Some people who get divorced from or break up with a lover often talk about how they forgot why they ever got involved with their special someone in the first place. Or they just wonder what happened to the love. As if it was a magical thing that came and went with the wind.

These kinds of emotions are often felt in the client agency relationships too. The old story goes – people change, grow and become disconnected.  They  begin to take each other for granted. Sooner or later they just don’t understand each other any more.

What’s a marketer to do? You’re landscape is changing on you daily. Money is tighter. Stress has never been higher. Doesn’t my “partner” understand what I’m going through? Maybe. Maybe not. Have you explained it to them lately?

Marketer, believe me. This one is a two way street and I’m not blaming you. And frankly, you’re the one with hand in the relationship. Agencies need to do more to nurture the love and keep the spark alive. If that means more face time, a trip to a conference, a happy hour on you or a trip to a ball game do it, weekly.

Maintaining chemistry long term isn’t something that’s easy even when true love is involved. Sooner or later you’re going to have a spat about billable hours. And if you don’t have a rock solid foundation and open lines of communication it could get ugly.

That’s why you’ve got to take a few moments to remember why you guys got together in the first place. To recall what it was like when you went stag to party. And never forget what it was like in that old relationship where you had irreconcilable differences.

Maybe talk this through with your partner every now and then. Remind them how happy you were when she helped you with that amazing presentation and about the day you got to tell your boss about the awards and the amazing ROI numbers. Good luck and please don’t forget.

Part of the creative’s job these days is to develop ways to encourage sharing a new campaign. It’s no longer enough to create brilliant creative that connects with the audience. Now, creative needs to be so powerful that it encourages “engagement” and “sharing.”

Read the rest here.

It’s been a few weeks since I posted here and for good reason. But this really isn’t the time or place to talk about it. (If you’re my Facebook friend and you know me personally, you already know why I haven’t posted.)

I’ve written here before about the need to post frequently and maintain a  constant presence. Consistently creating high-quality content is the best way to build influence in the social media sphere and to increase the chances that  posts be featured high in search results.

What if you’re not up to creating high-quality content? Jim Rome the popular sports DJ jokes that he has to go “down in the basement and recharge the batteries” every now and then to keep the quality of his program up to  his standards. This is a human and normal thing to do – yet professionals still feel the need to tweet their vacations away. Stop it.

If you’re in a corporate environment you need a plan for your personal time. For the agency blog, we keep a couple generic articles in reserve that can be posted when people are on vacation – we advise clients to do the same. If you’re a personal blogger you can do something similar, posting before your vacation but not have the posts go live  till you’re far away from responsibility – WordPress makes this really easy. Or you can just give yourself a break. I did and I don’t feel guilty.

Ever met someone who never takes sides. Never makes a clear decision. Always wants the group to decide so he doesn’t run the risk of making anyone upset. You probably called this person wishy washy, indecisive or maybe even weak. And never a leader.

Now imagine this person is your brand. A lot of marketers are scared to death that someone may call, email, write a letter to the editor or, God forbid, tweet their dissatisfaction. They would rather stand for nothing then have someone rant about their product on their Facebook wall.

Now think of a person with strong opinions maybe even famous people with strong opinions. Those people probably have a lot of lovers and haters. Most politicians are that way and many business leaders are that way too  –like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Yet their brands represent the two largest market capitalization in the world (Exxon is the only US company with a larger market cap than Apple).

People find their personalities both attracting and appalling as well as the products these companies offer. Sure, they are unique individuals and companies but that’s the point. So is Tony Heish and Zappos. Or Mark Cuban and his Dallas Mavericks and HDNet. And of course, Martha Stewart and Omnimedia.

A company doesn’t have to have a strong CEO to stand for something either. You probably don’t know who the CEO of Disney is now that Michael Eisner (or Walt) is gone but you understand what the brand represents (yes there are people who hate the mouse). And what about Porsche? Or say Burberry?

A brand can stand for something just through the products it makes or the service it offers. But is often communicated effectively through it’s marketing and advertising. I’m not going to dissect ad campaigns and say which ones run the risk of offending and which make a stand. It’s pretty obvoius when they do and when they don’t.

As a writer and creative person, inspiration is something I’m supposed to know a lot about. I shouldn’t need your help, because I’m inspired to write witty, interesting things all the time, right? Certainly I’ve got a direct line to the muse? Unfortunately, there’s no bat phone for writers.

Article continues here on agency blog.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what the future’s creative department should look like and who it should be headed by. Do traditional shops need to get rid of their old guard and make way for leaders and practitioners steeped in the traditions of the digital shops?

Surely they need to get rid of dated thinking. Kick out folks who can’t code, tag, and develop an app. And there’s no one who understands how to make use of the new tools available than someone with a digital background. Right?

But what about all that brand stuff? Is a techno creative really better equipped to communicate the client’s brand story than someone who’s been focused on it their entire career? Aren’t the truly great communicators capable of doing their job in more than old-school traditional media?

Digital creatives are getting dinged for lack of branding and planning experience. While traditional creatives apparently can’t grasp the internet. But are either of these characterizations fair?

I think people are getting too caught up on resumes and not focused enough on real skills. For example, I work at a traditional agency yet the majority of the work I do lives online. Some of the work I do is even social media marketing — imagine that. Does this make me a traditional creative or a digital creative. I suspect in the eyes of many recruiters who can’t get past a resume it makes me a traditionalist. But I just see myself as being current.

