Posts Tagged ‘Business’

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.

Avoid the content trap

One of the things that I’ve found as a producer of marketing and sites for the web is that the most underestimated and misunderstood part of a job is often content creation. On many projects content is one of the hardest aspects of a job to scope. Certainly, one can scope number of revisions, estimated page counts, etc. — but there are all sorts of gray areas within content creation, especially on websites. Sometimes there is existing content that “only needs to be edited,” “or content that’s already been created but needs to be given “a consistent voice and tone” Unless these, and myriad other content-related are nailed down and discussed in depth prior to the start of the job they can be become morasses that sink a job. This is actually a larger topic than this post will cover, and I’ll come back to it at a later date. What I want to share now, though, is how important it is to not short-change your site development process by forgoing a copy writer or content creator and taking it all in-house. There are three reasons for this that I see and am happy to hear more from others, so please comment away.

1. Assuming responsibility for writing site content puts extra burdens on either you, the business owner (the person in a small business setting with the most knowledge of the company), or on your staff. Content creation can be laborious depending on the depth and breadth of the site being built. Your time and your staff’s time is better spent on core competencies and responsibilities like running the business, client management and new business development. Placing content writing responsibilities on staff or yourself means that full attention is given to neither the needed content, nor core responsibilities.

2. Professional copy and content writers are much more experienced with this type of work. This is what they do for a living, and by including them on your site development team you are tasking them with something that is their job and for which they are paid (see point 1 above). This professionalism and experience permits a writer to say things more succinctly and efficiently than you and your staff often-times can. A writer does not completely relieve you of responsibilities, you and your staff, will still have to collaborate and work with them, but mainly in an advisory and review capacity. Efficiency will be gained all around.

3. Creating your website, or revamping your website is an emotional process as much as it is a creative and technical process. Diving into a site build or site redesign will really force you to look at your company’s offerings and define your company in a very public way. This emotional aspect often makes site builds much more challenging than anticipated at the start of an engagement. Bringing in a copy writer or content specialist adds an objective third party to the process who can help to navigate some of the issues that arise when developing one’s site content. This objectivity is useful for the very reason that site owners and staff have biases (often positive, sometimes not) that can impact the copy and content creation process and lead to too much, diluted content.

Bringing an extra resource onto a job does cost money, and in the current situations all business owners are looking for ways to save money — we understand that as well as anybody. Often, budgeting for a copy or content professional will save you and your staff time, and money down the road. It will also help your site, which is a large investment to be the best that it can be and therefore help to better represent your company to current and future team members, the public and, even more importantly, to current and potential clients.

When people get together

I had lunch this week with John Haydon (@johnhaydon) whom I follow on Twitter. We’ve chatted back and forth over the months about music social media and other things and we realized sometime this spring that we live fairly close to one another. We set up our meeting completely via Twitter, never sending a single email nor calling on the phone. I think that neither of us had any real notion of what to expect from the meeting, though, as I mentioned to John during the lunch, I approach all such opportunities with the attitude “who knows what happens when you put two intelligent folks together to talk.” We swapped stories about our social media adventures, shared tips and tricks and generally just talked about things relating to starting a business, fatherhood and the like.

I think that we both learned something from talking and laid a solid foundation from which to explore possibilities down the road. Also, importantly the meeting drove home the very real, and very awesome fact that behind the avatars and handles are people — actual, identifiable, physical people — not just demographic and psychographic distillations of types. Technically, I may not use twitter correctly (I’ve blogged about the “rules” of usage in the past) but I use it in a way that suits me. I’m not just an entrepreneur. I’m not just a family man. I’m not just an art history guy. I’m a lot of things and I follow many people. Some may help my business. Some I may help. Some I follow just because I want to see different perspectives from people of different nationalities, genders, politics, interests, ethnicities and regions. I frequently start chatting if something that someone says piques my interest. Often, I listen. I view Twitter as a line directly into the universal brain to which I hopefully contribute and from which I learn a tremendous amount. Back in December 2008 as I was pulling myself together and starting this company Twitter helped me feel a part of something bigger by looping me into  the idle chatter, the keen insights, the silliness, the mundane-ness and beauty of many people talking to one another.

It is this concentration of people that make social media the “It” channel in the minds of marketers, right now, but I think that too often the reality of the people who make up these communities gets lost. Marketers of all stripes count people as “eyeballs,” “traffic,” visitors,” “followers,” “leads,” “acquisitions,” “conversions,” “potential revenue/income/sales” and “friends.”Perhaps, CMOs and social media directors and CSMOs need to come off of their perches and interact with folks. Perhaps, a bigger part of their job should be real-world interactions with people who are passionate enough about their company and product to follow and interact with them in various channels. Social media is a start, but there’s no replacement for siting down to a pizza and a Greek salad and some good old fashioned conversation. It bears repeating: it’s amazing what happens when people get together and talk.

Please read John Haydon’s take on our meeting: The most effective social media tool in the universe

Andy Warhol

Recently, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal that documented the gyrations that some families go through to balance their work and their family lives. Through some network connections we were a featured family in this article — the first mentioned in the story and the only family with a photo spread. (Yes, that’s me in my slippers — I work at home, aren’t you jealous? ) It was an interesting experience, to be sure, and one that left us with some ambivalence about having agreed to participate.

