It’s really easy to make our jobs in advertising just another job.

The routine goes on day-in and day-out. Briefs, ROI, turn-key, blah, blah, blah.

Take a second today and try to remember why it is you got into this business to begin with. Mine began at Miami Ad School. Late nights working on a concept, forgetting to eat or drink for hours while you were so engrossed in creating something you believed in with all of your heart. The hours spent tweaking type even thought there was no thought of billings or time sheets. The passion that you talked about an idea with and the fire that burned inside you to create greatness. This is the determination that we need to find again to make our work great.

“Don’t mistake a message for communication.”

Our agency mission is this:

THEM! We exist to create, to experiment, to generate thought, to move people, to push buttons, stimulate conversation, to change minds and to provoke action.

Focus on the idea, the concept, the message, the communication, and not just all of the cool bells and whistles you can do to make it “cool”. Have a great concept before you even begin to think about the execution and let THAT dictate the communication.

Follow that with every bit as much creativity and thought as your concept as you plan your execution phase. Amazing design, perfect media execution and placement, and a thorough and complete understanding of who you are trying to reach will all add up to a successful effort. And let’s face it. We’re all in the sales business.

We don’t have to sell our creative souls to be successful.

Look at how many of the campaigns and efforts that have inspired us to get into this business to begin with have been successful sales efforts for their clients. Doyle Dane Bernbach and the amazing work for Volkswagon. Chiat Day and the iPod campaign. And too many more to list.

“Don’t just start a business. Start a revolution”

Please, let us as an industry get back to our youth. The days of great ideas at all cost. The days of creating movements and not accepting mediocrity. Let’s add some fuel to the fire of our industry and make it respectable again in boardrooms around the world. We do truly have the power to change the world. We just have to believe in ourselves like young students again.

This post was inspired after watching this interview with John Hagerty of BBH. Watch, learn and fuel the fire.

What is your inspiration? What campaigns moved you? Please add your comments below.

This is a great article from 2005 that holds true today. Let’s refocus our efforts and thinking to a way that truly benefits everyone.

THE MARKETING COMPANY COMMUNICATIONS DISCONNECT
And Why Ad Agencies Are Viewed as Laborers Rather Than Architects
June 06, 2005
By A. Louis Rubin

Marketing communications companies are not being given a seat at their client’s strategic table. It’s the sad truth that no one in the communications business wants to acknowledge or admit.

It’s not that brilliant communications ideas don’t have a profound strategic impact on a business, because they do, but that clients view their communications companies as purveyors of execution with a bias toward the “what” of “what’s for sale” in the back room of their various “factories.”

The problem is widespread. A recent informal survey of corporate communications officers found them all in agreement that their CEOs did not value their marketing communications firms as a complete strategic partner to their business.

Boards of large public companies
More telling is how few communications professionals sit on corporate boards of large public companies. An examination of the Fortune 20 finds only GE with two working practitioners on their board (Ann Fudge of Young & Rubicam and Shelley Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather). J.P. Donlon, editor in chief of Directorship, a monthly publication on corporate governance, notes that the “reason why there are few communications professionals on boards per se is that only a handful understand that communications is an amplification of business strategy — not something separate or apart from it. Certainly CEOs need to understand this as well.”

The bottom line is that few communications professionals are invited into the inner sanctorum of marketers’ strategy and planning sessions on the executive committee level.
How did this happen?

Somewhere along the way, ad agencies and other communications companies started thinking less about the strategy and more about selling execution. Worse yet, they started to fill their staffs with people who were craftsmen and not strategists. The result: They began to be viewed as laborers, not architects.

It wasn’t always so
It wasn’t always so. At Scali, McCabe Sloves, Ed McCabe invented some memorable advertisements that were also great strategic synopses (for Volvo: “Safety”; for Nikon: “We Take the World’s Greatest Pictures”; for Purdue: “It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken”). Looking back on those executions today you can see they are pretty simple demonstrations of the strategy. No talking animals, no hordes of barbarians storming the shopping mall, no bikini teams. The executions were not a pantheon of special effects. They had a strategic underpinning that reflected the clients’ overall business goals. They were strategic organizing principles upon which to base all brand communications.

The work that Young & Rubicam did for RadioShack in the early ’90s is another good example of how good strategy affects a business and cements the relationship between client and agency. RadioShack’s “You’ve Got Questions. We’ve Got Answers” campaign was created to recognize that service at the retail level is what was for sale. It gave customers a reason to seek out RadioShack — not just a piece or a part. It told employees what their jobs were about. It was a big strategic idea and Len Roberts, then CEO of RadioShack, invited his agency team in on every key business decision because they offered strategic insight into the client’s most urgent business needs.

