not in a positive way.

One to add to your bucket list!

Surely one of the most exciting periods to be a road planner must have been when the motor car was popularised. There were suddenly possibilities to design road layouts and infrastructure that never existed before.

This weekend we drove over 'the UK's first roundabout' in nearby Letchworth Garden City. It all seems rather ridiculous and quaint now but it got me thinking how the designers must have been very excited to see their new design finally come into fruition. It was a chance to innovate and really influence user behaviour.

Conversely, I've never seen a group thrilled by the prospect of the new canvas of mobile adverts or live video. Instead the default position is to take a small part of the advertising budget, re-purpose a creative execution from another medium and link it through to a website. Sometimes the creative execution may vary slightly, or a bespoke landing page is built, but this is the extent to the levels of excitement.

We know from the research conducted for our latest campaign that millennials are not hard to reach. They're surgically attached to their phones highlighting that we need to challenge everything that has been done so far. It's time to think positive, shake off defeatism and get excited by the new possibilities that are popping up all the time.

Of all of the questions I was asked at the CIM event earlier this month the one that stuck with me most was 'how long should I make my brand's videos?' What I should have said is that creating minute long case study interviews, or a series of 1 minute adverts, no longer gets me excited. Instead, it would be much more interesting to make 10 to 20 sequentially served 10 second adverts to tell a story.

Six second ads are hard, we can’t tell the whole story, we need to capture attention immediately, but what a great challenge. A story arch that peaks one second in, a handover to another unit that gives more information. A series of 10 or 20 units, served knowingly to individuals across screens, to hook them in and move them further down the funnel. Users who skip ads can be given a message to entice them in. Short ads are wonderful if we are to rethink how to earn and reward attention, rather than replicating the way old TV used to advertise.

This is one example of a change of attitude that is all too rare in how money is spent in digital. Instead we see countless examples of bad retargeting ("I've bought these shoes why are you still advertising them to me!") or adverts that aren't timely, relevant or just click through to a webpage.

Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin

By making things more interactive and immersive we cannot help but stand out and get excited about the opportunities new technologies bring. It’s been too cheap to pay attention to and too ineffective to spend much on media or production, we entered a spiral of decline that never worked for brands, publishers, agencies but most of all, people.

By raising our ambition we can then experience the excitement of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin when they unveiled the UK's first roundabout in 1909!