Pay-What-You-Want

Pay-what-you-want is currently one of my favorite trends to watch. I've posted about it before, and recently came across Agencynil - the pay-what-you want advertising agency. As this is an industry I take a lot of interest in (it keeps me employed) I really looked at this one closely. From a PR perspective it has done a great job of generating buzz. As far as output is concerned, I think the jury may still be out on this one, but according to the site it is a satisfaction guaranteed delivery - so if anything they are confident.

This got me thinking about a few points:

1. When does a company not pay what they want from their ad agency? As with many transactions, when one feels that there is something unfair about the value/price relationship one ends the relationship. Most companies request work for a fee and agencies deliver under that premise. Rarely are agencies in a position to dictate price. Which brings me to my next point...
   
2. This positioning also assumes that ad agencies charge what they want.An agency can only pay its bills when a client is happy. Clients that feel ripped off won't swallow whatever their agency feels it deserves. Likewise, a client rarely pays a premium for work that delivers on a remarkable success. Maybe there's a balance...but that's a different post.
   
3. Client happiness should not to be confused with client success. These two could not be further apart and have no linear correlation. Happier clients do not equal more successful clients. Great agencies can succeed by shifting focus away from happy clients towards helping clients succeed - but this runs deeper than churning out work or jumping on the latest new media bandwagon. It involves serious relationships that don't crumble under conflict and scrutiny of each party. Remarkable success comes from challenging the status quo. This causes friction as it is the status quo (either in work, in a clients culture, or in a agency/client relationship) which creates comfort and mutual happiness - but rarely sustained success. If you are a company, look for an agency that makes you feel uncomfortable, that will tell you where they think you fall and where you can do the same. It will help everyone.

The pay-what-you-want strategy is another great marketing tool. To think that in this case it lies on some deep rooted thought around fairness or market laws may be more marketing than logic. It simply addresses the eternal skepticism that an organizations has against its agency. A grass is greener strategy that may not transfer well to the perception of professional service. I'm sure there is a market for this, but it may compete more with organized online freelancers, online banks of creative work and graphic designers.

If you've experienced the agency or been involved with the work I'd love to hear from you.

We don't give our customers enough credit

We often under estimate the role our brand plays in the lives of our customers. As companies, we downplay the value of direct communication (of any form - social media, face-to-face, hand written letters, etc) because we don't think anyone cares enough about our brand for this stuff to matter. This is a problem derived from a combination of two corporate self esteem issues:

1) A brand's fear of being called out for being something other than its corporatly controlled definition
2) combined with a brand/corporate/marketing culture focused on 'the mass' rather than the customer. Our brands have long tried to get bigger, but only rarely focuses on getting better.

As a result, we avoid situations where the brand message is open for public interpretation. We over manage every piece of advertising just in case our customers notice (or even care) that our product is facing left instead of right and as a result decide jump ship. We tell our retail stores to sell but take away the opportunity to keep customers by always referring them to a 1-800 number or passing the responsibility to a higher power.

Be a brand that believes in its customers more than its ego.

One example of a brand who has made the effort to overcome its self esteem issues is T-Mobile. I've talked before about their current obsession with flash mobs. They've taken their benign, easily comparable mobile phone product, and repositioned it in favor of the customer (rather than the masses). They removed technology from the equation and made it about sharing. The Life's for Sharing campaign has so far be quite successful. I can't comment on T-Mobile's ability to fulfill the promise, as its service is unavailable to me.

The latest attempt at a flash mob involved 13,000 people in Trafalgar Square singing Hey Jude together. It has seen mixed reviews. Some digital marketing folks are slamming it as disappointing and a failure. Lucky for T-Mobile - those guys aren't really their target. The most allusive consumer are those who are 25 years old or younger. This also happens to be the sweet spot for the communications indusrty. These folks use the most bandwidth (= most profit) and have little loyalty. Mobile carriers around the world have been trying to figure out how to reach them. I think you could almost define a new category targeting this market within the mobile phone industry (thinkBoost, Fido, Virgin, Koodo).

So what are these consumers saying?
"These T-mobile events are great, keep them coming, im proud to be with T-mobile!"(15 year old CraigTaylor94 on YouTube)
“OMG, I love the new T-Mobile advert that just premiered tonight at 9! #Trafalgar Square” (from this excited tweet) Source: ViralBlog

That's not everyone - but the fact that a 15 year old would say that he's proud to be with a brand from an industry full of boring players is a huge step.

Give you customers some credit. They are waiting for you to surprise them. They almost expect it. Eliminate the legal/corporate mindfield of what would make everyone happy and focus on what would make the people who care about your brand happy - a focus on the individual instead of the masses. You'll get people talking and your customers will reward you for it.

You're wasting your money with that agency.

Too many companies feel that their marketing delivers random results and mediocre customer loyalty as the result of their marketing.

Why? Because they focus their job (or have been forced to focus their job) on advertising and not marketing. If you think of it, advertising hits consumers for only a fraction of the purchase decision process. Bang. Billboard when I'm in my car. Interesting pitch. I go to the store. No relevant support ads, no service- different offer than what I thought that billboard said.

