What’s Next for Digital Marketing? DCLabs Aims to Find Out
DCLabs is Digital Current’s in-house innovation playground, an R&D lab for digital marketing. Throughout the year, we identify real-world client problems to unpack, untangle and, hopefully, solve — or at least learn something new. The goal? Actionable, deployable solutions that not only help our clients, but also raise the bar for digital marketing. Each quarter we choose a client or industry challenge and solve it by piloting new techniques, testing the limits of seemingly risky solutions and hosting hackathons. Oh, and usually there’s pizza involved.
We take the opportunity to engage with experts in the field and other groups who can provide valuable perspective. In fact, a recent DCLabs team partnered with the digital marketing cohort at Grand Canyon University to develop marketing personas and buyers’ journeys, solving a client’s recruitment problem.
The DCLabs mission statement sums things up nicely: DCLabs exists to solve real-world business problems for our clients in an environment free of bottom-lines and buzzwords, giving us the freedom to geek out and play — with purpose.
Each DCLabs team is made up of four members, each bringing a unique perspective to the project. The teams rotate every quarter — we want to give everyone a chance to play!
- The Voice of the Client: Keeps the client’s needs front and center.
- The Voice of the Agency: Acts as the agency representative.
- The Voice of the Expert: Has the technical expertise to tackle the problem.
- The Voice of Disruption: Plays devil’s advocate and challenges preconceived ideas.
With these viewpoints, we consider every problem from multiple angles, giving us a clearer, more holistic perspective.
That said, DCLabs is all about innovation, and that applies to the structure of the program itself, too. As an exercise in continuous learning and improvement, we plan to revisit this foundation after every lab to address its efficacy. This also keeps us flexible and allows us to take on any exciting digital marketing problem that comes our way.
Does your company have a problem that needs an innovative solution? If you’re interested in getting involved with DCLabs, let us know!
