We were having lunch today with Kristen, over at Lemongrass. And she mentioned that she was starting to become interested in the herbs and spices Anne and I (and her sister and mother) use to stay healthy. I think this is pretty cool, because Kristen is young enough and generally healthy enough that it might do her some real good (as opposed to what it does for me, which is to keep me from completely falling apart.

Then later, I was looking at some companies around here (some of which we have done some work for). I noticed that the company formerly known as Perception Kayak is working with an outfit called Verde PR (or something like that). It’s a PR firm out of Colorado that claims to be all about green companies and companies that are into outdoorsy stuff (not sure I see the connection, but I guess it’s a different generation). Anyhow, this gave me an idea.

We eat almost no red meat. And we take hundreds of dollars a month worth of supplements (I mean fists full every single morning). So why shouldn’t companies that are committed to that sort of thing be interested in what we can do. Especially since we have some capabilities and a track record with things like HTML, specialized web tactics, text messaging, loyalty campaigns, insider communications, and stuff like that.

So, with renewed enthusiasm, I am going to start tracking down Earth Fare, Garners, and Greenlife. Or maybe, if they’re as sophisticated as they oughta be, their spiders will find this blog post and come looking for me. In any case, wouldn’t it be cool for folks like us to get to help folks like them? Well, let’s see what happens.

First of all, American Grocery was awesome last Thursday, as always. The place is a little bit of a secret, but it ought to be a destination. It would be worth coming to Greenville from Asheville, Charlotte, Columbia, or Atlanta to eat at American Grocery. I had the duck. I always enjoy whatever I have, but I can’t get past the duck. Duck’s so good it’s almost daffy.

Good time with the smart little brother. Look forward to seeing him again in a month or so.

Next order of business. A shout-out to my friend Willie, who gave me a really funny mug, about my really funny mug (check out those Bugs Bunny teeth). Willie seems to see right through me, no matter how hard I try to appear to be a normal person.

This week has been full of meetings and proposals. It’s one of the most stressful things I do. We did one for a school, one for a law firm, one for another school, one for an awesome town in Virginia, with a cool railroad station, a presidential birthplace, an awesome women’s college, and a 100-year-old brass band (more on that later). Had a great conversation with my pals in North Carolina about a small performance venue. We talked about some of the things they do and some of the artists that perform there. But they had me at Merle Haggard (“you don’t have to call me Waylon Jennings, and you don’t have to call me Charlie Pride, and you don’t have to call me Merle Haggard, long as you are on my fightin’ side, and I’ll hang around as long as you will let me, I never minded standin’ in the rain, you don’t have to call me “darlin,” darlin, you never even call me by my name.”) Could turn out to be a good week.

Took about as long as it took James Joyce to write Ulysses, but our new site is up. Go check it out. Let me know what you think.

I was just adding the category “Find an agency,” and going through all the posts to see which ones should apply (check it out, there are a lot of them), and I notices that we’re coming up on the first anniversary of this blog. In fact, we hit the one-year mark on May 7. Haven’t blogged as much as I expected to. But looking back, there have been some pretty good thoughts in here, if I do say so myself. 20 days and counting.

Also, it’s starting to be Spring. So things are looking up around here.

We talk about this a lot. The thing is, agencies are willing to go to great lengths to get business from clients that fit. But all too often, a new business pitch becomes a fishing expedition, in which the client doesn’t get the information they really need, yet the agencies take valuable resources away from current clients in order to impress prospective ones. Anne Peck Gibbons shot me an email today with these 21 points for choosing an agency and cultivating the relationship. I thought you might find this helpful.

1. Decide what kind of services you are looking for. (Marketing? Research? Full-service? Media? Branding? Project work? Creative-only?)
2. Conduct an online search with a view to your strategic need.
3. Thoroughly review agency websites. (Review staffing experience, work samples, and client list.)
4. Check to see if they have prior experience in your category, or comparable.
5. Narrow the list to a dozen agencies.
6. Talk to their people. Over the phone, discuss the scope opportunity to see if they’re interested.
7. Ask around. Check out their references.
8. Whom do you feel comfortable with?
9. Find out how busy they are.
10. Narrow your list to five prospects.
11. Visit their location, if possible. If not, ask them to visit your’s.
12. Ask them to show you their best work and their worst work. Discuss why.
13. Ask for a rate card or samples of previous efforts, with costs associated.
14. Meet their top executives.
15. Give them a plan of what you’re thinking. And make sure you are both on the same page.
16. Make sure you have a good idea of the budget and schedule, in hand.
17. National, large clients conduct a pitch to see what the agency offers (either paid or unpaid). Small ones sometimes pay for sample work, or issue an RFP.
18. Choose your agency.
19. Hold them to their deadlines.
20. Love your agency and let them love you, by giving them strategic, rather than executional, direction.
21. Give yourself a 6–month clause, just in case you want out.

people always went to the lowest bidder. I wonder this, because it seems that people are doing this more than they used to. Might just be nervousness over the economy. But we have experienced a lot of people saying, “we’d rather work with you, but we went with the lower price.” And we are dealing a lot more with current clients saying, “I want to do this initiative, but you’ll have to come down on the price.” Not sure what is going on.

