Met | Hodder’s Changing Channels

Full disclosure: I don’t own a TV. But the flower of my youth blossomed viewing Gilligan’s Island and The Beverly Hillbillies. As with all of us, TV is a particularly woody strand in my cultural DNA.

However complicated and stressed the TV industry has become in the cable-and-Internet age, it’s still a huge and influential business, and the supreme marketing medium. (This article helped get me up to speed.) And if you really want a good sense of where the TV business may be heading, much better to tune in to Kent Hodder.

National television isn’t all about the Coasts. Kent’s Minneapolis agency, Met | Hodder, produces on-air, DVD, and online content primarily for ABC; other clients include NBC-Universal’s USA and SyFy channels.

Kent cofounded Met | Hodder in 1987 (with business partner Nancy Bordson) to produce specialty film and video for corporate clients. Over time, the agency’s work expanded to specialized on-air and online productions for cable and network television channels. About five years ago, Met | Hodder parlayed its TV industry contacts into a new revenue stream.

Sometime shortly after the holidays, the ABC megahit Lost will premiere its final season. Before that first episode of the season is broadcast, there will be a one-hour program that will untangle Lost’s complexly interwoven story arcs so that new viewers, or those that have been away for a while, can tune into for that final season without being utterly mystified.

That one-hour special’s producer: Met | Hodder. This kind of customized “catch-up” programming—along with video extras on series DVDs and the like—makes up about half of its work now, and its portfolio is extensive. Kent believes that his agency is the largest producer of such programming in the country.

And while Met | Hodder does have an office near L.A., in Burbank (one of the centers of television production). And while it does a fair amount of its shooting there (and New York, and elsewhere), the front-end and postproduction work is done in sunny Minneapolis.

Angelenos often ask him: Dude, um, Minneapolis? But Kent believes his firm’s Midwestern sensibility makes its programming more suitable to most viewers. It’s not caught up in an “industry” sensibility. It knows viewers are more interested in story and character than in flash and glitter.

The other half of Met | Hodder’s business is content for digital signage networks (and other digital platforms like mobile). If you’ve been in a supermarket or a gas station or a health club and seen a television there with specialized content, that’s what it is. Met | Hodder’s clients in this realm have included grocery giants like Kroger and Safeway and other retailers like Best Buy and regional supercenter Meijer.

Kent calls his firm’s work “marketing-nuanced content”—content with an underlying marketing agenda. Content that is designed to inform or entertain, but with some form of association or sponsorship or adjacency to a commercial (or commercial network).

Food courts in malls, doctors’ waiting rooms, health clubs, the backseats of New York taxicabs, even gas pumps—all becoming home to TV screens. For many people, this kind of information and entertainment can be a nice way to learn things or fight boredom. Others of us might see this sort of TV, TV everywhere as annoying.

Kent believes advertisers know this: “People really don’t want the sponsorship to get in the way of the viewer’s entertainment or information.” Younger generations are so used to advertising and sponsorship that “they accept it as part of all the different platforms”—the old-school box, the Internet, the smart phone screen: “But they don’t want it to get in the way.”

Newer content platforms mean “advertisers don’t have to be quite so much in people’s face, because they’re probably dealing with a more targeted, receptive audience to start with.”

As for “regular” TV, Kent sees Met | Hodder’s work as “taking an experience that people for 50, 60 years have called ‘watching television’ and transfers it to all these different platforms.” Hulu’s just part of the story. How about adjusting shows so that they make sense on your Android phone’s screen? Television, Kent believes, will need to adapt to the users’ needs in terms of time and place. Lost is miles away from Gilligan’s Island.

However horrified many old-school network execs might be contemplating the future, here in Minneapolis, Kent notes, “We’re actually very excited by it, because I think of us as fairly nimble.”

Mono’s Culture

When Northeast Minneapolis–headquartered furniture maker Blu Dot dropped 25 of its Real Good Chairs around the streets of Manhattan recently, was it marketing, advertising, PR, a new-school publicity stunt, or what?

Maybe “what.” Or “all of the above.” Maybe it was a psycho-sociological experiment. Or maybe the terminology doesn’t matter. Your call.

Blu Dot’s co-conspirator in the “Real Good Chair Experiment” is mono, whose newish Uptown digs have enraptured numerous digital eyeballs. Unlike many new-marketing shops in the Twin Cities, mono is cool with the A-word—i.e., agency.

