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Preparing for Our Book Launch Event

Monday, October 5th, 2009

hack night logos

In a matter of hours, at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, about 240 Bridge Worldwide employees will launch a social-media marketing experiment to support the launch of our new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. I’m excited about the launch, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the groups’ work—and I look forward to readers’ participation and feedback.

The book officially launched on Friday, October 2, and it got off to a great start. That morning Advertising Age published an outstanding book review by Pete Blackshaw. I could not have asked for a better and compelling review of the book, and sure enough the sales lift-off was immediate. On Amazon.com, the book rose to the #1,200 seller across all books, and shot up to #2 in the Advertising category, just under The Tipping Point. McGraw-Hill emailed me soon after to let me know that they are already getting ready for a second printing. Thanks to all of you for helping me along the way and for your early book orders.

Tomorrow morning our entire company is going to try to generate some more buzz around the book by engaging in an exercise modeled after P&G’s successful “Hack Night” from back in March 2009. You might recall that the company brought together a couple hundred senior-level marketers and external digital experts for an evening to compete on teams, using social-media tools to sell the most Tide T-shirts in support of its “Loads of Hope” cause marketing program. I got to attend that event and saw it not only raise a lot of money in a few hours, but also get people to learn by working together and experimenting.

A few months ago, our President, Jay Woffington, asked me if we might do our own company-wide “Hack Night” in support of the book launch. His goal was to not only juice book sales, but to give all of our people a chance to further improve their digital sensibility by rolling up our sleeves and working together. This conversation spawned a project and a team and tomorrow’s event.

Here’s how it will work: The goal of the competition is to get as many people as possible to download the free chapter of the book.  We decided to do this because the free chapter itself is Marketing with Meaning, and it is much easier to track chapter downloads than actual book sales. We have split up the company into teams, and assigned each team a specific medium to use to market the free chapter: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, WPP resources, and this blog and community. The teams first met a little more than a week ago to start planning and preparing, and tomorrow at 9 a.m. they will begin their activities in earnest. We will have them each in separate War Rooms, with a live monitor feeding in the total downloads of each team. Everyone will stop working at 1 p.m. so we can go to have some fun at our annual company offsite, where we will announce the winner of the contest and present a few other awards.

Already people to seem to be having fun and are learning a lot. I don’t know much about what they have planned, though. A few teams have asked me mysterious questions, and one team dragged me into a room to film something before I left on a trip last week. “Winning” is one of the key words of our agency’s equity, so I’m sure the competition will be hot and heavy.

My only fear for the day is that the competition will drive people to do things that end up angering our carefully crafted audience. During the P&G Hack Night, one of my friends, Kevin Doohan, who knows several of the participants, wrote about how the contest felt like spamming. I have tried to reduce this risk by providing a coaching brief on how to approach people, as well as how to ask for forgiveness when you make a mistake. But I am sure that some of you might find tomorrow’s event annoying. I apologize in advance and hope that you see that our hearts are in the right place.

Although I am the author of this book and the most public voice of “Marketing with Meaning” I really believe that I am just one of many members of what can be an important movement. This idea has been driven by nearly everyone at Bridge Worldwide, readers of this blog have been incredibly supportive during the past 18 months, and now we have new tools such as our community to bring others into the cause. I am excited that our experiment tomorrow might give many more people exposure to what we’re trying to do together, and give more people the chance to be a part of driving a better future for marketing and society.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Sampling, book | 4 Comments »

A Meaningful 90-Second Sales Pitch

Monday, September 21st, 2009

imedia card 1

Last week I had the chance to present our Marketing with Meaning concept and hand out copies of my new book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, at the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego. There were some excellent case studies, including a Dunkin’ Donuts case that I wrote about here on Friday. But today I wanted to share an interesting experiment of my own that shows how meaningful marketing can even be the basis of a 90-second new business pitch.

One of the recurring iMedia events is something that its organizers call “One Minute Matchups.”  It’s essentially a speed-dating concept in which “buyers” sit at tables around a room and “sellers” rotate every minute or two and pitch their product or service. As odd as it may seem, it can actually be very useful. For both buyers and sellers it is a low-investment way to quickly size up whether there is enough interest to merit a follow-up discussion, and both sides get to weed out those that are not a great fit.

In March of this year I first experienced the “One Minute Matchups” concept at iMedia’s Breakthrough conference. In this case, I was a “buyer” and many specialty media vendors and digital services companies rotated to speak with me. I was disappointed, though, that nearly all of the 40 sellers I met with had done zero research on my agency. So most of the first 90 seconds was me answering their question, “What does Bridge Worldwide do?”  Needless to say, I didn’t find any great matches.

