We just lost our biggest account. We had to reduce headcount from thirty-five to twelve people. And on top of all that, we just went through a seismic leadership change.

We have every reason to be terrified.

But for so many reasons, we couldn’t be more excited about the future of this agency and where it’s headed.

Over the past ten years, we at Holler have built up a strong reputation in the digital industry in Australia as a culture of people who make some really awesome digital work while not taking ourselves too seriously. A lot of amazing people have passed through this place — first in Surry Hills, and most recently in our warehouse in Redfern — each adding their own unique imprint on this place.

And recently, we’ve hit some major challenges with the business.

For one, our largest client Audi Australia consolidated their digital business with their traditional agency. If you’re on the agency side, you’ve probably been here before: global cost-cutting, pressure from internal procurement teams, consolidation.

Over the last four plus years, Audi was a big part of Holler, and Holler was a big part of Audi. We helped them undergo a real and tangible “digital transformation” by executing award-winning campaigns (see: R8 Blink) and leading their evolution into a more data-driven and customer-focused business. It may sound like a bunch of buzzwords, but it’s true. Every person who touched the Audi business at Holler, past and present, should be proud of the work we made together.

As a result, we’ve had to say goodbye to a lot of really amazing people, all who have contributed to the culture, vibrancy and energy of this agency in their own unique ways. This has absolutely been the hardest aspect to deal with and if you’re one of these people, thank you for all that you’ve added to Holler.

And last but not least, we just went through a major change in leadership at the company. As such, we will lead the agency moving forward as co-Managing Partners.

So what do we do now and what becomes of Holler?

While some might have just thrown in the towel, we think the other option is infinitely more interesting and exciting: re-building Holler not to get back to where it was, but to build it into something different altogether.

Which is why today is essentially “day one” for Holler. A day for us to reset why this agency exists and how we think, act and make. A day for us to move this business forward into a completely different direction.

Yes, it has probably been the toughest couple of months in our company’s history, but the opportunity to directly shape and influence the new direction of Holler is something that we just can’t pass up.

What we’re building at Holler

Today, Holler is a team of twelve passionate strategists, designers, producers and developers who each bring their own unique skills, talents and experiences.

This business exists to grow, teach and challenge our people to do their best work. We believe that our best work will only happen by working together and that having diverse people, backgrounds and skills makes that work stronger.

We’re from all over the world: Brazil, England, America, Singapore, India, France, and New Zealand. Sometimes the couple of Aussies on the team feel like the odd ones out. Last week, one of our clients called us a United Colors of Benetton ad — and she isn’t that far from the truth.

What we’re building is a digital agency that partners directly with brands and companies to solve some of their biggest business problems through data, design and technology.

Holler is:

A place where people are given opportunities to learn, grow and be challenged to do their best work. We will measure our success based on the growth and health of our people. If they’re constantly challenged and learning, then we are in good shape.

A team that isn’t trying to do everything. At 12 people, we can’t do everything, but we can do three things really well: translating brands to digital experiences and interactions, integrating really complex technical systems and turning them into elegant user experiences, and developing data-driven digital strategies and roadmaps.

An agency where clients can partner directly with senior level talent who bring a lot of experience and smart thinking to the table. Each project and client relationship is led by a Managing Partner who is responsible for ensuring the best quality work and execution.

A small, dedicated core team that our clients can throw their toughest problems to. The best work happens when people work together, which includes clients. Our client partners are real, contributing members of each project team and work directly with our strategists, designers and developers.

In the past couple of months, we’ve started working with a few really awesome clients who are genuinely excited about digital and how it can transform their businesses and we’re learning a lot of lessons of what works along the way.

It’s still early days, but we’re busy working on a lot of exciting problems and we can’t wait to share our work in the coming months.

Why we’re so excited

Holler will continue to evolve over time, but we’re excited because we believe there’s space for a team like us — a space between traditional digital agencies and consultancies. Sort of like a hybrid digital agency that moves a lot faster than the big digital consultancies.

We’re also excited because we get a chance to start over.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve had an expression that we’ve been using: “Old Holler”. Old Holler is what we call the ways of thinking, making, and working that was reflective of our previous self. And whatever “Old Holler” used to do, “New Holler” wants to do better.

