Citrus is a northwest ad marketing agency with 26 people with offices in Portland – Bend – Whitefish, MT (yup, handles the Lottery plus) and soon Memphis. Peter Levitan is its founder. I first met Peter in a recent ad agency search I conducted.

In their capabilities presentation, they were the only firm who actually sent in questions for the prospective client to consider. That was impressive. Let’s see if their answers to our 7 questions are equally impressive. I have to admit, I like the answer to question # 4 and no coaching was required! I also loved their “Dear Agency“ self promo piece.

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”

We didn’t have an “a ha” moment so much as an “a ha” evolution.

In recent weeks, we have gone thorough an internal agency positioning review. We’re finally taking the time to do for ourselves what we do for our clients. This is not easy in the advertising/marketing/digital space because agencies tend to say the same things. Seems like it’s always the same blah blah. I suspect no one knows this better than Hitch.

During this process, we examined a range of positions that came from our brains as well as from the craniums (crania?) of other agencies. We also did quantitative online research with clients and learned that most think that all agencies are full of it. Just kidding. Well, sort of. Truth is, many clients and prospects think all agencies sound the same—no matter what we say.

So we decided to do something bold. Something different. Something a little crazy. We decided to tell the truth. We decided to tell the world what we really do for our clients: We move people. We move people through rational and emotional messaging. We move people from apathy to emotion, inertia to action (a purchase is among our clients’ favorite actions).

I guess you could say that our “a ha” moment revolves around the concept of MOVE.

What books are on your night stand or great blogs on your Google reader.

I believe I’m part of a dying breed: the magazine reader. I am committed—to the point of being slavish—to reading at least 30% of all New Yorker issues (near-impossible if you work), The Atlantic, The Economist, the last issue of Gourmet and stolen copies of Communication Arts.

The last great book I read was, in fact, a picture book. It was a look at how Avedon shot his famous series and book “In the American West.”

Works from the Blogosphere include Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine (we invented the Internet together), random Blogs from the AdAge Power 150 blog list and “Things marketing people love.”

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why?

I always admire the speed of New York umbrella salespeople to hit just the right intersections when it starts to rain. Super targeted. Well-timed. Compellingly stated. Isn’t this what we all strive for?

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?

I’d like to make three points on pitching, all of which are derived from years of pitching as director of Saatchi’s business development group and now as the owner of a small agency.

First, most clients don’t have a clue about what they’re really looking for. It’s not their fault. They’re just trying to select an ad agency based on what are ultimately subjective criteria. Do I think that the agency is smart? Do I believe that the work is strong? Do I like them? Unless we’re talking about digital or direct response agencies that can deliver quantitative stories that directly relate sales increases to marketing activities, these traits don’t help selection a whole helluva lot. Ditto most case histories.

Point two: clients should use an agency search consultant. Selecting an ad agency is an important decision. Chances are, Bob in sales or Margo in procurement just aren’t going to cut it. (No offense, Bob and Margo.) Neither will a CMO who does a search every ten years. Hire an expert, please. I beg of you.

Finally, a note to agencies: Get. Over. It. Most industries use RFP’s. Just get past your egos and decide if pitching the potential client is a sound business decision. Determine if you have a chance based on your work and category experience. Look at the odds and decide if it makes financial sense. Did it make any financial or rationale sense for 1,284 agencies to pitch Zappos?

What does the agency of the future look like?

The agency of the future employs robots and goes to meetings in flying cars. Kidding.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking through for a while. I live in Portland. Portland has one of the highest populations of strategists, creative thinkers, copywriters, art directors and digital magicians in the country—maybe the world. What if we found a way to harness this creative and strategic power under the umbrella of brilliant management to deliver the new agency: Portland, Inc. I’d love to pitch Portland against Goodby, Weiden, Crispin and Ogilvy. Why not— they all use Portland freelancers anyway!

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Marketers need more smart ideas that will drive sales.

This dearth of sales-driven thinking isn’t due to agencies’ oversight. Marketers have made their own bed by deflating agency profit margins and reducing timeframes. (I just had a major hotel chain ask for a proposal to develop a new website for launch “late this year.” Um, its mid-October [when I'm writing this].) Simply put, clients have reduced our ability to spend the time required to develop the big ideas that are required to really win in today’s complex media space. Period.

Who do you admire and why?

Paris Hilton. I mean it. I have never seen someone build such a strong brand on so little. It was magical.

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Thanks for waiting patiently on the next installment of Ad Industry Innovators.  It was a busy summer  for Hitch as I finished up new projects and started new ones.