Marketers need professionals that can tell their story and engage their customers in all media. Be it on Twitter or on a billboard. And that is best done by a media neutral creative, working off a media neutral brief, for a media neutral media buy.

I don’t think the best creative comes from a digital or a traditional background. What is important is their grasp of  today’s tool, the future, and the client’s business.

Too many marketing departments spend countless hours navel gazing, trying to find a omniscient inner-voice. This oracle is supposed to communicate who they are as a company and what they need to tell their customers so that they will finally understand the value they offer the world. It never works.

Sorry, navel gazers, your belly button can’t help you. Finding yourself might have been the mantra of 70s-self-help gurus but you’ll need to listen to your customers first if you want to make your marketing relevant to them.

Even worse, this feel good approach most often leads to corporate chest pounding. “Your number one source for widgets.” “The market leader in top-quality widgets.” Messaging no one gives a damn about outside the company and most customers will even find off putting. After all, who wants to listen to someone who only talks about themselves.

This approach totally ignores what the customer cares about. If you’re spending all your time discovering yourself, you’re not discovering the hopes and desires of your customers. Just your own.

The saddest part is there’s never been an easier time to really get to know what your customer wants and what they care about. Just fire up your internet browser and get to know them better. They’re putting everything on record for you through social media. Heck, you don’t even have to actually talk to them to get to know what makes them tick.

To be clear, this isn’t to say who you are as a company isn’t important – as long as it’s focused with the perspective of the customer. An easy to understand example of this is — UPS. What can brown do for you?

There’s a kind of deviant you can find in lurking in most ad agencies. Sometimes they’ve made it to the top, sometimes they’re just bottom dwellers but they rarely have a passion for what an agency actually produces – creative solutions to business problem. But they do aim to please the client and maybe even collect a tip along the way.

Here are the top 10 signs you are one of these enemies to the work:

1. You worry more about the presentation than the substance.
2. You think your job is to get creative to understand the client’s postion and not to solve the client’s underlying problem.
3. A brief is a “form” you fill out to get the creatives to do their damn job.
4. Your unique selling position is access to a skybox at the stadium.
5. The client is your “friend” and not a business partner or colleague.
6. You get the traffic manager to do your dirty work.
7. Your best comeback is “but this is what the client wants.”
8. Your job has more to do with managing projects than solving problems.
9. You feel you need to apologize if you come back to the client with a better solution than was asked for.
10. You expect everything you jot down on a pad from the customer’s mouth to come hot off the grill ASAP without any back talk.

Quick, how many copy points can you fit into a 60 second radio spot? The answer should be one.

But many ads that really suck the big one are about two or three things – maybe even more. This is real easy to observe in a print ad. Just open your local newspaper (if you still have one). You’re bound to find on the first couple pages an ad with something nebulous resembling a headline and, beneath that, five to fifteen bullet points describing everything the company does under the sun. These “ads” are more like a business plan than effective marketing communication.

News flash business plan publishers – your potential customers don’t care about your plans to make a mint from them. They don’t care how you make money. And frankly, they don’t even care if you do make money.

They’ll only care about you if you can make their life better. And confusing them with a bunch of pointless information won’t do that. It will just annoy them and make them want to buy something from your competitor instead.

Besides being strategically wrong, these ads are supremely flawed in execution. Now imagine you are at the hardware store and you need to buy something to cut steel. Would you buy something that also sawed wood, picked your teeth, had a magnifying glass on it and also promised to file your finger nails? A Swiss Army knife is good for a lot of things but it’s not a great knife (especially for cutting steel).

Now picture of single reinforced blade without any tricky gizoms. Just a long narrow piece of forged steel attached to an elegantly designed handle. It does just one thing and does it brilliantly: it cuts through the bullshit.

To keep from sucking, that’s what your advertising must do. Cut through all the clutter and bullshit while making a single minded case for purchasing your product.

There’s been a lot of hand wringing lately about what an advertising is and what it should be in the digital age. That conversation should not muddy this water. Because when you strip away all the discussion about technology, advertising needs to engage a customer and inform them about a product or a service. Simple, uncomplicated, well-executed messages in whatever medium will do that. Ugly, complicated, poorly-executed messages won’t. Period.

Every creative in the business has a portfolio.

It’s our calling card, our proof of worth, and our stamp of identity all rolled into one.

Resume? Why do people even have those when a book says so much more about your ability to work wonders day in and day out?

It’s not just creative people that help to make a project great. Besides us creative people that carry books throughout our careers, great account people are also crucial to to getting brilliant creative produced. Yet so few actually have a portfolio. Shouldn’t they? Don’t they love what they do.

I actually worked with a few portfolio carrying AEs in California and Oregon. It wasn’t that many and I’ve often thought that as an industry we should try and acknowledge the contributions of the entire team that touches a project before it exits the door. When everyone feels ownership, everyone fights harder to make the work great.

When I work with an AE I want to know that she has the same passion for the business that I do. That she’s equally proud of the results of the results of her hard work as I am. I understand the emotional connection to the works isn’t the same with account folks — but shouldn’t everyone be proud of a job well done and be ready to show it off.