Award Shows. After all these years, I’m still conflicted.
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Years ago, I used to get excited when the latest CA Annual was coming out so I could see what great work was happening at other agencies and what to aspire to next year. Over the years, the excitement of award season has faded but I still recognize value they create for their particpants.
Last night’s ADDYs were a success for the agency, we walked away with a bronze for our client Manheim in the direct marketing category and received a silver ADDYs for a website we built for The Bantam Group. It was work done for “real” clients that are very happy to know that they’re not the only ones who appreciated the work. This is good stuff. Great for client relationships and great for the moral of the people working their ass off to make great work and happy clients.
So why should I feel conflicted? Well, I have my reasons.
Reasons I don’t like award shows
Becaue you shouldn’t need confirmation from your peers that you’re doing good for your clients. You should just do good.
They bread cheating and irresponsible behavior from some agencies. Trust me, this isn’t an isolated incident.
Because there has been a little cronyism in these things over the years. I didn’t see that last night, but I’ve seen it.
I an iconoclast and I just can’t help going against the grain.
Reasons I love award shows
If you win just a few awards it can help your career.
They help agencies attract top talent.
Awards can help bring the right vendors to projects.
They can be a nice pat on the back for cubicle rats working in a business (award shows aside) that doesn’t do a lot of day-to-day back patting.
They are a great way to see what your peers are working on.
Open bars.
By my count, there are definitely more reasons to keep participating in the shows than not. So you’ll probably see me again next year, standing by the bar cheering friends on and hoping I’ll have good news for our clients in the morning.
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Top 10 signs you’re a douchey agency type?
- Image by Tacit Requiem via Flickr
Now more than ever, we agency professionals cannot afford to have cliche’ agency jerks among our ranks. There’s enough tension with clients and providers thanks to the economic hardships. So please, if you recognize any of these behaviors as something you or your colleagues do, please do your best to put a stop to it.
- Do you sigh every time a client opens their mouth to offer criticism?
- Do you say things like, “obviously, you don’t understand” when you fail to properly explain the agency’s thinking?
- Do you pretend to understand digital terms like analytics, UI, and RSS then blow them off as irrelevant or below your pay grade?
- Do you put more effort in arguing about the size of the logo than improving your knowledge base?
- Do you think SEO is someone else’s job?
- Do you think web video is just another way to sell your 30 second TV spot?
- Do you discount the client’s ideas without thinking how to improve them first?
- Do you spend more time thinking about how you look than the way your work makes the client look?
- Do you think pitching the client another iPhone apps makes you cutting edge?
- Do you constantly refer to the awards you won during the last Ice Age?
I am not so sorry to say that you’ve been outmoded. The future doesn’t need you. Please get out of the business before you bring the ship down with you. The client’s never liked you and they’re beginning to figure out they don’t need you, your sporty clothes and fancy way of talking. They need someone with a deep understanding of digital, social and branding – who wants to be a real partner.
OK. OK. So I’m having a little fun. But I’m sure you can name a few agency jerk behaviors that are hurting our business.
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Managing the noise. What to do about Twitter overload.
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So you have already drunk the Twitter Koolaide. You’ve been tweeting awhile and now you have a few hundred followers and are following more people than you can keep track of using Twitter.com on your browser. And you’re beginning to feel that you’re probably not getting all that you could out of your Twitter experience because of an information nozzle that is blasting so hard you’ve lost control of what you’re reading.
Now you’re wondering, “do I need to unfollow a hundred people because I’m not too interested in everything they’re tweeting?” They all seemed so interesting at first but now – not so much. Will they unfollow me if I unfollow them? Probably. And that may be OK. But if you selfishly want to hang on to them and not hurt anyone’s feelings, there’s a solution.
Thankfully, twitter now has a built in tool to help this problem: Twitter Lists. Lists allow you to group your favorite Tweeters into a single browser window. You can even create groups for specific topics. So if you’re interested in learning about a particular news story, click the “news” list you created of pundits or journalists. Or if maketing is your bag, create one of marketing professionals you respect.
You can also look at other people’s lists and get a feel if your missing something.
