Sure, people my age don't stick at one job the way people would 20 years ago, but why is it? Is it because we loose our interest? Our ambition? Our drive?
No, we leave for greener pasteurs. The problem isn't that today's young workforce isn't comprised of good workers, the problem is that yesterday's workforce doesn't work to retain us.
Wanna keep us around longer? Here's what you need to do:
1) Challenge us. Don't just keep us busy, challenge us with rewarding tasks.
2) Manage us. Don't micro manage us, just manage us, keep us pointed in the right direction.
3) Pay us well, and keep paying us well.
We're not third rate employees, we're first rate. We've been better educated, we're more ambitious, and if you take care of us we'll be far more loyal.
10.11.2006
10.09.2006
9.19.2006
K.I.S.S.
Quigo knows what they’re doing, and they’re doing it pretty well. They understand John Maeda’s ideas on simplicity. How, as marketers, can we apply Maeda’s ideas and Quigo’s approach to our work?
To me, new products offer the most temptation when it comes to adding unnecessary complexity. When brainstorming, it’s easy to get into the “What if we do this?” phase, taking what could have been a perfectly good product that served a legitimate need and diluting it until nobody cares anymore.
Quigo looked at Google and Yahoo, and saw an opportunity to do one part of what those companies were dabbling in really well. As marketers, it’s our responsibility to find out what it is that our client does really well, and promote that. A campaign should boil down to one simple, differentiating theme that strikes at the true nature of the product.
As a word of caution, as soon as you have something that promises to be everything to everyone, put up your red flags. While we should strive to simplify messaging until it applies to everyone, we should be wary of clients, products or services that try to be everything to everyone.
GM tried to have a car for everyone. They’ve got GM, Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Saab, Hummer, Saturn and Cadillac. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re just doing too much to be successful at any of it. Saturn has never had a profitable year. Their marketing has become so diluted that Pontiac’s G6 hard top convertible isn’t getting near the attention it deserves. While Buick might have some nice cars, they struggle with a perception of being stale.
You could say the same about Ford, with Lincoln, Mercury, Jaguar. Or Chrysler, with Dodge, Jeep, and Mercedes. The automotive industry is a prime example of large companies that, in trying to have something to appeal to everyone, have diluted their brands, and have lost sales as a result.
The auto industry also offers brands that do it well. Toyota, seeing significant growth right now in the US, keeps it simple. They have the Toyota brand, which markets affordable and reliable automobiles. They have Lexus, which offers luxury automobiles.
Where you may confuse a Mercury model with it’s Ford counterpart, or a Chrysler 300 with a Dodge Charger, or any Chevy truck with it’s GM doppelganger, you’re just not going to confuse a Toyota with a Lexus. They are very different looking automobiles.
Keep it real. Keep it simple. Keep it real simple.
To me, new products offer the most temptation when it comes to adding unnecessary complexity. When brainstorming, it’s easy to get into the “What if we do this?” phase, taking what could have been a perfectly good product that served a legitimate need and diluting it until nobody cares anymore.
Quigo looked at Google and Yahoo, and saw an opportunity to do one part of what those companies were dabbling in really well. As marketers, it’s our responsibility to find out what it is that our client does really well, and promote that. A campaign should boil down to one simple, differentiating theme that strikes at the true nature of the product.
As a word of caution, as soon as you have something that promises to be everything to everyone, put up your red flags. While we should strive to simplify messaging until it applies to everyone, we should be wary of clients, products or services that try to be everything to everyone.
GM tried to have a car for everyone. They’ve got GM, Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Saab, Hummer, Saturn and Cadillac. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re just doing too much to be successful at any of it. Saturn has never had a profitable year. Their marketing has become so diluted that Pontiac’s G6 hard top convertible isn’t getting near the attention it deserves. While Buick might have some nice cars, they struggle with a perception of being stale.
You could say the same about Ford, with Lincoln, Mercury, Jaguar. Or Chrysler, with Dodge, Jeep, and Mercedes. The automotive industry is a prime example of large companies that, in trying to have something to appeal to everyone, have diluted their brands, and have lost sales as a result.
The auto industry also offers brands that do it well. Toyota, seeing significant growth right now in the US, keeps it simple. They have the Toyota brand, which markets affordable and reliable automobiles. They have Lexus, which offers luxury automobiles.
Where you may confuse a Mercury model with it’s Ford counterpart, or a Chrysler 300 with a Dodge Charger, or any Chevy truck with it’s GM doppelganger, you’re just not going to confuse a Toyota with a Lexus. They are very different looking automobiles.