Today’s Ad Industry Innovator # 16 is Norfolk, Virginia-based, Grow Interactive.  Grow got on my radar thanks to my old friend, Alan at Platt Hollow Road.  While they do work directly with clients, the bulk of their work is done for agency partners.  Digging in a bit you’ll see they’ve worked with nearly everyone from Goodby, Silverstein & Parners and Wieden + Kennedy, to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and Mother.  These guys are good, and everybody knows it.

Grow has racked up their share of awards and recognition lately, including a 2009, Cannes Lion, two One Show Pencils, two Webbys, and a Clio shortlist.  They were also listed as one of the top 10 interactive production companies by Creativity in Aug 2008.

Everyone, meet Drew Ungvarsky, President of Grow Interactive.  Drew, meet everyone:

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?

A few years ago, we made a conscious decision to take more risks – both in our work and in our efforts to connect with bigger clients and projects.  We’d done plenty of solid (but safe) local and regional work at that point, but we thought if we could just put ourselves in the game by any means possible, we had the talent to compete on a much larger level.

I later heard a better summation of that mindset, which was: “Do what you’ve done and you’ll get what you’ve got.”  We keep that in mind with each opportunity we get and try to constantly remind ourselves not to become complacent.

What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

At last check, I’ve got 85 sites in my RSS.  Beyond keeping up with the latest and greatest digital advertising, I follow tech and culture blogs to spot emerging technologies, trends, and cross-platform ideas we can bring into future projects.

Sadly, my attention span is too short for books right now, but I’ve been trying out audiobooks recently.  I’m currently listening to Ken Robinson’s “The Element” about the great things that can come when your work is your passion.

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

Whopper Sacrifice was definitely a favorite this year.  It was a perfect execution that clearly stood out on an otherwise crowded platform.  A close second was Boone Oakley’s YouTube site.  With both of those sites, I knew they were hits the moment I saw them.  I also really liked Dunkin Run as a great example of utility marketing, and it worked perfectly for the brand.

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?

The pitch process works best when the relationship is open and everyone’s respecting each other’s time and effort.  If a potential client gives us clear expectations and transparency regarding the obstacles we’re going to face, it then falls fairly on us to decide how much time and effort we can afford to put towards a potential engagement… and everyone can sleep well at night.

What does the agency of the future look like?

The strongest agencies are the ones who are embracing digital as an axis to their campaigns instead of just another outlet within them.  Whenever we can work with agencies as partners and help shape a concept from the beginning (as opposed to just jumping in to execute), the resulting work is always stronger and more cohesive with the technology.

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

We’re lucky enough to work with a number of the agencies who I think “get it”, so I’ve got a bit of a skewed view in saying things are pretty good.  If anything, I’d say that we sometimes see people putting the technological cart before the horse – be that an app, a widget, or the other buzzword of that day.  Clients need strong ideas, and they need to live in the spaces most suitable to their brands.

Who do you admire and why?

I’m constantly trying to be a better leader for my company, so I soak up inspiration and ideas anywhere I can get them.  Recently, I’ve been trying to steal from the playbooks of Tony Hsieh and Steve Jobs, both of whom demand great respect in different ways.  I admire anyone who can earn the respect and trust of their employees.

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Well, it’s been an exciting and busy summer.  I’m talking to lots of agencies lately who are hearing the phones starting to ring again–which is good news for everybody.  That’s partly why it’s been nearly a month since a new Ad Industry Innovators series, everybody’s busy, including me.  I’m a little over two weeks from finishing up the first Hitch search–with a few other interesting potentials on the horizon so stay tuned for exciting news!

Today’s Ad Industry Innovator is a shout out to the Emerald City with a Seattle agency called Creature.  New Business Director, Barton Bodell described Creature as their clients’ wild card agency.  The folks clients go to when they don’t want same old same old.  I thought that was a great description, so I’m going with it.

I interviewed Robson Grieve, who is Creature’s Managing Director.  He came to the agency after being a Creature client con Corbis.  ( 5 pts for reading that correctly out loud.)

1. What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been”?

The big “aha” moment for Creature happened back in Amsterdam, when Matt and Jim (co-creative directors) were talking about starting an agency. After working in a couple of the biggest and best agencies in the US (Wieden & Kennedy and Goodby Silverstein), they went to Europe and saw a different way of doing things. This old world+new world experience led the guys to the simple philosophy that “the best media space you can buy is in someone’s mind.” That idea really defines how we look at the changing relationship between consumers and brands, and it has shaped how we do our work on a day-to-day basis. The evolution from a “broadcast” model where advertisers were telling people what to think, to more of a cooperative model where we are starting a conversation with people and incorporating them in to the brand development process.

