Coming Up For Air

It’s nearly a year since I started Openmike so I had a look through a few posts to work out what I had learnt.

My first post was on the 20th July with Prêt à Porter which, considering I was just wanting to show a bit of initial lightheartedness, seemed to hit a serious chord with people. In fact I have been in two recent conversations about the subject of work attire where I was representing the more liberal viewpoint. And funnily enough I don’t think whether you see contemporary lack of formalwear as abhorrent or something to be aspired to is anything to do with age. As I said most pretentiously in the post, we live in post-modern times.

Quite a few questions this last year relate to the account handler’s relationship with the creative department and the ensuing frustrations. That tranche of questions can be found here and you need to check out the A Few Good Men spoof which I have only just recently come across.

The business book I most enjoyed reading was Jon Steel’s Perfect Pitch, about the drive for new business, and I was glad that I had the chance through email to tell Jon directly how good that book is.

Doing the blog has opened my eyes to other blogs though interestingly I have noticed quite a few have slowed down, stopped entirely or moved their content into other areas. Adverblog is a daily inspiration but feels more like a slick commercial venture. So my award for best other homespun blog goes to Dave Mance’s Real Men Write Long Copy. He is very funny, consistently present and the only person I know who has related pitching to premature ejaculation.

I totally understand why a few bloggers have lost steam – it is another commitment fighting against work and personal life, sometimes a busman’s holiday and - when you know you need to overhaul some parts of the site - often gnaws on your conscience like peeling wallpaper.

So thinking back to a year ago when I had no clue even know how to publish a post or once I had embarked on it whether I would get beyond Christmas, it feels a good thing to have done. It definitely pushes my thinking and hopefully helps those who read it.

Lance, It’s Not About the Client

I recently took up cycling to compete in a Cape Town race which my best friend persuaded me to do. You can see my surprising efforts at the photoblog, Bike Openmike. Having got into it and thinking about this blog, I was interested in what I have learnt that it is relevant for agency client services:

a) You cannot ignore the phenomenon of Lance Armstrong if you touch any part of cycling. It tickled me to know that I was racing against him in South Africa but we knew he would be back in his hotel having his second breakfast by the time we reached our first pitstop. I have not read his book (I was surprised that quite a few non-cycling women have) but know his story. What I take from him is his dogged adherence to a vision which secured him those victories. In the above staggering footage, there are scenes of true adversity where he just gets back on the bike and pursues his goals (not even to mention the recovery from cancer). I was thinking in these tough times for agencies where it is a buyer’s market, we have not spent enough time selling and reselling in our vision (creative, strategic, technological etc). This means that we are being blown off track by a myriad client comments. Maybe we should regroup and relook with the client at what the vision should be and then have the rationale to stick to our goals more.

b) “Train as you mean to play”. I remember Brian O’Driscoll saying this years ago in a documentary about the British and Irish Lions. It’s just as true as for cycling. You need to put in the hard work and use the equipment that you intend to use in the race. Then when something unexpected happens, you are only looking at one new variable. This can be translated into rehearsing for pitches (no, really rehearsing for pitches), exploring cost conversations with clients extensively with colleagues before you have them with the client, writing creative rationales before you present (rather when you send the concepts after the meeting) etc.

c) Cycling is obviously in the zeitgeist currently. Whether we are talking about riding to work or our Olympic team's performances, it’s amazing sometimes to see an idea converge around the areas of health, environment, return to childhood, male obsession with gadgets, girlpower etc - and motivate so many people. How are we using real understanding of what consumers are thinking generally about themselves and society. Are we targeting our research too narrowly to inform our work?

d) We all go on about social media, networking, word of mouth etc. Just have a look at some of those bike blogs - Velodramatic, London Cyclist, Pedal Strike. This is where real opinion is being influenced and products being promoted. Let’s forget about suggesting it like it was a media option and understand how we can develop the brand strategy to create useful content.

e) We also could do worse by studying how brands and sites like Rapha and Wiggle are clearing up out there. Sure, they are tapping into a passion rather a boring ISA product but they still need to make money – Wiggle after 10 years distributes in 70 countries and is a great British business success.

OK, enough about cycling...

Putting Your Foot Down

I am in charge of a client team - a bunch of intelligent people - but I get hacked off with the way our processes (and those at our client's) get in the way of delivering really innovative thinking. We often use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut - people are not thinking creatively enough. And clients add to the slowness and inertia. What am I doing wrong?

I know what you mean. Sometimes you can get frustrated that things are just too slow on a project or with a client dynamic. That tired old linear thinking is driving the dynosauric pace of change. You want to move fast and take people, whether your team or clients, along with you. You want people to get it and not just say they get it.

My only real advice is to dramatise what they are missing out on and what a fast moving marketplace you are operating in. What you personally need to do is physically demonstrate to those people how innovative thinking can get you to a different space. Or what the downside of staying in the slow lane will mean.

When Amelia Torode quotes the Life Moves Pretty Fast line from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, she is not wrong. What you need to give your clients for a test drive is your equivalent of the 1961 Ferrari 250GT California. Then they may get your urgency for speed or different thinking.

That's why I like Gary Hayes' social media, mobile phone and games counters below. They really bring to life the pace of global "media" change; they make me realise we need to keep adapting ourselves or we will meet a dynosauric demise.

Pig Ignorant Metacognition

I came across your blog .... saw your last posting and it just made me think that I struggle just to get through my client work, let alone keep up with all these blogs and articles. Tell me, how do other people find time to read them? .... do they really get that much out of them?

I don’t think this view is uncommon. A number of my acquaintances are very complimentary about the content here but represent the view that life is too short to fill up on too much blog reading. I started this blog for the very reasons that Seth Godin mentions in the extract below:



Yeah, right. It's all about metacognition! I just learnt a new word.