“It’s what comes in front of that word that we’re not sure of,” cofounder Michael Hart says. “Branding” probably works, as long as that term also is interwoven with attractive, uncluttered design.

The agency’s physical layout reflects its culture. In the center of its open-plan space is a sky-lit area nicknamed “the piazza.” In designing its agency, the three mono cofounders wanted to depart from some of the organizational principles of the large agencies (Fallon, Carmichael Lynch) they’d worked for. They wanted more collaborative, un-siloed approach to creative work.

On the piazza’s big glass walls, everyone—creative directors, designers, account execs, strategists, copywriters—can see work in progress and comment on it. Everyone knows what’s going on. The idea is as much to encourage inspiration and innovation as it is to discourage egocentricity and turf battles.

The cofounders also didn’t want to be limited to standard, default media like TV spots and print ads, which more and more seem almost like commoditized work in this ad-cluttered age. By the late 1990s, the mono men sensed that more and more clients wanted a more direct, less bureaucratized contact with creative strategists and account people. Those clients saw that the traditional mass-communication “messages” were becoming less and less effective in engaging people with a company and its products.

“The future,” mono asserts, “belongs to the simpleminded.” While the execution of a branding idea may be complex (and “untraditional”), it should appear clean, playful (where appropriate), and direct.

The agency’s first client was Sesame Street, for which it has created some brand-refreshing print and broadcast work. This led to a number of other television-related marketing projects. (USA Network’s tagline, “Characters Welcome,” is mono’s.) Since then, more and more of its work has come from clients like Herman Miller and Apple (for whom mono has done in-store promotional materials for Christmas and Valentine’s Day in particular, and some retail-area design). Companies, in other words, with a strong design consciousness.

Along with Barrie D’Rozario Murphy—another small Minneapolis firm whose founding partners have long big-agency pedigrees—mono is really a national agency. Advertising Age named mono runner-up among Midwest shops in its Small Agency of the Year awards, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies gave it a similar designation (behind Barrie D’Rozario Murphy) for its 2009 O’Toole Awards for Creative Excellence. (The 36-employee mono expects double-digit revenue growth this year.)

Mono does have local clients—General Mills, Mrs. Meyer’s, Blu Dot. But these also have national presences.

Or, in the case of Blu Dot, national aspirations. As Jim Scott, another mono cofounder, notes, Blu Dot was well known among those who know modern furniture design—but not much beyond that particular tribe.

To celebrate the first anniversary of its Manhattan store, Blu Dot didn’t want to run a standard “Thanks, New York!” ad in the papers. It wanted to do something that would truly raise its profile, and reflect its down-to-earth, Midwestern, design-for-the-people sensibility.

The chair drop was very much, as third cofounder Chris Lange observes, “an experiment.” And not one that many clients would want to undertake. What’s the measurable ROI? (The media costs were actually pretty small.) Will the press make fun of us, or even ignore us? (Nope to both.) In any case, the experiment has put Blu Dot on more people’s mental maps.

The semi-hot biz-buzz phrase “design thinking” can be a bit vague, but it points to something solid about mono’s culture (and that of Apple, Blu Dot, Herman Miller, Procter & Gamble, and a few others). In order to reach people as people—not to shout at them as a passive audience of consumers—you need to directly engage their impulses of style and play. It also means that design, in both its pictorial and its more architectural meanings, is key to solving digital-era business challenges.

With evidence suggesting that people will choose greater simplicity and less stuff in the post-recessionary age, design thinking (or whatever you want to call it) like mono’s could well be the right stuff.

Follow that chair! The Real Good Chair’s Twitter feed is here; your humble scribe’s is there.

The Marketing “Nugget” of Business Strategy

John McKay thinks that and marketing people and advertising agencies blew it in the 1980s.

John’s the senior account director at Introworks, a Minnetonka marketing company whose work is divided about evenly between the medical, high-tech, and financial-services sectors.

So how did marketers shank it? John’s take: In the ’80s, marketers began to get relegated to business’s children’s table. They created funny commercials and glittering messages and won creativity awards—but the C-suiters treated them more and more as giddy kids. Instead, top management called in big-time consulting firms like McKinsey and Anderson, who gave them expensive advice with the air of profound grown-up seriousness. They wrote serious reports with serious-looking charts. Meanwhile, the marketers focused on “hey, dude, that’s cool!”

