Almost two years ago, we embarked on a journey to get to heart of what were the key ingredients to the successes we’ve had as an agency over the past decade-and-a-half. In that timespan, we’d created dozens memorable campaigns and even affected positive social change with some movements of our own. We wanted to know not only what separated these cases from our more ordinary opportunities, but how to fill our work and personal lives with the clients, coworkers and friends who would fuel our growth to a place where these situations the only situations we could accept.

At the end of this process, we discovered a lot about ourselves and most importantly, our core differentiator of “inspiring action.” We realized that inspiring without action is fluff, and action without inspiration is an interruption. It’s the filter we judged every new venture on moving forward.

With this new filter, we started to identify philosophies, techniques, case studies, success stories, processes, and most importantly, people who will eventually become an Inspiring Action book, and has become this Inspiring Action podcast.

We know from our friends and former client Netflix that one way to inspire action is to release a whole bunch of content at once, so people can “binge.” So if you find yourself inspired by Inspiring Action, we’re started you off with four new episodes hot off the presses with interviews with people we admire tremendously.

Eric Yaverbaum is a long-time friend, public relations legend and co-conspirator with Inspiring Action Podcast host Mark DiMassimo, whose successes include  the Tappening and Offlining movements. With Tappening, Eric and Mark reversed the 20 year upward trend of bottled water sales by encouraging people to drink more tap water. In this episode, we’ll learn from this case and others, including Eric helping prevent a Major League Baseball strike, how defining an alternative future you exist to prevent can give you the lofty goal you need to inspire huge actions.

Ty Montague was the co-president of global ad agency JWT, where it was named Agency of the Year under his helm. Feeling like something was missing, Ty realized that every client came to an agency with the idea that advertising was the solution to their problems, and wanted to know how he could enter the process at a higher, more inspiring level. He and his partner Rosemarie Ryan co-founded Co-Collective, committed to solving the problem of an epidemic of solving and a dearth of doing through “StoryDoing.”

Anthony Butler is a lifelong technologist who took apart his first computer and wrote his first code when he was fourteen. He has founded three businesses and is the former CEO of one of the 100 largest IT services companies in the country. He is a professional speaker and as a combat veteran and graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. In this podcast, Anthony teaches us about how one of the core issues around inspiring action in people through leadership is removing the obstacles they need to do brilliant work.

Ty Shay is the CMO of Lifelock, formerly of Squaretrade, FanIQ, Hotwire, Esurance and Procter & Gamble. In this riveting discussion, we learn from Ty how to inspire action in business by learning from sports, and how picking the best teams and situations are your key to success. If you want to be like this many-time NBA champion coach and current New York Knicks president, you need to learn what questions to ask before you enter a new situation. And how those questions should focus more on the “who” and not on the “what” or the “why.”

When you want to inspire action, you have to have a clear end in mind for what action you wish to inspire. For this podcast, it’s inspiring you to take action. So if you like what we’re doing, we hope the action you take is to share it with your friends and find a way to inspire the action you want to see in this world.

Are you Inspiring Action in the world? Do you want to tell the world about it on a future episode of Inspiring Action with Mark DiMassimo?

Ah, Cannes. Big, bloated ad agency muckety-mucks breaking expense accounts (and the occasional magnum of Rosé) on the terrace at the Carlton as they celebrate ads that may not have done much for their clients’ bottom lines. “But that cinematography, though!”

At DiMassimo Goldstein, we prefer to celebrate Inspiring Action. And, while it may be fun to fly to the south of France and go to lunches and pool parties and beach parties and the occasional seminar, let’s face it: it doesn’t do much good for the world at large.

That’s why we started the Festival De Cans.

Tonight if you’re in New York, starting at 7pm, if you bring a can of food for the hungry to our offices at 220 E23rd Street, 2nd floor, you will get a can of beer, wine or soda in return. That’s it. Okay, you can have several cans of beer, wine or soda. Oh, and we’ll probably have some music. We could make it French music, if you like. And we made some sweet cans of air freshener that will totally have it smelling like the beach up in this joint. And there’ll be some pretty cool people to talk to. Just look at the list of attendees on our Facebook guest list. It’s a veritable who’s-who-of-whoever-isn’t-in-Cannes-right-now.

So come on by and join in our Inspiring Action. It’s what we do here at DiMassimo Goldstein. We get brands to do things that get people to do things that make the world a better place. Like donating food and drinking wine out of a can.

Oh, yes you will. And the world will be better for it. We promise.

And, hey, if you want to go skinny-dipping in the East River afterword, you totally can. Just don’t tell anyone where you were before you did that, because we will deny ever having met you.

Is your agency at Cannes?

Something in me fell in love with the idea of the Philosopher King when I first learned the Platonic concept in an introductory philosophy course as a college freshman at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

Plato was an idealist. He thought ideas were more real than things. I don’t go that far, but I have a deep and educated respect for the power of ideas to change things.

