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Team DIGO | 05/09/2013 | in
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.
I’ve always hated that stuff.
You don’t let your target audience tell you what to be any more than you let your friends tell you who to be. There’s no integrity, surprise or life in that at all. Yet, in many places, it’s the norm.
And you don’t go to a dynamic, growing company – or a turnaround – to run a department like a fiefdom. You go there to be a key member of the CEO’s leadership team. You need that CEO to help you succeed even more than the CEO needs you.
I’ve always sought out clients with vision. Not rude or insulting, but laser focused, blunt, and as domineering about the brand as possible. Sometimes they are articulate. Sometimes they just know it when they see it. Either way, as long as there is really an “it” that will ultimately differentiate the brand in a world of bland, I’m in.
There will be twists and turns. I’ll hang in. I’m in it for the ride and because I believe in the destination.
As a marketing director or CMO, you are going to get the ride of your life working for a Founder CEO, and the twists and turns are no small part of it.
That inertia you feel is the marketing strategy hugging the road of a changing growth strategy. That’s a feeling you’ll rarely get in a big, lazy company.
But if you care about getting to the destination, you’ve got to care about making all the right turns along the way.
It’s exhilarating. But it’s not for everyone. If you can deliver on the business results, if you can be resilient through the twists and turns, and if you can bring on partners who share your passion and resilience, you will become irreplaceable to your visionary leader.
You’ll play your best game along side stunning colleagues. These will be the days and years you’ll never forget.
If you want to make a mark in the world, this is the way. And I’ll see you at the weekly meeting with the Founder/CEO.
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Team DIGO | 05/07/2013 | in
This week’s Mad Men opens with intoxicating talk of an IPO for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. This brings out the worst in nearly all of them.
When personal greed comes in, client interests are soon forgotten.
An agency focused on cashing out is not an agency focused on client success.
Don inadvertently torpedoes the IPO when he resigns a client. This particular client happens to be a snake and should never have been allowed to slither into the agency in the first place. This is a rare righteous moment for Don.
So, now the agency’s hopes turn to winning a much bigger client. But why?
Bigger clients are not better clients. Bigger agencies are not better agencies.
In order to do this, Don realizes that a merger with another agency is necessary. There is no discussion of whether this is a good thing for existing agency clients. There is no exploration of what this may mean for the culture the agency has built. The Chevy account is the Holy Grail and they will sacrifice everything to get it.
This is about as true as fiction gets. This bigger-is-better disease is almost universal in agencies. Smaller agencies think they are just temporarily embarrassed bigger ones. If they love their clients at all, they love them provisionally, as steppingstones to the big time.
Lust for a huge “exit” is certainly part of it, but that only affects the few who benefit from such events. The larger issue is herd instinct. Your mother knows what Microsoft is, and she doesn’t yet know Warby Parker. Enormous budgets make for better answers at cocktail parties. “Yes, you’ve seen my commercials.”
It’s about trading up. People trade up jobs, spouses, clients.
We’ve long since committed to the road less traveled. We choose clients based on their promise, not their past. We look for growth, not for mass. We grow with our clients, not out of them. We see them as pillars, not steppingstones. We run a business that is successful in creating value for clients, owners, employees and collaborators today, rather than planning for some future exit.
As a result, we’re able to devote nearly all our energy, passion, hopes, creativity and time to building our clients brands and organizations.
Are we naïve? We’re happy. And, this week we celebrated 17 years.
Here’s to the next 17 and beyond!
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Team DIGO | 05/03/2013 | in
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.
Changes. Yes.
You liked some and didn’t like others. Good!
Listening to you. Fantastic!!!
The thing about mistakes… Oh, there you go making another one.
Is that you learn. Oh, please stop. Please, please stop.
OK, so some folks at J.C. Penney were a little too ready to go out with the, “We kicked the bum out” spirit. But, that’s not really relevant.
What is relevant is that they are not just listening but responding in real time, with real news that real J.C. Penney customers care about.
Let the apology end and the conversation continue.
American Express Open.
Here, Drew Neisser of Renegade reports from the recent CMO Summit that Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly, SVP, Consumer Marketing and Engagement, American Express OPEN, attempted to persuade her fellow marketers to conduct “customer engagement with a new sense of humility.” In fact, she admitted that American Express had let down and angered many of their most loyal small business customers during the recession.
“It was important for us to say we’re sorry,” she explained, adding, “We created a customer advisory council to look at complaints after that.”
Wow, that’s a pretty big admission. We’re the company that’s supposed to look after and take care of small business, yet when the times where really tough for our customers, we let them down.
A couple of thoughts:
1) Apologize in private. Unless your company committed a sin against society, keep apologies private. The direct channel is ideal for one-to-one and targeted communications and conversations. The social channel is a great place to deal with comments in a differentiated manner. Some public, some more private. Have some meaningful conversations. Overcorrect. Create some brand advocates. When DiGo client Netflix introduced a wildly unpopular new pricing model in an insanely unpopular way, the company quickly backpedaled. There were some more ineffective communications that followed. Then, they got back to work on the experience. A year later, their stock is up over 300% and Netflix has surpassed even HBO in audience and subscribers.