“Marketers should be at the table,” John believes. They know (or should know) the customers. They know (or should know) what moves them. They should do cool work, yes (and Introworks does do cool design,). But not cool for cool’s sake. Their efforts, if done right, can be the difference between a successful campaign and something more along these lines.

And particularly for med-tech firms introducing a new product, customer information (data-driven and intuitive) can determine whether it gets attention in the emotionally and physically intense marketplace of hospitals, clinics, and patients—or disappears in the back of a hospital’s closet shelf, no matter how elegant the design or how attractive the marketing materials. Introworks says it’s been involved in 50-plus successful medical device launches—the 12-person shop knows whereof it speaks.

One of its newer clients is Kansas-based KCBioMedix, which is introducing a device designed to help preemies better “learn” the swallowing and sucking capabilities they need to move to oral feeding.

The standard approach to this is to have neonatal ICU (NICU) nurses do physical-therapy types of activities like sticking their fingers in the baby’s mouth to encourage sucking. It’s something many nurses (in a sense) like to do, and why not? You’re helping save a baby’s life, and in a very intimate way.

Not to say that the following is true about KCBioMedix, but the thing about smaller med-tech firms is that they’re typically founded by brilliant engineers who tend to think logically: If I build a device that saves providers money and offers patients a better treatment than what’s currently on the market, of course hospitals and doctors will want it. So all we need to do is get an appointment with the CFO, show him or her the clinical studies, and ring up the sale.

Makes sense. But as Introworks knows from experience, that’s not often not what happens. As company president and cofounder Bob Freytag puts it, “the question is, what’s the issue, not the product.”

In the case of KCBioMedix, the issue is, would the nurses and NICU physicians want what it’s selling? They already have techniques in place—why use an expensive new device? Especially if they’re proud of the techniques they now use? With a new device, if you don’t have buy-in from medical staff, the CFO isn’t likely to buy.

With a new product, John observes, you have to appeal to emotion, too. Informed emotion, if you will. In the case of the NICU nurses, you’d need to approach them directly and appeal to the fact that this will not only save babies’ lives, but also get them more quickly where they belong: in the arms of their mothers.

Bob calls this type of customer knowledge the “nugget”—the deep-down market understanding a company needs to position its product for launch. And to his mind, marketing people need to be in on the product discussion early—to ensure that strategy, company staff, product naming, marketing materials, and market knowledge are in alignment.

As John McKay notes, “What we do is more business consultation, not “let’s make something cool.’ ” Improving a company’s business practices, both internally and externally, can be cool enough.

BTW: Magnet 360, a Minneapolis-based network of marketing-related agencies, has launched a competition for $100,000 in free services to companies looking to improve their online marketing. Companies selected for the Challenge (application info here) will have new landing pages built by the designers and marketing mavens of Magnet 360. According to Magnet 360’s Scott Litman, the inspiration for the Challenge was discussions with marketers frustrated that their companies’ Web sites and related media were not sufficiently translating visitors into sales leads. I’m guessing what this initiative is addressing is that more and more companies are realizing that the Web site is becoming the hub of their sales efforts—but are still learning how to take advantage of that fact.

Notes From the Road

Taking a break from the local creative trail for a week (I’m back on the road next week). Three bite-sized mini-posts instead:

1. Most of the “new-marketing” firms I’ve talked to the past couple of months aspire to be some kind of variation of IDEO, the Bay Area–headquartered firm that conjoins strong design, creative thinking, business practices, and marketing consulting in a richly unsiloed way. (IDEO’s Web site is an intellectual and visual Thanksgiving feast.)

The local firms I’ve posted about also aspire to be more than old-school creatives. They seek to be design and business thinkers. And they’re all pursuing that business model in distinctive ways:

• Zeus Jones, for instance, has a strong emphasis on design and retail environments.

• Interval works with health-care providers to improve how they deliver services, seeing those improvements (rightly) as fundamental to their marketing efforts.

• Catalyst Studios unites animation and interactive design with insights into how a client company can tighten up its internal processes.

Firms like these—they’re not “agencies”—are offering practical visions of the ways successful businesses of the future will operate.

2. Someday, someone will write a good business history of Polaroid, one of the great American industrial innovators of the postwar era. It was a great design firm as well as an inventive manufacturer. Such a book would have a lot to teach about entrepreneurial creativity arises, and how it fails. It could even be a great snapshot history (wordplay intended) of American business during a golden age. Polaroid’s still around, but it’s been exiled far from its glorious throne.