But this time was a little bit different. On Thursday evening, just 36 hours before my flight out, I got an email from the folks at iMedia with a list of companies that I would be matched up with. I actually had no idea that my keynote address would afford me this opportunity. As an agency guy at this conference I was to be in the “seller” position, so now it would be my turn to see if I could do a better job of pitching. I huddled with Jonathan Richman, my Director of Business Development (and top blogger over at Dose of Digital). We quickly decided that I had to do something meaningful in my matchups, and likely something related to my keynote topic. We decided that the best thing to do would be to bring each company one or two ideas for how they might practice meaningful marketing. I stayed up until 1 a.m. that night coming up with ideas by using their websites and my gut as a guide.  Then on Friday Jonathan and Carole Amend from our team worked on turning these ideas into blown-up cards with the idea on one side and my contact information on the other.  I picked them up Saturday morning on the way to the airport and they looked great.  The image at the top of the screen is one example (the person from Atkins didn’t show up), and at the bottom you can see the contact info side.

Now, let me pause to say that it’s very, very difficult to sell a full-service digital agency like Bridge Worldwide in only 90 seconds. While brand managers may feel free to “date” specialty service providers, working with a full-service agency is like getting married–as you typically stay with the agency for a long time and make them strategic partners on the core business. Maybe one or two of the marketers in attendance expected to hire an agency sometime soon. My real goal was to leave each person with a positive brand experience with Bridge Worldwide, so that when they are looking for a new i-agency at some future time they remember to give us a call.

It was an interesting experience sharing my ideas at the event.  My time with the first group of about 25 marketers came before I had given my keynote speech, so they had no clue who I was or what I was speaking about. My approach was certainly unlike others that the marketers had experienced. About one-third of them reacted very positively and were appreciative to get something personalized and clever.  The other two-thirds had a hard time figuring out how to respond, mainly because they thought I was selling them a specific idea. So there was some defensiveness (“we already have an agency”) and dismissal (“we tried that once and it didn’t work).  I felt pretty good, though, because I knew my keynote the next day would help connect the dots in their minds.

Sure enough, when I went to the next batch of matchups just minutes after leaving the stage of my keynote address, every marketer I spoke to understood what I was doing. I also changed my talking points a bit to adjust, for example, by starting off with “I’m not selling you an idea; I’m selling you on how we work as an agency partner.” People were overwhelmingly positive and excited to hear the ideas I shared, and a handful promised to reach out on some specific work.

But one of the best things about this approach was that I really enjoyed these one-minute matchups.  The decision to bring a unique idea for everyone forced me to do my homework on the companies, and better prepared me for longer discussions with prospects over meals and cocktails.  The ideas gave me more confidence in sitting down with a stranger for 90 seconds, and I felt great knowing that I would be giving them something worth remembering when they got back to the office later that week.  This approach was more meaningful to me, too.

Part of me thought that I shouldn’t write this blog post and share this idea with the world. I wondered if now everybody else would take the idea and outdo us at the next iMedia show.  But the reality is that most people just don’t bother to make the effort. It’s too easy to stick with the traditional path and “rules” of the game, whether you’re a salesperson or a big brand. But it goes to show that our success is less about what our competitors do, and more about how we take advantage of new opportunities. And as my friend Brian McNamara always said, “If it was easy, anyone could do it.”

imedia card 2

Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Conferences, Organizational Behavior | 1 Comment »

Crispin’s New Site Shows Smart Branding

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

crispin beta site

My buddy and our agency’s President, Jay Woffington, is a master of comparing diverse data and figuring out how they add up to a common issue or opportunity. One of his favorite sayings is, “Two points make a line,” meaning that there can be a direct link between seemingly unrelated data or events. Well, it seems that we have another genuine trend on our hands, as now there are three prominent examples of companies that have turned over their websites to open social-media input by featuring unedited Twitter comments, Wikipedia entries, Facebook friends, and blog posts. First was Modernista!, an advertising agency, and next came the Skittles brand. Both experienced a mainly positive burst of buzz. The third example comes from another ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which has a live beta site that is attracting attention. Although the trend seems real, the questions linger: Is it meaningful… and it is worth the risk?