One of the most interesting things about participating in the article was the reaction of the Journal-reading web audience whose comments were cutting and highly negative (friends were very supportive). In all honesty we weren’t completely prepared for that sort of reaction, though in this day and age everybody has an opinion to which they feel entitled to vent, and we should have anticipated some backlash.

In light of our personal experience, I now have a better understanding of how to deal with negative comments that I can use to more effectively guide clients. I always make sure my clients understand that when they put themselves out on the web people are free to sound off, and will. As a result, social media participants need a response plan to deal with both the good and the bad. Being  involved with various social media channels is already one very positive step to demonstrating engagement with your customers. I did engage in the comments section of the article, but only to a point. Since the story and the comments were personal we eventually opted to ignore them.

Ignoring the negative in a business situation is not an option, or at least not the first option. In a business context you can and should engage the unhappy customer but not to the detriment of your other customers. There comes a time when you must realize, as we did, that you can’t please everybody, and folks are free to say what they want. Deal with the squeaky wheel as best as you can in an honest and forthright fashion — don’t hide, don’t let the negativity fester, don’t ignore the unhappy customer and say “you’re a nobody,” but also have an exit strategy.

Another outcome of our participation in this article was that when a Today Show producer, who had seen the article, contacted us to do a TV segment, we declined.

Gus Haynes, city editor of the fictionalized Baltimore Sun on HBO's "The Wire."

In the final season of HBO’s “The Wire” Gus Haynes, the city editor at the fictionalized Baltimore Sun is outside on a smoke break after an announcement of buyouts, talking about papers and why he went into the business. In essence he said he did so because his father, when Gus was young, was never to be disturbed until he’d read the paper and finished his coffee. Anything that could command such attention became a powerful force in Gus’s life and he knew that he wanted to be a part that world.

Written by newspaper-men, the final season of “The Wire” was a paean to the old school newspaper, as much as it was a gritty cop drama focused on the drug trade of Baltimore. Sadly the dramatization of the Sun is being played out ever more frequently in the real world.

Wither newspapers? I hope not. Though deeply steeped in digital media I still have some very strong attachments to certain analog artifacts of our world: Corked wine bottles, ink-printed and bound books, and newspapers

I still get two papers, each day,The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. While I don’t love the Globe, I enjoy its sports page and it does provide solid local news coverage. I love the Journal. I would be devastated to lose either, never mind both. I can only imagine how the 330,000 or so subscribers to the San Francisco Chronicle feel today with yesterday’s announcement by Hearst Publishing that they are either going to sell or shutter the paper.

Papers are the world delivered to the door, every day. The effort and skill that go into creating them and the ability to produce that world-recap each night and have it at the end of my driveway,or beneath my car (different story), every morning is amazing. The loss of each paper, some with long and illustrious histories, marks the death of a cultural artifact. From that perspective, news of the woes at the Chronicle, The Austin Statesman, the Rocky Mountain News, The LA Times and Chicago Tribune should upset anybody concerned with the material culture of our country.

This is not to say that some of the issues surrounding the pending demise of the newspaper industry are not to blame on the papers themselves. They were slow to adopt and adapt to the online space. They are embroiled in issues of fairness and impartiality. They were unable to match the ROI metrics of the web — the medium is the message. They were gobbled up by giant, publicly traded holding companies with much more emphasis on the bottom line than had been the norm in often, family-run, avocational-enterprises.

Now here we are.

I would say the potential death of the American newspaper is not good for the Internet, or the country. The papers provide a counterpoint to the information generated on the web and vice versa. Biased or not you know the political leanings and axes-to-be-ground of the paper’s staff and can process accordingly. This is not so evident when reading Larry-in-Wichita’s (and I’m not picking on Larry nor Wichita) coverage of the State of the Union. I’ll come back to, and close with another aspect of the materiality of the paper — there really is no replacement for the morning cup of coffee on top of the folded paper. As much as I love our laptops, it isn’t the same.

Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix

The other day, kicking around in my pantry I came across a box of “Jiffy”corn muffin mix. As far as iconic branding of consumer packaged goods go, I’d put Jiffy’s near the top. On this day though it was not the Jiffy Blue, nor the interesting mix of typography on the box-front, nor the close-up of the finished product that caught my eye — the front of the box was actually facing away from me. What caught my eye was the line, at the top of the back of the box, above the “Jiffy” logo, and the prep directions: “Great products since 1930.”

The parent company of “Jiffy” is Chelsea Milling, located in Chelsea, MI. It has been around for nearly 200 years but introduced the first ready-made baking mix in 1930. This was the first year of the Great Depression, and, one would imagine, not exactly a great year for new product launches. Yet, 79 years later, “Jiffy,” now in 21 varieties, can still be found in pantries and cupboards around the country.

Though seemingly ubiquitous now, ready made mix was a technological leap forward, and no doubt a costly investment for Chelsea Milling. They took a gamble going to market in 1930 and it paid off. As I start my own company in a downturn I find reason for hope in the “Jiffy” story. It reaffirms for me my belief that in flux there is opportunity if you are courageous enough to pursue it. In an environment as challenging as the one we face now (though not as challenging as 1930) I’m seeking inspiration and finding that examples of smart risk taking and savvy management abound — even in a box of corn muffin mix.