What these examples have at their core are big strategic ideas, because the only thing that binds people in an asexual entity called a corporation is an idea that people understand and live by. Says Donlon, “No executive or employee is going to throw himself or herself on a grenade for shareholder value. But an employee at Merck or Pfizer might stick his or her neck out to get a cure for cancer. The job of the communication strategist is to ensure the idea is big enough and powerful enough to convince people that the [business] goal is worth the effort and treasure. It’s also the CEO’s job to reinforce this every day.”

Puerile jokes and titillation
But these examples tend to be the exception, not the rule. Nowadays, execution trumps strategy, special effects reign and puerile jokes and titillation are the platforms from which products are sold. And very few communications efforts represent the strategic underpinning for how a brand can utilize all the tools of an integrated marketing communications program — from Web and public relations to advertising and trade shows, collateral sales material and internal communications.

It’s great strategy, not execution, that can inform every constituent, from customer and salesman, from factory worker and portfolio manager to Wall Street analyst on how to view the brand and the company. The right strategic platform helps employees understand why they work for the company and provides a badge of pride that gets translated directly to the bottom line through productivity and purpose. It tells the investment community why this is a good company to invest in. And finally, it gives customers a deep, fundamental, thoughtful, considered and enduring reason to do business.

How to Develop Good Strategy

1      First acknowledge that strategy is what you are selling. Not an ad. Not a logo. Not a list of public relations tactics. These are only executions and that makes them commodities to be evaluated subjectively, or worse yet, based on price of execution.

2      Tell the truth. Suppress your excitement at having a revenue-potential client at the table and focus on the truth about product reality, competitive strengths and weaknesses and organizational problems and issues. CEOs have trouble determining truth from myth because everyone around them has an agenda to sell. To stand out, tell the truth.

3      Throw out your factory — the daily special on the menu — to offer what the customer wants, not what you have in inventory. You must solve the client’s business problem, not go in with your CFO’s cost structure of how you have to utilize the specialized resources on your payroll.

4      Focus on the client’s customer. Avoid the product attribute discussion that your client wants you to execute. Building a great strategy begins with an understanding of customer needs. And too often execution panders to internal audiences versus a strategic insight about the end-user.

5      Hire people who think strategically. Now this may sound just plain dumb, but how many of you have recruiting policies in place where you go and visit Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, etc. in the spring to find the smartest, most imaginative minds in the world? How can you expect your organization to grow with the best talent if you don’t have a program in place to find them?

If you want your client marketers to respect your thinking, start thinking from a strategic vantage point in an unbiased way. Start telling the truth. Divorce yourself from execution. Find the best fresh minds in the world to help. And maybe then you’ll get invited into that walnut burled conference room.

Another good article on marketing strategy vs. tactics here.

Thursday October 29, 2009
by Ron Ashkenas

Have you noticed that more and more companies are marketing “simplicity” as a reason to buy their products or services? For example, Philips Electronics advertises “Sense and simplicity” while Bank of America promotes “Clear, easy-to-understand products.” Simplicity also is the subtle message that Schwab conveys when it says “Talk to Chuck” and that Fidelity suggests when it says just “Stay on the line.”

The reality is that simplicity is highly appealing in a world that is getting more and more complex — where consumers have too many choices, where technology is constantly evolving, and where the political and economic environment is unpredictable. In the midst of all this instability and change, people want to get back to basics. They want uncomplicated products, straightforward guidance, and things that work quickly and simply the first time, without lots of extra effort.

What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it is in sharp contrast with the thinking of the past few years — which was that consumers wanted unlimited choice so that they could customize their products and services to fit their own unique needs and lifestyles. As such, technology companies pushed for more and more bells and whistles, while other firms drove towards mass customization. The result was a huge array of choices that became almost overwhelming and costly.

For example, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller discovered that it was giving consumers so many choices for customizing its popular Aeron chair that it had to be prepared to produce over four million variations on the basic model — even though only a few thousand configurations were actually being ordered. Similarly, Cisco Systems learned from its top corporate customers that all the new features in its networking products were actually causing instability in the corporate networks because they couldn’t be integrated easily with existing hardware and software.

It’s easy to create slogans and marketing materials about simplicity. The challenge is to truly make things easier for the customer so that simplicity becomes a competitive advantage.

To do that, companies need to listen to their customers and truly engage them in dialogue about their needs — and their perceptions of products and services offered. For example, Cisco works with a number of customer advisory groups that meet regularly with senior executives and product developers; Fidelity executives either answer their 800-number consumer phone lines or listen to tapes of the calls; ConAgra Foods product managers make field visits to consumers’ homes and to grocery stores.

In addition to listening to customers, companies also need to design their products and services from the customer perspective. When Intuit developed its small business accounting software package, the product developers realized that most small business owners were not familiar with accounting jargon, and in fact were intimidated by it. So instead of using the term “accounts receivable”, they called it “money in.” Similarly, “accounts payable” became “money out.” As a result of developing a product from the customer perspective, Intuit sold 100,000 copies of the software the first year.