On the first question, I increasingly believe that adopting social media into your home page can be a powerful positive for customers. I say “increasingly” because the social-media space is evolving with the new digital social norms that are still self-organizing before our eyes. It is clear that already people are using social networks to judge any brand that they come across, whether it is posting a question to friends on Facebook, reading a review on an e-commerce site, or using Google, which often draws from personal reviews on blogs and discussion boards. So at the same time that people are visiting your brand’s website, they have a few other open browser tabs with this information. For forward thinkers such as Modernista!, Skittles, and Crispin, the logic is that they might as well go ahead and showcase this social media on the home page. So in this basis alone the approach is meaningful marketing.

The biggest marketing benefit can come when the brand website visitor first arrives and sees several positive stories, tweets, and blog posts. People judge a website and brand within microseconds, and some trusted, impartial comments on the home page can make a big impact. Instead of cluttering this moment of truth with ad copy, why not defer to the more-trusted comments of other customers? That’s what a billion-dollar brand that I used to work on, Tide, figured when it recently launched a home page redesign featuring actual user reviews front and center. And Juicy Juice is testing a banner ad that presents live tweets from moms.

But what about the risk and bad stories and comments that might appear at this moment of truth? Well, Crispin saw just what that looks like last week. First, it lost the Volkswagen account, which led to a rash of negative tweets and stories. It’s never fun to lose a big client, and worse to see the news everywhere. Second, the company took a lot of heat for running a contest in which it invited designers to create a new logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo for a $1,000 top prize. Many in the design industry felt that this was undermining and cheapening their craft. Again, another round of negatives has filled its beta home page. In fact, the very public space and open ability to add a negative comment likely invites a much more negative response than one would otherwise see. It’s the chance to hold a virtual picket sign on the company’s front lawn.

So Crispin would call this a failure, right? I don’t think so. They are smart enough to have anticipated the negatives that can happen and I believe they fully embrace the haters. Even negatives can end up being positive in this case. First, it shows that the company is in the center of the action and they matter. This falls under the age-old line that even bad publicity is better than no publicity. The second benefit is that this open acceptance of hate media actually helps them attract the right clients, those who want to take risks and want to build a brand with a little controversy. Jason Bender, one of our top Creative Directors and leader of the team that recently won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes for a Pringles banner ad (that was somewhat controversial), said it best in our conversation about the issue:

“This shows people that Crispin is not for everyone, and that they don’t mind alienating the tight-asses they don’t want as clients. This helps them weed out the bad prospects.”

With this open site, negatives and all, Crispin as a brand is living and breathing the kind of marketing that it does for its clients. Brands such as Burger King, MINI, and Microsoft hired the agency in order to stir up attention, and they’ve all gotten what they wanted. In fact, Volkswagen chose to look for a new agency because it felt it needed to broaden its marketing to a wider audience. This will likely mean more watered down creative and Crispin wouldn’t want to do it anyway.

Interestingly, this Crispin story comes just as we at Bridge Worldwide have started to dabble social media on our Web presence. You might have noticed that we just launched our new Marketing with Meaning site, and on the home page we decided to feature a live feed of Twitter posts that include anyone who uses my handle, @mktgwithmeaning. We actually got to this idea in a roundabout way. We asked Ryan, our Web developer, to try to increase interest in our Twitter account on the home page, and he wrote an Ajax widget that brought in live tweets. We loved the idea, but I hated seeing my picture 15 times running down the screen. Someone mentioned that we could bring in retweets and other @replies. I immediately loved the idea because it would show the new visitor at this moment of truth that this is a popular topic that others are talking about. Second, I knew that the people who followed the Marketing with Meaning cause would appreciate that we were giving them at least a few minutes of public attention on our home page. And this in turn would lead to more tweets.

But what about the negatives of our modest effort? Jay and I actually had a long conversation about what could go wrong. Our agency recently got dinged a bit on something we shared publicly, so we felt the need to be cautious. We thought about the worst that could happen: Someone could, say, protest our work for a client and flood the site with negative tweets. If a client CEO with no social-media understanding (rare, I know) visited the site and saw this on our own home page it could be a huge negative. However unlikely, it is possible, so we made some plans to deal with it, but launched the tool regardless.

Bridge Worldwide is no Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We don’t believe that we need to embrace controversy to build brands. However we do have a very defined point of view on the kind of work we want to do for clients: Marketing with Meaning. This blog, the Twitter feed, the upcoming book, and more all are tools that we use to put ourselves out there for client consideration. When I speak with clients and prospects about this concept I say that sometimes our work will be interruptive and less meaningful if that is what is called for; after all, we exist first and foremost to serve our clients’ needs. But I quickly follow that this is our starting point for all recommendations, and that we’re going to challenge them continuously to move in this direction.

