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Category : Culture

The Road To Dadsville

DadsvilleMy father was an airbrush artist. He painted crazy stuff on the sides of vans and motorcycle gas tanks and denim jackets in the 1970s and 80s. If you’re of a certain age, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not, Google the art of Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo and you’ll start to get the picture. Imagine it on the side of a van and you’ll start to understand why the seventies were so weird.

My dad also called himself Mongo. And he drove around in a big pink hearse complete with an airbrushed cemetery on the side and a giant, bearded wizard (who looked a lot like him) on the hood. He was one strange dude. And no doubt he is the reason I’m in this crazy business where we make weird stuff that gets people’s attention and makes them say “Hey, did you see that?”

Mongo died about ten years ago now. But a few years ago, while freelancing by day and teaching myself new skills at night, I made a comic book about him. It was called The Book Of Mongo and it was 12 pages long and basically told the story of how he got the name Mongo (Hint: Blazing Saddles was out at the time). It was a labor of love. And I loved it.

When I was done with the comic book, I put it out there on Facebook and everyone seemed to like it. I didn’t really try to get it on bookshelves because my freelance career was taking up more and more of my time and I hadn’t made it to sell. I made it for me. And to learn something new.

But whenever you make Inspiring content, Actions follow.

Soon, I got a message from my friend Dane LaChiusa. He loved the dad comic and wanted to make one of his own. Would I care to get a taco and talk about it? So we did. Dane said he had talked to other people and they were interested in making dad-themed comics too. Maybe we could make an anthology.

We met in a bar a few weeks later with some interested artists. We decided we would call it Dadsville.

Once the idea was out there, we started getting submissions. From comic creators and advertising people. From Brazil, Maine and everywhere in-between. We had hit on a fundamental truth: Everybody had a weird dad. Carol Holsinger, a talented comic creator in her own right, joined Dane and I to help edit the first edition. Mark DiMassimo offered to publish it through the agency.

Again, Inspiration leading to Action.

This past Friday, we had a launch party for Dadsville Issue #1 at our offices on 23rd street in New York City. As I looked around at all the people admiring the art of people I didn’t know, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride. Like a proud papa.

I hope Mongo was watching.

-Tom Christmann, Chief Creative Officer

 

Proove Accountable Media, The Way Media Should Be.

Media Agencies are operating in an old school fashion, marking up inventory, not being transparent, moving at a snails pace and not investing in the best talent. I felt there was an opportunity for an agency to be fully transparent, ethical, and to act as a true agent for the client. Built from the ground up, Proove is positioned as a challenger to the old school model and is set up to drive success for our clients in todays world.

What do our clients get from an honest agency?

No previous prearranged media, partner or data commitments…a realtime log of the daily optimizations made & a non-biased media recommendation that clearly maps back to what you need to accomplish in market. You will actually know where your media is running.

What does that mean?

Results.

Proove Accountable Media, the way media should be.

Read the full Business Insider article here.

 

What’s Your Measure of Proof?

There was once a man who refused to give up smoking until it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that smoking caused disease.

He didn’t live long enough to see the proof.

Today, there are direct (digital, mobile, SAAS, subscription, e-commerce, club…) marketers who refuse to improve their marketing success with an insight-driven multi-channel strategy until the perfect attribution model has been developed.

Every day, another one is buried by a marketer with a more reasonable measure of proof.

Is overall marketing efficiency your ultimate measure? Is making one dollar of marketing spend return two or three or four times as many customers your objective?

If so, you are an optimizer.

If you prefer perfectly attributable though small gains in discrete channels, then you’re an incrementalist.

Optimizers eat incrementalists for lunch.

Sometimes, in very big places, incrementalists work in the middle of a pyramid with optimizers at the top. Even so, they can only swim so far up before they hit a ceiling. Too late, they find that the open market is not a very friendly place for an incrementalist.

Why do incrementalists do it to themselves? Is it because they are trading upside for certainty? Is being sure more valuable to them than being successful? Is being right worth more to them than results?

Or did they just swallow a less intelligent idea of what it is a marketer is supposed to do?

Well … enough musing about the incrementalists, much as I would like to convert as many of them as possible to a life of success beyond explanation.

We are for the optimizers.

 

Freedom’s Pusher

We think we’re free, but we have habits. Our habits are tyrants. They dominate us. Hard as we may try, we can’t get free of habits, we can only build new ones. And we only feel “free” when we’re dominated by habits that empower us.

So, freedom is an addiction.

I help people form more inspiring, more empowering habits. I help marketers make more inspiring decisions, so they can help more people form more inspiring habits.

I’m Freedom’s Pusher.

What Happened to My DiGo? (What you want to know about our new logo and identity)

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When we first launched this agency nearly two decades ago, we briefly had more time than clients, so we focused on building our own brand — and the world responded!

Since then, we’ve never lacked for exciting opportunities to do what we do for inspiring clients.

Naturally, our own brand became a bit like the Cobbler’s Children. You know that story right? The shoemaker so busy that his children went shoeless. That’s the way it’s told, usually. Truth was probably a bit different. The Cobbler’s Children never really went without shoes. It’s just that sometimes the shoes were quite old and worn down. Other times, the Cobbler tested out his most eccentric designs on his own children, saving the tried and true for his customers.

In my version of the story, the Cobbler prospers due to his focus on his clients and his intense commitment to his craft, and finally turns his attention and skill to making extraordinary pairs of shoes for each of his children.

So, check out our new shoes, in the form of a new identity to support our inspiring action mission.

Building brands and businesses through inspiring action teaches us something new every day. Most of all, we have learned the power of an inspiring action to spark something that grows and grows.

Thus, the match. From now on, when you see our logo, it will be ready to be grasped and struck. Ready to touch off a blaze.

 

Why Do We Say Client Fulfillment?

Because clients that are really fulfilled — fulfilled as people, professionals and clients too — will become life-long clients. And in turn, recommend us. That’s how we grow. Great Clients, Great Work and Great People. 

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At DiMassimo Goldstein, we put our values in a document we call “The DIGO Standard.” It doesn’t just hang on the walls and sit on our desks and desktops. We use it every day. People who visit often ask for a copy. Here’s yours, and you didn’t even have to ask.