Because clients that are really fulfilled — fulfilled as people, professionals and clients too — will become life-long clients. And in turn, recommend us. That’s how we grow. Great Clients, Great Work and Great People.
At DiMassimo Goldstein, we put our values in a document we call “The DIGO Standard.” It doesn’t just hang on the walls and sit on our desks and desktops. We use it every day. People who visit often ask for a copy. Here’s yours, and you didn’t even have to ask.
Account management with a mission.
Account management is the heart of the agency. Here’s why:
Let’s start with the word “agency.” The definition I like is from Webster’s: an agency is a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved.
It is fashionable today to run away from “agency” and to denigrate it’s meaning. For ourselves, we completely reject every departure from a pure agency model. We are here to be used by others to exert power to achieve worthy ends. We reject any proposal that might detract from our operating as a pure agent. We won’t create a conflict of interest, for example by trying to own intellectual property in our creations for our client. We don’t want to get confused.
So, our mission is singular: client fulfillment. We see the client as someone on a mission. The client needs to achieve certain things. It’s a heroic journey. And we are there to do our all to help create the utmost success. When we play our role well, the client is fulfilled. Fulfilled clients hire the agency again and again. A pure relationship is one of growing respect, trust and, quite often, love.
In client fulfillment, you become essential to your client’s success, growth and fulfillment. Not just in advertising, but in life.
Focusing on small things like schedules and big things like the insight that revives a brand are parts of that. Delivering a more efficient media plan or more impactful creative are simply ways of delivering on the promise.
This pure focus on service might sound self-denigrating. It’s the opposite. By honoring the role we play and by playing it a full force, we demonstrate the power of an agency every day.
It’s about the client experience. We want the client to know exactly what we’re here for. This purity of intention and business model gives us more latitude to choose our clients. It lets us choose people, brands and causes we are proud to serve wholeheartedly.
In the end, focusing on client fulfillment is the key to our own fulfillment. By devoting ourselves fully to the client’s missions, we get asked along for the best rides.
If you’re interested in client fulfillment, drop me a line at mark@digobrands.com
Anyone who wants to get anywhere in the agency business ought to start out in account management.
Though “creative director” has been the title I’ve held for the most years of my career, I owe a good deal of my success to having started out as an assistant account executive.
BBDO Direct. 385 Madison Avenue.
Pepto Bismol was the agency beverage of choice. There were as many ulcers as vice presidents. But I didn’t know enough to be scared. That was piece of luck number one.
My first client was going out of business and just didn’t know it. Recent tax reform legislation had slaughtered their cash cow. The former Lieutenant Colonel took it out on the agency. Just a couple of months into my first job, my boss got fired and I had an account to run.
Direct Marketing legend and founder of the agency, Ed Nash, called the head of the LA office back to try to save the account. Lloyd Kieran, a former Marine himself, redeployed to New York for the duration.
This was piece of luck #2. I got the first great mentor of my career.
Lloyd had two missions and executed them as if they were equal priorities. One was to do his utmost to show the best version of the agency to our client, whatever the result might be. The other was to make sure I got a first class education in account management. He’d left his beautiful wife, whom he swore looked just like Jackie O, back in Southern California. This clearly pained him, but as I’ve said, he was a good soldier. He put his weekend energy into training me. We’d meet on Saturdays and he’d teach me to make a schedule, to proofread documents, to build a budget, to write a contact report, to negotiate with production over deadlines, to make a media calendar, to stand firm on agency schedules… and on and on.
Robert Solomon, author of The Art of Client Service, would have gladly signed off on this boot camp.
Lloyd was proud of my progress. I know this because he told me so and he didn’t have an iota of bullshit in him. He’d made a competent account guy out of questionable entry-level material.
Then six months in, I went above and beyond my account executive responsibilities and wrote a few ads. When I showed them to Lloyd, he didn’t say much. “Mind if I hold onto these for a day or two?” was all.
A couple of days later he told me that they weren’t bad at all “for a first effort” and that he’d shown them to the agency’s executive creative director and that she’d thought I’d shown some promise too.
Within a month, I was a junior writer in the creative department.
What a mentor! He’d given me wings, taught me how to use them, and then he’d helped me fly right out of his department. Soon, he went back to the West Coast and his Jackie O.
And I will tell you this, I absolutely loved that gruff, chain-smoking hard-ass. Despite the chain-smoking, and long after losing his Jackie O, he is still very much alive, and seems to enjoy the occasional update on my career. “Advertising is a young person’s business,” Lloyd likes to say.
Perhaps most important of all, Lloyd planted in me a lifelong love and respect for great account managers. They are the heart of the agency business.
Here is your social media update for the week.
1. Twitter Vines Get Shared 4x More Than Online Video
2. Coke Zero Mother’s Day Twitter Stunt Lets Forgetful Sons Off the Hook
3. Klout Perks Crosses 1 Million Claims, More Than 400 Campaigns
4. Now You Can Comment on Facebook Posts Directly From Bing
5. Twitter: Stop Tweeting and Call Your Mom
6. YouTube Introduces Paid Channels
Viral Content:
16 inexplicably Popular Instagram Hashtags
Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal
Here are 7 ways agency people can delimit their own growth.