Just as Crispin has successfully attracted clients that follow its brand belief, I hope that our focus on Marketing with Meaning will attract more of the clients we want: brands that buy into our concept and are ready to buy meaningful ideas. The more public we are with this statement, the more likely we are to succeed.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter, book | 1 Comment »

Plaid Nation Tour 2009 Wraps Up

Friday, August 21st, 2009

My post is a little belated, but I wanted to give a shout-out to the team from one of the coolest advertising agencies I’ve seen or heard about, Plaid, which recently wrapped up its annual Plaid Nation tour. As I wrote about last year, the agency has been spending a few weeks each summer driving across some part of the country in a “rolling demonstration of creativity and innovation.” Its goal is to check in on cool companies and share its unique take on the marketing world.

Once again the traveling team at Plaid shared their experience with the world using live camera feeds, a blog, and a Twitter account. This year’s tour took them mostly through the heart of the Midwest, including Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans. Sadly the team did not make its way over to our home base in Cincinnati, but maybe next year.

I believe this is a great example of meaningful marketing in the ad-agency world. Companies often choose long-term agency partners based on culture fit. By taking this tour, the people of Plaid are able to show their personalities, both in real-world meetings at the offices of companies and through online tracking. Prospective clients see an agency with high energy, big ideas, and a desire to get in the trenches. It’s no wonder the agency has clients such as Segway and Virgin.

But aside from the business-building benefits, this annual trek is meaningful for Plaid’s company culture. In the agency world, you have to keep your talent inspired if you want them to continue to stay and do great work for clients. By bonding together over a few weeks and meeting new people at top companies, the agency brings needed stimulation. The Plaid Nation tour shows recruits that the agency is special, and I know that Plaid employees love to be part of this, even if they are not one of the few who hits the road.

I look forward to next year’s tour (and next year’s free blogger T-shirt), and hope Plaid rakes in a bunch of new business.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Experience, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Book Review: ‘It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For’

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Last week I trekked down to Austin, Texas, to spend some time with a fellow leader in the campaign to elevate the role of advertising, Roy Spence. I first wrote about Roy in a blog post a few months back. Our initial phone conversation then led to this trip to continue the dialogue about how we might partner up. We were able to spend some great time with Roy, his Chief Purposologist and co-author Haley Rushing, and a few other quality folks from their agency, GSD&M Idea City. We met the day after it was announced that Roy was handing his CEO role over to Duff Stewart, and he seemed extremely charged up to focus on the new Purpose Institute.

The purpose of this post is to convince you to purchase Roy and Haley’s book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For. Overall, it’s a must-read if you are a fan of this Marketing with Meaning concept and wish to drive your organization and yourself to higher-level work.

I believe the act of proclaiming a Brand Purpose is really the best way to start down the path of creating meaningful marketing. When a brand makes the decision of “Why We Exist,” it becomes much simpler to begin thinking about how you can create marketing that people choose to engage with, and marketing that itself improves people’s lives.

What is particularly insightful about It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For is that it provides an inside view of some of the most successful businesses in terms of profit and purpose. The advertising agency Roy founded out of college, GSD&M, has been fortunate enough to attract and help shape great companies such as Walmart, Southwest, Whole Foods, and BMW, all of which have stayed close to a higher-level purpose. For example, the purpose of Southwest is to “democratize air travel,” and BWM exists to “enable people to experience the joy of driving.” I agree that being on the inside of an advertising agency offers the chance to see “lifetimes” worth of the good and bad of many organizations. It’s very easy to understand which companies “get it” and which are hopelessly lost, no matter what print ad or website we create for them.

Roy and Haley weave decades of personal history together with these brands’ most recent activity, and provide a nice step-by-step guide for brands to uncover their own purpose. There are a few specific sections of the book that I underlined heavily:

Life Is Too Short to Work Without Purpose

This is something I first began thinking more about after reading The 4-Hour Workweek. In this book, author Tim Ferriss encourages cubicle dwellers to escape the office, become Internet entrepreneurs, and focus on personal hobbies for the rest of their lives. He almost looks down on for-profit, 40-hour-a-week work. I enjoyed his book in many ways, but believe that a full workweek itself can and should be rewarding and exciting. Roy and Haley remind us that:

Bookstore shelves are now fully stocked with books about finding your personal purpose. But the reality is the vast majority of your time is consumed by your work life… Whether you’re a CEO or a secretary, the majority of your time, energy and talent will be spent in the service of your work. So why not make it worthwhile?”

They go on to suggest that you find the work you love best by paying attention to “the meeting on the calendar that you’re actually excited about going to” and to “notice when your heart speeds up just thinking about an issue.” In other words, finding personal purpose is the first step in moving your company or your career toward brand purpose.

