October 15, 2015

If You Want to be Successful in the Ad Business…Part One

It’s almost impossible to go it alone in advertising. It is, after all, a collaborative business.

Part one focuses on developing partnerships that evolve into friendships. Let me illustrate a game of six-degrees-of-separation for a moment.

If I asked you who John Orr Young was, the response, most likely, would be a head scratch. But if I tell you he was an agency account guy who partnered with a talented writer named Raymond Rubicam? Well, you’d most likely get Young & Rubicam.

McCann had Erickson. Weiden, of course, is inextricably linked to Kennedy. The list goes on and on. Would they have succeeded on their own? Maybe. Would they have created such lasting legacies? Maybe not.

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October 3, 2015

The Importance of the IDEA FACTORY

Ideas are the lifeblood of our business.

I learned in my first year at a Washington, D.C., public and government relations shop that ideas generated from credible, insightful information and translated into creative, measurable strategy separated the pretenders from the ladder climbers. That is still the case!

I was fortunate 25 years ago when I moved from Capitol Hill public servant to communications and lobbying. My first boss was masterful at conceptualizing strategic tactics to advance clients’ priorities. One day he handed out T-shirts with the words “The Idea Factory” and a graphic featuring a large golden light bulb being pulled out of a factory by many smaller light bulbs, excited by their collaboration. Our company logo was featured on the large light bulb.

Since then I continue to strive to offer my clients the “big idea” that will help catapult them forward. Every consultant should focus on connecting the dots for clients and generating ideas that inspire, persuade and build lasting relationships.

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August 21, 2015

Use Twitter to Tighten Up Your Writing

A consultant once told me that “tighter is righter.” A handful of well-chosen words provides so much more power than paragraphs that endlessly spool on and on and dilute themselves.

As a guy who writes advertising slogans and headlines, I’ll tell you right away that a powerful one-line headline trumps anything I can do in the descriptive copy to follow. If I can’t punch through the clutter and noise and commandeer your attention with a three-word statement, then whatever wonderful language I employ in describing the product is moot, because you’ve already moved on. Luckily for me (and the many others who make a living by churning out words) modern social media is a perfect whetstone to sharpen our verbal tools.

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August 5, 2015

The Future of Innovation is Customer Co-Creation

I’ve always believed in the idiom “two heads are better than one,” but what happens when a company adopts that mantra and expands on it? What happens when a company involves not only two people, not only their entire company, but outside consumers in their decision-making? If done right, it can transform your business into an efficient, innovative, and profitable machine.

This process in which companies involve consumers in the design and development of their business’s offerings is called customer co-creation. Customer co-creation focuses on understanding and meeting consumers’ needs and if a business is willing to listen, there are many benefits to this tactic.

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July 30, 2015

The Medium and the Message Are Connected

Buying media is not quantum physics. You have your message, your demographic, and your medium. As long as you can match them up efficiently, voila, your message is heard and your work is done.

Hypothetical example: your furniture client is having a huge two-day sale on futons. The target audience is women 25 to 54. We know they are most likely listening to WMEE-FM and WQHK-FM and watching the six p.m. local news and Wheel of Fortune. That’s what our trusted sources at Arbitron and Nielsen tell us. They’re driving by the same billboard every day on their commute into work. They’re checking Facebook throughout the day. If we’re lucky, they’re googling “futon sales” to find the best deal in town. In a perfect world with unlimited budgets, we can buy all media that this demo consumes and achieve a reach of 100% with a frequency that is sure to bring them into your client’s store. But it’s not a perfect world. With a limited budget, our job becomes more complex. Not as complex as quantum physics, more like rocket science.
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