Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

The invitation

Here’s an interesting ad I found researching some back issues on wired.com. It nicely blends online advertising and crowd-sourcing to solicit ideas for future editorial content for the magazine. I’m a fan of OLA, as I’ve mentioned before, and while I may not always click on ads I do notice them and like to point out good concepts, or cool executions. Online ads aren’t dead, and given the fact that large marketers continue to pour budgets into them, and executions continue to improve, and functionality to deepen, I’d say that there is still a future for this channel, and the imaginative marketer.

Filled in the data field.

John Madden, grinder par excellence

No, I’m not talking about the Sub, the Hero or the Hoagie, I’m talking about the unheralded players on hockey teams who go out night after night, and shift after shift and do the little things that their teams need to have done in order to win. It might be carrying the puck deep into an opponent’s end even though they are gassed; finishing a check in order to wear down an opponent; or, throwing oneself in front of a shot. It’s not glorious. It’s not high profile. It certainly doesn’t garner the headlines as does the game winning goal in overtime but the job of a grinder is an invaluable asset to his team and absolutely required to win.

I’ve been watching a decent amount of hockey this spring — playoff hockey is the best — and have watched hundreds of games over the years, even being so fortunate as to attend the New Jersey Devil’s playoff march in 2003 ( which culminated with a NJ Game 7 victory in the Stanley Cup Finals…). The one common denominator to all of this hockey is that the team with the best grinders is the team that wins. A roster can be loaded with smooth skating stars of dazzling ability and talent. These stars will score their goals, probably even the OT game-winner, but they can’t do their job without the grinders.

When a team needs an energy boost, a spark, or needs to counter and disrupt an opponent’s momentum, the grinders are sent out to deliver. The grinders also chip in at the least likely times (though if you watch enough hockey you can almost sense when some anonymous winger is going to make the small but necessary play of the night) and these little, often unnoticed plays are what make the difference between winning and losing.

Now, of course, the connection to advertising. You can have the most gifted and talented players on your team, but unless you’ve got grinders who do what needs to get done, day in and day out, campaign after campaign all the flash and brilliance will never make it to market. The guys who collect the awards, and the hosannas of the management team are the stars. The grinders are ones who brought it to life and made it happen, by digging deep, and finishing their checks when needed. It’s great to watch the starts do their thing, but never forget the grinders.

A brief note on this post: it began coalescing during the Boston/Philly series-debacle when someone who’s sort of in between a grinder and a star, Scott Hartnell (former 1st round draft picks, aren’t really grinders, but he plays like one) essentially terrorized the Bruins and created space for stars to pick the Bruins apart by doing all sorts of little things really well. There’s also a great post here about why hockey and agencies are similar, that came out yesterday and made me realize I wasn’t crazy to be seeing the parallels…

I was flipping through this month’s (May 2010) Inc. when I came across the a “How I Did It” article about Bob Moore, founder, owner, operator of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods (they supply whole grain flours to health food stores). He grew the business into a $70 million/year company, and at the age of 81 has decided to institute an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and sell the company to his employees. By all accounts the man is amazing, an example for us all as we attempt to build a business.

Moore says at one point in the article

When you’re in business, there are two doors you can walk through. You can walk through the door where you treat the customer like your guest, operating by the rule that the customer is always right. Or you can be cutthroat. The first door is the door of kindness. That’s the one I decided to walk through.

“The customer is always right” is a business saw that’s as old as the hills, but is the customer always right? I think it’s more true in certain businesses than in others.

If a customer buys a steak in a restaurant, and says it’s no good, they are right. If a customer comes into a dry cleaner and says the shirt is badly pressed, they are right. What, however, if the customer wants to pour money into Yellow Pages advertisements? What about the customer who wants to build a pure Flash site, or the customer who wants to use his 14 year old nephew “to do social media,” are they right? (perhaps I should be nervous about that last one, kids today are pretty good)

As marketing pros, people who are paid for our expertise, there are assuredly times when the customer is not right. We will try to dissuade them from doing things that we don’t think are best for their business, and lay out the reasons why — though this can often-times proves tricky. We don’t always reach a consensus. Because this is a service industry, we will, ultimately, do what the client wants. It does not mean, however, that the client is right. Like Bob Moore we eschew the cut-throat approach. We strive to treat customers like guests. In a service industry though there is a thin line between serving your customer well, and throwing their money down the tubes in order to do what they want because they are the customer.

A friend of mine posted a link on her Face Book page to an AdAge article that contains the new full length Nike/World Cup spot . I checked it out. How can one not check out the ad that Nike is calling its greatest ad ever?

If you took the three minutes or so to play it I think that you’d agree that it’s fun and that it makes some interesting commentary on the media-verse in which we live. It’s high energy and filled with stars, many of them even I, the most casual of football/soccer fans, know. The comments at AdAge though are what make me chuckle the most. Some are fawning, some are predictably xenophobic and soccer-hating (what a post, I get to work two ancient-Greek-rooted words into it!), and some highlight the absolute brilliance of ad-world navel gazing.

It’s unfortunate how many need to take the contrarian point of view to show how smart they are via their skepticism. The stone-tossers question the lack of branding, the wisdom behind not having certain players (who are their sponsors? If it’s not Nike, they won’t be in the ad), the relevance of the World Cup to the American market and blah blah blah. (Though I must admit that the guy who commented that Ronaldinho won’t even be playing for Brazil this year makes a good point, Nike and W&K should have caught that and found another Brazilian player instead).

Just enjoy the ad. It’s a nifty work of video art that pays homage to a much-loved sport and some of the stars who play it (who happen to be under contract to Nike), and shows the interconnectedness of media, sports and communication. It won’t cure cancer; it won’t end malaria in Africa; it won’t bring harmony to the Korean Peninsula. Stop showing off, stop jockeying for your next gig in your next agency because if I’m not mistaken you’re probably not at Wieden & Kennedy, Amsterdam working on that strategy, that media buy, or that spot. Most of us are not, and that’s OK.

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.