Today’s Friday Philosophy comes from David Ogilvy.
I’ve been reading The King of Madison Avenue, the first ever biography of Ogilvy written by Kenneth Roman. Roman is the former Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, Ogilvy was his boss. It’s a very well done book and I continually pick up nuggets as I’m reading so I’ve kept a journal close by to write down the epiphanies that apply to my own business.
One of my favorite stories Roman tells in the book is about today’s quote. The story goes that Ogilvy once left Russian matryoshka dolls “which directors found at their places at a board meeting. Opening the painted nesting dolls, each smaller than the one before, every director found the same message typed on a piece of paper inside the tiniest doll:
‘If we hire people who are smaller than we are, we will become a company of dwarfs. If we hire people who are larger than we are, we’ll become a company of giants.’”
Today we’re taking to Wexley’s Brian Marr. He works there. I have no idea what he actually does.
Wexley’s clients include Microsoft, the Seattle Sounders FC, WACOM, Copper Mountain and Bacon Salt. Founded in 2003 by Ian Cohen and Cal McAllister, Wexley’s goal: use non-traditional thinking to solve communication challenges in the ever-evolving new media landscape. And a look at their work proves they’ve stuck to that vision. Like the time they hung Sounders scarves all over Seattle to create buzz about the new team.
Or when they created National Snow Day and even made it snow in Austin to promote Copper Mountain.
Since the first day of school, Wexley has grown to 26 employees over 6+ years. They admit the first few years were tough. The guys were getting offers to do traditional work and took a few jobs that weren’t true to the agency vision just to stay afloat. As the non-traditional and media agnostic approach started catching on with clients and agencies, Wexley has been been fortunate to be at the forefront, while others talk the game and try to work out the rules.
What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”
We’ve never really had the aha moment as Wexley, but each of us had something in previous roles that made us think we wanted to try approaching things differently. Cal and Ian refer to the ideas they presented at their past agencies as Second Year ideas. They’d pitch them and everyone would agree it was a great solution to the customer’s business problem, but there was always a media buy that needed to be filled first so “maybe we can do those next year since this year’s media budget is already allocated.” There was good creative, just no creativity in the execution. They believed they were onto something so they decided to start Wexley and worked to define a new model for advertising.
What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?
The books I read at home are mostly just entertaining and borderline embarrassing. At work, we like people to focus on individual thought first and foremost. I once tried to stay on top of everything the industry reads but I’m a few thousand posts behind. I’m just reading about something called a “Tipping Point,” which I think is going to be HUGE!
Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.
I think the owners and marketing staff at the Seahawks/Sounders are brilliant. I’m biased because we work with them, but credit should be given where it’s due. The Sounders FC set out from the beginning to build something entertaining. From the choices they made with their product (including the players they hired, the choice of a scarf as the season ticket) to how they’ve rolled it out by turning the team over to the fans, everything has been methodical and highly effective. It’s a perfect example of the product becoming the marketing.
We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken. Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches. Do you see an alternative to this process?
RFPs are a necessity in subjective business. Someone is paying you to do a service for them that will be unique in each situation if we’re all doing our jobs right. They want to be assured that an agency understands their business and can handle the challenge.
As an agency, it’s easy to feel like you should be able to show some similar work to win the business. I was client-side for 10 years and can tell you from experience that your client really doesn’t care too much about what you did for <insert flashy brand name here>. You might get a few points that allow you to sit down with them and have a conversation, but that’s it. In our industry, you’re only as good as your last campaign. In your client’s eyes, you’re only as good as what you can do for them. They just want to know if you can hack it.
Regarding the broken process, I think agencies have brought a lot of it on themselves since the discussion inevitably boils down to cost/expense. We had a recent $10M opportunity and our first question internally was “can we afford to do this?” because we knew the competition would probably invest a ridiculous amount of money for a 1 in 12 shot of winning the business. As a client, I always saw things like staged out rooms and highly produced videos as overcompensation for the work not being there.
