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Team DIGO | 01/07/2016 | in
The final episode of Season 1 features a very special guest with a unique story. Ben Rothfeld is the founder of Plannerben Anecdata, a planning consultancy that helps marketers and their agencies cut big data down to size.
Rothfeld and Host Mark DiMassimo have a long and storied history. The partnership started over two decades ago when they first began working together as colleagues for Kirshenbaum & Bond. When DiMassimo decided to leave K&B to launch his own agency, Rothfeld agreed to leave his post at a San Francisco brand consultancy to become the very first employee at DiMassimo Inc. Cooped up in Rothfeld’s parent’s Greenwich Village co-op apartment, their journey began. After a few start-up years, Rothfeld went on to a storied strategy, analytics and data career, including a long stint as Axciom’s Global Marketing Strategy Director and Bloomberg LP’s Global Content Strategy Lead.
Now, after 20 years of inspiring action, Rothfeld joins DiMassimo on his “Inspiring Action Podcast” to cover a variety of topics such as: Analytical Investigation, Google cars, the future implications of the internet and much much more!
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Team DIGO | 01/04/2016 | in
Key #9 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here
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Every business and brand that grows has a Golden Goose.
Sometimes that’s sales. Sometimes it’s direct mail. Other times it’s e-commerce and a digital, affiliate network. Sometimes they tell me it’s “word-of-mouth.”
For a while, whatever it was, it produced the Golden Eggs. It worked. And the Goose’s enemies were marketing and branding. Or perhaps they were the Goose’s servants, such as when the marketing team was really the sales collateral team. Or the direct mail team. Or the in-house studio.
“Our salespeople sell and they’re starting from zero.” “We’re the leader in our category, but no one knows it.” “This channel is just getting too expensive – we need what’s next.” The Inspiring Action Moment is launched with sentences like these.
Our clients have some things in common. They can’t wait two years or even six months for “the brand campaign” to start working. They can’t tolerate poorer sales numbers while they invest in getting more famous. And they aren’t willing to match large advertisers dollar-for-dollar in order to capture a share of the market.
The kind of brand building they need is the kind that makes the selling more efficient right away. They need the kind of brand building that improves their return-on-marketing-spend right away, and then just keeps getting better.
And often they need more than a marketing revolution. They need at least an internal culture evolution as well. They need a team with a new common understanding of what it takes to succeed at the next level today.
This is what we mean when we say “inspiring action.” The great thing about an Inspiring Action Moment is that it can lead to the most exciting and impactful era for a business. Are you ready for yours?
-Mark DiMassimo, Chief
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Team DIGO | 12/17/2015 | in
Inspiring Action
Happy Holidays 2015 from DiMassimo Goldstein on Vimeo.
In many ways, Santa was the perfect client for DiMassimo Goldstein. We specialize in direct-to-consumer, life-changing brands. That pretty much describes jolly old St. Nick, right? He sees you when you’re sleeping, for crying out loud. It doesn’t get any more direct-model than that. And, every December 25th, he changes lives all over the world in one night. (We still don’t know how he does this, by the way.)
We advised him against Twitter. We think every action a client takes should be on brand, if it is to inspire. And our research showed that Santa’s brand was more inspiring when he stayed mysterious and never spoke to his customers through technology. But he saw some internet guru talking about “if you’re not on Twitter, you don’t exist” and he mandated it. Thanks, Vaynerchuck.
Yes, we were fired by Santa. But look on the bright side: now we have room for a life-changing, direct-model client. The new business elves are standing by.
And, for a stocking stuffer, here’s a behind the scenes look at how it all went down.
Digo Holiday Video 2015 BTS from Tom Christmann on Vimeo.
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Team DIGO | 12/15/2015 | in
Inspiring Action
Key #8 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.
I led a brainstorm with a new client just the other day.
Their list of “growth blocks” was so like what other marketers have said, I thought I’d share them with you (and let you in on a powerful solution):
“We have the goods, but we don’t connect with the audience as well as we should,” admitted the COO, who had previously been the CMO.
“Seems like there are two kinds of creative people — those that understand the product and those that are great at talking to the audience. Unfortunately, we’re having a lot of trouble finding the overlap,” said the marketing director, still working through the grief of the recently ended agency relationship.
The internal creative director continued: “Most people don’t define creative excellence the way we do either. To us, it’s all about results first, and yes, being true to our brand. But that doesn’t seem to inspire or hold the attention of the best creative people. Plus, how do you literally put two messages into one communication. Isn’t that going to hurt results? I’m confused …”
Prioritize Creative Excellence.
What works better for growing a brand and business: great creative or powerful sales activation?
Here’s an intensive analysis of all 700 cases in the files of London’s respected Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), which found that companies with both outperformed those with either by a wide margin.
In fact, they found the two most important factors for success were advertising spend and creative excellence (as measured by, believe it or not, awards). Of those two most important factors, creative excellence even edged out size of budget as the most important factor.
In an increasingly crowded marketing landscape, great brands win. Great brands are built by great experiences, amplified by communications that move people powerfully. Smart marketing organizations are full of great strategists and brimming with great strategies ready to be tried. Most simply fail to be executed with great, on-strategy creative.
Connecting great marketing to winning creative isn’t easy, which is why it’s not normal either. Getting two very different tribes to work together to transcend the ordinary takes specific values and skills. Check out my Inspiring Action in Creative Teams: Seven Strategies for Prioritizing Creative Excellence.
