Why we call it Client Fulfillment.

Account management with a mission.

Account management is the heart of the agency. Here’s why:

Let’s start with the word “agency.” The definition I like is from Webster’s: an agency is a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved.

It is fashionable today to run away from “agency” and to denigrate it’s meaning. For ourselves, we completely reject every departure from a pure agency model. We are here to be used by others to exert power to achieve worthy ends. We reject any proposal that might detract from our operating as a pure agent. We won’t create a conflict of interest, for example by trying to own intellectual property in our creations for our client. We don’t want to get confused.
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Account Management IS The Agency Business.

Anyone who wants to get anywhere in the agency business ought to start out in account management.

Though “creative director” has been the title I’ve held for the most years of my career, I owe a good deal of my success to having started out as an assistant account executive.

BBDO Direct. 385 Madison Avenue.

Pepto Bismol was the agency beverage of choice. There were as many ulcers as vice presidents. But I didn’t know enough to be scared. That was piece of luck number one.
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here is your social media update for the week.

1. Twitter Vines Get Shared 4x More Than Online Video

2. Coke Zero Mother’s Day Twitter Stunt Lets Forgetful Sons Off the Hook
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Don’t limit your growth!

Here are 7 ways agency people can delimit their own growth.

Why aren’t agencies helping their people to grow and develop?

At DiGo, we’ve been learning a lot lately by interviewing account people by the dozens. While we’ve met some spectacular people, I’m sorry to say that most of these interviews have been just shocking. Too many people come in with limiting attitudes about themselves and their possibilities. Experienced account managers typically don’t even have an understanding the agency business. They don’t get what agencies are here to do. They don’t understand the role we play in our client’s lives and businesses. They view themselves as narrow specialists. They are people in boxes, decades too early.
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Growth isn’t work. It’s life.

Here’s a quick dispatch from the intersection of personal, creative and business growth:

Some folks turn off at the phrase “personal growth” because it sounds like a lot of work. “Hey, I’m OK just as I am!”

But growth is as natural as breathing. It’s what we’re meant to do. Only sometimes we block what’s natural for us, and that takes a lot more work and energy.

Like staying in a job for “security” when we know we’re stultified. Like choosing the “safe” campaign rather than the right one. Like picking colleagues or partners who won’t challenge you.
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The Founder CEO, A Marketer’s Orientation.

I love working for and with Founder/CEOs.

No doubt, this makes me an eccentric marketer and an odder ad guy, and casts extreme suspicion on my membership in the creative community.

Marketers are supposed to want to run their own empires – otherwise why spend all that money on a Harvard MBA and all that energy climbing the corporate ladder? Creative directors think the ideal client listens to their presentations, and then applauds. Ad agencies think their job is to please the target audience no matter what the client might think.
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Suddenly, Everyone’s Apologizing.

Is it the era of the mea culpa for marketers? Could it be that, forced to start a conversation, some marketers have learned that they have some apologizing to do?

In rapid succession, McDonalds, American Express Open and J.C. Penney have all joined the mea culpa trend.

Here’s the story, and a few thoughts on where, when, how and how not to apologize.

J.C. Penney just launched this video on Facebook, under the theme JCP Listens.

It was a good idea to start the conversation, a good idea to listen, and a very, very bad idea to go beyond the first couple of lines of this treacly video.
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To Have And To Hold.

MadMen Season 6, Episode 4: Theme – Agency Conflicts.

Well, not exactly. Episode 4 is all about infidelity and the various ways the characters prostitute themselves or remain true. Mostly, they cheat.

Don is having an affair with his wife’s friend who also happens to be the wife of his only male friend. Nice guy.

But where he pays for his infidelity is back at the agency.

Don’s Heinz client brings in the prestigious ketchup brand leader to meet the agency, but then tells the Sterling Cooper Draper Price folks that under no circumstances are they to pitch or work for the peacock, who it turns out is his arch rival.