The truth is, however, that we are having “aha” moments all the time and we look at our model as a work in progress. We are constantly studying our capabilities and looking for ways to make Creature more relevant to current and future clients. Every year we seem to undertake one or two big changes, and we are constantly challenging the status quo and updating our business model. Essentially, we look at the search for “aha” moments as an every day part of the job.

2. What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

I almost never read about advertising or business, because I find most business popular books to be a little too orderly in their analysis.  There are a few notable exceptions, of course, but in general I try to find interesting/thought provoking books rather than books about business.  I’m working on a pretty scary book right now – it’s called “Global Catastrophes and Trends.”  It is a comprehensive look at the risks we face in the next 50 years by a university professor named Vaclav Smil.  Smil has written a lot about energy and the environment, and has a very data driven perspective on projecting the future of the world.  Before that, I read “The Black Swan: The impact of the Highly Improbable,” which was a really inspiring book that basically reinforced my belief that it is more important to be open to new things than it is to be expert at pattern recognition.

In terms of blogs, I read Mark Cuban’s blogmaverick.com a lot because he is such a firebrand, and has the ability to separate the hype from reality in new media.  For social media stuff I read Logic+Emotion.  He has a nice theory-based approach to explaining social structures online.  I am also a bit of an economic news junky, and my jumping off point there is a blog called “calculated risk” which has some interesting articles, and a wealth of links to top econ authors.

3. Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

Michael Jackson. Look at how popular he is all of a sudden. Tough way to do it, but you have to give the guy credit for his commitment to the brand.

Seriously, this is a really difficult question to answer because some of the most examples that people use as great “marketing companies” aren’t marketing companies at all – they just make great products that people love. I would say that I have been pretty impressed with Fed Ex and how they have incorporated golf in to their brand. They created a great event with the PGA (The Fed Ex Cup), and they have succeeded in making the connection between golf and fed ex very natural through their advertising.

4. 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?

I think it is convenient to complain about the RFP process. Is it fun to put a bunch of resources in to a high risk endeavor, with disappointment the most statistically likely outcome? Of course not, but I don’t see how the industry could come together and invent a method for pitching could be set up that would solve all the problems. Competitive bidding is a part of almost every industry’s procurement process, so agencies aren’t alone in being disappointed because they didn’t get a piece of business. Watch “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Life isn’t fair.

The thing agencies need to decide is how much they are willing to give in this process. This is an individual and situational decision. For example, at one extreme, some clients are demanding ownership of all ideas created for the pitch, and agencies just need to decide if they are willing to go that far. In some cases, the answer will be yes, in some cases it will be no.

There have been some crazy pitches the last few months (the famous “twitterfp” and Zappos are on people’s minds) that have people buzzing, and I would say that if they agencies don’t like the process, they should sit out. Or better yet, if agencies don’t like the process they should work with the client to shape the right process.

5. What does the agency of the future look like?

It is interesting to try to predict what the agency of the future looks like, because we are likely to be mostly wrong no matter what we predict. I think it is safe to say that it is likely we will be more similar to strategy consultants like Bain or McKinsey than we will be to old-line Madison Avenue agencies. I also think it is safe to say that we are going to need to be “cross trained” at every level, because the world isn’t going to be neatly organized by media like it has been in the past.

I do think that a lot of the speculation around ownership of ideas that has gone on is a little misleading. Big brands don’t need to share risk with agencies, so the expectation that they share rewards in a significant way is probably unfounded. Pay-for-performance is coming in some way, but I think it is going to end up being more of a cost cutting measure by corporations than it will be a chance for agencies to grow their piece of the pie.

6. What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Marketers need agencies to solve problems – not just make ads. Too often agencies decide to make ads, even when they know that won’t solve the underlying problem. Our clients need us to be ready and willing to look at each engagement as a chance to solve an important problem – sometimes that will be through ads, sometimes it will be through something entirely unexpected.

7. Who do you admire and why?

I would say that I admire my business partners, Matt and Jim. They have had a lot of fortitude and foresight as entrepreneurs, and I am fortunate to get to work with them on a day-to-day basis.

In the agency business, I admire the guys at Goodby Silverstien. They have managed to reinvent themselves over and over, and that is no small feat in any industry.

I look at Tiger Woods as a role model from a competitive perspective. He has such great focus, and usually finds a way to be win even when he isn’t at his best.