If something feels like it’s not working, we change it. If someone on the team thinks we can do something in a better way, we’ll at least consider it. Everyone has a say in where we go next and how we work.

We don’t have all the answers on day one, but our intent is to do our best to learn from our mistakes, do what’s right for our people, and to build Holler into a place where people are excited to do their best work.

There’s nothing like day one — and hopefully we are equally as excited about the future on day two, and as Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park would say, “Hold onto your butts.”

Diego, Ian and Eugene

Managing Partners, Holler Australia

Holler is a digital agency located in Sydney, Australia that transforms businesses through the innovative use of data, design and technology.

If you’d like to say hello, drop us a line by clicking here.

Peishan Tan examines the increasing use of data to create a more personalised experience in marketing. She posits that while hyper personalisation helps increase targeted conversions, consumers are starting to feel fatigued, and discusses how we can make it better.

Hyper personalised content and ads risk becoming too predictable.

In the past decade, I’ve welcomed the sophistication of companies like Google and news platforms to mine my preferences and serve me curated news articles they know I’d enjoy based on my browsing history. At the same time, instead of searching for that proverbial needle in a haystack for book recommendations, I could just scroll through the list of books Amazon and Goodreads suggested, based on similar books I’d enjoyed. It’s efficient, saves time, and feels familiar.

Recently however, I’ve begun to feel a little stifled.

Amazon and Goodreads keep recommending the same tired list of books that I’ve already browsed through and dismissed. I’m ready to move on to different types of books, but the suggestions I get from those sites haven’t changed. For that matter, if I’ve liked a particular style of photograph on Instagram — natural light landscapes for instance — that’s the only variation I see in the “Explore” tab. And if I’ve looked at Canon cameras on eBay, these cameras will follow me on my meandering path online.

I’m also not the only one that feels this feels this way. According to MarketingSherpa’s 2016 survey with US internet users, 17% of respondents unsubscribed from emails because they found the “content of the emails is boring, repetitive, and not interesting to me.”

I get it. Marketers don’t want to to be tone deaf, and hawk products and services that I clearly have no interest in. If the Instagram “Explore” tab shows me endless pictures of duck-lip selfies, for instance, I’d delete the app in a jiffy. But I wonder, have they — we (putting on my marketing hat now) — gone too far in data mining to hyper personalise to people’s preferences? Are we trying too hard to sell to consumers what they want / might have wanted? Have we done too good a job in pushing the confirmation bias that we sabotage our own goals as marketers to expand to new consumers, consumers who might not have even considered the products and services we were trying to sell? Have we hindered the power of discovery?

It’s a little ironic that back in 2004, Steve Jobs famously said,

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Have we since swung to the other side of the pendulum? With cookies tracking, big data mining, we now know better than ever before, exactly what people want at a certain point in time, and we are now relentlessly reminding them of that fact, stalking them across the interwebs, egging them on to purchase.

How did we become so hyper focused on personalisation?
Personalisation of course, is not a new thing. Marketers have been doing this for years, if not centuries. The difference now, of course, is more people than ever before are living their lives online. They are “window shopping”, actually making purchases, chatting, dating, and even being intimate online. These activities are way easier to track digitally — and with pinpoint accuracy. And processing that data has gotten much faster and cheaper, allowing more companies than ever before to crunch all that disparate data into a ‘single customer view’, allowing their marketers to analyze seemingly minute details, calculate all sorts of probabilities, and react / adjust on the fly.

From having a hazy, impressionistic idea of who your customer is, marketers can now paint a sharp picture of who their customers are — their age, gender, average income, address, marital status, job title, their social connections, how much research they’d done before committing to a purchase… you get the idea. The thought of all that knowledge is sexy, sort of like Clark Kent using his super-bionic-eyes-to-look-through-elevator-doors-sexy. For marketers, having this trove of data at our finger tips is incredibly stimulating. We can model the propensity for prospects to convert, and boy, have the leaders in the field shown us what is achievable with data mining.

Netflix, for instance, hacked the world of television production with its original US series ‘House of Cards’, in part because they’d trawled through their massive subscriber database, and noted users’ penchant for the British version of House of Cards, the actor Kevin Spacey, the director David Fincher, and their viewers’ love for binge watching television series. Their winning bid of $100 million over entrenched channels like HBO and AMC for the rights to produce the series had seemed rich at first, but their data analysis paid off, big time. Within a quarter of releasing the series, Netflix reported an increase in 3 million subscribers.

