To those of us who are not web savvy, it’s a little creepy. As I understand it, search engines have these virtual spiders (robots) that crawl all over the Internet, making exhaustive notes of everything they find. Then, when you do a GOOGLE search for something, say, “Stately plump Buck Mulligan,” the spiders remember all the places they encountered “Stately plump Buck Mulligan” and post a list of all the pages where they found it in their explorations. There are secret formulas by which they decide the order in which they list the pages.

In your site, you have code, HTML text, images, meta tags, and some other stuff. My friend Dan at Blueridge Solutions could give you the technical scoop on this. But as far as spiders go, they recognize HTML text and meta tags, but they don’t recognize pictures (spiders hate art it seems). Meta Tags are tags, written into the source code, not visible on the interface of your site, that tell spiders what’s important to you. Our meta tags, for example, include “Bank Branding.” This helps you be attractive to spiders (like I want to be attractive to spiders) in a way that helps you when people search for companies like yours. There are specialists within the web design business, who do nothing but “Search Engine Optimization,” (SEO) which is the art and science of attracting spiders.

Quick aside, I head that for the movie, Willard, they put peanut butter all over Ernest Borgnine, so he would be attractive to the rats, so they would look like they were eating him in the scene where the rats ate Earnest’s character. Told you this was a creepy post. Anyhow, SEO is to Internet spiders as peanut butter is to movie rats.

Some people are very sensitive about their image and frequently GOOGLE their own brand. This is a pretty smart thing to do, actually. A couple of times, for example, I mentioned UMPQUA Bank, you know, the world’s greatest bank—UMPQUA. Sure enough, within a couple of days, we got a bunch of hits from UMPQUA and others within their region. Hey UMPQUA, I mentioned you four times, I know I’ll be seein’ ya. Love ya’ UMPQUA. Mean it. You’re awesome.

Anyhow, SEO is great if you want to seat a position. But only if you’re prepared to back up the expectations you’re inviting. Gotta go.

In Permission Marketing, Seth Godin makes the point that in the future, as options become more plentiful, time will be the common currency, not money. There will be so many options, at such low prices, that people will be able to afford to buy whatever they want, but they will not be able to afford the time to consider all the options. This is one of the basic principles of permission marketing. Well, along those lines, I’ve been thinking about time as currency.

There is a principle in the Bible, where your treasure is, that is where your heart is. So, the idea goes, if your heart is on Heavenly things, that’s where you’ll be investing your treasure. I’ve been noticing a lot of no-shows at things that ought to be important.

We had a big conference at our assembly over the weekend. We heard two great speakers. One lived for 21 years in Senegal and is something of an expert on Islam. The other was a Raleigh police officer for 21 years, and is an expert on presenting the Gospel to kids. Very powerful stuff all the way around. Too bad so many people missed it.

If you ask them why they missed it, they would say that they had other time commitments. If you asked whether they considered the information important, they would probably say yes. If you asked if the souls of children and Muslims were at least as important as the computer installations, house painting, ball games, and other things that comprised their time commitments, they would probably say, absolutely. If you presented the credentials of the two men who spoke, many of the people who weren’t there would be impressed and want to hear what these men had to say. Yet, their treasure was elsewhere.

There are times when I have schedule conflicts. I end up wishing I could be two places at once. And as often as not, the commitment that went onto the schedule first wins. But I hope the Lord helps me to have my priorities right. I hope that, all things being equal, I will chose to invest my time in things that have eternal value.

While I’m here, here’s a little homework. Please, somebody show my “family values” in the Bible. Please, somebody show me where Scripture says, “family first.”

The Discipline of Market Leaders. A little while ago I came across this business classic on a bookshelf, while looking for something else. It was a huge hit back in the 1990s. Then it kind of disappeared, probably because it isn’t a “seven steps to category dominance” kind of book. You actually have to read it. And then, to get anything out of it, you actually have to think about it. But it was a pretty smart book.

The premise was that all category leaders master one of three disciplines: operational excellence, product (development) leadership, or customer intimacy. Makes sense.

Yesterday, we pitched a project that was declined by the client’s agency of record. Turns out, the agency of record can’t make money on the project for the budget that’s available. But the client spent a lot of the meeting raving about the agency of record, how much she loves them, how much she’s come to depend on one of the principals…. Now, we know those folks, and we think pretty highly of them. So what gives.

Well, the client loves them, because they are a “customer intimacy” company. But the cost, at least in their case, of being a customer intimacy company is so great, that there are things they just can’t do profitably. We, being an operational excellence company, can deliver an equivalent product (maybe better sometimes, probably not as good other times) for the same budget, and make money.

For us, it’s all in the process. If you can understand a concept at the thumbnail stage, then you get to see more concepts, and you can approve one or two as a thumbnail. Then, we can do comps of those concepts that were approved. And for the same price, you get more choices. This is never going to work for some clients. But for clients who can work this way, it yields benefits.

We’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about the benefits of a full service agency relationship vs. the advantage of a project relationship. There are two ways of looking at this: from the agency perspective and from the client perspective. In general, any client large enough to have an advertising budget and to benefit from annual planning does better with a full-service relationship. It’s a matter of scale, synergy, and consistency. You have too many initiatives to be paying a premium for each one (as you do when you treat them as projects). You gain momentum in the relationship, as you work with your agency from day to day. And your work, sometimes by design and sometimes by default, gathers momentum in the are of perceptual consistency (branding).