Great Takeaways from Whole Foods

While I enjoyed the deep case studies on Walmart and Southwest Airlines, I especially enjoyed two lessons from Whole Foods. First, there’s the fact that the company continues to commit to donating 5% of its sales on five days a year to nonprofits chosen by each local store. Stock analysts and some investors complain about so much of Whole Foods profits going to charities, but who can argue with a 3,000% increase in stock value over 14 years?

A second interesting observation is that Whole Foods admits that it is never going to be perfect in delivering on its Vision Statement, as seen in its “Declaration of Independence“:

We do not believe [the Vision Statement] always accurately portrays the way things currently are at Whole Foods Market so much as the way we would like things to be. It is our dissatisfaction with the current reality, when compared with what is possible, that spurs us toward excellence and toward creating a better person, company, and world. When Whole Foods Market fails to measure up to its stated Vision, as it inevitably will at times, we should not despair. Rather let us take up the challenge together to bring our reality closer to our vision. The future we will experience tomorrow is created one step at a time today.”

(On a side note, after meeting with the folks at Idea City we headed across the street to the Whole Foods headquarters store. We spent about two hours exploring the amazing selection and had a wonderful lunch in the seafood cafe.)

Conclusion

One of my favorite passages in the book is the challenge for people to be willing and able to communicate their personal+brand purpose into the dinner-party conversation. Imagine the usual first exchange when you meet someone new and he or she asks, “What do you do?” You know you’re onto something when you can proudly proclaim the higher-level drive of your work. For me, the answer is: “I create marketing that improves people’s lives.”

What’s yours?

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Posted in Agency Marketing, book, purpose | 1 Comment »

Celebrating Pringles Cannes Hands

Monday, June 29th, 2009

As most marketing readers likely know, last week was the annual Cannes Advertising Festival in France—unarguably the world’s most prominent advertising industry get-together, where the brightest creative minds in our business gather to compare the best work over the past 12 months. Last year I got to attend for the first time (with blog posts here if you’re interested), but this year I was on vacation in Italy with my family instead of Cannes.

I missed one of the biggest moments of the history of my company, Bridge Worldwide, when our team won a Gold Cyber Lions award for the Pringles banner ad above. While “only” a banner, this remarkable little ad unit offers a great case study in meaningful marketing for both B2C and B2B.

The Consumer Story: Once You Click, You Can’t Stop

Before reading any further, go ahead and click on the banner above. A new window will open to our staging server where you can see our banner in context, just like the judges at Cannes did. Spend as much or as little time interacting with it and return here to keep reading…

…Welcome back. If you’re anything like the Cannes award judges or the thousands of other people who have viewed this ad online in the past few days, you enjoyed, too. Our team created a banner ad that makes people laugh for a few minutes, and then share it with their friends online. This happens to be a perfect fit with what the Pringles brand itself is all about: a few minutes of fun, and sharing with friends.

What I love about this ad is that it takes banner space that most people ignore or find annoying, and turns it into a fun, engaging moment of play with the brand. That five minutes of fun is rewarding for the viewer who chooses to engage with it, falling under a category of meaningful marketing that we call “Entertaining Connections.”

Aside from great data on clicks and time spent with the ad, we measure its success in the word of mouth that it is drawing. Since winning the award and posting the ad on our staging server we are seeing a steady, growing number of people discovering the ad and sharing it with their social networks. Twitter in particular is becoming the barometer of the buzz, and I’m seeing about one person per minute Twittering about the ad with 100% positive comments. Here’s a sample of some of my favorite recent comments from search.twitter.com:

  • @steveklabnik: Best. Ad. Ever.  Pringles are amazing.
  • @MegLG: A banner ad that is actually engaging…Can hands: Pringles. I probably just made someone a million $ for clicking so much.
  • @lisahattery: Bored? Go here…Click on the banner ad. Keep clicking. It’s not spam or porn, I swear. I want Pringles.
  • @floatnsink: This is probably the best & only advertisement that I want to click.
  • @stuartwitts: Award winning banner ad from Pringles. Great work. Can’t remember last time a banner ad made me laugh.
  • @adamcoomes: Best banner ad I’ve ever seen. This is hilarious! Props to Pringles.
  • @hunterupton: please please PLEASE! check out this banner ad. Hilarious Pringles! it’s the best i’ve ever seen!