While I haven’t personally bought into ‘House of Cards’ (not a big Kevin Spacey fan), I have recently been nudged into action to buy a bag because of a company’s savvy marketing. I’d been researching online for a new camera bag, and almost bit the bullet on a Peak Design bag, going as far as signing up for an account to check out. At the last minute, I decided to sleep on it; it wasn’t strictly speaking a necessity after all. A week later, however, I received an email from the company, entreating me to rethink my decision, sweetening the deal with a 5% offer. I was sold.

So clearly, personalised marketing works. When consumers are actively in the market, the right message at the right time can and will easily help close the deal. But we have to be careful. What people have expressed interest in at a particular point in time may change. Our role as marketers is to gently nudge, but not stalk. It’s tiresome to be receiving the same message over and over again. People still like surprises; want to be surprised, to discover new things.

So every now and again, let’s challenge them, and break them out of their comfort zone with something different.

While we’re all for using data to personalise content and experiences for our consumers, here are a few guiding principles for making those experiences more enriching, gratifying and satisfying.

Guiding principle 1: Past behaviour does not indicate future preferences
Personalisation, to date, has focused mostly on past behaviour. We have to remember that people’s needs and desires change and are constantly evolving. They get married, divorced, have kids, change jobs, move cities, countries

Say I had a friend who had been sharing a Netflix account with his girlfriend. They’ve enjoyed watching endless horror movies, and Netflix had been doing a bang-up job recommending similar genres. But they recently broke up. Needing a distraction, my friend turns to Netflix, but he just sees the list of suggested horror movies. He doesn’t want — doesn’t need — the constant reminders of what used to be. Why not give him an out? Give him the power to reset, to completely wipe clean the slate of past behaviour?

Spotify does a great job of using data beyond just listening history to recommend songs to users. Within its “Discover Weekly” product, they leverage data mining to make suggestions not based on the individual listener’s past playlists, but based on the playlists of their millions of subscribers. Consequently, the song selection feels not only personalised, but also constantly fresh and exciting. Their “Discover Weekly” has grown exponentially since it debuted in 2015, from 1.7 billion streams to more than 5 billion streams in mid-2016.

Guiding principle 2: Nobody likes a nag
I don’t want to belabour the point but, nobody likes a nag.

If you know that someone has browsed your products repeatedly over a period of time, but have not responded to a gentle sweetener, have the discipline to move on. They just weren’t that into you, or more specifically, that product they were looking at. If you want to keep the conversation going, maybe offer something different. You could add a footnote with a link that allows them to get back to what they had looked at before, but don’t talk about the product again in the main copy.

Guiding principle 3: Every once in a while, burst their bubble

Following the polarising 2016 US elections, it emerged that people were becoming trapped in news bubbles, in which they only read news articles by writers with the same political leanings. This was due in part to readers’ own unconscious seeking of confirmation bias, but also in large part due to news media and social media’s conscious, constant feeding of personalised content, articles they knew readers they would be interested in. This is problematic, and news and social media are starting to have serious conversations about the need to balance the creation of giant, digital echo chambers, exacerbated by hyper personalisation.

To counteract this, BuzzFeed developed an experimental feature that quite literally tries to burst their readers’ bubble. Termed “Outside Your Bubble”, BuzzFeed has added a module at the bottom of popular articles in which they pull in opposing perspectives from social media channels. Their goal is to at least attempt to expose readers to alternative points of views.

Wrapping up

At the end of the day, our objective as marketers is to help sell products and services. To demonstrate that we understand the audience we are marketing to, we should still try to personalise our messages and recommendations — but we should still strive to do it in a way that is more enriching and empathetic to our consumers, occasionally surprising and delighting them, and allowing them a greater sense of control and discovery.

Holler is a digital agency based in Sydney that transforms businesses through innovative uses of data, design & technology. If you want to chat, drop us a line at hello@holler.com.au.

Senior UI Designer, Lucie Bertiau, discusses the immediate future of design and technology.

