Creative Agency Secrets

A recurring theme in my blog posts.  This time the criminal is Haymarket, the principal publications owner for our industry.

For some reason, trying to read Charlie Hoult and Rory Sutherland’s blogs on the Brand Republic Site this morning… Apparently my login is no longer valid.
Curious.
My print subscription still arrives.

Then it says send a password reminder…. not working either my email is not recognised.

Recognising there’s an issue coming up the site suggests

This email address is not currently registered with Brand Republic.  Please check you have typed it correctly

This is bollocks as I’ve been online on BR for years.  Same email address, same password.
No link to an email for the mythical administrator, no link to a contacts page, no apparent means of contacting.  GRRR

on Contacts page I get a long list of people (mostly in ad sales) NONE of which are administrators for everything.

I am tempted to email Rufus Olins, the Managing director of Haymarket Brand Media

When you see what you think is a holding page on a website what do you think?

Take a look here

and here

Which looks like a holding page and which is just crass arrogance?  How gorgeous and famous do you need to be in this world before you don’t actually need a website at all?

Are they courageous, confident or blind?

These are things I enjoy and so do well.  I’ve done most of them many times and can give you references, if you need.

In no particular order….

1 - Mentoring and coaching anyone with business development responsibility or who has to collaborate with biz dev to do their job better and get results

2 - Moving the whole company to an Enterprise 2.0 operation.  This is a more open relationship with its customers and prospects though using web 2.0 techniques (for yourselves not clients) and creating the open culture internally that enables outsiders to recognise the ‘personality’ of the agency - bypassing traditional outbound communication methods

3 - Facilitating an away day for a client or your senior team

4 - Improving your new business methods and, particularly, pitching

5 - Running a training session on "New business for non-new biz people"

One of the most patronising things about our industry is the way we ‘categorise’ target audiences and then try to sell to them in their language.  So often this fails, dismally.

See the article below from the Economist…. it cites a JWT research into the 6m Muslims in USA who are

on average, richer and better educated than the general population…..

And you hounded them out after 9/11 like dogs…. see the book I just read by Marina Budhos "Ask Me No Questions" about one (fictional) family’s experiences at that time.  Grim reading from the home of the brave and the free.

Coke, cited in the article, seem to have the right idea…. it is NOT adapting its global brands to Muslim consumers. "We don’t segment out consumers based on religion".  Nicely put.

Reminded me of the Girl Geek Dinner Saatchi’s hosted back in May, where they were discussing how they thought they should advise brands on how to market technology to women.  Sooooo deeply mis-understood and patronising.  Sadly I signed an NDA and so can’t go into details…. but I wish, i wish…

(more…)

Nice idea from Lloyd about creating a social media cafe in London.  Here’s the vision…

Ground floor is open to the public, a café style space with good coffee, tea, snacks, fussball, space invaders and the like - maybe the odd plate of eggs bacon chips and beans. Plasma screen shows a rolling twitter timeline from all our mates. An alternative to constantly having to find somewhere to meet up and have coffee and a place where people love you using the wifi.

First floor (don’t get hung up on the physical orientation, just a separate space) is for members & guests. Not a posh exclusive (male) type of private members club (you know where I mean), but something softer, gentler, more suited to creative & geeky types than just to the thrusting entrepreneur. Facilities are flexible meeting rooms, desks and co-working spaces and more exclusive lounging, chatting space with coffee & tea. It’s a bit quieter up here.

Second floor (again really just another separate space) is for media production - podcasting & video-blogging equipment for hire - soundproofed studios, maybe some helpful techies to guide the uninitiated.

Sounds nice.

My guess is the best bet it so buddy up with others already doing stuff in that general direction…. try the Hub in Torrens Street N1 - My client ONzo use this space and it’s great.

I was up there last week and they tell me that A new Hub will be opening somewhere near Waterloo with a slightly different focus - more meeting rooms….. but maybe Lloyd can use that as a launch base.

I work as a non-executive for a couple of my clients.  I came across this article from the Telegraph in which the differences and similarities of a non-exec and an interim manager are detailed.

detail below.

(more…)

Just read down the blog here from Russell Davies on how the Interesting 2007 day got organised…. and then read the event wiki to see who came.

Wow.  Collaboration to make an event happen with small manageable bits of help from loads of people (and their clients) plus some great attempts to record the day in Flickr, Video and site links…

How good are your questioning skills? 
When taking a brief, you need to be able to ask "open-ended" questions in order to get a deep understanding of the customer or prospective client’s decision making process when hiring.

I found a nice American sales trainer Barry Rhein’s promotional video tha you might like to try for yourself.
He sets a "sales challenge" which describes a classic sales skill set as:

• Information gathering
• Creating customised value
• Relationship building

Try the four steps on his video and see how your questioning skills match up….. it’s a good summary that works in our industry.

reading the Sunday Times’ 100 biggest private companies list this morning, it is not surprising that no agencies are on the roster.  The smallest has sales of over £400m and most are companies that make and sell things not services.

One of the underlying issues with our industry is that fundamentally we are selling hours.  Hours of creative expertise and experience.  But we are trading our hours for dollars.  There’s a limit to how much you can grow on that business model.  WE know larger agencies are not necessarily more profitable or more creative and so the creative services industry risks remaining full of SMEs - unless the business model changes.

A while ago, Tina Fegent, sent me a copy of Beau Fraser’s article on "Compensation".  He claims that Gate Worldwide is trying to work its timesheets better such that the areas where true value is added get paid at higher levels than lower value work like revisions.

He has five stages to a project: Discovery; Strategy; Development; Production and Revision.  Pretty standard stuff. But if timesheets were aligned to stage not just overall project, agencies would have a better idea of where they were adding value, making highest margins / profits and be able to adjust their pricing for clients and for staff accordingly.

When you find one team moves more smoothly with a client through to the production stage but then spends too long on Revisions - you know you start losing money.  And so agency staff compensation and client pricing could be adjusted to reflect this. 

it is possible.

Maybe this is one change to the agency business model that can move someone into the large public companies list….
Download AdAge_BeauFraser.pdf

If you are a business that need sto quickly find out "the latest"…. try these for help

One
trend and rumour website

Google
trends

How to brainstorm

(more…)