Plato imagined the ideal kingdom, and saw the kingdoms of his time as poor reflections of this idea. He said that for the ideal kingdom to come into being, philosophers must become kings or “those now called kings must learn to genuinely and adequately philosophize.”

Marvin Kohl, PhD, Professor of Philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy. This one educational moment focused my restless search for constructive leadership down to a career-long quest to work with philosopher kings and queens, in the hope of perhaps one day growing into a philosopher king myself.
My childhood in the 60s and 70s gave me ample evidence of just how bad things could get when “kings” don’t genuinely and adequately philosophize, or to bring that down to Earth a bit, when the wrong ideas rule.

To me the brilliant change agents, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, social entrepreneurs and movement leaders were the philosopher kings of my time. These people simply thought better. They thought better of and about people. They thought better about business. The developed distinctive cultures based on distinct ideas. By force of their better thinking, they managed to become kings – true rulers of their domains – and while many of them did well financially, the primary thrust of their rule was generous and generative. They ruled not just for themselves and not just for market success, but in service to an inspiring idea above commercial intent.

My whole career, I have tried to sit at the table with these philosopher kings, and when not there, to read and study their approaches. This has been my own philosophy.

Within the context of democracy and a free market, businesses and organizations are the true kingdoms, and leaders with controlling authority are the modern kings and queens.

Their philosophies change the world.

I would rather work with an Elon Musk who says, “I see that the future might not look like the one I’ve imagined, and I get angry, and then I determine to do something about it.” Or Gabrielle Bernstein, founder of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Network who says, “My mission in this lifetime is to help guide my generation to shift their search for happiness from the outside to the inside.” In short, I’d rather serve with philosopher kings and queens than any of the thousands of also-rans who are just in it for the money, attention, respect, fame, toys or whatever.

I’ve noticed that these philosopher kings are both more idealist AND more practical. They abhor the inefficiency of doing things for no good reason – and, let’s face it, most organizations are full of just such things.

I’ve tried to put into practice everything I’ve learned from working along side world-changing philosopher kings and queens. That’s why no one has ever filled in a time-sheet at DiMassimo Goldstein – it’s simply a waste of time, and has nothing to do with our reason for existing, which is to add value and impact, not costs and busywork.

Our mission of Inspiring Action has come out of that. Our belief that we’re not in the advertising business – we’re in the behavior change business, and sometimes we use advertising – has come out of that too. And finally, the 10 Signs of an Organization That Is Inspiring Action is the distillation of decades of studying contemporary philosopher kings and queens. If you want to check it out, there’s a PDF you can download here.

Key #3 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Check out Follow The Money  for Key #2 and download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.

A marketer I know has himself twisted up like a pretzel inside.

He’s following the rules of marketing as best he knows them, and what they all add up to is making less and less sense.

The membership service he is charged with marketing spends just less than half its paid media money on digital advertising. In this realm, my Tums-popping friend remains an extremely disciplined direct marketer of the old school. He believes each tactic and channel must pay for itself in sales. The search advertising must pay for itself with memberships brought in through search advertising. Mobile sign-ups are mobile sign-ups,and nothing more. Retargeting returns are calculated based on retargeting conversions only, and so on.

Attribution across multiple digital programs, which he allows might generate a higher return on his marketing spend, would fuzz his perfect accounting. He could no longer be sure of anything, and he feels that knowledge is power.

For example, he and his team have tested display advertising several times. The search sign-ups increased during these modest tests, but when he measured the display on display sign-ups alone, it didn’t reach the allowable. So, no display!

Sounds like a tidy, orderly world, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s a false order at best. This system doesn’t account for the influence of one channel on the results of another. We all know that ignoring a reality doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Worse, it isn’t working. The greater portion of this marketer’s budget is spent on TV. You’ve seen it. Anyone who knows anyone with a TV has seen it. He’s tried everything to figure out how to attribute sales to his television spend, but he just can’t. He’s tried pulling the TV, but then his volumes plummet. On the other hand, no change in schedule, and no other form of testing, has ever been able to demonstrate a lift in memberships.

So, this marketer lives in two worlds, one with an insane level of order and accountability, and the other with absolutely none.

Somehow the business got to this level with this system, but the efficiency of the marketing is decreasing, new memberships are more expensive every day, and higher levels of television seem to have no effect on sales.

It’s a serious Growth Block. He’s stuck and they’re stuck. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Attribution is, no doubt, one of the biggest challenges in modern marketing. Direct marketers want to test and learn, but the interactions among multiple channels create noise in their tests. Some are better at tolerating the noise than others. Some orchestrate that noise into a symphony of sales and brand building.

Those of us who view the experience from the customer’s point of view realize it’s the mix that matters. Those who believe that only the last click counts, that impressions are meaningless after ninety minutes, and that advertising in one medium has no effect on results in another, are most definitely running the wrong advertising.

Get smart about attribution while getting the creative you need to build your brand and sell too. That’s how successful modern marketers scale.