Now, hold on. Yes, clients sometimes have unreasonable or at least eccentric reasons for considering certain agency commitments to be “conflicts.” In this case, working for another division of the same company is off limits.
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Two Tracks, Simultaneously.

Clients shouldn’t have to wait months to see returns from an agency engagement.

We often deliver incremental revenue in the first 30 days. And we don’t sacrifice future success to do it either.

We call it Two-Track Planning.

You’ll find this works in most situations:
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Brand Direct Revisited.

It’s just over thirteen years since I introduced the concept of “Brand Direct” in an Op Ed style piece in Adweek. It’s a time capsule that holds up well, especially in light of subsequent events. In fact, while most of the “dot coms” went off the cliff like so many lemmings, some of our clients went on to define and lead the next and more lasting boom. Direct Model Leader: “There is no time but the present to build a brand.” Check it out:
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Engineering desire.

You wake up on a speeding train, in a bubbling landscape, on a fragile orb careening through space. You open your eyes, and you try to make sense of your predicament. There are other eyes. And they come with explanations. The explanations conflict. If you’re lucky, you learn how to make yourself happy. And then you’re happy with your own explanations, and nearly all the new that occurs to you gets filed in the established folders. … Read more

A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here is the social media update for this week:

1. Boston Police Schooled Us All on Social Media

2. Top 40 Vines Chosen in Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms Contest
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Who Wants to Build A Better Banner?

If you read what people are writing about display advertising, you will be tempted to think that the answer is, “Hardly anyone.”
It’s not that people – consumers, users, surfers, people – hate banner ads. It’s the people who make them and use them that hate them.
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Inspiring Experiences.

A good friend of mine nearly died when he was 35 years old. Something to do with a heart valve.

He needed an eight-hour operation.

Before the operation, the surgeon looked at my friend and said, “I’m not worried about you. There are going to be 26 experts in the room all working together to make sure that you are OK in every way. I trust these people without question, and I’ll be there every step to make sure. You’ll be OK.”

Then the Dr. turned to my friend’s wife and said, “But I am worried about you. You’ll be off on your own, waiting, and it can feel like an eternity…” The doctor proceeded to tell my friend’s wife some things that would help her get through the waiting and some resources that were available to her. … Read more

A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here is your social media update for the week!

1. Take a Bike Ride Through NYC Without Leaving Your Couch

2. Vine Launches Trending Hashtags
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

1. SEC Says It Is Ok For Companies to Make Announcements Via Social Media
(Based on Netflix investigation into CEO Reed Hastings post on his personal Facebook that resulted in a rise in stock price)

2. Alicia Keys is Picking Tumblr Users to Document Each Tour Stop
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here is your update for the week!

1. Can Content Marketing Save Journalism?

2. Hashtags on Facebook Would Open Up Exploration and Discovery Way More Than Graph Search
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

1. Pinterest Introduces Analytics

2. First to Know Series: LinkedIn Acquires Pulse, Netflix Announced New Feature, and Apple’s New Ads
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here is your social update for this week:

1. 66.5 Million Facebook Interactions Occurred During the Oscars

2. Twitter Launches Ads API, So Marketers Can Run Campaigns Through Adobe, Salesforce, Others
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The Most Successful DSE Yet!

ExpoNation asked us to boost the number of registrations for this year’s Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas. So far, we’ve increased registrations and revenue to a record high, and the registrations are still coming in – so this will be the most successful event in DSE’s ten-year history. The campaign went beyond the immediate benefit of seeing new technology firsthand, although we certainly touted that, too. … Read more

A few social media highlights to start your week…

1. Campaign Highlight: Leading up to The Walking Dead premiere, Toronto agency Leo Burnett set up eight foot tall “walker hands” in the middle of Union Station. Each day a decaying finger was knocked off counting down to the season premiere. Commuters could take pictures with the hands, tweet #TWDFeb10, and be entered to win one of the gross zombie fingers. They also had chained “walkers” attached to the countdown clock with giveaway tshirts ALMOST within arms reach. Read the full story here: Walking Dead’s Gruesome Countdown

2. Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked on Monday with the name and avatar replaced with McDonald’s. While the situation seems terrifying for any brand team/agency, the account also gained 5,000 new followers in 30 minutes and generated a ton of buzz: reactions to Burger King Twitter Hack. While not all mentions were positive about BK, there are some speculating that this could wind up helping Burger King more in the end. What do you think?
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

1. Campaign Highlight: Herbal Essences “First Time”
P&G’s Herbal Essences line went through a makeover back in 2006 in an effort to reach a younger demographic. After a few years of declining sales, they are getting back to the basics by releasing 2 of their classic products back into the market. To support the launch they served as an official Grammys sponsor and premiered a new tv spot (starring their celebrity brand ambassador Nicole Scherzinger) last night that is a modern take on their classic “yes, yes, yes” airplane ad: New Ad and Original Ad

They are also engaging social activity by asking users to talk about their #firsttime using Herbal Essences and aggregating the content on their website. It will be interesting to see how the classic products perform this go around!

2. Twitter Now Charges $200,000 For Promoted Trends
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Dogs, Babies, Horses, Goats, Funny Old People, Skin, Stars, Romance, Humor, Patriotism.

Dogs, Babies, Horses, Goats, Funny Old People, Skin, Stars, Romance, Humor, Patriotism.

Judging from this year’s Super Bowl spots, the surface of advertising doesn’t change much. The old saw about Dogs and Babies still applies. When Doritos brings in crowd sourcing, it works best when there are men in dresses or greedy goats. When Coke tries to go social audience participation, it falls flat due to the lack or poor use of any of the above.
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Mark DiMassimo’s Super Bowl Recap.

This was a war-time economy sort of Super Bowl. Unabashedly patriotic.

Or perhaps this was a post-war sort of Super Bowl. Optimistic. Resurgent.

Maybe it was a bit of both.

We saw the American car companies come back and identify themselves with other severely tested and ultimately triumphant swaths of American culture and myth. Chrysler went the furthest here, with a partnership with the USO and Oprah, and a highly emotional tribute to military heroes (the troops) that attacked the heart strings full force and gave no quarter. Trumping even that was Dodge RAM’s ode to the spirit of the American Farmer, with a resurrected Paul Harvey VO, reading the extraordinary classic piece of Americana, “For God Made A Farmer.” Oprah may be a Goddess, but she is merely an aspiring voiceover actor next to Paul Harvey.
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

A lot of great social activity coming out of Super Bowl weekend. Enjoy!

1. 9 Brands That Thought Fast on Social Media During the Super Bowl

2. Top Super Bowl Moments on Facebook
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The CMO.com Interview: Amway CMO Candace Matthews

In 2007 Amway was a global, $6 billion company nearing 50 years in business. Known as a leader in multilevel direct selling, the company had nearly 3 million distributors in about 100 countries. From the outside, the company would certainly appear to have been doing plenty right.

Yet, as it prepared for the 50 anniversary, Amway undertook a massive transformation program, one designed to make the company more consumer-focused and performance-driven.
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here’s the social media update for the week!

1. Twitter Introduces Vine for Creating GIF-Like Looping Videos

2. Not a Hoax: Facebook Might Have to Give You Ten Bucks
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DIGO Brands FreshDirect in Four New Radio Spots.

The process of grocery shopping still leaves, for most of us, a lot to be desired. Online grocery delivery makes the shopping part painless, but the first question people ask when faced with that proposition is “But will I get the same quality?”

With FreshDirect, they’ll actually get better quality than what they would get at the store. So we had a quality story to tell, but needed to reinforce convenience at the same time. And of course we needed a campaign that could tell that story in outdoor, print, digital, and – for launching new markets, especially – radio.
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Learn To Partner.

