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.
When it comes to staking out Web territory, Mark DiMassimo didn’t exactly have first-mover status. Up until a year ago, the 37-year-old founder of New York’s DiMassimo Brand Advertising wasn’t particularly interested in the Internet. A year ago, only 5 percent of his company’s billings came from dot com accounts.
“My attitude then, “ he recalls, “was ‘What’s all the fuss about?’”
Today, much of the fuss is about his 37-person ad agency, which so far this year has landed three Internet accounts- SmartMoney.com, Kozmo.com, and edu.com- worth more than $40 million, and recently added another two whose identities he declined to disclose. As a result, he expects dot coms to compromise more than 70 percent of 1999 billings, estimated to top $60 million, compared with 1998’s $25 million.
So how did DiMassimo go from Net no-show to hot dot-commodity? According to DiMassimo and his clients, it’s a combination of irreverence, prestigious offline experience- prior to founding DiMassimo in 1996, he worked at several agencies- and more irreverence.
Like many in advertising, DiMassimo has played agency hopscotch. After majoring in social science in college, he tried the life of a professional musician before staking his creative efforts on copywriting. (Today, he plays the drums to brainstorm.) After stints at BBDO and J. Walker Thompson, he moved to Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, a firm that appealed to DiMassimo because it took chances. Kirshenbaum, for instance, had created the campaign for No Excuses jeans, hiring Donna Rice, the Money Business shipmate of former presidential candidate Gary Hart, to be its first spokesperson.
That approach matched DiMassimo’s own penchant for flouting convention, which stems in part from his religious background. He’s not just an ex-Catholic, he’s a practicing ex-Catholic. “I find that among ex-Catholics there’s a certain kind of dark, irreverent humor, because if you’re Catholic, and you’re irreverent, that’s sacrilege,” he says. “It’s a pretty serious thing to be irreverent about religious principals, so when you make that move as a Catholic, you commit to it. It affects you deep down.”
At Kirshenbaum, he eventually became creative director, where that commitment was reflected in the Citibank AAdvantage card campaign, in which one of the ads shows an engagement ring on a finger and reads, “Was it love, or was it the miles?”
In 1996, DiMassimo decided to start his own firm; one that would blend creative with direct marketing. Having worked in direct marketing during his early agency years, DiMassimo says he sensed a gap in coverage. Companies launching new brands needed an agency that understood not only how to create brand awareness, but also how to reach consumers one-on-one.
It wasn’t until last year, however, that he realized the interactive Internet was the ultimate way to integrate the two. From that point, DiMassimo went after Internet firms “with a vengeance,” as he put it, by emphasizing his direct marketing and creative experience, and the irreverence that since has been revealed in campaigns for Kozmo and edu.com.
DiMassimo says that early on in this corporate makeover he learned a lesson in dealing with Internet companies. In the traditional advertising world, agencies are known by their work. Even if it’s a bad company, the good work will stand out, he contends. But on the Internet, your dot com clients’ identities also play a role. It’s not quite, “You are what you eat,” but more, “You are who feeds you.”
Says DiMassimo: “You’re known by your clients, and you’ll be positioned very quickly by whom you work with.”
Taking this advice, DiMassimo now finds himself interviewing potential clients as if he were investigating in the Internet firms. He spends most of his initial meetings with prospective clients asking questions: What’s your business model? Who are your strategic partners? Who’s your competition? Where did you get your money? What’s your budget?
“I have to interview and it’s not because of arrogance,” DiMassimo explains. “There’s so much of this kind of work chasing agencies that if people realize you’re in this business, you’ll be inundated with suitors in this area. My advice is: Be polite, but don’t waste more than 30 seconds on the phone with anybody who doesn’t have money. You can’t help that person. Also, learn to say no to people who have money but the wrong business plan.”
DiMassimo’s belief that your current Internet company lineup influences potential clients isn’t universally shared, even by his clients. During SmartMoney.com’s short agency review- it lasted only three weeks- the company wasn’t hung up on finding an agency with an Internet track record, says Peter Jurew, general manager of SmartMoney.com. In fact, he adds, some agencies with extensive Internet work have produced lousy campaigns, something he attributes to the current market in which Internet accounts can be plucked like low-hanging fruit.
“There are agencies who are so busy that they’re not going to really change or try and reinvent themselves,” says Jurew. “They’re sticking with what they’re doing because they’re getting so much work. So we saw agencies who were good, but nothing that knocked us out. Their stuff was the stuff you see all over the place.”