-Mark DiMassimo, Chief
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Team DIGO | 12/09/2015 | in
The Creative Director of the Dollar Shave Club is also the guy who made himself famous with a Google Experiment that got him a copywriter job in a top agency (budget $6). His name is Alec Brownstein, and he’s also the co-author of two best-selling comedy books, an award-winning copywriter, a film director and, yes, currently the creative director at the Dollar Shave Club. Spearheading one of the world’s fastest-growing and innovative companies, he’s quickly established himself as one of best outside-the-box thinkers in the industry.
Brownstein is also the mastermind behind the above mentioned “Google Experiment“, an inspiring example of how creative problem solving and persistence can put you in a position to succeed. The experiment gained him some overnight fame, but more importantly, it landed him a job. Listen in as Brownstein tells host Mark DiMassimo about how an unemployed International Relations graduate with zero marketing experience was able to catch the eyes of some of the industry’s most highly touted executives.
And, if you’re into laughing, you may want to order his books HERE and HERE. These books fit perfectly on a coffee table or even a bathroom, right next to your razor which you probably got from signing up to the Dollar Shave Club HERE.
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Team DIGO | 12/09/2015 | in
I once worked in an agency that did good work, had smart people, and yet grew relatively slowly. Even though I was on the creative side of the business, I was an avid proponent of growth because I knew how much better and how much more fun a growing agency could be.
I did a little informal listening tour around the agency.Read More
Senior managers expressed their doubts about whether we had the right people in new business and confusion about what they were “doing in there.”
Mid-level people in other departments were willing to confide to me – also in the mid-level at that stage of my career – that the folks in New Business were feeling lost and disaffected. They felt they didn’t know what the mission was anymore, that they were under appreciated and overworked, and that management was setting them up for failure.
I went to visit the new business manager – not at all a bad guy – and asked him if he kept any stats on daily or weekly progress.
“Yes,” he said. “We used to have a weekly report, but I don’t know if we’re still producing it. Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious,” I said. “And I have a theory that there’s a lot more going on in here than people out there know.”
“Good theory,” he said, and agreed to share the report with me going forward. He did. For a couple of weeks I watched the report, which included statistics on all the various actions the new business team was taking each week.
X number of emails, Y number of calls, Z number of blog posts, etc.
I went around the new business area and congratulated a few of the people on the numbers. Afterwards, I started hearing better things about their morale, and I also noticed that the “first meetings booked” number had climbed more than 100% over its baseline for two weeks in a row. The team had never managed to book more than a meeting a day, but this week’s number was eleven meetings booked.
I had a bell on my desk that I had taken home from a TV commercial shoot. I picked it up and walked over to the New Business Department area, and put it quietly down on the table that was visible from most of the offices and cubicles there.
I taped an eight and a half by eleven sheet of copy paper on the wall, wrote the number “11” on it with a fat Sharpie, and announced, “This isn’t my bell anymore. This is now the New Business Meetings Bell. You guys are doing an amazing job of booking meetings with the clients we want, but people don’t know that. Now they will – every single time!”
That bell got a lot of action from that day one, and the team continued to beat its previous records. Whenever the weekly total broke a new record, the CEO did something for the team. Sometimes he gave them cash, other times a team dinner or bar tab.
A healthy rivalry broke out among the three top new business people, with each adopting a distinctly colored marker, so that the simple piece of paper on the wall also told who was booking the most meetings each week.
Over the next two years, we doubled the size of that agency, from about 125 to nearly 300. I personally hired over fifty of those people.
The Difference Between Data And Inspiring Data.
Think about this: there’s data, and then there’s presenting data in a way that inspires action. Every marketing and sales team does a lot. A lot. And many have entire dashboards of data.
But, what’s the most important number for inspiring action? And what’s the most inspiring way to present it?
My Eureka moment back then was realizing that the key number was first meetings. You don’t get to work on the accounts of people you haven’t met. Between a lead and a juicy creative opportunity, there is always a meeting.
That’s why, at DiMassimo Goldstein, we have our First Meetings Bell. And we have our Meeting Tally right up there where everyone can see it too.
While there may be friendly rivalry among the members of the new business team over who books the most meetings, the team gets all of the credit. That credit applies even if I book a first meeting, because the job of the new business team is to get all of us working for them in booking new meetings.
But, if you haven’t, let’s try to set up a brief get-to-know-each-other session. I’m no different than anyone else here – I really want to ring that bell!This team produces so many quality meetings with prospects that fit our rather tight criteria, that there’s a good chance that if you’re in our target, you’ve already met us face-to-face.
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Team DIGO | 12/04/2015 | in
Sir John Hargrave is an inspiring innovator, published author, agency owner and the current CEO of Media Shower, a premiere content marketing company that has written editorials for The New York Times, Business Week and MSNBC among many other publications. His upcoming book “Mind Hacking: How To Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days” is an inside look at the life hacking techniques that Hargrave has developed to turn his life in a more positive direction.
A self-proclaimed computer geek, Hargrave has a comical yet refreshing take on how to tackle life’s obstacles. Listen in as Sir John tells host Mark DiMassimo all about the best practices to “reprogram” and “debug” your brain so that you can accomplish anything you put your mind to. And, since we know you’re going to feel inspired enough to want to read his book, we’ll just leave the free download link for you right HERE!
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Team DIGO | 12/02/2015 | in
Don’t settle for less. Find, ask, challenge, orchestrate, search, revisit…do what it takes to get inspired to do your best.
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.
Join the INSPIRING ACTION tribe!
