Founder of Harkable
Career to date:
2005 Roadrunner Records TV and lifestyle promotions
2007 Myspace Online Marketing Manager
2010 Freelancer working with investment banks and PepsiCo
2011 Founder Harkable
Chris Harris: Staying on course to be the best agency we can be.
Chris Harris: I started out in the music industry working at label Roadrunner Records (part of Warner Music), where I got to see the rock and roll lifestyle first-hand, meeting and later promoting many of my heroes. After that I moved to the upcoming social network Myspace, joining a team of incredibly talented people in the UK office. There were so many highlights, but my favourite moments were partnering with the iTunes Festival, creating a web-chat series with a host of celebrities and music artists, and launching the new music product. After a year as a freelance consultant working with a couple of investment banks and PepsiCo, I founded Harkable. We are a social media agency based in London, working with brilliant clients including Samsung, Spotify, Pernod Ricard, Microsoft, The Daily Mirror and Warner Music.
Chris Harris: We founded Harkable to be an agency with both social media and technology at its heart. With the Internet becoming increasingly social and the opening up of data and technologies on sites like Facebook and Twitter, we help clients make the most of these opportunities to reach, understand and connect with audiences.
"The campaign was a ‘socially-powered sale’ where customers determined the price of a OnePiece onesie by sharing the sale on Facebook and Twitter"
Chris Harris: Through the work we do as an agency I come into contact with a lot of young talented people who have built up huge followings on social media. What they’ve achieved, mostly by themselves, is amazing. It just shows what’s possible with a YouTube channel or blog.
Chris Harris: Hard to choose, but I’d probably say the #HackTheSale campaign created for lifestyle brand OnePiece. The campaign was a ‘socially-powered sale’ where customers determined the price of a OnePiece onesie by sharing the sale on Facebook and Twitter. Each share reduced the price by £0.01. Customers could see the price change in real-time as it was shared with their friends, and all participants got to buy the product at the final price.
Chris Harris: I’m a big fan of Paddy Power’s brand pages in social media. Being a football fan helps too, but they’re a brilliant example of how you can be entertaining and craft a brand’s voice using social media, to stay front of mind with their customers. Seeing the World Cup through their eyes has been entertaining.
Chris Harris: I get inspired in lots of different ways, it could be watching a film like Gravity and reading about how they made it in Wired, reading books and blogs, playing with a new app on my phone, or seeing a bit of news pop up from a friend on Facebook. We’re exposed to so many new and exciting things each day, it’s hard not to feel inspired by what’s going on around us.
Chris Harris: I use two services – Flipboard and Feedly. I also follow a load of blogs and news sites on social media, advertising, creativity, design, tech & startups. They serve me well on the commute to and from the office.
Chris Harris: R/GA in New York I know have a pretty respected Twitter page run by Chapin Clark with nearly 100K followers. It shows the importance of having a unique tone of voice in social, and taking your Twitter account seriously within a business.
Chris Harris: For social media, brands have been trying to figure out a strategy that works for them and and are now asking the questions around ‘What am I seeing from this investment?’ are now arising. The best agencies will be able to respond to this and demonstrate long-term value. Also, trying to move social media further up the creative process; in organisations it remains an after-thought, instead of at the heart of a campaign.
"We’re exposed to so many new and exciting things each day it’s hard to not feel inspired by what’s going on around us"
Chris Harris: It’s already happening but we’ll see a continued evolution of brands as media channels, investing heavily in their own content and growing their own audiences.
Chris Harris: I think shopping for an agency by choosing a few handpicked agencies you respect and setting them the same task, makes sense. However, I don’t feel a written RFP or a pitch deck in Keynote feels like the best way to get inside an agency’s head (unless the brief is to come up with beautiful pitch decks!). If you are serious about engaging an agency to become an extension of the team, it would make sense to dedicate time on both sides to get a sense if there’s a good fit between client and agency. That could be a workshop or day spent discussing issues within the business and how an agency would respond. By doing a test-run of the relationship you will be able to find out if there’s a strong fit.
Chris Harris: We’ve been fortunate enough to not have been involved in many pitches so far, but we’re working on a couple at the moment which are contenders to being the best. I’ll let you know if we win them!
Chris Harris: 100% service businesses, like agencies, can learn a few things by taking the time to develop their own products. We invest time and resources from our team into creating our own products through internal projects and hack days, separate from responding to client briefs. This broadens our team’s knowledge and expertise, positively effects our reputation as an agency, as well as helping us understand the challenges faced by our clients who have products themselves.
Chris Harris: Out of our Harkable labs team, we are set to launch our new social promotions platform Social Caffeine – making it simple to create and launch campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
What was your favourite work at Cannes 2014, and why?
Pharrell Williams 24 Hours of Happy was the standout campaign for me. It’s a really simple idea, brilliantly executed, that involved his global fan base and has generated over 10m views. It’s a very catchy tune too, which I’m sure helped. Apparently, the UN have decreed that the 20th March is now Happiness Day and Pharrell is the sponsor.
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