The Cannes judges agreed completely. In a video that was shown during the Cyber Lions event Wednesday night, they said they each spent 5 minutes on the banner, laughing out loud at their desks. Our Pringles banner was one of only 19 Gold Lions that were awarded in the entire digital category, and only six of these went to U.S.-based agencies. But what are awards for, anyway…?

It’s Starting to Go Viral

Over the weekend we started to notice comments and traffic to our staging server spike. We worked to post links on Fark, Digg, Reddit, BuzzFeed, and other places. I checked in with our Tech team Saturday afternoon and learned that more than 100,000 people had visited the page in the past day! If this was a number of views on YouTube, we would consider it a viral video success with that number alone. It will be fun to watch the traffic this week and see the other places it gets picked up.

Building the Bridge Worldwide Brand

Advertising awards are a big deal in our industry. Thousands of entries are made every year to awards shows like Cannes, with each agency hoping to get credit for the work they have done. The purpose of awards is mainly for agency marketing, a business-to-business approach. Awards allow agencies to brag about the quality of their creative work in new business pitches. But are they meaningful marketing in a B2B environment?

Many, many advertising industry pundits cry that we are too obsessed with awards. But I actually do believe that they can be meaningful to the companies that are searching for an agency partner. Here’s the rationale: First, the creative work is really the number-one thing that brands need in their advertising agencies. It’s the job they cannot do themselves. Second, it’s very, very difficult to judge the quality of an agency’s creative product through the pitching process. Case studies show work for other clients, but it is difficult to judge it because beauty is in the mind of the brief holder—i.e., clients can’t judge whether work for a different business than their own was successful or not. As a result, clients look for other ways to get comfortable with the creative potential of prospective partners.

Here’s where awards can come in—they give clients an impartial measure of the quality of creative work. Agencies that have won awards have “proof” that the work was good, as measured by very experienced judges, and as measured against many other agencies that are putting their best work up against it. While creative quality is only one piece of what clients need to see in an agency, and awards are only one of several ways to judge this, winning a big award such as a Cannes Lion shows that our agency can do some of the best work in the world.

A Cannes Lions award can also be very meaningful to an agency’s current clients. Our Pringles brand team and the senior management at P&G were ecstatic about this recognition. Within minutes of the announcement we were cheered by email from clients at all levels. A handful of top leaders got to see the show in person and they enjoyed a toast together in Cannes, immediately talking excitedly about what else we could do in this space. For P&G as a whole, it was the company’s first-ever Gold Lion in the digital category. This award is another step in the world’s largest marketer’s shift to winning in the still-developing digital space.

This win renews current clients’ confidence in us as an agency partner, shows them that we can help them compete with the best in the world, and challenges them to buy “bigger” work that we bring to them.

Impact on Our Company Culture

As an agency we only first visited the show in person last year. Our three-person delegation of Jay Woffington (President), Peter Schwartz (Chief Creative Officer), and me talked often during that week about the work we saw and wondered what it would take for us to bring home a Gold Lion. We decided that we wanted one and that our company was up to the challenge. We thought it would be a three- to five-year journey, and as Jay said, “I knew we had the ability, the talented people, and the desire… but an award such as this is not easy.”

By setting this goal and sharing our experiences with the company upon our return last year, it got our teams fired up and determined. I believe our work across the board was better in the past 12 months, and we felt confident enough to submit four pieces for Cannes. We were excited just to be short-listed for one, and the Pringles Gold win blew everyone away.

What I love is that this is truly “the agency’s award.” Our Creative Director on Pringles, Jason Bender, accepted the award on behalf of many who made it a success. As people were congratulating him late into Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, he continually deferred credit to the team behind it. And to paraphrase Bender, we all woke up Thursday morning as employees of a Cannes Gold-winning agency. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and of the agency I work for.

Conclusion

I hope this story illustrates how meaningful marketing can be a multilayered win for your brand or agency. Marketing with meaning breaks through the clutter to deliver quality work and business-building results, it gets your clients and new business prospects excited, and it can help make your company a great place to work.

As for Cannes, the statue wasn’t even back in the U.S. before Peter came to me talking about how we have a chance to win the “agency of the year” Cyber Lion next year—and I think our other creative teams are anxious to get in the spotlight next year. It will be fun to see the impact of this award on our agency in the year to come, and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Banners, Connection, Entertainment | 1 Comment »

Remaking the American Advertising Federation

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Yesterday the Cincinnati chapter of the American Advertising Federation—aka “The AdClub“—hosted a luncheon with James Edmund Datri, the new President of the AAF, and I was lucky enough to break away from the daily grind to hear from the man who represents the advertising industry in Washington, D.C. In a short but wide-ranging discussion, Datri presented himself as a strong leader who promises to help us transform into a more meaningful industry.