Keep it real. Keep it simple. Keep it real simple.
9.13.2006
One-stop-shop VS One-man-show
Today, John Moore points out Dan Pink’s idea that talented people in marketing and advertising no longer need to be a part of a larger organization, they can go it alone.
But is that what’s best? Are the talented people better off on their own, where they have to spend a large portion of their time cultivating business to fill the rest of their schedule?
As part of a small agency, we talk about this one a lot. I think the role of the agency is changing, and the giant organizations are going to be slowly and steadily replaced by organizations of about 20 or fewer people.
I do think, however, that there are efficiencies to be realized by not quite working alone. There’s an advantage to having a copywriter in house with an art director. It’s good to have a go-to account person to field all calls from clients, instead of allowing them open access to the designers and creative directors.
There’s a level of organization that simply provides better service to clients, more comprehensive and immediate service. It’s a more efficient and productive way to work to allow the left-brained folks to do their thing, and the right-brained folks to do theirs.
My bet is that five years from now, boutique agencies are going to be the first choice for businesses looking for marketing, advertising and public relations services. One-stop-shops have far too much overhead, and one-man-shows just don’t have enough to offer.
But is that what’s best? Are the talented people better off on their own, where they have to spend a large portion of their time cultivating business to fill the rest of their schedule?
As part of a small agency, we talk about this one a lot. I think the role of the agency is changing, and the giant organizations are going to be slowly and steadily replaced by organizations of about 20 or fewer people.
I do think, however, that there are efficiencies to be realized by not quite working alone. There’s an advantage to having a copywriter in house with an art director. It’s good to have a go-to account person to field all calls from clients, instead of allowing them open access to the designers and creative directors.
There’s a level of organization that simply provides better service to clients, more comprehensive and immediate service. It’s a more efficient and productive way to work to allow the left-brained folks to do their thing, and the right-brained folks to do theirs.
My bet is that five years from now, boutique agencies are going to be the first choice for businesses looking for marketing, advertising and public relations services. One-stop-shops have far too much overhead, and one-man-shows just don’t have enough to offer.
9.12.2006
People as brands
We all know about building brand identity and developing brand personality, but what about building personality brands? What about taking the identity and personality of an individual, or a group of people, and creating brands out of it?
Think of the Rolling Stones. First, they were just musicians. Then they were the Rolling Stones. Now, their branded apparel is sold in mega-retailers all over the place. They’ve done a decent job of building a brand through their personality.
Now think of Tom Cruise. He was riding high on a wave of great publicity for years, but recently the Tom Cruise brand has been tarnished rather severely. Whether or not this will have a huge financial impact on him remains to be seen, but the point is that he hurt the Tom Cruise Brand.
Publicists are generally the ones dealing with promoting someone’s personality as a brand, and I’m not claiming to be a publicist. I just find intriguing the balance between the person and the brand that they project .
Can you achieve fame, can you achieve notoriety, without projecting some sort of brand? Is it more likely today for personalities to become brands than 10, 20 years?
Does anyone really care?
9.06.2006
Who's in charge over here?
How much strategy should the agency be responsible, and how much should the client be responsible for? I know that the easy answer here is: it depends.
It depends on the agency – are they a creative agency, or a strategic agency? Any agency, be it design or marketing or public relations, needs to play to its strengths.
It depends on the client – how robust is their internal marketing team? Smaller businesses may be starving for some strategy and insight when it comes to promoting themselves. Larger corporations may make all of the strategic decisions internally and just outsource the deliverables.
In any mid to large sized agency, I think the agency has a responsibility in most cases to provide some strategic thinking to the client. When you are in the agency environment, you are in the front lines of marketing, advertising and public relations. We are the folks that look at commercials with a critical eye, that read the paper and think, “I know exactly how this company profile got into the business section.”
Maybe it’s a new SEO tactic, or a new format for variable data in direct mail. Maybe it’s a more affordable way to get on the radio or on television. These are things that folks within the agency world will almost always hear about before the folks in the client world, and for that reason it’s the responsibility of those outside the company to provide strategic thinking.
So what’s the right answer here? Who ends up doing what? It’s got to be a balance. Nobody knows the client like the client, and nobody knows the possibilities of what can get accomplished like the agencies.
The client is like Honda – really well grounded, they know what they do and they do it well. The agency needs to be like a tribe of punk kids throwing as much aftermarket product at the cars as they can just to enhance the performance.