Ad agencies are often criticized for not evolving with the attention spans of consumers. New media, social media, no media - have all cut into the traditional ad space and have left many people pointing the finger at their ad agency for any missed opportunity in these spaces and the increasing voice that says "advertising is dead".

I'll agree that there are a ton of agencies who continuously do pretty good work (as in TV, Print, Online) but miss the mark on this new media stuff. But that's not the point. The point is that pretty good work (in any communication category) doesn't mean increased revenue for clients.

The problem is the conversation between clients and ad agencies. If your job is to market the company you work for and you seek an ad agency for help, chances are that you base your requests to them off of previous work that you have done or the agency has done. The problem is that you probably do your job pretty good, the agency spits out creative that's pretty good, and everyone is left satisfied...barely.

The mindset has to change. When you are looking to an agency for help you should focus on the marketing of your company not the advertising. There's a big difference. Real change and remarkable work only comes when this is the focus. Just like you, the agency should be thinking about marketing. If you nodding your head in agreement, but deal with your agency as the 'producer of your ads' your short changing yourself.

To focus on the marketing, the first conversation with any agency should sound like - we have zero advertising budget, but need to market this company, how can we make that happen? You probably wouldn't say that though. How could you market your company without the media? Well you would get what you pay for from your agency - killer creative ideas. BUT these ideas would be "why don't your sales people say this...","what if the store did this..." and "do you think selling the service that way is still effective?" It will force a shift from being an ad focused marketer to a revenue generating marketer. You'll step on all sorts of department' toes. Some people will probably even be pretty pissed off - until revenues jump, that struggling product becomes a leader and you and your agency create that necessary shift to energize the companies image.

This doesn't mean that you will not use advertising media, it just means you'll approach the problem different. You'll train your mind to forget the knee jerk reaction ("quick, do a print ad, our sales are down.") You'll hit customers in more places - not just while driving down the road to work. Every interaction with your company will change and that brand you keep trying to build will solidify itself as a tangible emotion in the mind of your customer. In the end you'll be accountable, you'll have tested the guts of your ad agency, and done your job remarkably.

The sky doesn't fall - we just stop holding it up.

I was spoke to an MBA class last week on alternative media. I followed a colleague from CBS Outdoor - one of two major billboard companies in Canada. He mentioned how his industry, after years of profits and promising growth, had a major crisis after legislation was passed that banned the advertisement of tobacco. It turns out the tobacco industry loved outdoor advertising. They booked all the space they could get. It must have been great to sell this stuff back then - inflated demand due to a client not bound by price or consiense. But this all came crashing down. It hit the billboard companies hard. The industry was so busy focusing on its current success that it didn't foresee the possibility of change. They should have learned a hard lesson from the tobacco crisis: they're not in the billboard business, they're in the ad delivery business. I wonder if they have considered the trend arising from Sao Paulo, Brazil - where in 2007 the city banned outdoor advertising.

The tobacco crisis caused a change in the industry. It could be argued that this change should have occurred prior to the crisis. Didn't anyone notice all the advertising eggs were in one basket? You can't blame them - this is the way most industries think. Case in point: the newspaper industry.

The newspaper industry is in crisis as more readers go online and more advertising dollars go with them. Papers across the continent are disappearing. It started with the top heavy publications and has trickled to the local level. Newspaper journalists and lobbyists are scraping for solutions. Most are way off the mark. They continue to look at ways to bring the newspaper industry back to where it was. This can't happen. The world is not what it was. Time to think different. Take a step back from the tangible product you deliver and look at what value you provide. The value this industry has provided is not built in the actual newpaper. The value is in trusted local news delivery. The problem is that a decade ago would have been the time to recognize this, now millions of bloggers and online communities make it their daily mission to deliver trusted local news.

These two examples of industries blinded by success bring me back to a story I heard years ago. If we go back a couple of decades the rail industry is the legacy example of industries failing to understand their business. The rail industry was booming when it began. It moved people, food, products, and mobilized industries across the continent. Then the Wright brothers had to screw it all up. The introduction of commercial and consumer flight cannibalized the stronghold that the rail industry had on market share. Rail companies scrambled. Doom and gloom filled board rooms and rail yards. They have survived, but have not recovered to the silver lining of those early days. Maybe disaster could have been diverted. Just like CBS is in the ad delivery business and newspapers are in the trusted local news delivery business, the railroad was never in the rail business -it was in the transportation industry.

In hind sight it is easy to see the lost opportunity. But what opportunity are you missing because you're too focused on what you’ve always done (who cares that you are successful). What problems will your industry face because it continues to define it's value based on what last years profit told it.

You don't need to be in business for 30 years to understand that there is a great chance that tomorrow won't be like today - so why do we act/market/advertise/plan that way?

How not to sell a house

A few months ago I was selling my house. I listed it just before the market took a nose dive. I didn't end up selling it and just let the real estate listing expire. Four months on the market and only a half dozen interested people - only one real estate agent (other than my own) showed my house.

