Hasta La Creative!

Advertising lives at the top of the customer experience funnel. Thus, it’s important to make and run great advertising. It’s equally important to realize that no matter how high quality the ads, and how spot-on the messaging is, advertising is only one of several important parts of the customer’s experience journey. Smart brand managers use […]

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Herb Kelleher, the founder and philosopher of Southwest Airlines, passed away this month at the age of 87. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Mr. Kelleher, was a lawyer who moved from New Jersey to San Antonio to start his own law practice. Then in 1967, one of his clients, Rollin W. […]

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In 1898, Elias St.Elmo Lewis developed a model that mapped the consumers’ journey. Today, we call his framework the sales funnel. Some Marcom philosophers posit that the sales funnel is dead on arrival today. But Beth, an Associate Professor of Advertising at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication says not so fast. What […]

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British ad man, Mark Wnek, wants advertising people to loosen up. At what point did ad agency clients start coming to us because we’re the same as them? Never, I would guess. But somewhere along the line (perhaps it was pitch “chemistry” sessions?) agencies came to believe that the best way to win was to […]

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Ad people, like most people, love to bitch and moan. I can hear the collective groan now: Whoa is me, I have another dumbass client with another idiotic demand that subtracts value from ‘the work.’ Maybe there are many good reasons for this sour-faced condition. Or maybe ad people are choking on self-importance. Ask yourself […]

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I’ve worked at several agencies where the management routinely asked staff to clean up their desks and workspaces before an important client entered the building. I never understood the impulse. Why not show the messiness, the madness, the scramble for solutions? Craig Mawdsley, joint chief strategy officer at AMV BBDO in London, could be on […]

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Editor’s note: Please welcome Nathan Archambault of AKQA in NYC to AdPulp. An earlier version of this article appeared on Maybe I’m Gravy.

The old advertising agency model, the one where Madison Avenue agencies took their sweet and expensive time, isn’t working anymore.

It’s time for a forced retirement.

Sorry, old model. The nature of the business has changed. Client relationships have splintered and the traditional methods by which agencies profited are shrinking or disappearing. Clients want more effective work and they want it faster and cheaper.

Agencies are left with a clear choice: become more nimble, flexible and cost-effective or fade away. As Jeff Goodby recently admitted, we’re past the time for quick fixes.

It’s time to build a more agile agency. Here are a few things agency leaders can do.

Reduce logistics.

Today’s agency doesn’t need the same departments that were once a centerpiece to the creative offering. Goodby folded project management into account management and scaled back in-house production, opting to work with more outside vendors. Other agencies have eliminated the studio department, instead leaving final design responsibilities to creative instead of to a separate department.

Ask your agency: What departments are redundant, outdated or inefficient?

Operate like a newsroom.

It’s time for agencies to get out of the meeting business and get into the making business. The old model has too much overhead, too much process and too many barriers getting in the way of the work. An agency should feel like a living organism with the sole goal of producing great work, and nothing else should matter or get in the way. Oreo operated like a newsroom during last year’s Super Bowl and we all know how that turned out.

Ask your agency: What can we do to get out of the way of the work?

Replace perfection with experimentation.

In the past, clients demanded perfection and the agencies that delivered it thrived. These days, experimentation returns more on investment. Google launches everything in beta and future updates are expected and (mostly) welcome. The important thing today is getting your product, service or campaign idea to market. Once people have access to it, you can gather feedback, revise and repeat. This is what successful startups like Instagram, Foursquare and Path do and it works pretty well for them.

Ask your agency: What can we make today and worry about making better tomorrow?

Hire doers, not thinkers.

Agencies used to be able to hire creative teams to sit around and think up big ideas. But teams that lack the craft to build the ideas they come up with aren’t pulling their weight today. They’re requiring the agency to hire someone else to execute and bring the vision to life. The jig is up, big thinkers: Being clever and having good taste is no longer a job. That’s why side projects are the new main course – they’re the work of a doer.

Ask your agency: Who actually makes things around here?

Cast for talent.

Interpersonal relationships and unique skills matter more than staffing plans. The need may be for an ACD-level copywriter, but it’s important to be open to creative solutions when filling this or any position. An agile agency wants to find people with the right mindset, regardless of whether or how they fit into a particular department or job title. With the right people in place, an agency can cast for projects, not staff for them.

Ask your agency: Are we hiring the best people first and determining their role later?

Deconstruct the process.

It doesn’t make sense to implement the same process for every project. These days, unlike when advertising was mostly made of TV and print, each project is different from the last. Michael Lebowitz, Founder and CEO of Big Spaceship, gives his teams a framework instead of a process. This allows each team, each operating as mini-agenices, to bubble up a unique process that leads to more unique work.

Ask your agency: Are we finding new paths to the end goal of creativity?

Integrate every department.