Jeff Pundyk, CMO.com

In my last post I suggested that one way to let new ideas in was to partner with those who have capabilities you admire. Partner to learn, I said. But there’s a precursor that I should have mentioned. Before you can partner to learn, you must learn to partner.
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Take Two Apps And Text Me In The Morning.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

DIGO client AliveCor is on the forefront of the mobile medicine movement that promises to change lives. Their innovative iPhone heart monitor was featured on Rock Center with Brian Williams’ look into the near future of personal, mobile medicine. Read more here.

A few social media highlights to start your week…

Here are your social media hits for the week. Enjoy!

1. The White House Live-Tweeted Obama’s Inauguration

2. Instagram Is About to Start Sharing Your Data With Facebook
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Sorry for the delay on the update this week, but there was a big announcement from Facebook today that we were waiting to include. Enjoy!

1. Facebook Introduces ‘Graph Search,’ New Search Engine

2. New Myspace Opens to Public Riding Timberlake’s Coattails
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Seven Ways To See Beyond The Next Quarter.

Jeff Pundyk, CMO.com

It’s a new year with new goals, and you have rededicated yourself to driving results. You are focused and energized. Head down.

Wait. With your head down, you just might miss the signs of change, the subtle shifts that signal that your customers are operating in a different way, that competition is coming from someplace unexpected, that the nature of your opportunity has changed.
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Change What’s Changing In Media.

People get ahead of advertisers, and when they do there is opportunity for change agents like you to seize advantage.

In this case, a few words from the very smart to the wise should be sufficient to get some productive conversations going.

Mary Meeker of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins analyzed the percentage of time spent on each medium and compared it to ad spend. She found consumers spend 26% of their media consumption time online, while marketers spend 22% of their ad budgets on digital. TV should fare better, with consumers spending 43% of their media time watching TVand marketers spending 42% of their ad budgets on the thing we used to call the “tube.” Mobile is the area best poised for geometric growth, as consumers are now spending 10% of their time with mobile, while marketers are only spending a wee 1% of their ad budgets there.
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AliveCor Leads Change, Says Washington Post

DIGO client AliveCor has been featured in many publications subsequent to the recent announcement of FDA approval for their life-changing heart monitor device. The AliveCor Heart Monitor makes it easy to do a medical quality ECG with an iPhone. … Read more

A few social media highlights to start your week…

1. New Scam Targets Facebook Page Owners

2. How to Follow CES 2013 Online
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How to Write a Winning Essay.

I wrote this little system to help my twelve year olds write their school assignments, then took a look at it and realized it would work pretty well for you and me too. Enjoy!

1) Talk it out. Find a subject that really interests you. Play around with a few different “points to prove” until you come up with one that really excites you.

2) Write down your main point. Make sure you’ve really stated it clearly and well.
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5 Classic “Reframing” Movies You Must See Again!

So, by now you know I’m obsessed with reframing. In short, it goes like this: Your brain is a lazy piece of meat, it needs to be shocked into seeing things differently!

I absolutely love these classic movies and each one of them is all about reframing. If you want to become a master of changing perceptions, do as I do and watch them again and again. It’s fun work.

1) A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens classic employs the ghosts of past, present and future to change an old man’s mind, which changes his life. Get to know it like the back of your hand.
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Perception Matters More than Reality.

Things I believe:

1) You’re wealthy. If you are not freezing in your own house in the winter, if half of your 17 kids didn’t fail to survive to adulthood, if you can warm up and charge up in a public library and get treated in a modern emergency room, if you have access to antibiotics, then you are like a God compared to the robber barons of a century ago. Deal with it.
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Happy New Year and welcome back!

1. In reference to the privacy policy changes, Instagram released this statement. Your photos are safe—hurray!

2. Facebook 2012 A Year in Review

3. Top 10 Most Influential People on Facebook

4. 75% of World Leaders on Twitter

5. Is Snapchat the Next Frontier for Marketers?

6. Facebook Removing Attribution When Pages Post Via Third-Party Apps

Viral Content:
YouTube’s 20 Most Shared Ads in December
Portlandia Spoil Alert Sketch Spoils Everything
Puppy’s First Christmas

How To Turn Your Digital Thought Leadership Into Business Development.