Why aren’t agencies helping their people to grow and develop?
At DiGo, we’ve been learning a lot lately by interviewing account people by the dozens. While we’ve met some spectacular people, I’m sorry to say that most of these interviews have been just shocking. Too many people come in with limiting attitudes about themselves and their possibilities. Experienced account managers typically don’t even have an understanding the agency business. They don’t get what agencies are here to do. They don’t understand the role we play in our client’s lives and businesses. They view themselves as narrow specialists. They are people in boxes, decades too early.
1) Get out of your box. The first assumption of a growth agency is that your potential for growth is practically limitless. Who knows what you can be? Former account managers at DiGo are heads of social strategy, writers, leaders of social technology companies, designers, clients, creative directors and senior leaders of this agency. Stop habitually working from what you’ve already done – let’s talk about what you want to do. That’s much more interesting.
2) Question your limits. “I’m not creative.” “I’m not good with numbers.” “I’m not the writer.” “I can’t sell.” We see a set of roles that other people have defined and we feel we have to choose one. Who said you have to fit into boxes other people created? We look at a system of types and we think we need to identify with one of them. Let me tell you that there are more people inside of you than will ever get out. You have no idea how much potential for growth is in there. I will never tell you what you can’t be or do. Never. Don’t do it to yourself either.
3) Learn what you don’t know. Any agency job that isn’t the best educational experience of your life is a waste of your time. The world is changing in so many exciting and promising ways – wouldn’t you like to be able to say the same about yourself? If your agency doesn’t invite you to see the big picture, to be cross-trained, to look at your own desires and yearnings for growth, to develop your own vision for yourself, and to grow… then develop your own program and try to sell it in to them. They may not be hostile to growth – they may just be distracted. Give them a chance and you may transform the place.
4) Practice until you’re fluent. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. That’s what humility is for – keeping an open mind. There are things we know and can do fluently. Then, there are things we know how to do, but that don’t come easy. Knowing isn’t enough. Practice is everything. A great guitarist doesn’t necessarily know more about guitar playing. The enormous amount of practice leads to fluency. You can practice creativity. Presentation skills. Writing briefs. Giving comments. Leading innovation sessions. Just about anything. If you’re not good at something – if you’ve never been good at it – ask yourself whether you know what you need to know. Once you do, take every opportunity to practice.
5) Do a different job for a day or a week. At DiGo, from time to time, we switch roles. Account people become writers, art directors or media people. And vice versa. Brand journalists sell. Social media strategists do project management. It’s frightening and enlightening to do a different job for a day or a week. You use different muscles. You see it from the other person’s point of view. We find we become a tighter team and we become better. Sound like insanity? You would be shocked how well it all actually works.
6) Press the boundaries. People who need us and want our collaboration don’t always invite us in. Often the help they would appreciate is the last thing they think to ask for. Go brainstorm with a creative team. Hash things out with a planner or strategist. Organize “15 minutes of genius” with a client. Be the one who makes time for possibilities. Some people will ask you to go back to whatever it is you do, but in a healthy place, people will be charged up by your vision and commitment to possibility.
7) Help others grow. Too many agency conversations start and end with, “What do you want us to do?” There are a thousand variations. What’s the assignment? What’s the strategy? What’s the deliverable? What does the client want? Be the one who takes the conversation to the level that has the potential to change everything. Be the one that focuses on why the client wants the agency to do whatever it is. How does the client want to grow? How does the client’s company want to grow? What about your boss, your colleague, the people you supervise? Do you know what growth they yearn for, what possibilities excite them? You can never go too deep into that conversation.
Wherever you are, you can begin to build a culture that’s all about growth. If it has to be a University for One, so be it. Start where you are. And if you know someone who is all about growing and helping worthy others – people, brands, organizations – grow, then please refer them our way. We’re growing.
Here’s a quick dispatch from the intersection of personal, creative and business growth:
Some folks turn off at the phrase “personal growth” because it sounds like a lot of work. “Hey, I’m OK just as I am!”
But growth is as natural as breathing. It’s what we’re meant to do. Only sometimes we block what’s natural for us, and that takes a lot more work and energy.
Like staying in a job for “security” when we know we’re stultified. Like choosing the “safe” campaign rather than the right one. Like picking colleagues or partners who won’t challenge you.
Some places assume their people are inanimate objects, fixed entities. Productivity is expected, but growth isn’t. Other places assume growth.
People seldom end up in the position where they started. Typically, they move up, over or on to very different things than anyone could have predicted. Growth unfolds naturally, if you let it.
We choose growth clients because we want to grow, and find they are the ultimate growth fuel. We like money, but this isn’t about that. We’ll turn down revenue growth – and we have many times – in favor of growing in the way that feels natural for us.
So much is possible when you have a growth mindset. You come to expect that people will surprise you, and that you’ll surprise yourself. A life of growth is habit forming. While you’re living, you’ll never want to get into a box again.
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.
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!