All of that said there are some bad situations out there. We have all seen poorly thought out RFPs, people who don’t actually have a budget asking you to pitch, the issue of idea ownership, clients requesting fully produced creative and more. Those aren’t problems with the RFP; they’re a problem with reasonable expectations at the client. We have our parameters for success set up and only pitch when it’s in our best interest.
What does the agency of the future look like?
I think things will continue to be interesting for the next few years. The networks will eventually hit stride again, but not before the overhead associated with the shift to digital forces them to rethink their media departments. They’ll need to re-organize themselves and package their services differently. In a digital, on-demand age, clients are going to be looking for things like rapid iteration and innovation across all areas. Smaller agencies can deliver on these more quickly than larger places, but will lack the breadth that the networks can provide. To overcome that, I think we’ll see independent agency co-ops on the rise.
We’ll also see far more digital focus, obviously. When you look at the numbers it’s surprising how little is sold today. These aren’t precise stats, but ~30% of eyeballs are online and it’s still only about 5% of the media mix for big brands. Why is that? My guess: it’s insanely more time consuming/expensive to do a multi-touch digital campaign than it is to do traditional. It’s only time before savvy clients are going to start demanding more digital in their mix than media departments are selling them.
What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?
Marketers desperately need integration across their campaigns, which now involve more customer touch-points than ever. Internally, most marketers are still trying to determine the best way to align themselves organizationally to be most effective – they likely have a new social media team, an experiential team, grassroots team, digital media team and more. Between those groups and the preexisting ATL and BTL teams there is a going to be overlap. At the same time as clients staking out territory in the disciplines they care about, agencies are involved in a crazy land grab. It will settle with time, but for a while agencies will need to focus on playing nice to help make campaigns as integrated and effective as they have the potential to be.
Who do you admire and why?
I’m a huge fan or Pixar’s approach. They’re master story-tellers and have a unique process that enables consistent creativity and innovation. The result is a set of investors, employees and fans who can count on something great coming from them. I’d love to be a fly on the wall there for a day or two. I think we would learn a lot.
HEARTS FOR HAITI: AN AMERICAN DINING RELIEF BENEFIT LAUNCHED BY BRAVO TV’S TOP CHEF CONTESTANT
Top Chef Ron Duprat Teams with three Fellow Contestants & Fine Chefs Across the USA Valentine’s Day to raise funds for Haiti
Up to ten percent of all funds raised will be donated equally to Hollywood Unites for Haiti and Kinship Circle Disaster Relief
Hollywood, FL – Haitian-born Ron Duprat, perhaps best known from Bravo’s hit TV series “Top Chef” has teamed up with three fellow contestants, Mattin Noblia, Hector Santiago and Michael V. to welcome other fine chefs across the country in an all-chef Relief Benefit on St. Valentine’s Day for his native land. On February 14, all participating chefs and restaurants will donate up to 10 percent of their receipts to Hearts for Haiti: An American Dining Relief Benefit. The donated funds will be divided between two charities: Hollywood United For Haiti and Kinship Circle Disaster Relief. One hundred percent of the donated funds will go directly to on-the-ground relief efforts.
“Food always brings people together,” Duprat says. “I hope that this St. Valentine’s Day, every community will have at least one restaurant where people can dine out with their loved ones and share their hearts with Haiti.”
“Chefs always care,” Duprat adds. “I hope chefs across the country will join us in this heartfelt effort for Haiti. One hundred percent of their donations will go directly to Haitian relief efforts for both people and animals. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
For more information on becoming a participating chef or dining at a participating restaurant, call 415-461-9300 or visit www.chefronduprat.com
Charitable Beneficiaries:
Hollywood Unites for Haiti is a Los Angeles-based non-profit founded in 2008 by Jimmy Jean Louis, a star of NBC TV’s hit series, “Heroes”. This charitable non-profit organization focuses on enriching the lives of Haitian children. HUFH has established a relief fund to support the victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquakes.
Kinship Circle Disaster Relief is a St. Louis, MO-based non-profit that deploys volunteer teams certified animal aid workers to disaster-stricken areas with necessary animal food, equipment and veterinary supplies.