You made the move. You invested heavily to put your thought leadership online. Now you’re wondering what happened to all of the cost savings and audience growth you were promised.

Don’t blame digital. For B2B firms that view their online journals as a forum to host an open exchange with readers, the rewards are there. What’s more, the very tools used to create the exchange can be a rich source of data to help guide ongoing marketing efforts.
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Hey… check this out.

Turns out the Obama Campaign direct marketing and analytics team learned what we’ve learned many times over, that “the casual tone” often works best.

Whether you’re thinking in terms of “direct response,” “click-thru,” or “engagement,” camouflage — looking like something else that would naturally appear in the context and typically invite engagement, like a note from a friend in the email inbox — is typically a highly effective tactic.
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DIGO Brands Innovative Double Cross Vodka Events

Double Cross Vodka sponsors some fantastic events. One event was Speak Up for Autism at 1OAK where people came together to raise money for autism. Guests at this event participated in a silent auction while sipping on Double Cross Vodka. Some enjoyed themselves in the Double Cross VIP section where each table had their own bottle of Double Cross Vodka.
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Forget Marketing Campaigns, Think Marketing Products

The traditional role of the marketer is to influence buyers at the moments they are considering a purchase. But digital platforms and, more pointedly, social media have spread those moments over wider and wider areas, introduced unexpected advisers from unlikely sources, and managed to both contract and expand the consideration process, making it increasingly expensive for marketers to engage prospects and customers at the right times with the right message.
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DIGO Brands AliveCor In Gizmodo.

Our client AliveCor recently received FDA approval and a medical grade mobile ECG device, revolutionizing the mHealth industry. The device snaps on the your iPhone 4/4S, and with the quick download of a free app and setting up a free account, medical professionals can now take ECGs anywhere, anytime.
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Guide to Business Cursing – The Email Version.

In my e-book, DIGITAL@speed, I included a brief guide to business cursing, explicating in hard language and a light-hearted tone the various ways in which deftly deployed common swear words can speed up a process.

Well, I’ll be damned! Now, the Obama Campaign has come out with another proven use of tactical swearing to improve results – the email subject line! The campaign learned that throwing out minor profanity such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks.
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A few social media highlights to start your week…

Lot’s of good stuff happening in the social world this past week. Enjoy!

1. See What You’ll Look Like Old With Merrill Edge’s “Face Retirement”

2. Social Media Use Leads to Real-World Actions
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People who love you don’t unsubscribe.

We who email naturally worry about unsubscribers. We limit how much email we send for fear of wearing out patience and in the confident expectation of diminishing returns. That’s probably a good thing.

But there is evidence to suggest that, at least for certain brands, there is a better approach to optimizing email success. It comes down to sending as much as possible, while testing for diminishing returns. The Obama email team did this and found that, for them, there was no limit.
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How To Lose The Direct Response Game

Why do we under-test?

Here are some lessons from the winning Obama Campaign, via Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

I love this article because it neatly demonstrates what all marketers who use direct response tactics should know, but typically don’t. It gives some great examples of what marketers using direct response tactics should do, but overwhelmingly don’t. And it shows the results, including the large sums of money that most marketers leave on the table.

Their marketing crime: under-testing.
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Collaboration Is The Path To Digital Connection.

The argument is over.

Digital is the most effective and efficient means of connecting with customers. Increasing consumer engagement digitally has measurable impact on both the top and bottom lines. Compelling digital content fuels an increasingly social, mobile, and connected world.
Case closed.

So we can all just get on with it, right?

Not quite.

Yes, there is agreement that digital technology has killed the traditional marketing funnel as consumers turn to one another for advice and information–and that this shift has put pressure on brands to create content that is consumable, shareable, and credible. But the common response seems to be to saddle marketing or corporate communications (or their agencies) with budget-starved mandates to get digital, to become publishers, to interact.
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