The title of the luncheon was “The State of the Advertising Industry,” but it actually started with a description of how the AAF itself is also working on a turnaround plan. I was surprised and impressed to hear that Datri is walking in the shoes of many business leaders by trying to cut costs in a tough economy. (He came into the role with a $500,000 budget deficit.) I was further impressed to hear that he is making some critical moves; for example, he has already downsized staff, reorganized jobs by workload (versus function), moved to a paperless office, and cut his and other executives’ salaries by 15%. Datri understands that these moves not only help close the budget gap, but show his members that their organization is sharing the pain of its constituents.

But Datri has also recognized that his organization—like the ad industry itself—must use these tough times to invest in transformation. Datri spoke of his belief that organizations that fail to invest in needed areas will miss the chance to benefit from the transformation thrust upon us.

The AAF is taking a few smart measures to become more relevant and financially stable. First, Datri is leading a charge to recruit more corporate members into his organization. New wins include Wrigley and the Jim Beam brands. Of course, with a new President and Congress, it’s a pretty compelling time for big businesses to become more active in Washington through the AAF.

I was more impressed with Datri’s drive to do more at the grassroots level through his embrace of new social networking technology. His strategy is to make the organization more valuable and better able to act on national politics by activating the 40,000 members around the country with new tools. He has already gotten the group on Facebook and Twitter (although I cannot find the Twitter account).

I asked Datri whether he was personally engaged with these tools, and he admitted that he was behind but will be making them a center of his communication plan in the weeks and months ahead. He clearly gets that these tools are not simply broadcast media, and he seemed genuinely excited about the chance to digitally network with people in AdClubs around the country when he returns from his cross-country luncheon tour.

Toward the end of his speech, Datri admitted that advertising professionals are not viewed with a great deal of respect. He specifically called out that too many people (including lawmakers) think of our industry as made up of Mad Men and pockets of elites in New York City and L.A.—completely missing the AdClub folks in places such as Houston, Minnesota, and Seattle, which are full of good people doing important work for businesses. Datri committed to driving the AAF to help rebrand our industry and show the world the value of our profession.

I just hope the AAF does more than simply telling the public we are doing good, but rather it helps its members embrace the more meaningful-marketing model that we must follow to deliver on this promise.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Government, Organizational Behavior | No Comments »

Connecting with Roy Spence

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

One of the really exciting experiences in our mission to spread the concept of Marketing with Meaning is the chance to meet up with brilliant people who have come to the same general conclusion of where the world needs to go next. Thanks to an introduction from our mutual friend Jim Stengel, I was able to spend some time chatting with Roy Spence last week.

Roy is the Chairman and CEO of GSD&M Idea City, one of the best and brightest advertising agencies in the world. He just released a book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, and had a great article in Adweek recently. Overall, Roy has a simple but meaningful message: “Companies that aren’t in the life improvement business are not going to be around for very long.” His firm has helped create memorable work and business success for many leading brands, including two (BMW and Southwest Airlines) that I mention in our upcoming book.

We immediately felt a common bond on the phone during this first conversation. I found Roy to be an incredibly personable and good-natured guy. In terms of our key messages, we share the same overall perspective but come at it in different angles. Roy is focused on convincing brands to focus their existence around a key purpose; Southwest Airlines, for example, is about democratizing air travel. Our Marketing with Meaning comes into play once brands have selected a purpose and need to start doing work that fulfills the purpose. It’s a great synergy and we obviously have a better chance at changing the world by teaming up around our common cause rather than debating definitions and interpretations.

Despite the fact that our companies operate within competing holding companies, Roy immediately suggested some projects that we might work on together, and mentioned several other business leaders and entrepreneurs who share our mindset. We’ll be getting together in person in a few months.

I encourage you to support the overall Marketing with Meaning cause by picking up a copy of Roy’s book today. Let me know what you think!

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Concept | 3 Comments »

“Brands Do” in 2009

Friday, January 9th, 2009

‘Tis still the season of predictions of what will happen in the year 2009 in business and marketing. Some say it will be the year of everything from modest to mobile to mob rule. But I’m glad at least one major organization agrees that 2009 will be the year of Marketing with Meaning.

In a recent blog post, Malia Supe and Garrick Schmidtt from interactive ad agency Razorfish (full disclosure: a competitor of ours) write that marketers “need to find meaningful ways for their brands to participate, as well-but not in the traditional manner of pushing tired old messages at consumers. No, today, brands need to build strength through action.”

