Hasta La Creative!

Editor’s note: Please welcome Annie Heckenberger of Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners to AdPulp. Her first post is a “get to know me” piece and an excellent intro to her fast moving world.

I have this favorite childhood memory. Every Friday afternoon in the summer, my best friend’s mother would drive my best friend, her younger brother and me to the Atlantic City train station to pick up their dad. We’d bypass a ground level platform in front of the station, the four of us walking through overgrown weeds, gravel and wildflowers along the tracks until we found the perfect spot.

My friend’s mother would give each of us a penny or a quarter and we’d carefully climb over and place each of our coins on a rail of the track. Then the three of us would step back, away from the tracks, and wait.

The anticipation was overwhelming.

We felt it coming on the ground before we could even see it. Tremors shook under the soles of our summer sandals, reverberating up through our knobby knees. Then the noise. Suddenly, like a mirage, we’d see a massive locomotive racing toward us at a speed collected over some 360 miles. Our mighty 60-pound frames blew back a bit and we were warmed by gusts generated by this beast as it pulled ahead into the station.

When my friend’s mom gave us the ok, we’d race to the tracks to find our coins. And there they were, pressed by heat and power into something completely new. Flat and big and warm to the touch. The shape and image different each time. We’d race to the station to show our friend’s dad what we created. And on those Friday nights, we’d sleep soundly with our hands wrapped around flattened coins under our pillows. We had made something, both story and product.

That’s what working at Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners feels like.

Every day there’s that anticipation and the question, What am I going to make today? Sometimes the creative opportunity is as big as a locomotive and has that kind of beastly power behind it. Other times it’s that perfectly pressed and shaped penny. Nearly every time it blows you back a little with its force.

We’re an agency in the moment right now. You know the moment. It’s that twinkling second when an agency goes from mid-sized to well, more, and everything is changing so fast that the frame is blurred.

Some of this rapid acceleration may be because the industry landscape is shifting relentlessly. Creative thinking and content is needed across platforms at a speed like never before. Social media equals deliverables times infinity. The content hole will never be satiated. You will feed the social content beast forever. And when you best it, you will be bested. That’s the game.  Get in or get out, ad world.

We believe that the best creative comes out of collaborative teams. As such, art directors and writers and creative directors and developers and production and social and digital strategists and media planners all work together at RTO+P. Always. And we silently thank Buddha, Jesus and even Elvis each night for the badass account people who advance us while keeping it all together.

I’m not going to get all kumbaya on you about this. The real skinny on working at a creative agency during a period of immense growth and momentum is that you might feel more like the conductor driving a train than the childlike observer. There’s a tremendous amount riding on your performance. Every ride is weighty regardless of the distance traveled. And the hours might break you, if the breakneck speed doesn’t clobber you first.

But the thing is, the anticipation is overwhelming. We share a common drive to get up, get in and get it done like it’s never been done before.

And on the best days, you can still feel it in your knees.

The post Crushing Copper with Annie Heckenberger appeared first on AdPulp.

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.

On this week’s edition of The BeanCast — the best podcast about Marketing on the air — I claim that “Native Advertising” is the dumbest term that I’ve ever heard. And it is, but even worse than the term itself is the fuzzy thinking behind it. It’s no wonder that no one even knows what it means, much less how, when or why to execute a Native campaign.

Rebecca Lieb an analyst for Altimeter Group, writing for iMediaConnection, says the term “Native Advertising” raises more questions than it does answers. Indeed.

My first question is, why – in The Age of Knowledge and Transparency – are we talking about hiding advertising so it appears to be something it is not? Doing so merely reinforces our industry’s processed cheese factor. It says, “Yes, we are a bunch of quacks trying to sell people a bill of goods.”

Lieb writes:

The fly in the ointment is that without a real definition of native advertising, it means anything you want it to mean. Or anything whoever’s trying to sell it to you wants it to mean. Confusion in the marketplace is not a good thing (though it can benefit certain constituents).

She goes on to say she is working to define Native Advertising and that she welcomes input. I have input. I believe Native is “a neologism for what we used to call advertorial.” Thus, I fail to see the need for it.

The need we have is to raise the bar on advertorial, and I contend it is easy to do and worth doing. The thing to realize when we talk about producing any form of brand-sponsored content is how money solves many problems. The fact is, brands have the money to invest in journalists, filmmakers and other storytellers — and smart brands like RedBull are already doing a great job of this.

On The BeanCast, host Bob Knorpp, asked what role ad agencies can play in all this. The answer is simple. Agencies play the role they always play, creating a framework for a client’s storytelling needs and managing the million details involved in creating and distributing not just ad campaigns, but media products.

Previously on AdPulp: Hello Advertorial, Nice To See You Again

The post No Need To Hide, Just Make Advertising And/Or Content Worth Showcasing appeared first on AdPulp.