Opinion: CMO World Tour interview with Jon Wilkins, co-founder of Naked.

Digital has become the electricity of age and brands need to view everything they do through the prism of digital. That’s the view of Jon Wilkins, co-founder of Naked.

In fact, he says, much of the company’s time is spent trying to get marketers to face up to the way their consumers are using technology.

“Rather than spending a lot of time asking them about their own personal preferences, we try and put it really up in front of them as to how their core audience is behaving and use every form of lever and research to get them to really see and recognise that change in their purchasing customer,” he says.

Part of the challenge, he admits, is that senior marketers have such a wide role. “You realise that these guys don’t spend much time thinking about communications and when they do digital communications would be a subset of that. So I think, sadly, when you see the statistics whether [digital] is 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 per cent of their communications thinking, you can’t but help but think they are kind of really missing the point.”

Wilkins himself admits to being a medium-adopter, rather than someone who uses technology for its own sake. “I’m not an early adopter, I wait until I go: actually that’s going to sensibly help me either have fun or work more efficiently,” he says.

He’s a Facebook user for his personal life – it helps keep in touch with friends in London now that he is based in Australia – while LinkedIn acts as his professional connection point.

When it comes to gadgets, he remains unconvinced that here’s any one phone that does it all, having used Nokia, iPhone, Blackberry and Samsung Android handsets.

He’s more inclined to praise the iPad, although that too has limitations. “If it’s a short [trip], taking an iPad is much more convenient and easier just to start work and entertain yourself but obviously I still have a laptop. And unfortunately because you can’t make calls on your iPad you still have a phone. So you just end up carrying more electronic stuff every year.”

Wilkins will admit to Googling himself, more in the hope that some of his more widely distributed sayings will disappear, than for any other reason. The results of searching for “Jon Wilkins Naked” are usually of the more explicit kind, however.

“[Our name has] caused all sorts of problems with technology. Even down to firewalls protecting important clients from receiving our emails. But Naked is not a pun, it’s more about a belief system; about being objective and focused and trying to achieve stuff.”

More than ever he remains surprised at what the younger generation will put out there. “I’ve got my 18-year-old cousin staying with me at the moment in Sydney and they were just showing me some of their stuff in Facebook, which was borderline pornography,” he says. “As all this digital knowledge on the individual gets segregated and people can search and see things. How that’s going to affect the way people picture us in the future? Some of the things that you do in the digital world, you probably wouldn’t want your boss to see.”

FC: What’s your perception of where digital fits into communications process

JW: It’s electricity and everything. You have got to think about everything you do through the digital world. [It affects] everything from releasing your share report to the investor community, through to dealing with a pressure group, through to resetting your product with loyal fans.

FC: What does that mean for traditional channels?

JW: The only way to think about digital is to think about it like electricity. It’s not a channel, it’s basically the spark that ignites everything and, if you are talking about TV, you should be thinking about digital TV. If you are talking about print, you should be thinking about digital print.

… So you can still run ads on TV, you can still run print ads in the Wall Street Journal but you got to think digitally otherwise I think you are really in for a very difficult time moving forward. It is almost like the ascendant way of thinking and then the channels are subsets whereas some plans think of digital as channels, which is just rubbish. It is not a channel.

FC: How do you think marketers have responded to the digital challenge?

JW: I have been to so many global marketing conferences where the top guy has said the thing to do is fast-forward it everybody talks about accelerated times digital culture. But there is never a blue print for change handed down so what actually happens is almost like what you’ve said but maybe even worse.

…It’s just like panic and people think [it’s an] order and they have been told to something, so they will do an experiment and then when the experiment fails they will stop. I think what people need to recognize is that this is a new process, a new blueprint, a new structure, a new way of organizing the business. It’s a revolution and actually anything that is short of that will mean that they will be a playing catch up for a long time.

FC: What’s really stopping them?

JW: I think they’ve trivialized the operational ramifications of changing their culture, so I think that they will say to you: ‘Absolutely we are investing more, we are moving fast forward. Last year was 30 per cent this year it’s 35 per cent.’ So they will all talk about it as being a bigger agenda point but I think few of them have really grasped the sort of cultural shift within their business in order to become digital. When they talk about upping their spending on digital, they mean basically doing search and kind of wobbly banners and that to me that isn’t digital culture.

I hate to say it I think they are not taking it seriously enough.     

FC: What will it take to make them take these steps?

JW: We used to get really quite angry that the advice we were giving was being bought into but then superficially actioned. What we actually recognized was that what was holding the businesses and brands back wasn’t whether they liked our advice or not, it was the fact that they couldn’t digest and operationalise it.

We’ve done a lot of work on that, we’ve done one big study with Booz & Co the management consultants because we thought we’re not skilled in change management but there so let’s partner with a change management expert.

FC: What structural changes do they need to make to put digital at the heart of their organisations?

JW: I think [clients] have to take more responsibility. I think one of the things that I have really noticed is clients aren’t really set up to be media owners. They communicate through corporate communications and they communicate through predominantly advertising paid-for communications. What they really need to get much, much better at is being able to be more representative, have more media owner-like skills to represent and create dialogue in on-going communications. That is not something they should something they should outsource, we could never encourage a client to outsource their voice to us. We would say: “You need to hire some people who could run your blog, who can run your Twitter stream, who can respond immediately to negative comment, who can propagate the things that are really positive about the business.”

FW: What changes has digital forced you to make as an agency?

JW: Because we are a young company, we have always had digital thinking hardwired into our business but probably about five years ago we recognized that inspiration could come as much from more deeper understanding of technological capability.

That meant rather than only tracking the consumer but thinking digitally, actually really understanding that a certain piece of kit or technology could be used to embrace or enhance the engagement. Probably about five years ago we brought technologists or people with a very-strong tech background into the business so classically now we have inside planners, people who have ideas, then a very strong triangulation with technology [as] an input into every solution.

FC: Anything else?

JW: What we have been really doing a lot recently is trying to make data interesting because the digital world throws of reams and reams of data but actually the most clients find they are already burdened with just their existing data.

…We have actually spent quite a lot of time making data both look pretty, but also help guide, make it much more strategic. Because data is everywhere I could serve you data on a plate but if it was all jumbled and unappealing then you are not going [to do] anything about it.

Whereas if I make look really sexy and then I overlay a small commentary on it then you are more likely to make a decision so we have a business called Naked Numbers, which is our data and analytic business and basically just makes sense of multi-various sources of digital data.

… I don’t know what will happen next but we know that you never be complacent so you got to keep changing.