As to why I read other blogs and recommend this habit become a regular thing for those in client services and frontline client relationships, I would say the following to those acquaintances and the questioner above:

An agency is dead in the water if it does not keep its thinking fresh with its clients. More than ever with increasing time and budget pressures, clients expect more from agencies. Even if you just create the artwork rather than do the strategic thinking, you should be showing the clients that you know about their business and are thinking about ways to enhance your offering to them. With the other agencies on the client roster snapping at your heels, you are being forced to either drop your prices or show more added value. The way you can do the latter is by keeping yourself informed and making that knowledge relevant to your clients. I am not saying it has to be blogs but they are useful in giving you information or discussion in bite-size chunks. It then allows you for example to talk about using Brands in Public for your clients' brands, understand what's going on with consumers globally through Did You Know? or debate the latest development on the back of a TEDTalk podcast.

Stephen Covey talks about prioritising your workload in another way and that the focus should be on the High Importance, non-Urgent quadrant activities. This is because they deal with building relationships, long-term planning, prevention and maintenance and these activities deliver high impact, long term results. The way you can do this is keeping your mind open to new ways of looking at old problems. Also if you, as a client services person, rely on your planning or strategy department to have the ideas, you start to become just a project manager. You have the opportunity of keeping up with new developments and re-packaging them with an added relevance to the client situation. Consequently, if you feel that this information monitoring (whether it is through blogs or elsewhere) is just not intrinsic to your client relationship and is too much for your workload, I would strongly recommend sitting down and doing a radical review of where you are spending your time. If you can carve out 20% of your time to spend on things that really develop the client relationship, the 80:20 success rule will follow.

Also this goes for agency management who rely solely on their strategists to come up with the ideas. Or more critically, those who treat certain subjects as a “black boxes” and feel they need to get unnecessary specialist consultants in to advise them. They run the risk of getting generic recommendations as knowledge of a client context takes time and money. Better that you see new developments through the lens of knowing what is right for the client’s organisation and customers. Then you may avoid kneejerk reactions like the one below:

May the Force be with You...

I am an Account Director with great experience in branding but my company does not fully develop digital comms like we would do print materials. I know the basics but I feel I may be being left behind. I want to expand my digital knowledge so I can advise clients with confidence. Do you have any ideas on the best and most effective way to do this?

Good question. I think everyone - from agency CEOs to junior creatives – are struggling with how to keep up with new developments. It’s just that you may feel like the archetypal teenager wanting to lose their cherry because you think everyone of your peers is doing it and you’re not. The digital world is so massive that it makes people who are dealing less with digital solutions feel as though they are missing out. The reality is you are and you are not – you have realised that you could be doing more but there is so much of it, you need to decide what is relevant to you, your client and your agency.
You work in the area of brand and design and I think those agencies – in contrast to other traditional agencies like advertising agencies - are in a very interesting position with regard to structuring themselves for the new challenges all agencies face. They are less constrained by the old art director/copywriter model and have always dialled up and down different resources like design, copy, film, modelmaking according to the brief. This sort of flexibility is what all agencies will need to show a lot more of.

So what can you do personally? Here are just some initial suggestions:

1) Decide what knowledge is relevant to you in your job and mine this vein of info as it will make most sense to you and should bring business benefits. I would start with your clients’ customers and understand how they are using or could be using online to engage with your client’s brand. I would register for Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) so you can see what is being said or not being said on the web about your clients’s brand. You can get more detailed about this by also registering at moreover.com for sector-specific related breaking news. Technorati allows you to set up RSS feeds for blog-generated info if blogs are used frequently to talk about your client’s products (eg mobile phones). In fact, everyone is talking about social networks as the key for brand engagement. They are definitely part of the story but I thought Seth Godin brought a level headed view in a recent debate about how businesses could use them:



2) Because there is so much out there, you need to treat gaining knowledge in this area like learning a language – you will learn more if you have to learn it and it is in a live environment. Like when you are asking the way in Paris and you have to make sure your French is good enough to be understood to find the railway station, I suggest that you choose something which will help you familiarise yourself with some digital channels and force you to engage with them in quite a granular detail. So take one of your interests and see if you can use the web to help you further it. So if you are into cooking, create a blog using one of the easy platforms like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad to blog about the results of using new recipes. If you have a company or school reunion use Facebook to organise and record it. If you are a mad-keen cyclist, then use Twitter to tell people of your exploits. My point is that these platforms cannot be seen as normal media as they have changed the way people see the world, interact with each other and engage with brands. So you need to interact them with yourself and a little more deeply than just your average customer. In my case with this blog, I have had to learn about online reputation management, website analytics, social bookmarks, coding issues and many more things. Sure if you had asked me about online reputation management, I could have given you the theory and the mechanisms but now I have a much more practical understanding and the continuing need to keep on top of it. And that is helping me think differently about client problems.

3) There are some many great sources in our industry and beyond that will provoke your thinking, you should consider signing up for RSS feeds from the likes of Adverblog, Seth Godin's blog, Digital Connections and mashable.com. Once you have visited a few they will point you in the directions which may be more your style and taste. Also because you will be finding stuff on the web which you will return for reference, you may want to sign up for a bookmarking site. Somebody recommended me Diigo and I find it really easy to use. I don’t share my bookmarks but it is great way to keep a handle on all that you come across which may be of relevance later down the line.

So that it is my starter guide. The problem you will have is keeping up with all the information but it will be up to you to decide what is relevant. And you have to bear in mind that this sort of thing takes a chunk of time out of your week so you need to legislate it for it. Also as Princess Leia in Family Guy's Blue Harvest found out, there are people out there to help you –with so much talent and inspiration. It just may take a bit of time to open the lines of communication.