Posts Tagged ‘advertising agencies’

The "ayes" have it.

As I mentioned in a Tweet this week, the Season finale of Mad Men, was one of the greatest paeans to the entrepreneurial spirit of the advertising industry that I’ve ever seen in media. Throughout the episode we kept high-fiving each other as great line, after great line kept rolling out of the characters’ mouths. The best line of the night, and the most perfect line I’ve heard uttered about big agencies happened as Roger Sterling and Don Draper were leaving the Sterling Cooper offices after their stealth raid. Sterling looks at the modern, wood paneled reception area with his name on the wall, and the fancy plate glass doors and says to Draper, “When do you think we’ll be back working in a place like this?” Draper responds “I never really wanted to work in a place like this.”

Howls of delight ensued.

Whether you’ve entered the freelance, small-biz, solo-preneur pool voluntarily, or involuntarily, as many have over the past year, that line resonated. Some may say “sour grapes,” but many of the advertising-displaced stayed in the game because we really do love it. It’s fun, interesting, challenging and ever-changing. We just now choose to play the game by our rules, beyond the walls of big agencies with modern reception areas and fancy plate glass doors.

Draper, like many of us has the epiphany that the cool work space, the trendy address, the tricked-out office spaces etc., are not what this business is about. For all of his character flaws, and he has many, the thing I admire about Draper is his absolute commitment to the work. For many of us, it’s all about the work, yet the places we work (or once did) do not share our passion for the work. Rather, they are about rank, privilege, bonuses (though, tough lesson to agency-aspirants: bonuses in agencies are rare. They always cry “bad year/quarter/week/day.” If you seek bonuses, go to work for a “consultancy.” Wall St. can’t really hand them out anymore either. ). The work, and, ultimately, client needs, get lost amidst the noise and superfluity of the agency.

In a previous post I wrote about how the Mad Men creators really nailed something about agency life via the analogy of the mutilated foot. Nineteen sixty three in the show is the doppelganger of the current moment in the business. The creators of the show have shown how and why agencies end up where they do, and have shown what happens to the people who work for them. No doubt, 2010 will show what happens after people have decided that it’s not about the agency, but rather about the work and your clients, and what happens when individuals take charge of their destinies. Mad Men in 2010 should be interesting as well.

Finally Firming Up

We received the latest edition of AdAge today in our P.O. Box and I read with interest the article “Fed-Up Shops Pitch a Fit at Procurement.” A little while ago I wrote a post about how law firms were standing up for themselves and saying “if you want to pay less, that’s fine, then just don’t expect the top tier of our talent.” It appears that agencies are starting to do the same in negotiations with potential clients during the pitch phase. According to AdAge, The watch word between agencies after these budget sessions with procurement people is “don’t cave.” As the AdAge article mentions agencies (though, from the deals they sign to close a piece of business you’d never know it) are in this business to make a profits just as much as our clients are. We don’t expect them to sell their products at a loss, they should not expect us to do it either. If we don’t value our services and charge valuable rates, our clients won’t value them either.

We may not be saving lives here — though sometimes our work does, tangentially — but we are professionals who bring  know-how, years of experience and insight to issues, problems, trends and best practices around marketing and communications. We are not a commodity, nor are our services. If clients, large and small, want to regard advertising and marketing in a commodotized fashion, then I say let them — and let them work with folks who regard it the same way. Get back to me when you see the results.  In my experience the jobs that go worst are the jobs in which someone has decided to meet a potential client’s budget expectations rather than sell the best program for the client’s business needs. Stooping to make the sale is a recipe for disaster that sets the wrong tone from the get-go. It’s an incredible misjudgment on the part of the sales force. If you undersell yourself at the start in the hopes of raising your rates and gaining money back down the line, “fugghedaboutit,” as they used to say in Carroll Gardens.

Last week I was in a conversation  with a colleague and we were discussing this very topic. At the time, when I mentioned my hope that we — the ad industry — would begin to finally stand up for ourselves, he said “it’s tough, because there’s always someone willing to do a job for next-t0-nothing.” I didn’t, and still don’t disagree — though it pains me as a small agency owner. Perhaps this latest bit of news from the pitch wars is good news for the industry. Like the lawyers we need to stand up for ourselves. We can work for cheap rates if we put our B-teams on a job, if that’s what the client wants. We can scale back wish lists. Deliver fewer features and functionality. Do fewer rounds of review. Help our clients to understand the intricacies of the review process. As some commenters below the article state, some client side businesses are hurting, but agencies are in dire straits too. Somewhere, amidst the carnage, the two sides need to come together and find common ground. We do need one another, but the client/agency relationship has grown abusive and nasty over the past few years. Many of the agency-side issues come from agency’s general lack of a spine. It’s nice to see spines hardening. Kudos to the big shops. It’s high time, though maybe too late, that we tried to regain some ground.