The different stages of any given project shouldn’t feel like a baton pass. The brief can’t spend weeks with strategy before being handed off to the creative department, and later to production. AKQA CCO Rei Inamoto believes that agencies need to combine strategy, storytelling and software in order to build emotional and useful connections with people. This means that creative, strategy and technology work together from the start, making each team more invested at every stage of the process.

Ask your agency: Is each team member a stakeholder from the beginning?

Maybe you’re not in a position to change the way your agency operates. But there is something you can do: you can join an agency that believes in the game-changing power of agility.

In this agile age, one thing is for certain: the inflexible will be left behind.

Previously on AdPulp: The Google To Adlandia: Be Lean And Agile Like Us, And You’ll Be Rich Like Us

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Robin Williams once said cocaine was God’s way of saying you make too much money. Something tells me he’d say the same about ad agencies’ current fascination with turning even the smallest task into a gigantic group project.

You’d think in these days of tight budgets, rapidly changing media and constant connectivity, agencies would not only be doing things faster but with fewer people. Especially after all the crazy mergers, consolidation and downsizing. Sadly though, in today’s ad world there’s just no project too small to involve way too many people.

Notice I used the word involve. That’s important because the number of people actually doing the work hasn’t really changed. Just the number of people involved. For example, if we were talking about a crew of city utility workers, these would be the six guys standing around the edge of the hole doing nothing but watching the two guys who are actually down in the hole digging. (And if they were agency-types, they’d be constantly emailing the poor saps while they dug.)

Naturally, these peripheral peeps insist their Too-Many-Meetings process be given a new name, so as to sound less stupid and more innovative I guess. Scrum seems to be the latest moniker they’ve latched onto, a surprisingly apt descriptor given the way workplace overthink can invade your personal space. As buzzwords go, scrum may soon prove to be the next crowdsourcing. And no wonder, considering it has a much better ring to it than the other name they were considering, Opening The Oven Door Every Other Minute To See If The Cookies Are Done.

I may be getting out of my element here, but I always thought one of the easiest ways for an agency to make money was to do more with less. Considering that people are an agency’s greatest expense, the fewer people you pay per task, the more money you have left over, no? Especially if your revenue comes from a fixed monthly fee.

Yet it seems like the goal in most agencies today is to require more people than ever to hold as many meetings as possible to accomplish what could just as easily happen in about half the time with 1/3 of the manpower. (With that 1/3 feeling much happier and vital and empowered and other stuff the Human Resources Dept. says we should care about along the way, too.)

Of course, I can hear the scrum-mers now: It’s all about collaboration! The wisdom of the crowd! The hive! Great ideas can come from anywhere, etc, etc.

Fine, great ideas are everywhere. So is gold and oil technically, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize we’re not all equally adept at finding it. And sure, collaboration is important, but at a certain point we’re simply getting in each others’ way.

So what say we all pick up our Scrum Participation Trophies then go back to our desks and spend some of this precious meeting time actually thinking instead?

Who knows, maybe some of us will actually get some work done.

(Thanks to Brian Morrissey @bmorrissey for pointing out the rise of scrum. So many buzzwords, so little time.)

Prediction: the big agency buzzword of 2014 will be 'scrum.'

— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) October 2, 2013

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David Gianatasio of Adweek explores the rare art of moving from an agency leadership role to CEO on the client side.

Ironically, agency executives tend to suffer from, of all things, ‘a branding problem,’ according to Renée Richardson Gosline, assistant marketing professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She says recruiters and corporate boards have long perceived agencies as second-tier organizations—useful and interesting enterprises but relatively frivolous and not on par with producers of durable goods and global services. By extension, agency heads are sometimes perceived—fairly or not—as lacking the gravitas and business skills to run a large corporation.

Agency heads are sometimes perceived as lacking the gravitas and business skills? That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?

By the way, “Gravitas was one of the Roman virtues, along with pietas, dignitas and virtus. It may be translated variously as weight, seriousness and dignity, also importance, and connotes a certain substance or depth of personality.”

Personally, I tire of the “advertising is bullshit” framework. I know we earned it by piling mounds of crapvertising into every conceivable public and private space. Yet, there is another reality to advertising, one where what we do is a fundamental driver of economic growth. And the more we advocate for customers’ best interests while meeting client objectives, the more brand value and economic growth we will help create.

I work with a fair number of CEOs of small to medium-sized businesses, and I have also worked closely with agency owners and CEOs. Whatever business you’re in, you have to lead from a place of operational strength where number crunching, product engineering, hiring and talent development are all required. But to truly excel and take your company to a higher place, a CEO also needs to be a visionary planner and exceptional communicator of the vision. She needs buy-in from the team, and all the soft skills to acquire it. That’s where marketers get the job done over “engineers” or operators.

So, do you want an engineer/builder or a storyteller to lead your company? You want both. You want the poet to write the code, and the chef to wait on tables. We demand a lot from our leaders.

The post Do You Work In A “Relatively Frivolous” Industry? 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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