2) Identify the systematic issues and correct them. If your customer service people are rushing off the phone, for example, look into and change their incentives. Address issues of culture. McDonald’s got it mostly right when they put their managers on public notice that they were committed to turning around deteriorating customer service.
3) First, fix the customer experience. But what am I supposed to communicate while I’m doing that, Mark? You communicate what you can, knowing it’s less important than fixing the customer experience. If you have something to sell – and I hope you do – you keep selling it. Decades ago, when Ford realized that the quality standards in their industry had long since left their products behind, they went to work on changing that. A year ahead of launching new product, they couldn’t say much so they got people ready with, “Have you driven a Ford lately?”
4) Remember the dream of the brand. There’s a positive side to disappointing customers. You can’t do it unless they have expectations to begin with. When we took on The Plaza Hotel account more than a decade ago, several years of Trump ownership had left the place in need of a massive renovation. The new ownership assumed that our first campaign out of the gate would be an apology. With our client, Tom Civitano, we determined that apologizing would actually be disrespectful to our most important customers. These people had paid a lot for the privilege of staying at The Plaza. When they flew into town, they didn’t say they were going to New York City, they said, “I’m going to stay at The Plaza.” To publicly apologize would have undermined their experience and their bragging rights – things they’d paid good money for! Instead, we ran a campaign celebrated the dream that is The Plaza, while we went to work improving the customer experience. In the first year, long before the renovation even started, the Plaza Hotel rose to the top of its class in Rev-Par, the industry’s key metric, and stayed there for the next seven years. The campaign one the HSMAI’s Platinum Award as the best of the year.
There is a dream that is your brand, an experience that your customer is trying to create with your help.
1) Identify that experience. Get to know it intimately.
2) Learn how to leverage it to create action and advocacy. That’s what we call Brand Direct.
3) Now make this experience the measure of every touch point.
4) Do a POE – a paid, owned, earned inventory of your touchpoints with your customers and prospects.
5) Every day, infuse at least one of those touchpoints with more of the core experience.
6) Use the media and materials of today to stay one step ahead. That’s what we call Modern-Day Marketing.
7) Finally, apologize along the way, and overcorrect. Fixing things creates advocates. Staying in touch every day will go a long way toward making sure that no big public apologies are necessary.
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Team DIGO | 05/03/2013 | in
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.
Enlightened, confident, sane clients aren’t obsessed with conflicts. They set clear, reasoned limits. Honorable agencies honor those limits.
Well, we already know Don cheats. He and his partners decide to pitch Heinz Ketchup in secret. They create a locked room and label it “Project K.” This brings out the paranoia, of course, as it would.
Ultimately, they lose the pitch. The first client finds out about their infidelity, and they lose that business too. Schmucks.
Of course, they were only trying to grow. But it was the secrets and lies that ensnared them. A forthright conversation might have worked a lot better. The sort of client you’d choose would want to help you win other business, even if he or she might not want you working for the internal rival. Something mutually fulfilling could be worked out.
Don’s an interesting character. He’s very good at acting like a forthright man. He’s got the chin for it and the skills. But he lies and cheats, and spends a lot of his time hiding. Agencies, like lives, grow on trusting relationships. Yes, it’s possible for stardom to short-circuit the normal rules of growth for a while, which is why so many stars are so screwed up. But, generally, the limits of trust define the limits of growth. Don is holding his agency back, for now.
Curiously, the only honest and true character on the show seems to be Don’s young wife, Megan. Yet she is the true arrow that seems to hit the bulls-eye of success every time. She succeeds in advertising – in the episode, they go to an advertising award show and she, not Don, brings home the award – yet she has already moved on to a successful career in acting. Despite everything and everyone around her, she remains true.
Client and agency leader, enjoy watching Don, but emulate Megan.
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Team DIGO | 05/02/2013 | in
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:
1) Consider the ideal, the vision. People may not be clear about how long it will take to get there. Most teams, left to their own devices, will ruminate on this project of getting to the ideal for weeks, months, even years. We put a proven plan in place to get there. With processes and milestones. We manage and report.
Now, hold on. Sit right back down. Do not close up that notebook and go back to your office. Let’s take just a couple of minutes more and let’s figure out how we’re paying for this meeting.
2) Consider the immediate problems and opportunities.The low-hanging fruit. Typically, this is not a bitter fruit at all, but a quite tasty variety at the peak of ripeness, and within easy reach. Yet people will sit under that tree and plan for next years harvest and let those cherries rot on the vine! Perhaps that’s what Newton was doing when the apple fell on his head.
You want a Newton at your agency, but you don’t want Newton as your agency. We don’t let Newton out from under his tree without a GO – a project manager with total forward motion. Because in the uphill battle of growth, gravity is the force we are working against.