A week after my house was off the market I got a call. It was a real estate agent. He wanted to know if I was still interested in selling my house. He had a list of potential buyers who were really excited about seeing it. Wondering why he never brought anyone through over the previous four months, I asked when would they like to see it. He responded he could probably get some of them through my house in the about 30-45 days. Yes, you heard right. His "extremely motivated" buyers were about 45 days from even being interested enough to look at my house. That was my first hint that this call was far from credible. My next hint was a little more obvious. The agent said "So if I sell this house I'll get full commission right?" Done. This agents credibility dissapeared. He was a bottom feeder. He looks through the real estate listing for expiring contracts, then hops on them looking for the easy sell. He probably makes good money doing that.

But it's this type of marketing and sales that hurts the real estate industry. The same thing happened to the lawyers that chase ambulances, to that used car salesmen that sold you a 'newly upholstered' car that just happened have been submerged in a river, or the insurance agent who convinced your grandmother that she needed that extra premium just in case. (industries mentioned were easy targets - sorry)

Advertisers make the same mistake. That keyword ad on Google that sent me to a irrelevant site (just type "Buy" followed by a product of your choice and look at the ads). The Facebook ads that fish for your cell number are breaking trust in an environment that is struggling to establish. The seven lines of legal type on the bottom of that car ad in the newspaper, regardless of what it says, just shows you that $295 a month is just too good to be true. Then there's that "Starting at $9.99" advertisement followed by "when you spend $150 dollars on our premium service". You've seen it a million times - it probably doesn't even effect you now. But that's the problem. We can't ask consumers for time when we continuosly waste it.

The first step is to be authentic and honest.

The real estate agent that called me would have been better to just ask if I was unhappy with my last agent and willing to talk about the benefits he could bring.

The car company with the legal type might be better using messages that provide clarity and break the standard - especially now. Why use a cool photo of the European fully-loaded vehicle, and just show the one that I'll get when I pay the advertised price (the answer is they want to upsell from the advertised price - but you get the point).

These examples are everywhere. Common sense solutions are often the least common used.

Avoid Fork, Knife, Butter

I was recently at a Judges Breakfast for a regional advertising award show. The guest speaker/lead judge (who shall go unnamed) had just given an impressive speech on the need, now more than ever, for advertising agencies to be innovative on how they connect between brands and consumers. To exemplify this point he engaged the audience with a basic question and pointed at random to the attendees for a response. The questions was “what items do you find in a kitchen?” He points at an individual at the front table - “Fork!” is the response. Another “Knife”. Another “ Butter”. This goes on for a few minutes, with more responses coming out representing cutlery, dishes, or appliances- “Fork…saucer…fridge…party…blender…plates”. Stopping the exercise our judge asks the intent listeners what was the most memorable kitchen item? The resounding response: “Party”.

Apparently, the top three responses received when this question is presented to a group of people are Fork, Knife, and Butter. I guess Butter is the attempt at some people to avoid saying Spoon, and rounding off the cutlery name game. This exercise was a great example of how unconventional thought, when appropriately applied can create a memorable response amongst listeners, while telling a lot about the brand that is making the statement.

On the discussion of unconventional thought, a member of the group asked the lead judge what his thoughts were on the “Gorilla” ads for Cadbury – which happened to win a Gold Lion at Cannes this year. His response and the other responses that surrounded the discussion, were very similar. The general consensus was that the ads were irrelevant to the brand, were another gimmick used by Director Juan Cabral (creator of the Sony Balls and Paint spots)”, and without the hindsight of Cadbury's success, it may not have been so well received by its peers.

I’m not sure if you’ve picked up on this, but even if you haven’t seen the ad, you can guess by its title that it is beyond conventional. With the previous demonstration of the need for marketers and advertisers to avoid Fork, Knife, Butter, I did find it a little bit surprising that many members of this group would be surprised that a Gorilla playing the drums could have a chance at delivering positive results for brand and product. In fact one of the judges mentioned that this ad would not win in this regional competition as they couldn’t see the connection between the brand and the ad, and although it was funny, would not constitute good advertising.

I had a look at the spot. I don't have 30 years of creative experience. But after seeing the ad and taking in the discussion at the breakfast, I’m reminded of a quote I read once “the products and services that succeed wildly are the ones that everyone expected would fail..." (Is that Seth's?). In this context “products and services” could be replaced with “ad campaigns”. A group of old agency executives all looked at the Gorilla ad and said this won’t work. Even with the hind sight of knowing the ads success with the brand and at Cannes, most of this group would still never consider producing an ad that followed the unconventional, left-field, thought process that went into the Gorrila spot. To play on the metaphor – these folks would avoid Fork and Knife, but deliver Butter. Party is too risky.

Whether you like the Gorrila spot or not, my point is that all the rules of business are changing - and the agency world seems to be the last to take notice. This spot doesn’t seem to connect to the product. But it DOES connect to the emotion. It DOES catch your attention. It DOES guide you through 60 seconds of experience (don’t most of us pray for 12 seconds?). And it DOES make an effort to break the mold and give the audience something to share.