Not every company needs to create its own version of the iPod, an icon of simplicity. But there is no reason why every company can’t listen to their own customers and design products and services in ways that better satisfy their customers’ desires for greater simplicity and ease of use. If you don’t, your competitors probably will.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the forthcoming book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done

This article is from the Harvard Business Blog. Original article can be found here.

The state of the “ADVERTISING” business.

Preview:

The Breakup:

The plot thickens:

Thought for the day:
Build relationships. Not impressions.

It’s time to reinvent how we do business.

Never in my 18 years of being in sales and marketing have I ever seen a market like we are currently in. I think that may be a good thing. Here are some observations and recommendations for how we do business and what will work today and in the future.

Business is all about relationships.

Now I know you can say that business has always been about relationships, however, in the past those “relationships” could be created with glitzy advertising campaigns and celebrity endorsements. Consumers were much quicker to accept what they were told by advertising and the media with little thought to the validity or cost of many of their claims.

Today consumers are so much more analytical and sensitive to marketing.  This completely influences the way we create and maintain a relationship with them. Our messages need to be compelling, transparent and honest. There is little to no tolerance for fluff or manipulation. You may get away with it once, but you’ll be hard pressed to get another chance.

Don’t mistake a message for communication.

When we were riding the wave of a healthy, growing economy, consumerism was at an all-time high. Companies were throwing out messages in every shape and media. It was a no-holds-barred competition for that miniscule moment when you could make any kind of impression on a consumer. Shock-based tactics were prevalent because there were so many messages out there that consumers just became numb to all of them. To overcome the numbness, marketing resorted to shocking people in an effort to be memorable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Just because consumers got the message didn’t mean that they got what we were trying to communicate.

Consumers vs. Producers

In the early 2000′s we, as Americans, were the poster children for consumerism. We consumed (and still do in a lot of categories) a large part of what we and the rest of the world produced. We had the money and the access to anything and everything money could buy. And buy we did. Much of the global economy was supported by our blatant consumerism. This allowed many of the “producing” countries and their economies to grow and thrive. China, India and many other emerging markets became extremely powerful players in the global economy. But when the bubble burst in America beginning with the financial and housing crisis, it impacted the entire global market as the consumers slowed their consuming and the markets based on producing had nowhere to go with their products. Now that we’re consuming less, the competition for what we choose to consume is so intense it’s completely changed the game.

So what can we as business people do to market ourselves and our wares in this advertising-adverse economy?

1. Create an “Architecture of Participation”

I believe it was Tim O’Riley that coined this term. You can find his write-up on this here. But I would like to expand this definition somewhat to cover all aspects of your sales and marketing efforts.

Consumers have begun the change from being defined by consumption and now are being more closely defined by their participation. With less disposable income available to consume, people are becoming producers. Not necessarily of physical products, but of opinions, ideas and feedback. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the many other “social media” networks, people are producing more than ever. Don’t be afraid of this participation. Sure, it will definitely change how sales and marketing traditionally works — it already has. But this participation is here to stay, even after the economic situation improves. This level of participation will allow truly open-minded business people to access information and feedback we never had before. And, in doing so, it will allow us to create an even better product or service. But, only if we allow our consumers to participate and, most definitely, only if we LISTEN.

If we start truly listening and implementing what we learn, we will build these much desired relationships with our customers — relationships that facilitate a true interaction with your product or brand. This, in turn, leads to happy customers and repeat business.

2. Realize that interactivity is not only on-line

True participation is not only an on-line experience. Even if you are amazon.com, eBay, or any other web-based business, the experience your customers have is not only on-line. It’s the entire experience from beginning to end.

Take, for example, Amazon. A customer goes to amazon.com and places an order. If the ordering and payment process is not simple and intuitive the “experience” of the Amazon brand will suffer. Continue on to the fulfillment process. If the item ordered arrives later than the customer expected in a tattered package, the perceived value of both the product, the service and the Amazon brand suffers. This is where having participation can become painful. Trust me, those consumers are going to participate in some serious conversations. Even if you as a company don’t facilitate the conversation, they will vocalize their opinions in one or many of the other avenues available. Even if they do have a negative experience, if you are willing to listen, communicate and make it right, you can create a life-long customer.

This thinking needs to expand into your personal customer interactions as well. Find ways to have your consumers interact personally with your people and product in the way it best benefits them. Allow them to have a voice — even when it’s an unhappy one. Again, if they don’t vocalize to you, they’ll vocalize to someone else. And that can hurt a lot more.

3. Balance your messages with unique ways of communicating

Advertising and sales are not a bad words. Improper tactics and messages are. To “advertise” is defined as “to promote or draw attention to”. People can’t interact with something they don’t know about. The true challenge lies in communicating with the right people with the right message at the right time in the right place. No one tactic or strategy is going to solve all of your marketing needs effectively. Work to develop a strategy, tactic and a message that is right for your audience and stay focused on it. Work with a solid, proven marketing partner who will be your eyes and ears into the best way to accomplish these goals. Work with them to develop these goals and hold them accountable for the results.

