Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You also mentioned that even just in LA there are hundreds, if not thousands, of boutique agencies nowadays that are competing for the same dollars and are becoming much more open to experimenting and spreading the dollars across those different smaller agencies. How do you keep track? What’s your process of keeping an eye on who’s doing what and what’s interesting?

John Deschner: The awards shows used to be the best place. You went to Cannes and you saw the best in advertising and marketing in the world. If somebody made a dent there, you should probably keep an eye on him. That’s a less reliable way now just because there are a lot of small and medium players who are doing interesting stuff. Having been in the industry for a while, I have a lot of friends in the industry. We watch and show things.

There’s that social version of other Chief Digital Officers. We share stuff around. Then beyond that, there’s a great community now, especially in LA. They organize a lot of events to bring us together. That helps you keep track. The other side is recruiting. We’re always looking for the next interesting person from a background that’s not exactly like anybody we have here.

The other piece is, a lot of times within the big agency world, you need to know 50 or 100 people before you get a handle on the world. For us, it’s looking beyond that. There’s a platform called Influential that’s AI-driven. My Head of Digital Production, Head of Digital Content Strategy, and I meet with just about anybody who calls us up just to understand what they’re up to and what the opportunities are.

We’re always open to partnerships. For instance, we’re doing a pitch in partnership with Super Deluxe. We haven’t worked together before. They have an amazing handle on Facebook Live and how to exploit it. Those exercises help keep us fresh.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. How do you keep track of the influencers that you want to work with? There are actually many of these influencer marketing systems out there. Is that what you use?

John Deschner: Influencers now are essentially the same as working with any celebrity. I couldn’t tell you the difference between working with any top-tier influencer and working with a celebrity. That is hard to track. When you get down to tier-II or tier-III, those data-driven platforms become really interesting. To me, it’s not so much about tracking influencers as it is about trying to cast a reasonably wide net.

If you’re going to take $20,000 or $30,000 and spread it around to a tier-II or tier-III program, we really incentivize content creation. You just see which one of them and creates the most noise. You’re just finding them through in a more data-driven way. There are a lot of people who are right in the bubble of being a tier one influencer who are challenged to do things because as they do, they dump 5% of their audience. There are people who are around the 300,000 subscriber mark on YouTube.

There’s an opportunity there where you might get a really big bang for your buck without having to cost them 5% of their audience. We haven’t cracked that yet. I’m having some really interesting talks with professional gamers in that space. They will be able to try some different things. A lot of these things just come down to being open to experimentation at the financial level. If we say, “Maybe the money doesn’t move like this. Maybe it moves like this.” If you’re open to that, I think you can get some more interesting things done.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting conversation. We definitely look at the world from the technology industry’s point of view. You are more of users and consumers of technology as opposed to the actual technology vendor. It’s helpful to our audience who are experimenting with that to hear a different point of view.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day
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