For additional media information only; to set up interviews, etc., please contact: Valary Bremier
Not sure how I found this. How do we find anything on the interwebs these days, we stumble along.
But I thought it made for a good Friday Philosophy post. If you enjoyed it, check out Toothpaste for Dinner.
10 red balloonshave been hidden around the U.S. and you have to find them. How long would it take you? Could you do it in 4 weeks , 6 months, a year? MIT Media Lab‘s Dr. Riley Cranetook that challenge, which last month was presented by the Pentagon’s DARPA, and with his team, used social media to accomplish the task in just 8 hours and 52 minutes!
Ad agencies are facing real challenges to their value proposition and the outcome of the DARPA experiment is indicative of how social networks have changed the advertising industry forever. DARPA’s experiment (and MIT’s approach) can offer clues about how agencies can make this industry shift work for them—rather than feeling threatened as the ground moves below their feet. And it’s a cautionary tale for clients as well.
The new big idea
Social networks (and by extension, crowdsourcing) have helped bring about the democratization of the big idea, which is probably one of the biggest shifts to our industry in the last 50 years. Marketers now know their agencies aren’t the sole generators of solutions. This shift is changing how clients compensate their agencies—or at least the value placed on previously highly-valued goods—like the big idea. Traditionally, advertising agencies focused on finding balloons—the big idea—and clients paid handsomely for it. In today’s hyper social-networked world, often the strategy is the big idea.
In the case of the DARPA experiment, strategy won the day. Someone (MIT) had to devise the system or architecture that allowed the solution to be found. In other words, DARPA wasn’t paying for the balloons to be found (the apparent solution) they were paying for the creation of the process. Today many marketers are less interested in paying agencies for ideas—they would rather pay for strategy, for process, and the broad thinking to get to the solution. How does this change the value of creativity?
Elton John famously wrote “Your Song” (one of his biggest hits ever) in about ten minutes after his lyricist partner Bernie Taupin penned the words over breakfast. By today’s valuation of creativity, Elton and Bernie would probably have been paid 25 bucks for that masterpiece. This strikes fear into the hearts of many creative people because if agencies can’t charge well for their ideas, what do they have to sell?
Clients should look to their agencies as strategic consultants, not just idea factories. Yes, clients still need ideas and good ideas still sell stuff, but the fact that ideas are likely to come from anywhere goes against having an agency if ideas are all you want your agency for. It’s like hiring a piano teacher to sit in your living room and play you tunes. Real agency value comes in having a partner with broad perspective and insight on your business, a team with peripheral vision, foresight and hindsight who is strategically responsible for making sure the whole plan and execution of that plan is greater than the sum of its parts. To use another music analogy, if the CMO is the conductor of the orchestra, the agency is the Concertmaster. So in the search to hire your next ad agency, find an agency with demonstrated strategic ability–one that uses social networks to their advantage to tap creativity and good ideas, wherever they live, not the ones trying to be balloon finders.
There’s a story about a family who runs out of gas in the desert a few hundred yards from the only gas station around. The station owner comes up with a gas can, and charges them $25 for gas, $25 for the gas can and $150 for labor. The stranded travelers question “what labor?” The attendant responds, “All the thinking to add it up”. The gist is this: clients should be paying agencies to think, not necessarily execute. Agencies need to be willing to use all the tools currently at their disposal including sourcing ideas across social networks. Clients will more likely value an agency who is not threatened by, or needing to be, the only one with the big idea—because they aren’t anymore.
It’s tough out there for marketers on both sides. Agencies, in particular, are having a rough go of things amid a complicated mash-up of contracts, compensation, and collaboration. So what does this shift mean for the future of the advertising agency and the clients who hire them? DARPA’s experiment and MIT’s solution may offer some clues:
Don’t hire an agency to look for balloons but instead, hire an agency who realizes that the solution is not always the end goal.
Hire an agency to think about your problem strategically, who when necessary can find solutions outside their own walls.
Hire an agency who realizes that the best solutions to your business don’t always happen inside the marketing department.
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