#####

I’ll admit it.  Until a few weeks ago I had never heard of BooneOakley.  Then I saw their company website.  After I stopped laughing, I gave them a call.

BooneOakley was started in October 2000 by two former Martin guys–which probably made the people at The Martin Agency pretty mad, considering the great work these guys do.

BO’s sharp, strategic work has been put to the test by MTV, HBO, State Farm, Carmax, Visit Charlotte, the Charlotte Bobcats, Charlotte Hornets and Ruby Tuesday, to name a few.

If any part of David Oakley’s answers tick you off, I have his cell # and you can call him, after you stop laughing.

1. What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”

Why is the first question always the toughest?  There have been many times in the last 9 years at BooneOakley that we have said to ourselves, “We are really screwing up.  And we’ve got to change things.”  Back in 2002, things were really slow at the agency and we were trying to cut costs, so we switched to that really thin scratchy toilet paper for the agency restrooms.  It didn’t go over well so we switched back to the 2-ply Cottonelle pretty quickly.  That was truly an “ah ha” moment.  We learned that if you make a decision and it isn’t the right one, it’s ok to admit you’re wrong and try another solution.  Being a relatively small company, 30 people, it’s easier for us to do that.

2. What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

I have a really short attention span so I absolutely love Amy Flanagan’s blog, “the shortest blog in the world.”  She describes it as “a blog in handy bite-sized pieces for people who want to follow a blog but don’t have hours and hours of time to spend reading.”  I think she’s hilarious.

There are three books on my nightstand right now. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim” by David Sedaris.  Both of these are a series of short, (I’m sensing a theme) laugh out loud essays.  The only problem is that I usually laugh louder than I snore and that keeps my wife Claire awake.

I also just finished reading “Where the Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls.  It was on my kids’ 6th grade reading list and they both loved it.  Trust me, you will too.

You’ll notice that there are no advertising or marketing or social media books on my nightstand.  That’s the stuff that keeps me awake at night, so why would I read that right before I try to go to sleep?

3. Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

I was blown away by the “There Can Only Be One” campaign that Goodby did for the NBA.  It was so simple.  It was deceptively simple, actually.  The first time I saw the split images of Kobe and Shaq, it almost seemed to me to be a really easy, first concept or idea.  But what it was, was an idea that got to the core about the NBA playoffs:  that everyone wants the same thing.  They want the championship and that’s all that matters to each and every player.  Well OK, maybe money and prostitutes matter too, but any player can get those.  There can only be one champion.  Last summer, Time magazine featured a split image of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the cover with the “There Can Only Be One” headline.  That’s when the campaign truly became a part of culture.  And history.

4. 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?

We’re truly not interested in competing in pitches.  We’d like for clients to instantly recognize how different we are from all the others and just hand us their business.  Yeah.  That’s it.  That’s the way new business should be.

But the fact is, as cool and good and different as we think we are, we’re not any cooler, or better or really that different from 100 other shops.

That’s what makes the rfp courting process so difficult.  For the agency.  And especially for the client.

How do they cut the list from 20 to 10?  Maybe they chop the list based on how many people the agency employs…

How do they cut it from 10 to 4?  Maybe it’s based on who has the most creative packaging…

How do they cut it from 4 to 1?  I’d venture to guess that mostly it’s on relationships. It comes down to who do the clients want to be spending a ton of time with.  It comes down to who they like the most.  Personally.  It rarely has anything to do with the work.

At least that’s been our experience.

One question:  When we make it to the finals of a pitch and don’t win, the consultants always tell us we came in a close second.  Do you think they say that to everyone?  Just wondering… [Editor's response: Umm, I'll get back to you on that.]

5. What does the agency of the future look like?

I’m not even sure what the agency of the present looks like.  But as we move into the future, I’d venture to guess that some things are timeless.  Like hot interns.

6. What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Nice Answer:

A true partnership.  Genuine collaboration.  And a real chance for them to be on the same team with the agency.

Not-so-nice Answer:

The finger.  Especially if they let 107 agencies pitch their business.  OK, maybe I’m a little bitter that we did the zappos rfp.  I guess that was really an “ah ha” moment for us.  Like “ah ha”, we’ll never do that again.

7. Who do you admire and why?

I admire and love my wife Claire for putting up with me for almost 20 years.  I’m sure it seems much longer to her.

I also admire my second wife John Boone for many of the same reasons.

Mentors are often overlooked.  I have been lucky enough to have been blessed with several great ones.  John Sweeney, professor at University of North Carolina.  Peter Coughter, life coach, ad guy and professor at VCU Brand Center.  And my parents, Sid and Pat.