Fact & Fiction

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I worked at a chocolate snacking business out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was the senior director in charge of all the digital which represented $470 million in spend and created over 22 different brands within the portfolio.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Fact & Fiction?

It was real-time relevance and resonance in terms of creative expression for each of our brands. We couldn’t move at the speed of the digital world, but Fact & Fiction could. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I was trying to understand how to leverage data and storytelling for our digital audience. We wanted to know how we would be able to do that while offering relevant topics to our external stakeholders. Kyle (Founding Partner) and I ideated for 1–2 weeks on what we should do, what would be meaningful, and what would be helpful.

We talked about different models for partnering together, and we talked about using internal people and leveraging them holistically in one capacity or partial capacities. We called it the “Hothouse Project” which was essentially an agile content curation system or practice for our business. Moreover, we identified challenges and how those activation models would look before we would consider rolling content out. In total, we developed two strategies for agile content curation, and created a system for content development that was nuanced, and leveraged what was a new model for both forward-looking, and real-time content ideation.

We created an agile workgroup for each of our brands that essentially had daily scrum models. The system creates content in virtual real-time at a cost that was exponentially lower compared to other agencies. These agencies wanted to create content at a 3–6 month cycle, but what Kyle and I were able to create was something that was incredibly agile. It leverages data that allows us to use a framework for agile approvals. We looked at the channel executions to determine the value and opportunistic approaches.

What is the team composition?

We worked with four people from Fact & Fiction, including Kyle.

How did you come to work with Fact & Fiction?

I worked with their sister agency in my days when I was creating digital content from scratch for a sporting goods company out of the West Coast. As a result, I called Fact & Fiction to initially ideate on what I was trying to achieve. I also worked with them before, and we did an RFP when we needed an organization most fundamentally from a decision-making perspective. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent roughly around the range of $500,000–$1,000,000. We were leveraging them for a certain amount of resource capacity, as well as production capacity. We did various levels of strategic support with an ongoing agility and production team always on the ready.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started talking in August 2017, and we continued to use them until I left in June 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

One of the key things that we wanted to increase specifically, was our engagement across certain channels. We were actively looking at opportunities to get more intimate with our customers, and get more knowledge about their likes and dislikes.

Essentially, we were able to increase our engagement from this program by 30%. Our most successful channel in this particular instance was social, but that lent itself out into curation of actual TV commercials as a function.

How did Fact & Fiction perform from a project management standpoint?

They used whatever they wanted, and they had their own specific tools for project management. The biggest challenge that ever came up was more on our side, because we had too many cooks in the kitchen, and managing the project got more complicated.

However, in terms of the clarity of the work, we had to figure out what those benchmarks were, so we really worked together to create some of those communication models. In addition, they were always on time when it came to the deliverables. It wasn’t about perfection, it was about being in the moment that was resonant and relevant at the time. We didn’t consider something lost as a miss, we considered something lost as maybe it wasn’t the right time for it, and we picked up on something else.

The project management was very deliberate, intention, quick, and not designed to find errors, but opportunities.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were phenomenal partners, and they were incredibly smart. Fact & Fiction did a lot of things in a thousand different ways, but they understand fundamentally that each engagement was unique. Every time we started something new or thought about something new, they had a trove of information around things that worked and didn’t.

We could easily collaborate together to get to an answer, and even though none of it was perfect, they had the same goals that we did.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only thing that was the most complex was time since we were in different time zones.