Attendees to the 2010 ECLP global commercial conference were treated to a special out-of-the-box external speaker on January 13th. Aaron Dignan, founding partner and "cool hunter" at hip New York based Undercurrent, a digitally focused strategic think tank, captivated an enthusiastic crowd of GE’s future marketing and sales leaders.

Undercurrent, founded in April 2007 by 20-something entrepreneurs Josh Spear, Aaron Dignan, and Robert Schuham,  provides digitally focused strategic planning, ideation, measurement, training, and advisement to global brands ready to engage a new generation of human beings that were born into digital.

Prior to joining Undercurrent, Aaron garnered experience from Brandplay, a boutique marketing agency based in Boulder, Colorado. Today, his team explores the future frontier of social interactive - where consumers rule and brands aspire to interact with the most connected generation in history. Aaron has also consulted with GE in the past year in a number of capacities as GE has sought to become a more active player in digital media.

Opening with a fatboy slim soundtrack, Aaron began by walking the crowd through a fast paced and edgey 5 minute clip. The underlying theme: how digitally connected our world has become in recent years, as global population has soared alongside the number of internet hours logged, texts messages sent, and blogs posted. The audience was hooked.

One of the messages Aaron touched on was the recent 21st century concept of "disruption marketing" greatly enabled by the many new digital platforms permeating our daily lives. For those unfamiliar with the marketing term, "disruption" exists by creating new methods that interfere with the way a traditional industry conducts business through a more targeted and compelling customer engagement.

Aaron’s disruption example included Undercurrent’s own work with rum producer Don Q, which sought out untraditional digital media channels to gain market share on North American rum leader Bacardi. For Don Q, this resulted in "lady data" (see www.donq.com) content which surveyed 200+ females with question’s relevant to Don Q’s target audience of 21-35 year old males (e.g. how a young man should behave, dress, and engage the opposite sex during an evening out). This content was then linked into a digital campaign which connected popular social media sites such as facebook, twitter, and myspace among others.   Additionally, to keep the Lady Data campaign viral, Undercurrent worked with BuzzFeed, a popular ”social bookmarking” site.

Aaron also introduced the ECLP community to a few examples of the hundreds of new apps, blogs, and web tools appearing on a day to day basis. He claimed that while most trend as inferior copies of known successes like twitter or facebook, occassionally a new twist appears in the digital media space. Of mention was "Four Square" (www.foursquare.com), accessible by Internet-enabled mobile devices. The service prompts users to create a profile and "check-in" at various stores, cafes, and sites around a city while earning points, locating friends, and offering tips along the way. Of interest to marketers, such a platform opens the door for simple, local, and instantaneous marketing promotions that can target a very specific customer base. 

Naturally, a few ECLPs were quick to join Foursquare following Dignan’s advice that marketers should engage new digital media as marketing turns sharply away from traditional channels such as newspaper and tv in the coming decade. Although the majority of GE’s products and services are more b2b than consumer focused, Aaron prefaced that the digital space would become increasingly relevant for b2b as well.

Myle’s O’Connell, our very own NBC-Universal ECLP who has worked in the NBC digital media space, summed up Aaron’s session with the following takeaway: "Undercurrent shows that for marketers, there is an increasing need to microtarget specific customer segments with customized interactions and messages.  It’s important to target the right client, at the right time, with the right message, and digital media allows us to do this very cleanly".

You can follow Aaron Dignan on twitter (@aarondignan).

Posted by Patrick Burlingame