Sales and marketing is not rocket science, nor a walk in the park, nor does it have to be fantastically expensive to be effective. Smart thinking (strategy), the right message and medium (creativity), the right execution(s) (advertising, PR, social media, interactive, etc.) and the right participation by your customers will help you successfully reinvent how you do business.

Tim Scott
Executive Creative Director
THEM!

___________________

Here is a really interesting video that is well worth 17 minutes of your time discussing consumerism, time and participation. We would love to hear you comments below.

With all of the “information” about Social Media running rampant out there we’ve decided to start an ongoing list of Social Media references and links that we’ve found useful. Feel free to send yours over!

General Social Media:

1. 10 Tools of the Social Media Swiss Army Knife
2. How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day
3. Build a social media plan that never sleeps
4. Top 8 Ways To Use Social Media

Twitter Resources:

1. A great introduction to Twitter
2. HUGE Twitter resource list!
3. How to Speak Twitter – a twitter glossary
4. How to Use Twitter as a Twool Marketing in 140 Characters or Less
5. What Can Twitter Do for You? More than you might imagine
6. 27 Twitter Applications Your Small Business Can Use Today
7. 4 ways companies use Twitter for business
8. Find and Follow Top Business Execs on Twitter
9. Twitter: Building Businesses Tweet by Tweet
10. How to follow back everyone on Twitter without ruining your experience.

Blog Resources:

1. Why Is Your Business Afraid of Negative Blog Posts?
2. 10 ways to boost the value of your corporate blog
3. The Top 50 Blogs for Startups In 2009

Facebook Resources:

1. 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence

Tools we like and use:

1. Tweetdeck
2. Yahoo! Sideline

We will continue updating and adding so check back often. If you find any dead or inactive links please let us know.

Fear seems to be the big ruler of large organizations right now. And understandably so. But fear is paralyzing and inhibitive. Exactly what we DON’T need right now. It’s a time of change and transition, but it’s also a time of growth and creativity.

Impersonal and disconnected just doesn’t work in this environment. People want to trust, want personal contact and definitely want a reason to believe. “Because I said so” isn’t acceptable any more.

Consider the strong trend of “social media”. People are looking for personal contact and a feeling of being personally connected. Granted, a lot of the “connections” are strictly virtual, but it’s still a direct connection with the outside world and information. Companies are slowly beginning to understand and several are doing new and innovative things with communications outlets like Twitter. Check out people like @zappos, @SouthwestAir, @JetBlue, @GMblogs and others. They are working to connect directly with their consumers. Some better than others.

One of my personal biggest frustrations when I was working as a creative director at the “big agencies” in New York City was the lack of connection and understanding of the business needs that were driving our assignments. We have so many tactics and medias available today I cringe at the number of dollars wasted simply because major decisions were made almost blindly simply based on gross tactical generalizations.

Now as a smaller agency, our goal is to truly get to know and understand our clients. Not just on the corporate laugh level, but to truly understand their challenges and their consumers and marketplace. That is the best way that we can effectively create a plan and execution that will work as effectively as possible with todays smaller budgets.

We strongly encourage our clients to give us a business challenge or a desired outcome rather than a request for a print ad or a “viral campaign”. This allows us to dig into the myriad of opportunities and medias to create a message that is as targeted and effective as possible. And last but not least, we strongly encourage our clients to be part of the process. The more we know and understand about you, your organization and your product or service, the better we can communicate that to your customers.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is, your consumers want to feel like you are vested in them and that you care about them and their business. We have been told time and time again that “it’s not personal, it’s business”. But business now is personal. What we do in business affects people in personal ways. And we should never lose sight of that.

This post was inspired by a post at harvardbusiness.org entitled “Why Small Companies Will Win In This Economy”.

“Social media” can be defined a lot of different ways. Does it have to be on-line? Nope. It’s simply a way of socializing with people. The “media” in this case is a simple 8.5″x11″ piece of paper. But it’s effective. So that’s the lesson in this short to us business folk. It doesn’t have to be fancy or elaborate to work. It simply has to have the right message at the right time and place.

This is a great little short film Directed by @RadicalMedia’s Patrick Hughes for the Schweppes Short Film Festival. It may bring a smile to your face. And that’s a good thing…

So recently I was browsing through my Twitter followings and from @phemey I found a really interesting (and entertaining) perspective on the education system as we know it now and it’s effect on “creativity”. I will be the first to say that I do not have an in depth knowledge of the educational system as it exists today nor is this post meant to be a critique of the current educational system, it is instead, an interesting point of view that I hope sparks some conversation.