Until that book is published, here’s something to help tide us over: a fine little slideshow (with entertaining embedded videos) that shows what happened to Polaroid, and why its downfall was so fast. Many of the insights are surprising, even counterintuitive. (Polaroid actually was an early adopter of digital photography. But...)

3. The blog links on the right-hand side of this page have been updated. Most are local—all are worth mental exploration. Discover.

Thinking Ahead on Health Care

Health care marketer Chris Bevolo has strong opinions:

“Joe Public doesn’t care about your hospital.”

“Hospitals, when they think about marketing, talk about ‘benchmarking.’ That means: ‘The hospital down the street is doing that—we should do it, too.’”

I’m making him sound like an irascible old geezer, a Tareyton wobbling irritably from the corner of his mouth. In fact, Chris Bevolo is an affable, thoughtful Gen-Xer. He runs Interval, a Warehouse District marketing and branding firm whose clients are primarily hospitals and clinics, mostly in the Upper Midwest. He also speaks and writes extensively on health care marketing. (Founded in 1999 as GeigerBevolo, a more traditional graphic-design and branding shop, his company became Interval in November 2008, a couple of years after it chose to focus on health care marketing.)

So, um, Chris, you still have clients? He laughs: They’ve heard it. In fact, he wants them to hear it. And apparently, it doesn’t deter them from working with his firm.

When 150–year-old St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul, which had been doing major renovation, wanted to show that it had undergone a transformation, Interval created a series of patient documentaries positioned to resemble first-run movies. During the first month of the campaign (seen on the sides of buses and on billboards), the word “hospital” didn’t even appear. The campaign has since won numerous health-care marketing awards.

But the projects that especially appeal to Interval are those where marketing intersects with how a hospital or clinic interacts with patients.

In 2004, North Memorial Medical Center opened its new heart-care clinic for women. Heart screening is typically not covered by insurance. So how to encourage women not only to get screened, but also to improve their heart health?

Interval developed personalized journals entitled “MyHeart Book” that include the results of each patient’s tests, educational information, and specific ways to improve, like dietary tips and stress reduction techniques, as well as encouraging them to follow up with staff. Patient response to the program was so strong that North Memorial soon expanded hours and staffing. And the MyHeart journal helped convert a scary or at least unappealing prospect into a positive experience.

(An Interval project on the guy side, designed to get more men to sign up for organ donation—Half the Men.)

Why do hospitals and clinics resist improvements in how they operate? You could ask: Why do organizations in general resist real change? (Some thoughts on that here.) In the health care world, Chris believes, an additional roadblock is that medical staffers are swamped. Being pushed to change the way they work can add more stress to what is already a high-blood-pressure vocation.

Hospital and clinic marketing staffers are more likely to “get it,” Chris observes. But there aren’t many opportunities for them to push for it. Most are encouraged, even required, to stick with traditional mass-comm messaging, typically resulting in a mushy snack cake with a mysterious cream filling, liberally sprinkled with glittering generalities. Examples from Chris: “We’re a hidden gem.” “If patients only knew our story.” “We really like our nice new heart wing.”

In other words, many health-care providers seem to believe that they, not patients, control how they’re perceived.

But as Chris notes, people don’t particularly want to go to the hospital. And if they’ve had an unpleasant experience, if staffers have treated them like downed cattle, then all the shiny-happy-people images from all the stock-photography CDs in the world aren’t going to change what those patients tell their friends.

“Fifty percent of health care marketing is wrong,” says Chris, also noting that health care is a highly complicated industry, where suppliers generally control demand, and people typically can’t “shop around.” It doesn’t follow business-to-consumer rules.

So why should its marketing follow the same rules? His point exactly.

BTW: I won’t be able to attend The Show, the Minnesota Ad Fed’s awards gala the evening of Friday, October 23. But I can dig its Web site, and do. Augmented reality, mind-bending colors, the Hamm’s bear (drinking Summit?)—it’s all there. How shall I praise it? As an all-night rave for the eyeballs. An interactive acid trip, without the pesky side effects of real LSD. Both good things, by the way.

The credits: Carlson Marketing’s Door C division for the site design, Analog for the augmented reality, Brent Schoonover for the illustrations, and Ratchet for the behind-the-scenes technical that’s on beyond Flash.