If you use a tool like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or Seesmic these lists can be integrated into your desktop tool or iPhone app. (CoTweet is also an excellent tool but focused on enterprise users. If that’s you, I highly recommend it.)
If you use Seesmic of Tweetdeck (Hootsuite is phasing out groups and wants you to use Twitter’s lists) you can use groups to create columns to easily scan and not have them part of your actual Twitter account. I find Tweetdecks function to be easy to use. And since I manage three accounts, ease of use is extremely important to me.
These tools should help you make more sense out of Twitter stream with a bit of time spent getting caught up sorting. I’m constantly tweaking my Tweetdeck groups to try and make sure I have the best information stream possible.
One problem lists doesn’t solve is the DM conundrum. I find that I’m consistently auto DM’d so I tend not to pay much attention to what’s in my DM inbox. I could just unfollow anyone that does that but I’m conscious that some people don’t know they’re being annoying by sending automated messages, so I’m giving everyone the benefit of doubt.
The things that will get people unfollowed by me is spamming me with porn or otherwise offensive stuff and auto blasting me with 10 tweets at a time in attempt to capitalize my stream. I’d rather tweeters be interesting than annoying.
Hope these tips help. If anyone has any to add please add to comments.
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Give yourself a holiday bonus
It’s been a difficult year in advertising and marketing to say the least. The worst in my memory. And the memory of everyone I’ve talked to – even the old timers.
Signs point to a recovery in the spring for most businesses but the agency business is always quicker to suffer in downturns and the last to reap the benefits of an upswing. This means the real hiring gains may not be felt till summer and maybe even later. Plus many traditional agency jobs may be gone forever as budgets shift permanently to web based marketing.
What’s a poor soul to do in such a challenging environment? Give your self a holiday bonus. No. Don’t go out and spend money on something expensive and fun. Rather, do something for yourself that will improve you and your marketability. Like:
Read a book on social media marketing. I can recommend two – Word of Mouth Marketing
Take a class, do an online tutorial, or read a book on a new program and actually learn it. Any skill development or Web related will certainly be positive for your future.
Improve your presentation skill by taking a improv class or joining toastmasters.
Volunteer to take on a new initiative at work.
Become expert in another marketable skill that you already have. I’m currently refining my photography sills.
What do you think people can do for themselves for the holidays? I’d love to know what you think.
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White elephants, advertising, and interactive and social media marketing
Are you prepared for the risk?
Today we’re doing our annual white elephant gift exchange. It can be a blast if you end up with a nice bottle of wine or an iTunes gift card. However, the unlucky end up with garden gnomes and REO Speedwagon LP’s. You never know what you’ll end up with in the end which makes it a lot more exciting than secret Santa, where you simply get what you deserve. The uncertainty of how it will end, and the promise of a potentially great gift, makes playing worth while.
The truth of marketing and advertising these days is a lot closer to white elephants than it is the old days of advertising. With the explosion of media content and the tools consumers have to avoid your marketing, you’d be foolish to expect every single effort to be either an unbridled success or failure. There are few opportunities to hit a home run and reach a truly mass audience these days – unless you really want to spend your entire marketing budget on a single Super Bowl impression.
Let’s just acknowledge the truth, there’s a great deal of dumb luck involved in what someone types into a search engine or browser address bar. It just can’t be controlled. Back in the days of popular magazine titles and three networks, assumptions were and could safely be made.
I think this means we all have to play. But play with the assumption that sometimes it’s going to go really well, sometimes not so well, and will usually go as expected. And if we bring the right attitude and strategy to the game, it can be a whole lot of fun trying.
Update: In case you’re wondering, I ended up with a bag of airplane-sized vodka bottles. One watermelon flavored. They’ll remain in my desk drawer in case of emergency.
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Hey flash people, it’s a mobile world
I’m just about over Flash forever. I once heard flash refered to as it as the “flashy gold chain of the internet.” I tend to agree – especially when it’s used for a site intro. But I am guilty of using it on sites in the past, some of which I would still defend.