Best to leave it to the pros

Lately, I’m hearing about many jobs and opportunities at various ad agencies. Surprisingly, there are jobs in the advertising business, despite the gloom and doom of the industry in particular and the economy in general. For those of us around Boston we have to be willing to relocate. For all of us, in the advertising biz, we apparently need to possess multiple skill-sets.

If you are an art director then you must now be able to concept, create great designs and help sell ideas to clients (standard job description) as well as know Flash with ActionScript and hopefully some HTML & CSS. I recently read a post by a young art director wondering whether she should learn HTML because some copy job descriptions now list coding knowledge as a requirement. I see jobs for my role, producer, that require knowledge of Flash with AS2 (not AS3, are you sure?), HTML/CSS & JavaScript, PhotoShop, Illustrator, copy writing, and great MS Office skills especially, Project and PowerPoint. A former colleague once complained that the designers on our job didn’t do front end development too, and wondered why not.

Whenever confronted with this attitude, or with job descriptions like the above I wonder in which year folks are living because it sounds like 1999. My next thought usually has to do with the evolution of societies. Back in the early days of web marketing many folks did many things like design and code and even write. An interesting thing happened, as it often does in evolving societies: things started to get complicated and division of labor within the (web marketing) tribes began to emerge. Granted, there are folks who have truly full tool sets, and the more that you can do, the better. Yet, I think it unrealistic to expect everybody to wear many disparate hats as par for the daily course. Sure it’s great from a bottom-line, head count perspective when you can hire one rather than two folks. In over a decade in this business I’ve met very few people who were conceptual thinkers, great designers, rocking Flash developers and good managers (in fact, I know one).

I do believe that everybody in an interactive agency who touches work that goes into the world needs to understand the medium, the platforms and the capabilities and limitations of same. Expecting a copy writer to write both the copy and the markup that holds the copy is asking quite a bit of that person and, frankly, not providing the level of service and work that we should provide to our clients. Many of us in advertising can do many things. We are gamers and are willing to tackle challenges. Perhaps the new business model –whatever it will be — will require us all to wear more hats (though, the old one did too) but I want to wave a caution flag. Unless that copy writer is very good at both markup and pithy marketing copy — and I mean very good at both — then she should not be writing both. There is a professional level of work that we marketers need to deliver to the people paying the bills. I’m not entirely convinced that hiring Jacks & Jills of all trades is the way to deliver that superior product. If an agency finds that multi-tool person, by all means, scoop them up, and pay them well. Otherwise, hire appropriately, let people do what they do well and deliver great work from within well built teams.

Built by and for pros

This is a release that I’ve been looking forward to announcing for quite some time. Please Feed The Animals, a  site where out-of-work advertising agency professionals can open a free account and post their resumes, work experiences, and  eventually, portfolios to connect with agencies that are hiring, has been released in Beta. The brain child of Erik Proulx, the site was designed and built by an all volunteer force of agency professionals. I provided project management and information architecture services as well as space on exUrban’s BaseCamp for the duration of the project. Through Erik’s connections, and mine, some of whom overlapped (unsurprising in a town as small as Boston) we pulled together Michael Durwin, Joe Morris, Liz DiPietro-Frazier, Amanda Talbott, Conor Feely, John Szalay, and Richard Haynie — rocking designers, all. Based in and around Boston, New York and Phoenix, AZ these folks designed and laid out the many pages that Skookum — who generously donated their staff’s time and is based in Concord, NC — needed to work their magic.

The designers went above and beyond and knocked the designs out of the park. From just a single, model template this geographically distributed team created 26 page designs (lots of forms and information presentation pages) that matched each other perfectly in terms of PFTA’s brand. This consistency is a true testament to their skill and their professionalism. As happens with a volunteer team of hustling ad-types the size and composition of the team ebbed and flowed as folks picked up paying gigs, but the design work was evenly distributed across team members and the bulk of the templates were completed in a few weeks — give or take some staffing ebbs.

The development and deployment of PFTA was a terrifically collaborative experience with plenty of spirited give and take, and a high level of trust that the pros on the team would make good decisions and do what was right for the job. The team did not disappoint. PFTA proved, yet again, the viability of social media as a connector (that’s how Erik and I met) and a tool that can be used to marshal resources and enable them to work together. Spread across the country, using email, cell phones, Twitter and a $25 per month, cloud-based-extranet/project management tool (two actually, Skookum has one as well) a talented bunch of folks brought to life a really cool idea. If I were a giant, publicly-traded-holding-company-owned-agency I’d look at PFTA as both a wonderful staffing resource but also a potential threat to my organization. The world’s biggest, most experienced agency is on the streets, and it has everything it needs to succeed and deliver value to customers. In a final, wonderful bit of meta-context, Please Feed The Animals was built by the people for whom it was intended: the talented, passionate, driven ad-pros who lost their jobs in the ad-biz blood-letting of 2008-9 (hopefully, it evolves into “just” a job site for talented ad folks, no more hemorrhages for a while, please). I am proud to have been a part of the genesis of PFTA, and completely thrilled at how well it turned out. May it be wildly successful.

