In this series on managing the digital revolution, Ari Aronson and Stephan Argent collect insights from both the agency and the brand sides of the street.
This week, Marketing contributor Stephan Argent reaches out to the senior director of creative and digital at McDonald’s Canada to see how the fast food chain is navigating its way through the digital revolution in marketing.
What’s your vision for the future of digital in your organization?
It’s definitely representing an increasingly important part of our media mix, recognizing that it has tremendous business value as we contemporize our brand and continue to innovate — digital will play a huge part of that. McDonald’s has always been a fun brand where people can have unique experiences, so we see digital as a huge enabler of creating those connections and a way for consumers to have that fun, playful interaction with our brand. But we also use digital on the practical and functional side to make life easier and enable smoother transactions.
How has digital impacted your marketing org chart?
We have revamped the scope of work of some of our existing employees within our marketing team, communications area and IT area – given the increasing digital portfolio overall.
We also plan to increase the size of our teams over the coming months and years both in Canada and globally to reflect the increasing scope. We’re looking to increase in size by about 10% over the next 12- 18 months, ensuring we have the right dynamic of resources here in Canada versus resources that may exist in the U.S. or globally that we leverage and pull upon as needed.
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing from a digital perspective?
I would say it comes down to time, money and people. We’re always trying to balance the need to move quickly in digital, keep pace or keep ahead of what’s coming, but balance that as an organization. We’re very mindful of testing and making sure we move through things in the right manner. Sometimes speed is at odds with our desire to want to test and move through effectively, which sometimes compromises with speed to market – so we’re always trying to get that balance right.
And then resources and money – it’s the need to prioritize because it’s prohibitive to think we can work on everything all at once – from a resourcing perspective it’s not something we’ve been able to do to date. I think that’s the biggest challenge – the desire and willingness to move forward with innovation is certainly there, it’s just biting it off in a manageable way.
What are the key expectations from your (brand) / digital partner?
I would say our expectation is that they are provocative to bring us ideas and thoughts that perhaps scare us and push us out of our comfort zone. If we’re not scared, it’s probably not provocative enough. We like things that make us slightly uncomfortable. “Our Food Your Questions” was a good example of that. We knew it was an amazing idea that made us a little uncomfortable. Certainly when we first heard it, there was a lot of, “What-if? How will it work? What are the implications?” but it’s good to have those types of ideas brought to us by our partners. We have that expectation of all of our partners, but certainly digital seems to be the one where we can push boundaries and test new ideas.
And we also expect our agencies to be aware of trends and bringing us best practices from other parts of the world. We have a unique benefit of being a global brand and Tribal DDB work in many markets, so even bringing us ideas that have worked in another part of the McDonald’s world that might have some applicability for us is an expectation.
And finally, we expect all our agencies to have a good insight into our business — where we are today and where we want to go in the future — and always be partnering with us on things that are going to make good business sense both in the medium and long term.
What key lessons have you learned as an organization when it comes to digital?
Don’t bite off too much. It’s not advantageous to be doing things that aren’t at an exceptional level. It’s better to have prioritization and a sequenced roadmap to ensure the initiatives we’re undertaking are feasible and can be done at a high quality level. That means being a little more patient and putting a little more rigour around how many things we can actually get to at a time. Its’ like being in a candy store – you’re so enticed by all the possibilities, but we’ve learned the hard way you have to be selective and choose one or two of the things you’re going to benefit from the most and do your due diligence on all the rest.
How do you decide how to allocate budget between traditional initiatives and digital?
I look at traditional and digital as serving very different needs and objectives. We use a lot of traditional media to create awareness for product messaging and tell more from a McDonald’s perspective, but it is a bit that’s more of us telling. Increasingly we use digital to be a bit more participatory and to have more of a dialogue and encourage consumers to have more of a say and give us their feedback. They serve different objectives and at the beginning of the year we allocate budgets based on how many things we have to tell versus how many points of interaction or touch-points of engagement we like to have back with our guests and we set those budgets quite independently.
How can agencies be more effective to you and other marketers in their digital solutions? What’s the one thing you’d like your [digital] agency to do better?
Understanding the consequences of different programs and being able to educate us on the implications of doing them, or conversely, what the implications might be of not doing something. What Tribal DDB did really well with “Our Food Your Questions” was they thought through what some of those potential implications could be. They didn’t just bring us an idea in a vacuum. They had thought through what some of the possible extensions and watch-outs could be. They brought us a balanced perspective on the idea and didn’t position it in a utopian fashion and then leave all the risk and uncertainty to us to figure out – they had done their due diligence about the pros and cons of the idea and what to look out for.
So as you move into spaces that are uncharted or uncertain for marketers, agencies should think about some of the implications on the periphery that would help marketers be a little bit more bold about taking some chances or at least evaluating the risk before moving ahead with an idea. That also helps turn something from theoretical into something more tangible so they can get their head around it a little bit more. Think about how to execute it and what some of the reactions might be.
Finally, being able to assess the value this would have to the consumer, the benefit to the brand and the benefit to the business. They may well be very different benefits, but they’re all equally important.
Stephan Argent is president at The Argedia Group, an agency management consultancy.