I do have some caveats to my being over Flash statement. Flash video and banners are effective uses of media that’s not meant to be search able. It’s, served paid media after all. So if you’re browsing with a mobile browser, you shouldn’t be served it anyway. Also, some specific sites and applications inside a site that do not need to be searched and are not intended to be dynamic content are fine as long as it’s properly tagged and you have some other content to drive your SEO. But you just better be ready to live with the Flash content for awhile.
So where does this loathing of Flash come from?
Search engines still hate it.
It’s a pain in the ass to make changes.
It takes more time to execute most things in Flash which can be a real drag on making deadlines.
The biggest reason though is incompatibility with mobile. And mobile is more important than ever.
Some accounts have 1/3 of all internet usage on mobile devices. And mobile web usage is supposed to double in the next three years. So why the hell would you build a site that doesn’t work on mobile? Of course, you could just build two sites and have one served to mobile browsers. But why not just build one great site?
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Fast enough is the new good enough
Pick two and only two sides
Today fast enough is the new good enough.
Fortunately, this will change and clients will start by asking for quality again, in addition to cheap and fast. The cyclical nature of business will cause them to demand memorable and even entertaining work again.
Do you have a plan for this eventual turn back toward quality? Are you still trying to do the best you can with every project? Or have you been consumed by the apathy bug and just trying to get the project out the door on time? The worst situation you can find yourself in is focused only on fast and cheap when your clients want good again. So ask your self on the next rush job – is this as good as it can be, or is just cheap and fast enough?
12.7.09Loose you inhibitions
My 3 year old had a ballet recital this weekend. It was awesome. 20 little girls just throwing it all out there for the sheer joy of doing something they enjoy. Big smiles on their faces and having the time of their short lives.
Ballet is new to them and they’re finding great joy in it. However, the longer us adults do something the more inhibited we become. We’re afraid to show that we’re amateurs and end up paralyzed.
But the fact is, most of us are amateurs at social media. Even the media professionals are. They may spend the day working on old media but they too are fish out of water when it comes to blogging. And even though social media is part of my job, it’s constantly changing, putting me and any participant on a perpetually steep learning curve. A curve that I embrace – it keeps things interesting.
So why not loose your inhibitions a bit in this space? Reach out, engage and be creative. Be that three year old just doing it for the joy of it. How can you make a fool of yourself if we’re all still learning?
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Is content the future of advertising?
- Image by neonihil via Flickr
I’m writing this from the set. I’m a day and a half into the production of a series of informational videos for a B2B client. Trust me, if you’re not in the automotive wholesale remarketing business, you probably won’t ever want to see them. And that’s totally fine.
Over the past six months, I’d say half of the projects I’ve worked on haven’t been traditional branding or promotional, they fall into the category of content. They are created to directly inform the audience/customer about the category. That’s right, mostly-unbiased information.
This is a huge swing compared to when I first entered the business. Then the internet was new and branding was all the rage. The majority of the work we produced was to reinforce the brand name and its unique selling position.
Now Mark Earls is telling us the big idea is dead. And the 30 second spot is also dead. So is it time to contemplate the future of advertising messaging? I’m going to go on the record and say that this more altruistic form of “solution selling” is here to stay, especially in B2B categories and for high-involvement purchases. Frankly, people would much rather buy from a helpful teacher than a class clown or a loud-mouthed salesman. Especially when the purchase matters.
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Quick take on BlogWell
As an agency professional, I really enjoyed BlogWell. It provided a great insight into how social media efforts are viewed, integrated, and deployed by big brands.
There was a lot of learning to be had from the individual presenters which I’ll go into in a later post. But there were a few 10,000-foot view take aways too.
I was impressed with the level of dialog. No presenter thought that had to tell people why the subject was important or gave a 101. And no remedial questions were asked in the sessions I attended. This to me means that this subject that is so near and dear to us is becoming less esoteric.
None of the case studies were presented as experiments. These were all projects with senior by-in and are being taken seriously as part of a broader communications strategy.
No obsession with ROI that I’ve seen at other venues – mostly coming from agency professionals.
Obviously, this could be an anomaly, but it seems to me on a day in November, in Atlanta, GA, social media had grown up a bit.
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