What were the key decisions when founding the agency?

Having some money to back yourself rather than borrowing and having the right business partners is cruically important.  Also a good idea of what is going to be different from other agencies.

Quickly after setting up Ben and Lisa joined us from Mother and this developed into our proposition as a creative agency with a digital spine.

The proposition is for a new kind of client – many brands recognise that they need to make a lot more of digital as a way of thinking as well as a channel.  Few clients know who to get the advice from to do this.  If they get it from an ad agency it is not very insightful.  If they go to an old style digital agency then they get digital technicians who aren’t always able to offer the same level of business, brand, strategy and creative advice that you get in a really good ad agency.  We tried to put it all together for a kind of client for whom digital is increasingly the number 1 channel and the way they have to think about their brand in future.

What does this mean in practice for a client?

We are lead agency for 80% of our clients.  Pizza Express hired us to do a website for them, we dug into their brand and helped them to define a proposition which was more fitting with the digital age “feeding great conversations since 1965″. People go there because they like the food but want to catch up with their friends and family therefore the reason for going is great conversation in the  context of getting the delivery right.

A strategy based on consumer dialogue is fitting with the digital age of sociability powered by digital.  We took this idea and exploded it into all channels, events, advertising, POS, direct, promotions and we are now lead agency for them.  It makes more sense for them to have a lead agency whose heartland is in digital than a series of agencies.
It also requires a client mentality to take the leap to choose a digitally-centric agency as the lead for the brand.  It is a bit bold and unusual.  To do great work, clients we want to attract are someone maverick and prepared to take risks.  We will probably never be BT’s lead agency as they are not likely to put digital first.

We recently started to work for Alfa Romeo – they don’t have an advertising agency because they realise 95% of all new car purchases are researched online and so they need to get digital right first.  They may need to advertise on top of that but feel better to have a digital agency defining the brand.

So how are you getting the talent into Work Club?

We are trying to get all the skills required in-house.  We are now working across nearly every channel, print, TV, outdoor.

A crucial difference about how we set up the agency is that we have no in house production.  Most digital agencies have 20 – 30% of people having ideas at the front end and the rest in the back room coding micro-sites all day.  We found this limiting – on an operational level you are limited by the people you have got and you also have a skills restrictions e.g. mobile apps, hardcore website, brilliant media sites.  Clients recognise that and it limits you in skill sand capacity terms.  Clients also realise that paying London agency rates for asset production when it can be offshored for a tenth of the price is not necessary.
Strategically agencies tend to recommend what they can make money out of best – and most agencies push banners and a microsite.  We decided to take the strategic high ground as brand guardians, you can’t have a vested interst in producing stuff in a particular channel.
We work with a broad roster of production companies, film, event, mobile – probably 30 different suppliers and partners.  It’s an old model but within digital it’s a new model. We see digital agencies as people who think and have ideas.

What was the most recent client you won and why?

Alpha Romeo we did a pitch through the AAR – it was a digital pitch.  They loved our ideas the most – our creative concepts were great, our understanding of the brand was good and the blend of people was the same standard of creative and strategic  in a great ad and digital agency.  An holistic blend of skills.

Most of the work we have won has been through contacts and recommendation.  Our proposition has started to shift -  up to to now it has been hard to sell through intermediaries.  They categorise the pitch as being ‘digital’ and we don’t fit.

The work we get is referrals.  We started working with Plum Baby two years ago and we now do everything for them.  Plum Baby met Pizza Express to get them to list the Plum Baby food and they mentioned us.  Will Harris at Nokia I worked with years ago at O2 and I have worked with him before.  He recommended us to Sony BMG and Oakley.  Once you really deliver for a client and they know they can trust you the relationship is at that level.

It’s gold dust – when it happens it’s brilliant.
It doesn’t happen very often.  We won 118 118 through Oystercatcher.  Kraft came through ISBA and we are now on the European roster and across a range of categories.

One of the reasons we have done well is we have had strategists running accounts so far.  We are starting to bring people in now in order to be able to scale on large pieces of business – raising the quality of conversations when representing the belief of digital at the heart of brand communications, you can be more persuasive and get invited up into senior meetings.

How can ‘production’ agencies get onto your roster?

Talk to Josh Tenser our Production manager – his job is to make sure we are working with the best production partners in whatever field.  The whole white label thing is complete nonsense because the best people won’t want to work with you and we need the best executional partners in the world.  We think this is the benefit of our collaboration model when talking to clients.

