In 2013 I joined the DiMassimo Goldstein team. Prior to coming onboard I had only worked at “large” ad agencies; companies who had at least 500 employees and 10 account members to one client. While I always wanted to escape the feeling of being just another cog in the machine, I was nervous about making a change so far along in my career. Then I met Lee Goldstein.
My resume of many years in client services made its way onto Lee’s desk and in less than I week I was heading up 3 amazing accounts at DiMassimo Goldstein. I guess you could say it was love at first sight.
Mark and Lee foster a culture where everyone is expected to make an impact on our client’s business – no matter title or department. You walk through the agency at any given time and feel the creative buzz, see the camaraderie between departments and hear passionate conversations on how to best solve a business issue.
It’s been almost a year since my start date and not a day has gone by where I didn’t feel accomplished. I’m proud to call all of my “co-workers” friends and am beyond grateful for finding my home.
Erica Grau, Graphic Designer at DiMassimo Goldstein
I moved to New York 4 years ago when I thought I just wanted to check it out for a year. I fell in love with the constant energy, inspiring people, and worldly culture. I knew by moving from my home, Marietta, Georgia, I would be a step closer to my dream. My dream is to impact people through my creativity. I want to use my own energy to inspire others to be the best versions of themselves so they can in turn spread their own passion. I think if everyone feels free to be their unique and awesome selves, the world only becomes more beautiful and authentic.
I am so fortunate to have landed at DiMassimo Goldstein only about a year and a half ago. It has pushed me and helped me grow into the designer I am today. There are so many opportunities that give me the room to continue fulfilling my dream each day. When the United Nations came to us and asked if we could design their annual report for the Central Emergency Response Fund, I lit up. Knowing that my design work would help bring light to all the people around the world that are affected by natural disasters, war, hunger, disease, and other plights, made me feel like I was making a difference somehow. Every donation counts and knowing that I played a part, truly warmed my heart.
When we were asked to rebrand and give new life to Reader’s Digest, little did I know that seeing a stranger in the subway, reading and enjoying our work, would make me smile until my face hurt. I couldn’t help but say hello and tell her about our company and she promised that every time she read an issue, she would think of me. It touched me to know that I played a role in that stranger’s day. She was smiling while she flipped the pages.
Sometimes all it takes is one smile to bring you back to yourself, so you may continue to spread your own joy.
This is my first job in the world of advertising. I had taken Mark’s class, done some freelance work, and completed some necessary reading so I could be deemed competent with a certain amount of confidence. More or less though, I was hired on faith. Faith that what had been seen from me during my time in class and as a freelancer was not an outlier, but indicative of greater, underlying potential. Since the day I started, I’ve felt a constant assault of anxiety and self-doubt as I try to reward that faith. I’ve experienced the never-ending rollercoaster, as I’m sure most creatives have, as I’ve gone from feeling like an utterly worthless piece of crap to being roughly 99 percent sure that I am actually the second coming of Christ, only to plummet back down again. It’s exhausting and thoroughly, unapologetically addicting.
Two months in, I was getting into the swing of things. Tyler and I had pitched some ideas for Reader’s Digest that we were proud of, but ultimately went nowhere. We had missed our shot we assumed and would surely be looking for new jobs soon. We underestimated how much being bargain bin cheap worked in our favor. Before we knew it, a new opportunity arose in the form of DSE, The Digital Signage Expo. We weren’t even initially supposed to be on it and were brought in during the eleventh hour after a few things hadn’t gone quite according to plan. We helped shout ideas across the table until we had a list the client liked. Tyler and I were given the concept “Return on Innovation,” We looked at each other and with excitement gleaming from behind our eager eyes, we said, “What the f*** does that mean?”
The rub was that of course, it meant nothing and it was our job to change that. So we concepted, fought, ordered in, stayed up late and ultimately ended up with a concept that embodied “return on innovation.” At least we were pretty sure it did. It had been a long process and by the end, our grips on reality had become dangerously loose. It was sent to the client and was out of our hands.
A few days later, I got to the office, to find my brother waiting there. He told us DSE had bought our campaign and I just about sucker punched him, being pretty positive that this was one of those jokes that, if anyone other than your brother pulled it on you, you’d black out in a fit of rage and wake up in prison without the chance of parole. Sure enough, he was telling the truth and I lost it, but was forced to wait for Tyler to get in to tell him. I excitedly relayed the news and he met me with the same level of disbelief. Once he was convinced, he also went nuts. We had sold our first campaign. We, the new guys, beat out the others. We proceeded to celebrate with naps that would make Rip van Winkle seem like an insomniac. That was my first time at the top of the roller coaster. I’ve had many ups and downs since then, but the downs don’t bother me so much anymore. I see them more as a necessary evil because without them, the ups just aren’t as much fun.
