Why Iris Wants to Close the Gap Between Social and Brand-Building

 

 

 

Chris> I think it's an interesting time for that proposition. Because of where I've just come from – a purely social influencer world, having been at Iris previously – I think you'll see that there are some holes in that world. When you look at some of the things that those agencies trade off of, which is the ability to be reactive, to spot trends, jump on them super fast and what clients demand, there's a hole around how you build a brand in that context.

 

A lot of the work that we were doing at my previous agency, if you look below the surface, you did this really reactive tweet that did really well. Outside of that, what are you doing for the brand? I think a lot of those agencies struggle. They can do reactive stuff, they can do trends, but the thing they can't do is pure-play marketing, which has a deep strategy at the beginning, a real understanding of the business objective and what clients are actually trying to achieve. And then looking at how you meet those aims through social. It's all very much like, how can you jump on a trend that you're seeing in TikTok and make sure that the brand can play in that space? People are getting too savvy to that now. Consumers are all bored. It's like that ‘wackaging’ era that Innocent started off. I think we're going back through that in the social landscape where people are just jumping on stuff that they shouldn't really be playing on.

It almost becomes like pop culture commentators, without any real objective. The irony is brands kill trends. As soon as a brand jumps on anything, it's sort of the death of it. It's so cringe. I remember being a kid, and whenever my dad said, 'that's really cool' I was like, OK, it's not cool. It's kind of that vibe.

 

 

 

Chris> Oatly are amazing. They don't jump on any trends. At no point did they do the Bill Hader dancing meme thing or anything. It's all original content, fairly product-centric, but it's done in just the way that’s just entertaining. I think that's the thing that a lot of people are missing.

 

 

 

Chris> I was working at an agency in 2015 called Jam. They were so ahead of their time, they were doing what every agency does now before organic social died and everyone took social in house. They were doing brand social for some of the bigger Unilever brands, Xbox, they were killing it. A lot of those strategists that worked in Jam went on to some of the best creative agencies. They've had that amazing strategic thinking, real brand understanding. When you go to social specialist agencies, it always feels like there’s a bit that is missing – the bit up front from a brand thinker.

 

And then you've got that coupled with a load of agencies that are still really moving in the same way. They'll build social capability but what they can't get around is the muscle memory, being able to take a campaign and actually deliver it and translate it on social channels.

 

It leads on to what I'm trying to do with Iris. I think a lot of it is muscle memory. The response to any brand brief now is an epic film that is 30 seconds. It's hard to get people out of that mode of thinking.

 

You have people lower down within agencies who really understand social. People in charge don't live and breathe it. How can you close that gap? That's a real challenge and I don’t think many places manage to do it.

 

 

 

Chris> It’s that brand guardianship. I think social gets away with a lot because people within those brands who run social don't necessarily understand branding. That's why we're in a weird place. All agencies will catch up. But before the time for big agencies in the context of social – I think we’ve got one more period to go through where I think you're gonna see a lot of social agencies lose big accounts. You can see the bigger ones are like a slippery bar of soap that's moving from hand to hand at the moment. I think that's because the emphasis and expectation on social has increased and those agencies don't have the delivery mindset or craft mindset that some of those bigger agencies have. They don't have the infrastructure. It's a massive scramble. It's just gonna be about how long it takes them to close that gap between those two worlds. That's going to be a big thing.

 

 

 

Chris> My wife worked here, my brother-in-law, my sister. In a weird way it’s the family business. And I always felt I was going to end up back here, this was gonna be the end goal. Each time I went out and did something different, and learned something. I did government work for almost three years. I took a lot from that that I now carry forward into this.

 

It all came about really organically. I wanted to chat to Claire [Humphris, chief executive officer] because I knew they were going to move in this space. I said there are probably some things that I could tell you about my last three years. Then it turned into a more concrete conversation. It felt like a homecoming for sure.

 

 

 

Chris> We need to have more people attracting talent. A lot of that is about other people building profiles. That's another thing social agencies are really good at – their own marketing and marketing their people. I think that's what attracts the best talent. We need to have those people that social talent and young creators actually want to come and work with. That's the priority.

 

Then I think giving those people the space to bring what they're really good at, to get all the benefits of advancing their understanding of this industry, to help them to really understand how to dissect brands. As a career path, you move through an agency, you could go on to do anything. You've taken a bunch of different problems for different brands, learnt how to interpret them. You can go and start any business you want.

 

If you look around LinkedIn, the last few years have been really serious. And the reason why I left the government work and came back was I just find the whole thing funny. If you really detach from it and say what is it that we do? We take this stuff and we come up with creative ideas to solve problems. That's amazing. My cousins are scaffolders.

 

If you remove some of the stresses that come with short delivery times and demanding clients, you can engage with it for what it is – actually it's all about problem solving, which a lot of people don't get to do. You can get a real sense of achievement. It will also set you up with the ability to go into a room and present, build a case, understand to interpret the challenge and create something off the back of it. That should be the easiest sell in the world.

 

 

 

Chris> I think building the machinery and the mechanisms to deliver the work is easy. That point at which we have built up some amazing case studies around the type of work that you can do in this space – because I know we can do it and we're better than most social agencies – the point at which we cross that line between knee-jerk reaction and think more laterally around what solutions look like. The Starbucks work is that. The more we can get that as our standard operating procedure, that will be the point at which the job's sort of done. When we're looking leftfield for insights for creativity, executing in really unexpected ways. Retrospectively we'll look back on it and say we did it. But I'll never know when it's actually done.

 

We're on the cusp of that with a few clients already. When Iris comes unexpected again, that's when we know we've done a good job. And I mean that in every sense, whether that's the way we run a chemistry meeting or the type of work we're winning or the way in which we bring people in. It's hard to put a KPI against unexpectedness though.