Of course, when you’re talking about commodities, price is the issue. Why pay more for a pound of sugar than you have to? Is that what’s going on? Are people seeing advertising, and marketing communication as a commodity. It’s happened before.

Back in the 70s, when I was studying the art and science of advertising, they were just beginning to churn out MBAs in unprecedented numbers. They were deft at analysis, but not typically good at judgment. So, with the help of a PC on every desk, business began the process of reducing every issue to an arithmetic problem, with a correct answer that could be devised with the use of a spread sheet. Of course, the seventies gave us stagflation (I heard that terrifying term just this morning on NPR, for the first time since the Ford administration), leisure suits, hair mouse, disco, and some of the worst advertising in history.

Fortunately, by the mid-eighties, top businesses seemed to learn their lessons. We had the West Coast influenced creative revival—MacIntosh 1984 spot, Levi’s 501 blues, Bartles and Jaymes, and so on. During the boom, people paid not six figures, but seven figures for single commercials. And in some cases (MacIntosh) it paid off. That was an exciting time.

Then came the 1990s, “Xstreme” everything, and the Internet. The self-indulgent, art-school educated new generation of creatives began using client budgets to subsidize their own cool little films. We got advertising full of smart remarks and special effects—full of sound and fury signifying nothing…and not generating sales. Along with that came the 24/7 auction/bidding war that is the world wide web. The ubiquitous banner/button universe of ads, measured not in reach or frequency, nor in transactions or trial, but in “click through,” began the process of re-dumbing down advertising to the two lamest objectives in history:

• GET YOUR NAME OUT THERE

and

• MAKE AN OFFER THEY CAN’T REFUSE.

The confluence of the MBA quantitative mindset, the waste of budgets on self-indulgent creative, and the point-and-click mentality have taken the sophistication level of advertising strategy to about 1922 (Hey, Mrs. America, is your family satisfied that your dishes are clean when they sit down to dinner? Try Squeek™!). It is not the kind of advertising that history tells us will work over the long haul. But it is advertising that can be done fast…and cheap. Which brings us to the original musing…I wonder what would happen if people always went to the lowest bidder.

Have to tackle that next time. Sorry for the rant.

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.

That’s objective, goal, strategies, measures. It’s one of the strategic tools we use to keep from wasting resources. Sometimes we have so many forms and strategic tools, that people feel like it restricts their creativity. Of course, we need to remember that our creativity is not the point of what we do; we should be focused on enhancing our client’s business. Besides that, certain constraints actually enhance creativity (for example, check out how a creative cornerback uses the sideline).

Anyhow, the OSGM is a linear/waterfall tool that helps us put first things first. Everything is subservient to the Objective—the reason for the initiative. From the objective come the Goals—practical, measurable desired outcomes for the success of the initiative. Then come Strategies—things we’re going to do in order to achieve the goals. Then come Measures—quantifiable methods, determined in advance, to evaluate the degree to which the initiative was a success…or not.

Without objectives, you can spend a lot of time, resources, money, and brand equity doing stuff that seems cool, but that does not get you (or your client) where you want to be. Without goals, you can all agree on what your trying to achieve, but then, you can spend a lot of time, resources, money, and brand equity doing stuff that seems cool, but that does not get you (or your client) where you want to be. Without strategies, you end up trying to solve problems by throwing money at them. And, of course, if you don’t establish your measures in advance, you can roll out some arbitrary measures after the fact and use them to declare victory (if you like the initiative) or defeat (if you don’t like the initiative).

So, the OSGM process keeps it about the business, and thwarts self-indulgent creativity, the tendency always to jump on the next big thing, and the counterproductive effects of office politics. It is what it is. It is does what it does. It succeeds or fails on its own merits. And that’s that.

We do this thing several times a year. We call it “fun day.” It’s always the last Friday of a month with five Fridays. And it usually involves some sort of competition.

The other day I had an idea. What if we have two prospective clients, both looking for a new agency. We split into two teams, one assigned to each prospect. We do simultaneous new-business sales presentations on that day. If one of the clients selects our agency, that team wins a prize. If both client select our agency…we’ve got ourselves a new business strategy!

So any volunteer clients? The requirements are: you must have the authority to hire an advertising agency, you must be sincere about looking for an advertising agency, you must be the right size ($100,000-$1,000,000 annual budget) and in one of the industries where we have experience or applicable expertise. And you must look at www.gibbonspeck.com and conclude that we may be the kind of agency with whom you would like to work.

I will select the two candidates to participate from the many volunteers I expect to get. You can volunteer by leaving your contact information in the comment box. If you do not want your identity posted, please stipulate that and I’ll take care of you.

What can I say? It’s 100 degrees, headed for 102, and my brain’s a little overheated. I’ll watch the comment box.