The Reader's Digest cover, redesigned in partnership with DiMassimo Goldstein
Growth Key: Positively Addictive
What happens when a brand born in 1922 decides to revive itself and start a new life in 2014?
Consider that the brand is a print publication, a category experiencing a mass extinction in this age of technology. Paid subscription circulation figures were slipping, as were advertising revenues. Furthermore, its parent company filed chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, only recently emerging under private ownership. No marketing had been done in the last ten years.
This is the story of America’s beloved general interest family magazine, Reader’s Digest, and how January 2014 began a new age for the publication as it undergoes a collaborative editorial and design overhaul, making the new Reader’s Digest relevant for the twenty-first century.
Why do more people pay for Reader’s Digest than any other magazine? It’s a top 5 magazine with 49 editions in 21 languages. But with numbers falling into decline, how do we get the next generation of readers excited before it’s too late?
For the vision of Reader’s Digest founders Dewitt and Lila Bell Wallace to continue, the new Reader’s Digest owners had to radically change their approach, and they chose to share this challenge. With a collaborative effort between the agency and the client to both redesign the logo and magazine, as well as create an overall marketing campaign which would encourage a whole new audience to choose to read the magazine and become a subscriber. Our marketing needed to gain new subscribers by making the content relevant to a younger generation.
“If you start reading that magazine, you don’t stop,” commented Mark DiMassimo, Founder and Chief of DiMassimo Goldstein. “You read on. We recognized that the magazine is full of addictive content, but too many consumers believed that Reader’s Digest was either no longer being published, or was the kind of magazine seen at their grandparents’ home. Too few people were getting past the cover.”
The Reader's Digest team celebrating a successful launch in Times Square
Together, Reader’s Digest executives and the DiMassimo Goldstein team worked on a reintroduction of the cover concept, an interior redesign and a new organization of the existing content to make the design point of view appropriate for the magazine. Strategically, the agency positioned the brand as an “island of positivity in a sea of snark” giving readers a needed break from gossip and cynicism. Our key insight was that people actually crave a break from this nonstop vitriol. By contrast, Reader’s Digest is filled with inspiring, upbeat stories for any occasion. The articles provide the kind of humor, inspiring and useful, educational information that make the publication hard to put down.
“The agency/client initiative was built around taking the opportunity to reintroduce Reader’s Digest in a current manner. The goal was to be true to what the magazine stands for, taking the traditional brand but positioning it appropriately to be relevant to today’s consumers, subsequently increasing the circulation figures.”
This multi-million dollar marketing campaign began on December 11, when the publication released a new look and feel to the magazine, starting with the January cover, more contemporary looking than previous ones. The new look was unveiled at a special launch event in New York’s Times Square promoting a free digital download. The new campaign, called “Read Up”, launched in early 2014 includes national TV, print, radio, direct mail and digital media.
"Read Up" Print campaign for Reader's Digest by DiMassimo Goldstein
"Read Up" Print campaign for Reader's Digest by DiMassimo Goldstein
The “Read Up” campaign revolves around the idea that the content of the magazine is so enjoyable and hard to put down that the reader would sacrifice his or her own well-being in an effort to save his or copy.
And… it’s working. By showing the next generation of readers why the content is relevant to them via our integrated marketing campaign, we’re successfully acquiring a new generation of subscribers for – YES! – a print magazine, while building digital subscribers and engagement too.
And Reader’s Digest now has more paid subscribers than any other publication in the world.
By Tyler Maxson, Art Director at DiMassimo Goldstein
My life at DIGO began in the class Mark taught for the School of Visual Arts. After a while, I really started to hit it off with Mark and was able to work my way into an internship, which eventually turned into a full time position. Before I knew it, I was working on my first big project, a campaign for New York Health and Racquet club promoting their 40th anniversary celebration. For the first time in my life, my work was for something other than a grade. There was an actual, living, breathing, and most importantly, paying client anxiously awaiting the completion of my work. It was nothing short of mind-blowing. However, this was only the beginning.
After the campaign launched, I was walking down the street, on my way to work or school, I forget. What I won’t forget is catching a glimpse of one of the ads I had made for the first time. It was lying in the street, soaked with water, covered in footprints and badly warped. It was absolutely perfect. Here it was, something I made, something that was bought and paid for, out here in the real world. It existed somewhere other than on my monitor or in my imagination. I picked it up out of the street and brought it home. I stuck it on my wall. Somehow all the damage just made it seem more real. It was a symbol of it’s direct contact with reality. I’ve never felt more proud of myself than in that moment.
Introduced in January 2009, Bitcoin is the world’s first “crypto-currency,” a completely digital form of money that can be used as an easy method of instant payment or else exchanged for other currencies.
Because DiMassimo Goldstein has a tradition of quickly identifying and inserting itself ingeniously into burgeoning trends in business and culture before any other agency, we’re proud to announce that, as of today, we are the first ad agency network to accept BitCoin from our clients.
