Not Digital - You May Not Be Relevant

How one Kiwi woman in Colorado is rewriting the rules of advertising on a global scale.

Claudia Batten possesses a natural talent for business. There’s nothing she would rather do than start new businesses, primed by her previous career as a lawyer and her current career in advertising. However, playing by the rules is not part of her game plan and she confesses that she’s likely to change the rules to suit herself. “I feel like I physically buckle anytime someone says ‘you can’t do it that way’. I’m pretty headstrong; it’s a strength and a weakness, and if someone tells me ‘no’ I just want it that much more.”
 
Originally from Wellington, Claudia now abides by Mountain Time, living in Boulder, Colorado with her artist husband, Mark Castator. Her first foray into the advertising market was with Massive, the world’s first network for advertising dynamically in video games. In 2006 at only three years old, Massive was acquired by Microsoft Corporation, where Claudia remained as Director of Partner Development for a further three years.
 
A continued desire to take the road least trodden and meet the needs of advertising clients, Claudia cofounded Victors & Spoils. Launched in 2009 with Evan Fry and John Winsor, Claudia is the Chief Operating Officer of the world’s first advertising agency based on the principles of crowdsourcing. Instead of turning to an inhouse team for creative input, Victors & Spoils turn to 6000 contributors from 130 countries, all vying for the ‘spoils’.
 
The company, with clients such as Coca Cola, Unilever, General Mills and Harley Davidson, departs from the usual approach to creative development whilst retaining the good of conventional methods. “We actually have a very traditional way of approaching the development of advertising - a lot of things that are necessary to create great advertising already exist,” explains Claudia. “What we do with crowdsourcing is bring more voices into the conversation and into the ideation process. We’re using crowdsourcing and any other digital tools that we can to make sure our clients are paying the best price for great advertising.”
 
Claudia says that advertising agencies have got a little carried away when it comes to charging for their services and expertise. Fortune 500 companies are paying big, big dollars, believing that’s necessary to get the best ideation, but that’s not what they’re getting. “We say that we are everything you loved about your agency before they became big and bloated and expensive. A lot of clients out there just want a lot of great creative thinking and by using the fantastic talent in the crowd we can bring that to them. Crowdsourcing is actually something our clients don’t see. It’s not really relevant to them except that, by using our model, we bring them bigger ideas from a broader group of people in a more cost efficient way.”
 
The world of advertising was a bit of a departure from her original career as a lawyer at Russell McVeagh. A seemingly rash decision to move to New York was based on Claudia’s strong sense of intuition and organic approach to life and business. “I think it’s really hard to know you’re making the right decision at any given moment,” she muses. “You just make a decision to go in a certain direction. Taking in what’s going on, assessing that bit of information, reacting to it and then seeing what happens from there. That’s how I look at it rather than ‘ah, I’ve got it’.”

Claudia uses the same decision making process with business decisions at Victors & Spoils. “You just go full force into it and see where it takes you. I think the biggest and most important thing is to make sure that right from conception you are always open to changing what you are doing. What we thought we were going to do and where we are now is very different in some respects and exactly the same in others.”
Her ability to take any path she chooses stems from Claudia’s early days as a student at Kaori’s Samuel Marsden Collegiate School. “Graduating from there I just had a sense there was nothing in the world a woman couldn’t achieve. In fact, I didn’t even think about it being relative to sex – there was just nothing I couldn’t achieve if I didn’t set my mind on it, work really hard to achieve it and find people who were willing to support me.”

It was in her teenage years that Claudia caught the first glimpse of her inner strength. “I had an operation that went sideways and it meant I took quite a bit of time off school. I will never forget the teachers at Marsden staying after school and working with me over the lunch hour to get me up to speed so that I would be OK for my exams. That experience really brought out the fighter in me.”
Claudia also credits the incredible role models in her universe with having an influence on her outlook on life. “When I was growing up New Zealand had a lot of strong women in powerful positions. The ‘girls can do anything’ campaign started when I was five. I don’t think you can discount the power of seeing this being infected into popular culture. Then you take Jenny Shipley, Dame Catherine Tizard, Fran Wilde, Helen Clark. And add Theresa Gattung and Mai Chen when I was at law school. With all these immensely powerful women in high places it just never occurred to me that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted.”

Victors & Spoils offers Claudia what she, her colleagues and the advertising clients want. She cautions that as we move deeper into the digital age the rules are changing, something to ignore at our peril. “We’ve gone through the adoption phase of the Internet, we all opted in and we’re all there now. Now we’re at the point where our behaviour begins to change. It used to be about connecting online – now it’s more about engaging online and using that connectivity to deliver your message. When you see what happened with the Online Piracy Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act digital outrage, and even when you look at Arab Spring, you see that last year was pivotal in what’s happening online. The connectivity is established – it’s now about how you use that connectivity. We’re in for some exciting and radical change.”

For advertising the change means giving more power to the people. “It’s the idea of allowing consumers to have a voice with a brand, have more of an engagement with a brand and connect more deeply with the brand,” explains Claudia. “Whether you call it crowdsourcing or engagement marketing or whatever, I think reaching out to consumers and asking them for their ideas, their opinions and their thoughts is something we’re going to see more and more of.”

Building online engagement is a topic that sees Claudia happily jump up onto her soapbox, especially when it comes to her homeland. “If you’re not obsessed with digital, you have to be careful that your business doesn’t become irrelevant. It blows me away sometimes how little Kiwis are using these platforms, and it scares me because this is where the world is shifting. New Zealand arguably has the ability to use this connectivity to remove any barriers to our geographical isolation and really start making an impact on the world. If we don’t start radically embracing digital as a country, let alone as a company, we’re going to be out to pasture.”

Likewise, adds Claudia, New Zealand needs to be fostering the amazing talent we have right on our doorstep. “The young talent today grew up with digital. They use these networks in a different way and they think about them in a different way. We need to be really embracing young talent and figuring out how they think. New Zealand is untapped potential of the highest degree.”
 
Claudia says people often question why she doesn’t live in New Zealand when she is so obviously devoted to the country. She replies it’s purely because, for the moment, the United States is where the bigger opportunities - and victories - lie. When asked to define ‘success’, Claudia shies away from using the word ‘happy’ although one gets the feeling that’s really what it comes down to.
“For me success is when I can sit back and be proud of what I’ve achieved, feel like I’ve done it with integrity, and that I haven’t stepped on anyone along the way. Ultimately if I can sit down with my husband and a glass of wine at the end of the day, laugh at my Golden Retriever and go for a ski – that’s success. It’s so easy to feel like it’s all these other things like money, recognition and other elements that are ego based. None of that’s to say I don’t want to achieve a lot! But to me it’s feeling like you’ve really climbed a mountain, stopping to enjoy the view and being happy about what you’ve achieved.”
 
Catherine Murray
www.victorsandspoils.com
 
Claudia’s advice for staying ahead of the game:
 
-Never get complacent - ever.
 
-Learn to listen to your intuition and learn to trust it.
 
-Have an openness to transitioning, taking your skills to new places and  learning new skills.
 
-Have broad shoulders. It’s inevitable that new ideas will induce some degree of criticism.
 
-Embrace digital with abandon. Understand and participate in the digital world, thinking about where it can take your conversation.