Design is everywhere. But as Brian Reed said, Everything is designed. Few things are designed well. It seems we live in a world where poor UX and bad design are simply accepted as the norm.

This could be blamed on the relatively newfound accessibility of design — technologies such as 3D Printing and website design suites making the ability to concept and create both online and in the real world easier and cheaper than ever before — but even the professionals seem to be working with the belief that people should adapt to new technologies.

It’s actually the opposite: these technologies should adapt to us.

Likewise, designers still seem to believe that the role of design is to make things pretty, and are leaving the actual experience of the user to fall by the wayside.

Today’s designers, and tomorrow’s, need to change this. We need to change this. We need to make technology invisible, not pretty, and we need to start designing solutions that save people time and effort.

Consider the music industry. It used to be that if you wanted to listen to a song you had to wait for it to play on the radio. Your only other option was to drive to a music store, find the CD, wait in line at the cashier, pay for it (remember that?), return home, open the CD case, put it in your player, skip to the song you wanted…and, finally, hit play.

Now you can listen to it on Spotify. Free.

But is that good enough? You still have to find your iPhone, unlock it, install the Spotify app, sign up (forfeiting your privacy), search for the song…and hit play. It seems clear that listening to music has become a more streamlined experience, but it’s far from perfect.

Google agree. They think you should just be able to ask your phone: “Okay Google, do something.” And then that something should happen, no other steps required. Their new Google Assistant isn’t just about answering simple questions and commands however; it’s about allowing you to complete more complex tasks directly from a single interface, all in one place. Making bookings and reservations. Accessing multiple strings of information at once. Google Assistant will turn what are currently a series of user interactions into an intelligent, coherent, and context-aware conversation.

The real idea here is to remove steps from processes and, in doing so, remove the pain from everyday tasks. We’re seeing this in all sorts of organisations. Uber, for example, have started asking people ‘Where to?’ first, before requiring their pick-up point. They’re also syncing with your calendar for ride booking prompts. Even better, they’re partnering with Foursquare to ensure you can type in venue names, not just addresses. They’re also allowing you to order food from restaurants close to your drop off point, or check nearby places to eat while you ride. Smart? Yes. Simple? Well…no. Not yet. Not quite. The menu is limited, it isn’t customisable, and delivery mistakes are easily made. But they’re working on it.

This is not a standalone idea. App developers are working more and more behind the scenes to ensure that they can provide all of the relevant information in a single place, rather than putting the burden on the user to switch between them all the time.

Airbnb is a great example of this, and are now aiming to disrupt another element of the travelling experience. They’ve spotted a common issue with travelling, that while tourists want their experience to feel like that of a local what actually happens is that they use a whole bunch of apps to discover exactly the same experiences and eateries as every other tourist. They end up queuing in the ‘tourist traps’ that locals avoid completely. They end up bumping into their neighbour in the middle of Paris…and then again in Rome next week.

So Airbnb have launched a new Experiences feature to allow their users to not only find a place to stay, but things to do and places to eat…all recommended and hosted by locals. This is real recommendation from real people, all in one place. They now promise “the whole trip, in one app”.

Another sphere from which we’ll be seeing much more user-centric design this year is VR. We’re still at an early stage of the technology, and good design is only beginning to creep in. Think about VR in its current form: bulky headsets and tethers (sorry, wires) that tie you to a computer. That’s definitely not invisible technology…it’s not even pretty.

One strong issue I have with current VR technology is that I can’t see my real hands, or my feet at all. 2017 might be year we begin to bridge the gap between VR and AR, drawing in the best of the real and virtual worlds.

Intel, for example, is currently working on a new blend of reality is called “Immersive Reality” or “IR”. IR shows the real world (your hands or a passer-by) as a virtual representation, giving the user the best of both worlds. It also untethers the headset, allowing you to move through the real world as you move through the virtual one. It will be interesting to see how they can continue to improve this experience, and how the end users react to the change.

This year we’ll see design and technology actually making our lives easier (not just promising simplicity while adding complexity). We’ll begin to remove the pain and wasted time of everyday tasks and experiences. This means AI and chatbots and deep-linking…and a whole lot of complicated technology that, hopefully, will be completely unseen by the people who use it.

Design is everywhere. Let’s make it invisible.

Originally posted here.