Founded as a hybrid digital and traditional agency in 1996, DiGo quickly became the growth partner for several early iconic Internet businesses in the first dot-com boom. We recognized upcoming consumer backlash against the waste created by the bottled water industry when we successfully launched the Tappening movement, and the yearn of our society to tune out the high volume of digital noise with its Offlining movement. Both efforts were far ahead of their time and are now emulated and included in major advertising campaigns today.
For decades, the entrepreneurial culture at DiGo has navigated the blue oceans of innovative, fast-growth markets. Not only have we succeeded, but we’ve built a reputation for picking the right people, technologies and industries. We’ve seen, and seen through, many markets and a great deal of hype and meet it with a combination of curiosity, and pragmatic business sense. We’ve had extensive experience working with and launching campaigns for new and currently leading payment systems including airline miles, credit cards, payment processing systems such as MasterCard and innovative, non-traditional platforms such as Revolution Money, now owned by American Express.
Early experiments are essential to our intimate understanding of new media and business models. Accepting BitCoin as a leading growth agency network continues that trend. Therefore, we will begin accepting payments in BitCoin from any clients who prefer this new transaction system.
While “SoLoMo” (social locate and mobile) is the latest industry buzzword, we’re surprised to not see more brands taking advantage of Foursquare. With location-based marketing, you start with WHERE, to seize an opportunity to put a brand spin not only on your audience’s location, but what they’re likely doing based on the venue.
At DiGo, we’re constantly searching for ways to engage our audience in unexpected, appropriate and refreshing ways.
In this SlideShare, we explore how brands such as GranataPet, PepsiMax, The History Channel, and New York real estate powerhouse The Corcoran Group have used location layers to create their own unique experience based on the landmarks and venues consumers check into as well as some thought starters on how you can invade the Olympic Games, World Cup, SuperBowl or any other major event without paying for it.
While growing something meaningful can be exhilarating, too much, not enough or just plain erratic growth is frustrating and each presents its own unique challenges. Of course, when we encounter these frustrations it’s important to keep perspective. Nothing worth doing is easy and we all have to start somewhere.
Pictured above is a Google server in 1999. Now in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, known as the “corkboard” server, this one one of 30 racks that housed the entire system. Today, there are tens of thousands of servers in a dozen server farms scattered across the globe with hundreds of people maintaining them around the clock. You can see what a staggeringly humongous enterprise this is in a microsite Google created for it.
The takeaway is that between the first corkboard server and the giant they are today was a sustained growth plan that worked. No doubt, along the way there were outages, failures, mistakes, hacks, and limitless challenges. But knowing where they were headed, having a plan for it and keeping that perspective is how they got where they are today.
Fast-growing companies make some critical mistakes when scaling. One of the biggest ones is losing perspective.
It’s easy to lose it when you grow from five to twenty to hundreds of employees in a short time, or you quickly onboard too many new clients, or roll out a complex array of products. So how do you keep focused?
Have an onboarding plan:
Too often, companies fly by the seat of their pants and hire others with a similar ethos. Founders are often pulled in dozens of directions per day and thrive in chaos. Ultimately they tend to hire people like themselves because without the time or discipline to create a proper onboarding plan, they seek talent who can “figure it out” on the fly in a “sink or swim” approach.
The problem is that this type of growth can’t sustain itself beyond the first round of hires. Chaos simply leads to more chaos and the whole system collapses onto itself.
A disciplined growth plan means taking the time to put a system in place. At the core of this system is having each and every new hire understand what the company is, where it’s headed and how they’re going to help get there. This isn’t something you just do once and forget. People need to be reminded and re-inspired. Share good news. Share challenges. Most importantly, keep your perspective, so others keep theirs.
Keep key partners aligned:
Your outside vendors and partners: IT, marketing agencies, media partners, PR firms all need to be on the same page. Sometimes growth happens so fast, it’s difficult to convey or anticipate needs to your partner companies. We’ve seen cases where a staggering amount of marketing needed to happen but the client’s marketing team growth lagged actual company growth so much that there was no one to oversee or approve new ideas. When they did staff up, no one was quite sure what they could do. Sometimes they would approve nothing. Other times just about everything. In the end, it’s impossible to create a system that works when the parts have not been screwed in properly.
When companies are valued and bought by investors, they’re not necessarily buying a client list, or employees, or a brand. They’re buying a mechanism that works. And that can’t happen without having a plan, knowing what parts go where, and making sure everything is constantly in good working order as you forge ahead.
Create a blueprint that’s a living document:
The first pitch deck from FourSquare is a great example of a company that knew exactly what it was and where it was going from the beginning. Disciplined enough to see where it was headed without becoming too feature heavy quickly, you can still look at their plan all these years later and be certain they’re accomplishing what they set out to do. Having such a document keeps everyone – investors, employees and partners on the same page, even if you occasionally have to change what it says.