Naturally, I’m thrilled that Supe and Schmidtt align on the use of the word “meaningful” to describe the concept that we are dedicated to promoting. We sometimes find that the word only conjures elements of cause marketing-which, while important, is only one of many ways that brands can deliver value to people’s lives. It is a word that has much more soul than rival expressions such as ”branded utility.” And I believe “meaning” is superior to “marketing as service” because it suggests that there is a progression-i.e., brands can do more by reaching people in an increasingly meaningful way.

I also like that the gang at Razorfish is promoting the idea that meaningful marketing is “active.” In their words, brands must “do” something. Instead of talking at their audience with interruptive advertising-say, telling people that they are a great brand-today’s consumer demands that brands actually prove it. This speaks to our idea that while great products and services are the baseline for success, the marketing itself must add value to people’s lives. Razorfish’s President, Clark Kokich, made a similar comment when I spoke with him at an industry event a few months ago.

Like we at Bridge Worldwide, the employees at Razorfish appear to agree that “our goal then, as a digital agency, is to help create real, tangible expressions of our clients’ brands and make them meaningful to consumers.”  Like us, they realize that digital marketing is the first medium that really depends entirely on meaningful marketing to succeed. We can’t force people to visit our websites, download our widgets, or subscribe to our emails. Digital agencies like ours have always had to earn consumers’ attention by creating value. No wonder that digital agencies such as Bridge Worldwide, The Barbarian Group, Razorfish, and Renegade are leading the way in this revolution.

I am excited that 2009 is the year we will be in market with our book around Marketing with Meaning. I hope it generates more mass discussion of this important topic, and encourages others to rally around a committment to this new way of thinking-and acting.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, book | 5 Comments »

Analysis of RecessIsOn

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

As the word gets out about Marketing with Meaning, we are starting to attract some interesting outreach from unexpected places. A few months ago, a company engaged us in a project to do some consulting, which I hope to talk more about later. More recently, for the first time, I was asked to provide a review of a new marketing campaign from an agency on behalf of its client. In other words, I was suddenly elevated to the lofty list of targets for “blogger outreach.” I feel so special. But seriously, it is cool and I am happy to provide my honest assessment—according to Marketing with Meaning principles—in this post…

The Morgans Hotel Group has launched a new advertising campaign under the mantra RecessIsOn, a clever play on the word “recession,” which is dominating too much of the news lately. Morgans is playing on this depression around the now-official recession by calling for fun. The boutique hotel chain is using targeted print ads (see above), wild postings, and PR to drive traffic to Recessison.com. Once there, visitors can discover the path to parties and other enjoyment at Morgans’ hotels in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and London. Each hotel is hosting events (most seem to require a charge) as well as several added-value offers such as free massages, room upgrades, and complimentary dirty martinis (full disclosure: my favorite kind).

Survey Says: It’s just so-so.

First, let me say that I love Morgans’ decision to focus on the economy and to embrace the idea of having more fun with more freebies. Many marketers (including our clients) are working on ways to adapt messaging to appeal more to people who are struggling to make ends meet. It is very clever to see a company stare the recession in the face with defiance.

Second, I think that Morgans has some smart promotional offers for its customers. Each hotel has a wide variety of packages with complimentary services at a lower-than-usual cost. I really felt like Morgans was doing something special in this down economy.

My main issue is that this campaign is not offering significant value aside from these specials. If you’re not staying there or buying a party ticket, there’s really no meaning for you. The posters and ads might make you smile for a minute, but they don’t merit more than a half-second pause. This is not Marketing with Meaning.

My big suggestion is for Morgans to turn its party atmosphere into an open event. Once its clever campaign got the attention, it needed a meaningful hook to pull people into something valuable. What if Morgans held weekly parties with free admission, cool music, and low or no-cost drinks? They could use word-of-mouth and these wild postings to, say, publicize a code word to get in these parties. And the company could focus on its historic guest list as the best source of traffic. The attendance could even be limited to out-of-towners to encourage a hotel stay on an upcoming trip. The idea of a free party with a guerrilla-marketing guest list worked well for the Stoli Hotel, which got a ton of buzz for its effort. And if this can work for a $20 vodka brand, it’s got to work for a $300-per-night hotel.

Finally, Morgans and its agency should make sure to do more in terms of blogger outreach. I received an email and a request to cover the campaign. Thanks very little, guys! How about an invite to one of these parties with celebs such as those below, or even a free night’s stay? In case you’re listening, I’ll be in L.A. on December 16 and will be happy to update this blog with more of the Morgans experience. :)

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Entertainment, Experience | No Comments »

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