Billable, or fixed rate?

I read an interesting article (requires online subscription) in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (24 August, 2009) about the pending demise of billable hours at law firms. It appears that lots of large corporate clients, who also use outside counsel to augment their corporate legal teams, are driving some hard bargains and asking law firms to drop the highly profitable billable hours compensation model. Any time I see lawyers making less it makes me smile a bit, though, before I started getting too giddy, I kept reading. The article gives the impression that both sides are on board with it and that it’s pretty good for everybody involved. The article made it seem that there are some very open discussions between clients and vendors (let’s face it, if you work in client service then you’re a vendor) about what you get for certain agreements, and there is still the ability to revert to hourly for really large, complex cases. That’s when it hit me and made me jealous, for just a second, of the lawyers.*

The article, in its most refreshing passage, quoted a lawyer who said of these agreements that

a client can’t expect to have the absolute best team of [trial] lawyers from a firm and have the lawyers give up all the other work they could be doing on a regular fee basis to work 18 hours a day for months of time on a flat fee engagement.

Right there is the difference between agencies and law firms. I guarantee that even when an agency says we’ll work for that, and we’ll get it done for next to nothing, they never follow it up with “but we’ll put our b-team on it, they’ll work no more than 40 hours/week, we will not deliver our best work as we could for more money and we will ruthlessly manage your scope so that not a single comma will be moved, nor a logo enlarged even 1% after the allotted two revisions.” Sure, it’s written in scopes and terms etc., but it never happens like that in practice. Agencies, “invest in the relationship” and reduce their margins in an effort to hang onto business. Sometimes, this is warranted, but eventually it makes for bad relations between agency and client, as well as the team being put through the grinder by the client on one side and management on the other.

Agencies should follow the example of the folks in the law firms. Be blunt. Be up front. Be strong. Agencies have long worked on fixed cost projects, and have always striven to lock in long term retainers, but they rarely stand up for themselves within the frameworks of these agreements. Given the plight of so many shops today (though the market does seem to be stabilizing, somewhat), they will be more loathe than usual to stand up for themselves and say “this is what it takes to do this, We can work under this agreement, but you need to give us latitude and you need to understand very clearly that the scope means what it says.” I hope that large corporate clients and their large law firm-vendors acting like rational organizations and altering their relationships in the context of the current economic climate, can be a positive example to agencies and that the latter can learn a thing or two to help them down the line. Maybe, agencies need to hire lawyers to help with these conversations. Or, if an agency would rather not pay the hourly fee they, could talk to their outside counsel about moving to a fixed rate agreement and get some pointers for when they have the same discussions with their clients.

*Major Tangential Aside: Could you imagine an agency that got paid for every hour it actually worked for a client? Imagine if agencies were more like lawyers (used to be)? We’d all still be sitting in private offices with credenzas filled with booze a la Don Draper and the boys of Sterling Cooper (those were the days!).

Maria Montessori

My children attend a Montessori school. I have to admit that we didn’t know much about it when we first enrolled them there except that the classrooms were open, children could work on what they want, when they want, and that the woman who founded the method was Maria Montessori.

What we learned, though, is that Montessori was developed as a system to teach institutionalized children life skills starting with grooming, cleaning etc., and proceeding to reading and writing. Montessori then took the system out of the institution and taught developmentally-able, but underprivileged, children similar skills. In a Montessori classroom the child learns through doing, and is free to explore the class room and its activities as he or she sees fit. The teacher guides them and there are steps to each of the activities. There is a right way and a wrong to do things, but by making mistakes the child develops necessary life skills.

I attended two classes with my two Montessori-attending children last week and I started thinking how the best agency processes mirror their classrooms. I’ve been around agencies a long time and almost from the day I started everybody within the organization fretted about “process process process.” Sometimes, there was no process and chaos ensued. Other times process was a thick manual, or required regimented, and required, online classes and chaos ensued.

The best processes evolved organically from within teams from the individuals themselves and as a result suited the personalities and working styles of the team. This is not to say that there was no process, there was. It just was not the be all and the end all — the work and the people doing the work were. A framework — cogent, clear and consistently applied — was in place, as in a Montessori classroom — but team members were permitted to work in their own way to reach the goal, within defined parameters. Adults, like children, will perform when given an environment in which their individuality (their humanity, really) is respected and neither forced to conform to some mathematical model of efficiency, nor allowed to wallow in anarchy. Provide a framework, set expectations, be consistent in them, permit people to be people, and wondrous things happen.