I think if we want to work with the best – we have to showcase their expertise and credit them if they want to work with us.  We are experts in strategy and ideas and they are production experts.

Agencies hiding their production partners are usually also hiding their production margins.  We are 100% transparent.

What other changes can you forsee in the marketing services industry?

I don’t think procurement people still have a clue about digital.  Going in and trying  to persuade them to pick us for roster reviews and RFIs – the questions are being asked are wrong on the whole.  “How much will you charge us for a banner?”, rather than what is the role of digital in our business.  This was still the case from 10 years ago. That is holding back the quality of agencies working for clients.  They are hunting for cheap banner shops rather than how digital can make your business more profitable.
Most clients are savvy as to whether their ad agency is walking the walk as well as talking the talk.  Some agencies have hired quality people and can think differently from a broadcast advertising model – but the people running , managing and owning them are all ad people and that makes it hard to change.  If you are a smart strategist and 28 year old it is hard to change what’s above me.

Who are the emerging new agencies who get it?

Wieden and Kennedy, Fallon, Albion.

To get from the interesting promising hot young agency into the seriously good agency bracket you need to have some awesome badged creative work that people really get “the agency that did X”.  The third year is make or break, culture solidifies, the big client accounts are developed into a platform from which good work can come.  You have to get it right – and that propels you on.  We have to get some landmark creative work in the next 6 months and we have some good opportunities.

Also effectiveness measurement.  Most clients have been happy with the model of measurement through industry-understood benchmarks e.g. Millward Brown qual and quant.  But in digital where the volumes aren’t as big yet and there’s a surfeit of data there is not yet a commonly understood approach to measurement.
e.g. Kraft are very excited about moving digital to the heart but at brand planning and working out what they should be measuring in a impact on brand health and sales there isn’t a templated one way to do it.  We have hired a Director of Effectiveness andwe are trying to work with every client with time and money in the budget to bespoke a measurement approach for every bit of work we do.  This means agreeing what success looks like up front, dynamically generated data into dynamically generated dashboards that clients can log into at any time to check on.

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I was asked to speak about the ‘family tree’ of the sector and what the job titles really mean.  Thanks to all of you who contributed to my research panic post.  I got more than enough material!

While hanging around the exhibition it was interesting to see who was present and how they were projecting their brand identities onto prospective graduate hirees.

Companies present

• Engine Group
• DLKW
• DAS
• Fishburn Hedges
• JWT
• The Value Engineers (Cello)
• WPP

As a cross-section of the industry this was a fair spread… but of course disproportionately represents the listed groups against the independents.  But you’ve got to be a business of a certain size before you decide to run a graduate training programme.  Fair enough.

I thought that FH had the best attack as the only pureplay PR firm – they got first bite from any student interested in PR.  Good for them.

The others had such a different way of selling their wares that I found it hard to assess what a grad might get from choosing to apply to one over another.

JWT was the least appealing with a table full of brand samples and a poorly displayed laptop who kept going to screen saver mode.
Engine had a nice booklet detailing each of the group companies and what they do, DLKW came armed with branded pencils, pads and button badgets and DAS were rather hard-selling but knowledgable about their organisation (as each person was on the graduate scheme and got rotated around different departments).

I decided to ask the trainees one question each.

“What was different about the job they are doing now compared to what they thought it’d be like when they were a student applying for the job?”

And here are the answers
Engine – it’s all about money and I really didn’t udnerstand that before.
DLKW – there’s a greater sense of responsibility, within 2 weeks I met a client which was quicker than I’d thought. Creatively you can contribute to the concepts  being developed which surprised me.
DAS – I have much more business development confidence in talking about what we do.  I understand the business concept of clients and the biggest thing is commercial awareness like ROI and utilisation rates.  I was completely unaware of the commercial imperative before.
Fishburn Hedges – I really didn’t know what PR activity was in its broadest sense – it isn’t just sending out press releases, it’s about influencing messages.

A good recruitment opportunity?

I thought that the marketing services groups are probably the right people to be attending the event.  They have the greatest number of grad jobs to fill and the largest range of operating companies in which to place the student applicants.
Cello and JWT missed the boat in promoting fellow group companies, DLKW head to head with JWT failed the ‘razzle dazzle’ test which is so appealing to student applicants to the industry (I know, I was one).
The Value Engineers had shoddy home-made literature that compared poorly to Engine and Fishburn Hedges.

What would I have done differently?

