Laurie Baker, PhD, MITACS/York University Post Doctoral Fellow

Blogging at agencyanthropologist.ca

Follow me on Twitter @AnthGrad

Digital marketing success is normally based on the quantifiable results that can be earned. Yet aggregated data that reports seeming success or failure, without any grounding in user experience, are often held as the ideal benchmarking practice.

Analyses of the thoughts, preferences, beliefs, motivations of real people, actual social media, website, or app users, are superficial at best, absent at worst.

This clear lack of grounding in experience has inspired my project to expand the research and development capacity of the digital marketing agency, Treefrog Inc. In my MITACS-funded Post Doctoral Fellowship, I’ve endeavoured to create a social media strategy and digital marketing analysis department offering unique, cutting-edge and anthropologically informed services for our corporate clients. Anthropologically informed analysis goes beyond a superficial reporting of unanalysed or aggregated numerical data to provide contextualized understandings based on broader social trends and cultural practices. Using Treefrog as a case study, I’ve begun developing a set of durable processes and services that, over time, will be refined for application for Treefrog clients (this suite of tools will be tested in constructing an interactive web version of my “Ethnography of the University” project).

During the first year of my project I began educating key Treefrog decision-makers about the value, applicability, and potential growth opportunities related to qualitative research. Education is a process. It doesn’t occur just once, but rather over time when the opportunity presents. Explaining the value and uniqueness of anthropology at team training events, called Learn O’clock, has offered me an opportunity to share more widely with the Treefrog team. This is an ongoing endeavour.

Being embedded within the organization has also offered me the opportunity to reflect deeply on the various processes that give shape to daily practice and how the mythos of the company should be, or can be, tied to, or reflected in, its ethos. Together, mythos and ethos (ideally) help to enact a sense of shared legacy among employees—offering them a sense that their work contributes to goals beyond the immediate needs of clients, such as community support or charitable giving. This relationship is further reflected in the “cultural artefacts” of the organization, such as what colours to wear or items of significance. Artefacts also figure in the cultural narrative of the organization and become “common” knowledge among the employees.

From digital marketing data analysis to company research, keeping people “in the picture”, so to speak, has been an ongoing challenge. One that has offered me the opportunity to rethink the ways that anthropological practice can be applied outside the academy in fruitful ways for everyone involved.

Treefrog Inc. is a digital marketing agency located in Newmarket, ON that believes digital marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all. Treefrog currently specializes in web design and development, content marketing, SEO, social media, mobile app development, and graphic design.