It depends on the agency – are they a creative agency, or a strategic agency? Any agency, be it design or marketing or public relations, needs to play to its strengths.
It depends on the client – how robust is their internal marketing team? Smaller businesses may be starving for some strategy and insight when it comes to promoting themselves. Larger corporations may make all of the strategic decisions internally and just outsource the deliverables.
In any mid to large sized agency, I think the agency has a responsibility in most cases to provide some strategic thinking to the client. When you are in the agency environment, you are in the front lines of marketing, advertising and public relations. We are the folks that look at commercials with a critical eye, that read the paper and think, “I know exactly how this company profile got into the business section.”
Maybe it’s a new SEO tactic, or a new format for variable data in direct mail. Maybe it’s a more affordable way to get on the radio or on television. These are things that folks within the agency world will almost always hear about before the folks in the client world, and for that reason it’s the responsibility of those outside the company to provide strategic thinking.
So what’s the right answer here? Who ends up doing what? It’s got to be a balance. Nobody knows the client like the client, and nobody knows the possibilities of what can get accomplished like the agencies.
The client is like Honda – really well grounded, they know what they do and they do it well. The agency needs to be like a tribe of punk kids throwing as much aftermarket product at the cars as they can just to enhance the performance.
9.03.2006
Screw Everyone Else!
Is there something to be said for Dodge here? Sure, everyone is thinking green and efficient and hybrid, and they're unloading a truck that's lucky to get 8 miles per gallon. But what if Dodge is right?
There are a LOT of brands competing for space out there in the automotive world. Dr. Z has hurt Dodge, and Daimler Chrysler in general, by blurring the brands. He's also tried to take some very American brands, like Dodge, and push them as cars with German engineering.
Dodge knows big engines and big trucks. Dodge has spent far more, per truck sold, than Ford or GM in the past few years, making "Hemi" a household name again.
While at first glance, the new Ram may seem counter-intuitive, let's look at the whole industry and where dodge fits.
Dodge does NOT have fuel-efficient little urban cars for the college age crowd - Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Scion and Kia have that.
Dodge does NOT have big, cushy luxury American cars - Buick, Lincoln, Mercury and Chrysler have those (why does Mercury exist? Different conversation...)
Dodge does NOT have high-performance sports cars the way that BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche do
Dodge does NOT have the family friendly cars like the Honda Odyssey, the Chrysler Town and Country line, some of the GM trucks
Dodge DOES have big engines and mean looking trucks. Perhaps in putting out a vehicle that can actually claim to be Al Gore's nemesis, Dodge is only acknowledging that they know their role, and that they're comfortable there.
Marketers often talk about creating a niche, not keeping up with others. Dodge may very well be creating their own niche of bad-ass-trucks and, lest we forget, mean-looking-station-wagons.
There are a LOT of brands competing for space out there in the automotive world. Dr. Z has hurt Dodge, and Daimler Chrysler in general, by blurring the brands. He's also tried to take some very American brands, like Dodge, and push them as cars with German engineering.
Dodge knows big engines and big trucks. Dodge has spent far more, per truck sold, than Ford or GM in the past few years, making "Hemi" a household name again.
While at first glance, the new Ram may seem counter-intuitive, let's look at the whole industry and where dodge fits.
Dodge does NOT have fuel-efficient little urban cars for the college age crowd - Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Scion and Kia have that.
Dodge does NOT have big, cushy luxury American cars - Buick, Lincoln, Mercury and Chrysler have those (why does Mercury exist? Different conversation...)
Dodge does NOT have high-performance sports cars the way that BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche do
Dodge does NOT have the family friendly cars like the Honda Odyssey, the Chrysler Town and Country line, some of the GM trucks
Dodge DOES have big engines and mean looking trucks. Perhaps in putting out a vehicle that can actually claim to be Al Gore's nemesis, Dodge is only acknowledging that they know their role, and that they're comfortable there.
Marketers often talk about creating a niche, not keeping up with others. Dodge may very well be creating their own niche of bad-ass-trucks and, lest we forget, mean-looking-station-wagons.
9.02.2006
The Account Executive
At my agency, there's a lot of talk about whether or not clients actually need an account executive. What is the role of an account executive? Does the role of an AE depend on the character of the agency? Of the client?
Large companies are trending away from putting all of their eggs in the Agency of Record basket, instead opting to distribute projects to several agencies. Let's face it: it's been a rough couple of years for retail, and budgets are shrinking. That's bad news to the MEGA-agencies, but good news to more nimble boutique agencies that offer lower overhead.