I didn’t see the details of any internships or job specifications being offered, but I did feel that if I’d been running one of the stands, I would have put together a self-test sheet for the students to help them work out whether a career in this sector was for them.

The main purpose of career events is to assist students in finding a sector that will suit their skills and aptitude.  Some form of literature that helped ‘weed out’ the unsuitable ones from applying to you will make you friends both in the HR department as well as the applicants themselve who won’t waste time chasing a dream when they aren’t suited to the lifestyle.

A simple psych and skills profile multiple choice quiz would be easy to put together and would help you find people more suited to creative versus planning and client handling skill areas.

There was little attempt to find creative team members – most seemed to be looking for classic ’suits’ or planners.  Why the presumption that a university degree sets you up for that type of job?

For the record, in my talk, I advised the applicants to find agencies who have a strong digital arm because ‘traditional’ agencies that are not yet fully digital will be dinosaurs in the next 5 years and you don’t want to get trained in a businesss and for a skill that won’t be used within that timeframe.

What do you think?  Can you remember your graduate careers fair experiences?

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As you know there are sites who can amplify and multiply the effect of your blog posts using aggregation.  I find them helpful as long as the audience is exactly what you are targeting for your service.

We are expecting to launch the new Technorati, complete with your articles and content, next week. Our goal is for 100 articles to be published on launch day.

And so I signed up.

Now, having received their sign-up email I find it’s not an offer that is just about content aggregation.

the joining instructions had some conditions attached:

Once the New Technorati is live, please publish stories to Technorati before publishing them on your own site or elsewhere – this is critical for our continued improvement in search rank, which we then pass on to you and all of our writers. Fair enough.

The more you participate, the more you will get out of your experience at Technorati!

Also, please do the following:

* Join the Technorati Yahoo Group where we distribute press releases, interview opportunities, story suggestions, and discuss internal matters: Nice opportunity to get early opportunities and publicity
* Add http://technorati.com to the permanent blogroll/sidebar of your own site – this is critical for our search engine page rank (which we pass on to you). Sounds reasonable.

Here’s the rub

POSTING INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Click “New Entry”
2. Type the title of your post into the “Title” field.
3. Type or paste your post into the “Main Entry Text” field.
4. Please LINK TO AT LEAST ONE AMAZON PRODUCT in every post.

WHAT?????

This was totally mis-sold.  It’s nothing more than an Amazon.com co-branded plug session.

Kinda takes the energy away

Can’t Technorati work out another way of getting revenues?

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A multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving.

This means that instead of assuming there is one solution to a problem, geographers are encouraged to get input from every affected party, specialism and context in order to find a better, holistic solution.

In marketing, this is probably called ‘integrated’.  But there is more to this approach than just having many facets to a campaign.

What about the team executing the work?

There are many more people working in the creative services industry today who have experience of both client side and agency side business.  This is really important if you want to take a multi-disciplinary approach.
Take the article in Marketing last week where they list out all the client-side issues that do not concern an agency: planning, risk management, retail, commercial team negotiations.

Good point.

And in conversation with William Corke at Harvest Digital,

“We’re recruiting Ads and a CSD at the moment, and nearly all the candidates have both client and agency experience.”

He goes on to say why he thinks this is happening

“[the] Skills market is more agile (whatever that means, but I think it sounds about right!).  Another example of the blurring of boundaries – a lot of what agencies do is in-house at clients now, from creative (Google’s campaign that launch this week in the UK) to paid search (loads of big clients do this in-house).”

And so if you need another job – take a stab at going to the other side of the fence.  It’ll probably make your experience  more rounded and it might set you up for improved multi-disciplinary skilled approach to solving complex marketing problems.

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What on earth does that mean?
Well her quotes are from some nice statistics and some new factoids I didn’t know e.g. Linked In is helpful for SEO.  And congratulations to Lucie Bickerdike who as a lowly AE succeeded in getting quoted amongst titans of her competitor companies.

She got hired from a Tweet.   How ‘of the moment’!

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I have been critical before about these supplements as business development tools.

But the publisher has tried hard to get additional online readership by making them a micro-site all of their own.  It has a video about the agency, contact details and the full essay.  Nice touch.  But the volume on the videos is very high and doesn’t remember your settings; the buttons on the video player are so faint you can’t see their function and it’s written in freaking flash so you can’t cut/paste contact details.  And when you click on the agency site link it opens in the same page… quiet fail for lack of browsing ease.