Some clients feel that they benefit from breaking their budgets into pieces and working with multiple agencies on multiple projects. Sometimes, when you’re dealing with highly specialized issues like the security concerns with bank databases for direct mail, it makes some sense. Or, if you’re a multiple brand company with a billion dollar budget it can make sense to consolidate things like media planning and buying. But as a rule, trying to work agencies against each other is counterproductive. You lose continuity. You pay more for each initiative (because they’re projects). You lose clout in negotiating either price or production priority. And you have to live with the fact that some percentage of your projects went to your second-choice supplier.

From the agency perspective, the advantages of a full-service relationship over projects are:

• consistent dependable billings
• continuity in communication, work flow, and client direction
• efficiencies in creative, media, and planning processes

From the client perspective, the advantages of a full-service relationship relative to projects are:

• relatively controlled spending
• additional consultation, research, and other services “thrown in” as added value
• costs of meetings and estimating are virtually shared by agency and client, rather than born by client alone
• efficiencies in creative, media, and planning processes
• top priority in agency production schedule—a large full-service client is king and will almost never get bumped for other work

From the agency perspective, the advantages of project over full-service are:

• projects tend to yield a higher-percentage margin
• projects provide flexibility in the production schedule (they can be moved back to make room for larger projects or full-service client needs)
• projects allow the team to stretch, projects tend to yield award-winning work (don’t even get me started on award show judges…idiots!)
• projects can fill in during down parts of the annual work cycle

The disadvantages of projects for an agency are:

• they do not provide any security (when the project is over, it’s over)
• they can be disruptive of other work flow (especially during busy times)
• they tend not to leverage efficiencies developed for full-service clients
• because they can yield high-profile creative, they can be a distraction for the team

From the client perspective, the advantages of project over full-service are:

• you get bigger guns on your initiative than you could afford to hire full time
• you are not committed to a long-term expense
• the work can be high-octane in the short run, since it tends not to be constrained by things like brand guidelines
• there is some leverage for negotiating, if you’re willing to wait and use agency resources as they become available

The disadvantages of projects for a client are:

• the project is subject to being bumped in the production schedule, in favor of bigger projects and work for full-service clients
• you pay a premium for project work and have limited leverage for negotiation
• you frequently end up sacrificing continuity elements such as brand guidelines
• the creatives may be tempted to be motivated by their own portfolios than by the client’s outcome.

Tomorrow, two high-octane smart guys are going to debate whether or not God exists. It will be quite an event. John Lenox, author, serious math genius, Oxford professor and Biblical Christian will go toe-to-toe with Richard Dawkins, author, serious physicist, Oxford professor, and spokesman for the “new atheism.” Should be a great debate. Fun to listen to. Fun to watch. Fun to talk about later.

I’ll be rooting for Lenox, of course. But in the end, the debate will not make one bit of difference. God doesn’t need a math genius to prove He exists. Nor can a physics dude prove He doesn’t.

To paraphrase Daniels three pals, if God wants to prove Himself, He will. If He doesn’t He won’t. Either way, I will not bow down to your stupid statue, Nebi. And to paraphrase Ester, if I parish, I parish. To quote my big sister, God’s God, He can do what He wants. And to quote my former business partner, don’t use God, He doesn’t like it.

To me, this is the biggest job of branding. Yet, most people who talk about branding, even those who really, really get it, hardly give managing expectations a thought. But think about it this way:

• Any effort you spend trying to sell somebody who is NOT going to buy is wasted effort…time you will NEVER get back
• Any effort you expend to draw prospects who are not qualified to buy or likely to buy is wasted marketing expense
• The most expensive part of any sale is the closure—the part that involves people’s valuable time, creativity, energy, and knowledge
• Anyone who is strong-armed into buying is not going to buy again
• Someone who shows up knowing what you’re selling, wanting what you’re selling, and ready to buy what you’re selling is going to be a low-friction, low-cost buyer…and is likely to be a repeat customer…and is likely to be a good cross-sell/up-sell prospect,

So, the biggest job of branding is to communicate, loud and clear, what the world can expect from your brand—your product, your service, your pricing, your commitment to future products, the whole nine yards. Of course, it needs to do this by consistently expressing the brand to all the senses, even as the customer experience is consistent with all the brand expressions. One of the biggest mistakes branding clients make is trying to use branding to become something they’re not.

So, say you’re a hundred-year-old company that has never changed. You know how to make people comfortable who don’t like change very much. You are not very hip—never have been. You’re sort of technologically backward. You still use cash boxes and an abacus. You still serve coffee in cups with saucers (some of which have become chipped over the years). You don’t move very fast. You get a new marketing director, and the first thing she does is declare that this company has to be branded…it has to be presented to a younger, hipper, faster-moving audience as a hip, fast, cutting-edge company…because “that’s what people are looking for today.” WRONG.

What you really need is to find a younger audience, and a broader audience, of people who are in the market for what you offer, who are intimidated by cutting-edge stuff, who aren’t terribly hip, who don’t move that fast, and who would be quite comfortable with the rate at which your 100-year-old company embraces change…AND BRAND YOUR COMPANY AUTHENTICALLY… to that market segment. Differentiate on what is in your DNA. Don’t try to look hip if you’re not. It will make you look like you’re wearing somebody else’s clothes. Instead, brand for what you are, to appeal to those who would like you if they knew you, and to set authentic expectations.

Some people like Starbucks. Some people like Dunkin’ Doughnuts. Some people want a bank that feels like coffee shop. And some people want a bank that will never be mistaken for anything but a bank. I love UMPQUA. And I think everyone can learn from UMPQUA. But not every bank customer is looking for UMPQUA.