SmartMoney narrowed the list to four before choosing DiMassimo; a decision Jurew says was based on the agencies penchant for irreverence, its direct marketing experience, and on DiMassimo’s work at Kirshenbaum.
How Irreverent is DiMassimo? He doesn’t go for the Outpost.com approach, the gratuitously irreverent commercial in which mice are shot out of a cannon against a brick wall and viewers are told to send complaints to Outpost.com. Instead, he strives for relevant irreverence. Some of the firm’s work for shopping and delivery site Kozmo.com is brassy bordering on vulgar, but it calls for readers to buy a product, not register complaints. For instance, DiMassimo placed Kozmo posters in bar restrooms. The ad in the men’s room reads: “That girl’s a bitch. Why don’t you go home and rent a movie?”
DiMassimo explains, “You’re in a bar, talking to some girl, and you’re getting nowhere, and then you go into the bathroom and see this sign.”
Edu.com radio spots, meanwhile, brazenly make the point that the site is for students only. The campaign uses respected figures such as a nun or a police officer to rudely explain how they are not welcome at edu.com. In one, an announcer details the daring exploits of Officer Hanrahan then states, “We couldn’t give a rat’s ass” about Hanrahan because he’s not a student.
Popular with students, the campaign was what edu.com expected from DiMassimo, says Rob Levinson, edu.com’s director of marketing communications. “Mark had an edgy quality,” he says. “He understood how to approach our market and we’re in the college space, which is even more irreverent that the rest if the Internet space.”
One thing the edu.com spots don’t do, DiMassimo notes, is explain too much- a continual problem among Internet companies. Many Internet firms are introducing entirely new products or business models and their executives are often frustrated that consumers don’t understand exactly what they do. So they become fixated on the idea that they should explain it all in their advertising. This preoccupation, DiMassimo argues, leads to misguided expenditures of time and money.
“It doesn’t matter if people understand what you do, or how you do what you do. What matters is, are people buying your product or service?” he says. “I try to get my clients out of the explaining business, which is usually a frustrating, expensive, and fruitless business in advertising, and get them into the attraction business, attracting people to their sites and learning who they are.”
It’s a preoccupation DiMassimo essentially mocks in the non-restroom potion of the Kozmo campaign. Kozmo promises to deliver orders in less than an hour, which seems an almost ludicrous boast. Naturally, consumers are keen to know who it intends to achieve this, and DiMassimo built an outdoor radio and TV campaign based on explaining the process. The catch is, the ads lie. Rocket skates, turbo go-karts, and a delivery boy shot out of a cannon are all used to describe Kozmo’s impossible mission.
This offbeat, impious approach seems particularly well suited to young Internet firms and their youthful target markets, and the willingness of Net firms to push the envelope make them fun to work with, says DiMassimo. Then again, he notes, they can be also unusually demanding, preoccupied with quick results, and more volatile than offline clients. “They can be,” he says, half-laughing, “a pain in the ass to work with.”
In some quarters, that type of comment might put people off. But on the Internet, it appears to be a rather winning approach.
DIGO, DiMassimo Goldstein, Proove, Propolis, Origami… in our WHY, we are all one and we must all be one.
Since Simon Sinek says that effective leaders start with WHY, I’m going to start off 2014 with the one word that describes the why of DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO). That word is…
ENTHUSIASM.
This comes from Greek words meaning to get a god inside you. Think of it as having life breathed into you. The word I often use, INSPIRE is actually a synonym. It’s just the Latin version of “breath into.”
There are two ways to respond to life. One is FEAR. Often this is frozen in depression or its lukewarm cousins, boredom and ambivalence. The other direction is ENTHUSIASM. Love, curiosity, creativity, friendship, interest, affinity, enjoyment… these things come from enthusiasm.
We create enthusiasm for things, people, services, ideas, organizations and brands. And in order to do that, we first have to find it in ourselves. So, there’s your why.
We focus on growth because there are a lot of things about growing organizations that enthuse and inspire us and that challenge us to be the best we can be. And because we don’t have to fake it.
So, there’s your Day One Message.
Find, tend, teach, feed, grow, protect, challenge and expand your ENTHUSIASM this year. Tend and feed it every day. And there’s no limit to what we can do in 2014.
Tom Millington, Copywriter, DiMassimo Goldstein