How should it be done?

And so for biz dev purposes, the rule is
1 – if you are going to use them, write something that is really excellent, gives advice freely and shows how your agency is leading the innovation of new ideas and meeting the challenges of the marketplace today.
2 – Do some direct marketing around the same article, leverage it on your website and in other media (if appropriate) as well for maximum impact.

And so, who has succeeded?  

Claire Stokes from the Circle Agency definitely ticks my number 1 box by explaining exactly how her team executed a campaign for BlackBerry using a Facebook fan page.  Great, I feel I can understand, use and adapt that for my own purposes now.

John Carver at Cunning spends his time knocking advertising and proving that ‘traditional advertising has been superseded by a strategy that fuses PR with….a range of channels to make a brand famous.”  He kicks off with a nice snub to the format of this supplement.

“My immediate inclination is to view each feature [like this one] as a free ad.  The trouble is, most people see through this…. you’ll be delighted to hear I won’t be taking this route.”

But he then goes off to describe ‘what we do’ – which he explains well.  It’s about getting people engaged and interested as well as making a brand famous.  Yes we know that.  Advertising turning into dialogue from monologue.  But unlike the lovely Claire, he doesn’t say how to do it.

Joel Kaufman at Link Communication shows off a nice twist to traditional sampling activity.  He ticks my number 1 box by recommending sampling in non-traditional locations such as office parks where access is cheaper and more freely available.  He gets an extra point for being the first MD to actually give his personal email address as the contact on the micro-site.

Both Rob Allen at TRO and Nick Adams at Sense drive home the point about what an integrated campaign really is.  Rob has a four point strategic check-list for brands to understand what experiential can deliver.  He also states that after a 12 week roadshow, experiential staff may have a better understanding of customers than the brand team.  But doesn’t point out how this can be debriefed and shared around other agencies as it sounds like really useful insight information.  And Nick focuses on how important it is for “experiential marketers to understand the dynamics of other communications and the role these can play in fulfilling the communicationa nd sales objectives within the experiential brief.”  However he lets himself down at the end by claiming the most successful experiential compaigns are those based on either a brand proposition or at “Themed campaignable idea”.  A WHAT?  Blimey, should have spent the whole article explaining what that means.
Back to the campaign for plain English, please.

Drum roll….

The winner from this crop is outstanding.  He focuses on a single format, explains it clearly, draws parallels with the participants and pitches the idea that experiential agencies should lead the messaging.
The man is Shay Boyd of Clay London.

He claims this can avoid budget misappropriation, combine the PR, sponsorship and activation goals of a major brand in a sports tournament situation and draws the  comparison between shared experience in sport and discussion, dialogue and opinion which is surely a conversation in which most brands want to take the lead.
The format is sport, the clear insight he provides into how athletes work to prepare themselves and how tiny incremental improvements lead to gold medals is articulate and, from my experience as a sports coach and athlete, accurate.

Shay has proved that he knows how to pitch against other agencies, he provides tips for collaboration in campaign situations and his articulate stand proves to me that he would be a great guardian of my brand message.

You’ll have to read the article for yourself to see whether you agree – but he gets my vote.

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It’s another version of crowd-sourcing great ideas but with some strong funding and a great brand behind the programme.

So if you are a genuinely “ideas led” agency come up with a couple of goodies and let’s see if you can get a slice of the spondoolies.

A quick email to draw your attention to OCSR, an open innovation project that is being run as a collaboration between Reboot Britain partners NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and Orange, in partnership with live|work and Wireless Innovation.

The project is based on the underlying concept of “shared risk and shared reward” and aims to demonstrate how corporates can work with partners outside of their organisations on a mutually beneficial basis. There’s £100,000 up for grabs to work with Orange and deliver service innovations that grow their audience.

For those free on Thursday afternoon, come along this Thursday to OCSR’s launch event at NESTA, to meet Orange representatives and find out about their requirements. Get a free ticket.

And check out the project

All best

The Reboot Britain team

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I do have the site set up so if I’ve previously approved you, your comment automatically posts.

But take a look at Outside Line – an agency that says it does “Digital Communications”.  Its site is certainly simple – a show reel, contact page and a blog.  But the comments all look like unmoderated spam.

Get it right, please.

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here she is hula-hooping. She also used her time to say public thank yous from her many friends including my favourite “Thank you to the person who invented cheese!”

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Is it just me or does Mark Ritson resemble Michael MacIntyre?  Which is the better informed?

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