We are a smaller agency that prides itself on the accessibility of our partners to our clients. In this environment, ideally, there would be no need for an AE. But what about growth? As we gain more clients, it will be inefficient to bring on more partners. Could you imagine an agency with 6 partners, 2 designers, a book keeper and a traffic manager? How would we make any money? Would we truly be serving the client's needs?
But suppose the smallest agency in the world - a one man creative director/designer, takes on a large client. The creative director brings creative to the table - that's their job. But the client doesn't want to have to constantly reign in the creative director, they are going to want to farm their work out to an agency that can empathize with their needs, their limitations, and their struggles.
Call it an account executive, a project manager, and client relationship manager, whatever... the fact is that the role that these names represent is critical to agency's ability to serve the client and to serve them well.
The client's marketing and advertising assets need to perform, make money, move the needle. A creative director alone runs the risk of neglecting some of the metrics that go into the planning of how the client's assets are used. They could design a really cool ad that falls short of performing the function that the client intends for that asset to perform. It's an ad that gains tons of attention for consumers, from competitors, and from critics. The problem is that the ad doesn't sell enough of the right product to pay for itself, and is thereby ineffective.
In my humble, inexperienced view, it is the AE who balances out the client and the creative team, who makes sure that the client, in the end, gets the best possible solution to their current need. The AE is the clients inside man.
At the same time, the AE is the agencies inside man with the client, responsible for understanding their business climate well enough to suggest new tactics and initiatives that truly benefit the agency.
So, yes, the AE must represent the client to the agency, but the AE must also promote the agency's strengths to the client on a consistent basis.
My examples above are more about advertising and less about branding. For branding projects, for awareness initiatives, you might not need to move the needle. But even in those cases, you need an AE to get close enough to the client to understand their brand in order to insure that the agency is operating as an extension of that brand. Yes, you could have a creative director do this, but it's not an efficient use of their time - they are there to provide creative, not necessarily to forge a relationship with the client.
These are just my thoughts here - please feel free to comment. Are Account Executives a thing of the past? Are they always necessary? When are the unnecessary?
Large companies are trending away from putting all of their eggs in the Agency of Record basket, instead opting to distribute projects to several agencies. Let's face it: it's been a rough couple of years for retail, and budgets are shrinking. That's bad news to the MEGA-agencies, but good news to more nimble boutique agencies that offer lower overhead.
We are a smaller agency that prides itself on the accessibility of our partners to our clients. In this environment, ideally, there would be no need for an AE. But what about growth? As we gain more clients, it will be inefficient to bring on more partners. Could you imagine an agency with 6 partners, 2 designers, a book keeper and a traffic manager? How would we make any money? Would we truly be serving the client's needs?
But suppose the smallest agency in the world - a one man creative director/designer, takes on a large client. The creative director brings creative to the table - that's their job. But the client doesn't want to have to constantly reign in the creative director, they are going to want to farm their work out to an agency that can empathize with their needs, their limitations, and their struggles.
Call it an account executive, a project manager, and client relationship manager, whatever... the fact is that the role that these names represent is critical to agency's ability to serve the client and to serve them well.
The client's marketing and advertising assets need to perform, make money, move the needle. A creative director alone runs the risk of neglecting some of the metrics that go into the planning of how the client's assets are used. They could design a really cool ad that falls short of performing the function that the client intends for that asset to perform. It's an ad that gains tons of attention for consumers, from competitors, and from critics. The problem is that the ad doesn't sell enough of the right product to pay for itself, and is thereby ineffective.
In my humble, inexperienced view, it is the AE who balances out the client and the creative team, who makes sure that the client, in the end, gets the best possible solution to their current need. The AE is the clients inside man.
At the same time, the AE is the agencies inside man with the client, responsible for understanding their business climate well enough to suggest new tactics and initiatives that truly benefit the agency.
So, yes, the AE must represent the client to the agency, but the AE must also promote the agency's strengths to the client on a consistent basis.
My examples above are more about advertising and less about branding. For branding projects, for awareness initiatives, you might not need to move the needle. But even in those cases, you need an AE to get close enough to the client to understand their brand in order to insure that the agency is operating as an extension of that brand. Yes, you could have a creative director do this, but it's not an efficient use of their time - they are there to provide creative, not necessarily to forge a relationship with the client.
These are just my thoughts here - please feel free to comment. Are Account Executives a thing of the past? Are they always necessary? When are the unnecessary?
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