By
Team DIGO | 10/19/2015 | in
My 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
By
Team DIGO | 10/13/2015 | in
Key #6 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.
One of my clients once told me about The Wall.
“The Wall” is what she called it.
“I’m squeezing my brain, my team, my budget and every hour of the day to build this thing, while all around us there are new services gaining market share with little or no advertising.
“My product is dated and it shows – yet I’m in my marketing silo and don’t have the power to change it.
“I know total marketing success requires a product that does a better job of selling itself, but what do I do without the power and the tools to make that happen?”
I told her that she wasn’t the only marketer facing The Wall. Yesterday, the best marketer with the deepest pockets won. Today, everyone is a click away from customer comments and reviews. That means the best customer experience wins.
Fortunately for my client and others like her, customer experience isn’t just about function. It’s not even primarily about function. It’s more about emotion and meaning. Which means that marketing is as much a part of a winning product as the product itself is.
My new client and I determined to work with our teams to do two things:
1) We would determine the emotional meaning of her brand.
2) We would use every lever, every touchpoint, to enhance that meaning.
We remade the aspects of customer experience that she could influence. And then we measured the results.
Based on those results, my client quickly developed the reputation of a “fixer” in her company. She was given responsibility for overseeing the website – effectively the core delivery of the product – in addition to marketing. Extending our insight about the emotional meaning of the brand deep into the customer journey yielded still greater incremental results.
Today, my client can work just about anywhere. Fortunately for us, she’s extremely happy and highly valued right where she is.
By
Team DIGO | 10/08/2015 | in
Even if you’re not in love with your planet or passionate about conservation and even if you’re annoyed by organizations that change the world for the better, this edition of the “Inspiring Action Podcast” is for you. Paul Butler is the senior vice president of global programs for Rare, an innovative not-for-profit organization committed to inspiring change so that people and nature can thrive.
Over the course of forty-five riveting minutes, Butler tells host Mark DiMassimo how his lifetime passion became his profession when a 6-month voyage to St. Lucia evolved into a 12-year mission. That mission – to save a species – led to an adventure you’ve just got to hear!
By
Team DIGO | 10/07/2015 | in
Key #5 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.
Imagine you’re marketing a limo service and you get Uber’d.
Or you’re trying to put travelers in hotel beds and you get Airbnb’d. You run a car dealership and you get Tesla’d. You’re a travel agent, a financial advisor, sell insurance, or – heaven forfend – you publish the yellow pages!…
I know real people in these situations, and I can tell you this about every one of them:
They never saw it coming!
But Nike saw it coming. Starting with their own brand story, they got ahead of change. Nike didn’t see themselves as an athletic shoe company – they saw themselves as a company that inspires athletes. While other athletic wear companies may have seen the coming age of wearable computing as irrelevant, Nike saw it as an opportunity to inspire. In creating Nike Plus, they got ahead of the curve and developed a way to get to know their customers like never before.
You don’t have to BE a new economy business to WIN in the new economy. You just need an inspiring idea that guides you, and you need to be able to connect that idea to better experiences for your customers. American Express (founded 1850) has done it, reinventing the core of their customer relationships many times over. JetBlue (founded 1998) has done it. Apple (founded 1976) is most certainly doing it.
We call these companies Inspiring Action brands. They share a common point of view. They see things with their customers’ eyes. They know what the people they serve aspire to be and do. They know what their devotees love about themselves with them. They’ve mapped the customer journey and have found ways to intercept and change behavior.
You are what they do.
Your audience is just people trying to inspire action in themselves. If your service works better, you win.
Think Outside In. It’s really that simple and that challenging. Understand your inspiring idea from your customer’s point of view. Map the journey and work out effective ways to change behavior and create new habits.
By
Team DIGO | 09/30/2015 | in
Steve Harrison has won more Cannes Lions awards than any other creative director in the world. He is one of the most influential and inspiring copywriters of his time, and is the author of “Changing the World is the Only Fit Work For a Grown Man”, an eyewitness account of the life and times of legendary adman Howard Luck Gosssage. For his work, Campaign Magazine has recognized Harrison as “the greatest Direct Marketing Creative of his generation”.
Tune in and listen as Steve calls in from the United Kingdom to tell host Mark DiMassimo all about his book, his unorthodox journey to becoming an award-winning copywriter and much much more on this edition of the “Inspiring Action Podcast”.
By
Team DIGO | 09/30/2015 | in
Leslie Doty was the marketer behind the legendary Citibank AAdvantage Card campaign that won the top Account Planning Group Award, a Gold Effie, and was recognized by the Loyalty Marketers Association as the campaign of the decade. That campaign, created with creative director, Mark DiMassimo, was the seed that helped launch DiMassimo’s fledgling agency, nearly two decades ago. The journey of discovery to the inspiring idea behind that campaign was the seed from which the Inspiring Action approach that Doty and DiMassimo share has grown. As colleagues and friends, Leslie and Mark have achieved many things as partners in inspiring action. Fast forward 19 years and the agency that Leslie undoubtedly helped take liftoff has long since named a conference room in her honor, and what better title for the plaque than the “Leslie Doty Dukker Center of Inspiration”?
Leslie’s extraordinary resume includes stints as the Senior VP at MasterCard Advisors, Managing Partner of DiMassimo Goldstein, Corporate Vice President at CVS health, and now as the Chief Marketing Officer and President of Reader’s Digest Consumer Services, Inc.
In this very special episode of the “Inspiring Action Podcast”, Leslie and Mark revisit their time working on Citibank’s AAdvantage card, an experience that both call transformative in their careers. Listen in as Leslie tells Mark about the defining moment in her career when she became a marketer, and how a great insight can turn into an award winning campaign.
By
Team DIGO | 09/29/2015 | in
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.
By
Team DIGO | 09/24/2015 | in
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.
My 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.