Bamboo Network, only in existence for five years, has experienced such exponential growth that they’ve had to move to bigger offices twice and are now on a recruitment drive to attract what's been coined ‘T shaped’ people to join their team – more on that later. They call themselves a challenger ‘agency’ (yes, with ‘agency’ in quotation marks), because they’re so much more than the traditional creative space and workers. Over the last half-decade they have had success in putting as much focus on being logical as on being creative.
Part of that stems from the fact that Matsau himself is a digital native, so he understands the needs of today’s ever-distracted, always-needing-more-personal-touchpoints consumer.
Matsau shares a few further insights…
How exactly do you collaboratively bridge management consulting with the creative world of marketing communications?
I’ve always found that gap challenging to understand, because every management consulting firm has a lens through which they approach business. This means some traditionally come from a tax and auditing lens, while some tech companies who we can argue are now management consultants have a technology lens.
Management consulting is basically about helping organisations improve their performance, so we analyse existing problems and develop plans aimed at improving or mitigating said problem across a number of avenues, from research and development to market share loss, brand erosion and even operational inefficiencies.
With this in mind – and the fact that marketing accounts for close to fifty percent of business, and that developing customers is one of the cornerstones of even having a business – the idea that a management consulting firm can’t approach business problems from a marketing and branding lens is one that I find to be an oddity.
That’s why we talk to the whole management contingent when dealing with marketing problems, not just the CMO; in the same way that a management consultant will work with the CEO in solving an operational problem through addressing HR, finance and marketing issues. It’s only logical to conclude that a market share problem can also be solved by addressing HR issues such as having the right people internally the right operational processes and pricing.
For you, the right people are ‘T-shaped’. Explain what such a person is like, where to find them and how they benefit your own agency network.
In essence it's a person with a depth of skills and expertise in a particular field, with the ability to collaborate across disciplines with people that have expertise in areas other than their own.
All management consulting firms have models and processes, which is IP that belongs to the organisation and is developed by the organisation as tools to solve business problems. We operate in the same manner. Additionally, when you look at how management consulting firms are traditionally structured, it doesn’t matter what background a person comes from; some people come from psychology, others from law, physics, social studies or finance. All these different talents, expertise and worldviews are structured into groups, taught proprietary models and processes and trusted to solve business problems. But the situation is different in the marketing field; the challenge for us is breaking that mould.
We have become too homogenous over time. We’ve been attracting the same kind of people and thus have started to have the same kind of solutions; with the same homogenous group of people telling each other a variation of the same thing whilst continually giving each other awards. The thinking starts being stagnant. This is why we’re now recruiting more than just people from an agency or ad school background, instead looking for candidates from IT, research and business administration to start thinking of how to solve marketing problems. This works perfectly with the 'T Shaped' idea, and experience has shown us that someone from a finance background can have very interesting and effective views on how to solve a marketing problem.
Interestingly, the idea of being T-shaped has become critical in a world that is evolving into one wherein people and entities need a breadth of skills to survive which has manifested in agencies starting to overlap. Everyone is positioning themselves as offering through-the-line services, in essence describing themselves (and trying) to be T-shaped.
How exactly does your T-shaped team then ‘engage things only to make them better’?
We did so for #MutualFriends, a TV show based on students studying at Wits University focused on the impact of social media on their lives. With digital budgets on the rise and marketers spending less on traditional media, like TV and radio, the challenge was how to make a television programme find relevance in the digital space. The business problem thus was not only in relation to the TV programme itself, but also linked to the TV platform: we had to make the programme live outside the four corners of the screen.
The solution was to devise what was the first social media second-screen experience in South Africa. Simply put, the main characters had social media profiles that allowed viewers to interact with them on the screen. As the characters were living out their lives on TV, they were simultaneously living their lives out on social media. So as the character was updating their status on TV, the same status would show up on their social media profile and the viewers responded in real time.
This extended the idea of fictional reality as seen on TV and putting it in your hands, creating a further engagement platform as well as revenue stream for the programme. #Mutual Friends ended up as the top drama show on SABC 1 and was continuously the top trending item on Twitter.
This was great as viewers are often taken from watching TV and directed towards the digital space with QR codes, URL addresses and social media handles. With #MutualFriends, we made the TV show (and TV platform) relevant by putting it squarely and deliberately on social media and driving people to the TV show. This has now become a trend that we’re starting to see, with programmes like Date my Family and Our Perfect Wedding being perfect examples of shows where people who weren’t traditionally watching the show start to see the content on social media and are then directed to the TV programme.
That certainly takes cross-platform marketing to a whole new level. Click here for more on how Bamboo Network is challenging the brand innovation norm and be sure to follow them on Facebook and visit their website for the latest updates.