3) Plan to attack both, simultaneously. It is possible that these “short-term wins” will be a distraction that further delays the other much more important achievement? On the other hand, it’s also possible that the business can grow fat and strong and successful on meal after meal of low hanging fruit, picked off daily?
This is one situation in which, when faced with a choice between two compelling options, the right answer is often “Both!”
But here’s the thing, you must manage to move them both forward simultaneously. For the low hanging fruit, you need one kind of planning. For next years harvest, you need another. The first should be driven by a ruthless calculation of time efficiency. You need to create a something that is better than a nothing. And you need to do it in the shortest time and with the least effort possible. You can always improve on it after that.
No go!
4) Two-Track Reminders. Find ways to bring this concept of Two Track Planning dramatically to the foreground for your teams. Run the schedules side by side on the same page. Do the same with the plans. Celebrate two-track planning. When you see a plan for just one thing, ask about the other track.
How did we learn Two-Track Planning? The same way we learned most of what we know about modern-day marketing, by working side-by-side with successful entrepreneurs and leaders of the direct model revolution. For the entrepreneur, money never just appears from nowhere to finance the pursuit of your dreams. You must earn it, raise it or pick it yourself. So you get good at paying for tomorrow’s possibilities with today’s opportunities.
Whenever people tell me that they have no time to think strategically because they are too busy getting things done, I teach them this system.
Two Track Planning is one great way to be more successful today and more strategic about your future in a time-starved world.
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Team DIGO | 05/02/2013 | in
A couple months ago, On Deck, the company that uses big data to evaluate whether or not a small business is worth lending money to, landed a healthy $42 million Series D investment of its own. Today, that same round got bigger.
On Deck announced this morning that Google Ventures has led an additional $17 million investment with participation from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Industry Ventures. Other investors in the round include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital.
That round comes on top of a $100 million round of debt financing raised last year from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., and a $15 million Series C led by SAP Ventures in 2011.
Read the full article here.
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Team DIGO | 05/01/2013 | in
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:
Brand Direct by Mark DiMassimo
April 21, 2000
A year ago, dot-coms were beating down the doors of hip advertising agencies looking for the magic of “branding,” which they associated with wacky TV commercials, like my own shop’s work for Kozmo.com.
Today, these clients are leaving their agencies at the same gallop, sputtering, “We’re just going to buy numbers.” At least nine times out of 10, this is a mistake. Without a brand, a business has no future. There is no time but the present to build a brand.
To survive, dot-coms must know this: Branding isn’t a new logo or an expensive TV campaign. Branding is the core of everything you do. Period.
If all you can afford is direct, make sure you build your brand with every sale. Make sure you dramatize your brand idea, even if your only medium is e-mail. (If you don’t have a compelling brand idea, get one.)
I call the approach “brand direct,” and the advantages are many. For example:
1) You make more money right away.
2) You build your brand while you’re doing it, so …
3) You make more money later.
Here’s a guide:
1) Hire a great, experienced direct marketer.
2) Make this person the head of your agency.
3) Insist that the brand people and the direct people work together.
4) Pass all their work through one creative director with the appropriate experience.
5) Live by the results.
Interestingly, the agency founded by David Ogilvy has done just that. In fact, Ogilvy said: “Every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response.”
As far as I know, I’m the only head of a creative ad agency who has had a career as a direct-response writer. I spent my first seven years in direct. Those years of living and dying by response rates were an education. I learned to create in the presence of hard data, and to love it. When I beat my first “control,” I did indeed taste blood. I learned to work for the effect I could have on a client’s business.
How did I become a successful brand advertiser? I did it the way direct people do—I tested into it.
Time and again, a great brand idea turned out to be the best response device. With my new secret weapon, we slaughtered venerable campaigns.
Why haven’t Ogilvy’s prescient prescriptions been applied at more agencies? Because there remains a wall between the direct practitioners of most shops and their generalist colleagues. It is more than a physical wall, more than a line on the profit-and-loss statement. It is a wall supported by mutual distaste. It is an artifact of ad-agency culture and history that has lost any trace of utility it may once have possessed.
Mr. and Mrs. Agency Chairman: Tear down that wall!
See the original article here.
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Team DIGO | 04/24/2013 | in
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.
All too certain, you fear you aren’t certain enough. You are ever on the prowl for mortar to shore up your certainty. Which is to say your sense of self. That’s where we come in. Brands are mortar. The stories we tell fill the chinks in your façade. We remind you how it looks from the outside. We make a public reputation for you to live up to. Ultimately, we help you define yourself and all you have to do is spend a little money. And you do spend.
Human Beings are desiring animals.
When we lose desire, we lose the will to live. In fact, scientists have shown that when the part of the brain that creates desire is injured, deep and enduring depression results. The desire to live is gone.
Isn’t that interesting? Not when we lose the ability to feel satisfaction or happiness or joy, but when we lose desire.
Deep inside, there is a shark that needs to keep moving forward or die. Desire moves us forward.
“Move me forward today. Move me. Make me desire something.”
We hear you, Human Beings. And never fear.
That’s what we’re here for.
