Hasta La Creative!

Editor’s Note: The following article is by Clifton Mark. It was originally published at Aeon and has been republished here under Creative Commons. ‘We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …’ Barack Obama, inaugural address, […]

The post Meritocracy Is A False God. Instead, Practice Gratitude and Cultivate Good Luck. appeared first on Adpulp.

When you work in a creative field, you traffic in ideas. For a creative person in advertising, ideas are currency and like cash, fluid and hard to capture. Ideas are also something that people in advertising fight for, steal, glorify, and covet. The thing to know about ideas is they do not accrue value when […]

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Daniel Goleman’s seminal book Emotional Intelligence was a breakthrough in workplace dynamics. For the first time, we had to consider that intelligence alone is a poor metric for measuring or predicting career success. The thesis of the book is that an individual’s emotional intelligence quotient — their skill in innately human attributes like empathy and […]

The post Are You Open to the Massive Business Opportunities in EQ? appeared first on Adpulp.

Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, gave an interesting talk recently, where he reveals the thinking behind the machine. The problem the Facebookers sought to solve: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? The “solution” they ended up inventing: “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of […]

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President Trump has the power to rock markets and drive a company’s stock price up or down. He may not intend to upset a company’s apple cart, but the outcome of his erratic actions is the same. When the man drops a Tweet Bomb from his Samsung, things are bound to explode. Melanie McShane, head […]

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Impatient, are we? Not so much by nature, but by digital design. If something takes a few seconds to load, for instance, we act as if we are being cheated of precious time.

The powerful multi-way communication channels we now rely on have also reset expectations. Emails can sit there unanswered, but ignoring an Instant Message is another issue entirely. Now, take that concept to Twitter and Facebook.

According to Marketing Charts, a new study conducted by Havas Worldwide suggests that consumer expectations are high for social responsiveness, and that brands that fail to meet those expectations risk alienating a large portion of consumers.

Went to @McDonalds today and ordered a mcdouble with no pickles or onions and they gave me no buns…. pic.twitter.com/nd2urKJyYM

— Hunter Davis (@hpd_21) July 16, 2013

What happens when companies don’t respond quickly? Consumers get annoyed. 48% of respondents agreed that “it annoys me if I don’t get a fast response from a company or brand I contact via Facebook, Twitter, or another social media channel.”

Facebook and Twitter are places where people like to talk. That’s the “social” piece of social media. The need to craft traditional but moving communications remains. But now a brand (with help from its agency partners) is also expected to keep up an ongoing dialogue with the company’s biggest supporters on Facebook and Twitter. This dialogue is one part content offering, another part realtime conversation. And as a representative of the company, the conversation can quickly turn to customer service, reputation management and sales.

Brands spend lots of money on advertising in effort to capture the interest of a coveted audience. But whatever good will the brand earns via paid, earned or owned media can be instantly washed away in a devastating typhoon of social media cluelessness. Don’t be that brand. Understand the demands of modern media and invest in developing talent to meet these needs, because they’re not diminishing.

Footnote: To McDonald’s credit (see above), the hamburger chain maintains a customer service account on Twitter to quickly address customer’s problems.

The post Customer Service Defines Your Brand In A Way Advertising Never Will appeared first on AdPulp.

Agencies don’t just churn out ad campaigns these days, they incubate startups. And why not? When you have the resources you can afford put them to good use. In fact, it is your responsibility to do so.

You may have heard, Wieden+Kennedy got into the baby-company warming game a few years back with the launch of PIE, now run by Man about Tech Town and friend of AdPulp, Rick Turoczy. Some notable success stories have already emerged from PIE, namely Urban Airship and Simple.

Note: PIE is taking new applications from budding startups until April 15th.

Now we have word from Richmond — home of VCU Adcenter, Cabell Harris and The Martin Agency — that 80amps, a local incubator, is being backed by Martin.

Neil Patel, The Martin Agency’s Senior Vice President of Content Strategy and Development, says:

We’ve chosen to work with 80amps for two main reasons: first, it provides a path to innovation that allows us to continue to focus on our core business of creating world-class advertising; second, 80amps’ focus on consumer products and services is in perfect alignment with our core competency.”

A path to innovation that fuels world-class advertising. I think this addresses the “Why?” question some may have.

Media is a shifty business, and marketing with it. Martin and W+K already have deep expertise in print and broadcast, now they need to add digital to their core competencies, and the people who make digital are different beasts. Interestingly, Richmond and Portland are not cities loaded with VCs, so Martin and W+K are stepping up to fill a need.

Iain Tait, who works at Google Labs now, following the shortest stint ever as a W+K partner, highlighted the differences quite nicely a few years ago.

We need to borrow from the places where real innovation is occurring: the world of hack-days, collaboration, open-sourcing, ring-fenced R&D time and incubators. Clinging to outdated idea-farming methods just because they’re reliable and predictable is a surefire route to extinction.

For sure, Tait’s world of propeller heads on speed is not the agency world of old, where creative teams holed up for days on end scribbling ideas on a notepad. Marketing complexity is increasing rapidly and it is a struggle to keep up with the curve, much less ahead of it. Not only do agencies need to produce a ton of content today, they need the data-crunching capabilities to track what happens once it is released. This data, in ideal circumstances, is then used to help inform next steps.

Can you see why agencies want to cozy up to people practiced in lean and agile development?

Previously on AdPulp: Be Fast And Fascinating (Or Be Gone) | The Google To Adlandia: Be Lean And Agile Like Us, And You’ll Be Rich Like Us

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