Marketing Regressions

Ogilvy & Mather: One Agency Indivisible

"Ogilvy & Mather: One Agency Indivisible" is one of David Ogilvy's famous tid-bits that you pick-up early at O&M.  I always loved the feeling, wherever I might appear in the world, of the long-hallways culture he established.  Trumpeter Swans.  People with brains. 

Now it seems the brand name is changing.

I really couldn't believe my eyes reading this article in The Economic Times where Miles Young describes the split of the Ogilvy & Mather brand into two parts.  No doubt, Miles has encountered a number of client "conflicts" that he hopes to resolve under his umbrella rather than those of other WPP companies.

Miles is an interesting and enterprising man - always on the bleeding edge of business development.  He has continuously launched interesting sub-brands, acquired local agencies, and sniffed out new revenue streams to expand the company's share-of-wallet among clients.

But this time it's different - it's the core brand.

Granted, the O&M culture and brand has long centered upon David Ogilvy.  In fact, I couldn't tell you a whit about Mr. Mather. 

And if it's true, why did Shelly Lazarus not announce it?  Why is it not on the WPP website?  My instinct tells me this was a bad-boy move by Miles, a misguided PR ploy to generate attention.

We'll see what happens.

 

The Measure of a Mentor

Each Tuesday night for the past three months I've lived the FastTrac experience at the ATDC.  Twenty young companies learning to plan their business, think through their business models, and get a grip on the realities of capital & cash flow. 

The program includes successful CEO's both as guest speakers and as mentors to smaller groups, along with a nightly trail mix of lawyers, angels, VC's and accountants to dimensionalize our thinking.  I've made some good friends and I'm a better person for the experience.

Last night was the "end" of the official program.  And what appropriate timing - Thanksgiving. 

In thanking our mentor, Emma Morris, I offered a reflection on the Origin of the word, Mentor - from Word Origins.  This excerpt had inspired me; I hope you enjoy it too.

“When Odysseus, hero of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, set out for the siege of Troy, he was afraid that he was going to be gone for quite a while, so he left his household and his wife Penelope in the care of his trusted friend, Mentor.

“But once Odysseus was away, things went from bad to worse in his house what with Penelope’s suitors drinking up the contents of his wine-cellar and butchering the cattle to their own use.

“The wise goddess, Pallas Athene, saw all this going on from the Olympian heaven, and became afraid that Odysseus wouldn’t have any home to come back to.

“So she asked Zeus, the father of the gods, whether she shouldn’t go down and help out: He said “yes”, so Athene assumed the shape of Mentor and whispered a lot of sound advice into the ear of young Telemachus, son of Odysseus.”

That we can all be so lucky as to find a Mentor to whisper in our ears, and protect our wine-cellar and cattle!

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Human Alerts vs. Google Alerts

For nearly ten years, my wife and I owned just one car.  That's because I spent my life on airplanes or commuting into NYC on Metro North.  I always had my backpack filled with that day's newspapers, analyst reports, and trade magazines using those in-between hours to plow through data.  I took to heart David Ogilvy's mandate that we pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles. I felt bad for the cleaning people emptying trash bins in my wake.

While the early web had some interesting content, mostly our big insights came from reading and mentally processing all that information.  For our team, I served as a human alert system, feeding nuggets into our consumer research and focus groups, creative exploratories and agency briefs.  Our team "noticed things" way before other people did.  It showed in the work and in our clients results.  I attribute those successes to listening to people, tracking competitors, and analyzing the media. We had no time to wait for a Press Clipping house or Ad Tracking service to send us reports weeks after the month end.  (it's amazing how many people still do this!)

The web, of course, changed all that.  But not yet for the better.  Now there are thousands more bits of information to gather, consume, and mentally process.  A few webclipping companies have promised to get us just what we need, when it happens; and Google offers their free Google Alerts tool.  Mostly, these are crap services.  We've tested most of them, and even pay for a few, but only as source data.  In and of themselves they are not there yet.

Don't believe me?  Ask yourself:  How many Google Alerts do you receive in a given week?  20? 30?  If you use a webclipping service, how many alerts?  Using the same search criteria you may end up with 1000 clips in that same week. 

But here's the rub: we find that as high as 70% of these clips (both Google Alerts or the paid services) are junk.  Yes, junk.  (and forget about blogs - the automated analysis tools are a long way from useful unless you have many people doing the manual work.)

Don't misunderstand- I love that we can now search and find things quickly and cheaply.  I love that computers can guess the sentiment of a story.  Even better is that you can now uncover and analyze the 50 real stories (totaling 300 clips after syndication) that may have appeared about your company.   

But someone still has to parse through the 700 that are no more than table of content mentions, tags used to ping search engines, OLD stories that were reprocessed with a new URL, or that list of stories dating back to 1999 that just popped up when Magazine X was finally discovered by WebClipping System Y or modified their content management system.

Yes, this is all great IF you accept that it's new technology that will improve and use it directionally to improve your own processes. 

But conversations with reputed thought-leaders and sales prospects over the past six months have led me to another conclusion:  Marketing people - especially PR people - are trying to buy report cards.

I'm seeing way too many agencies, mid-level users, and DIY analysis vendors simply plot and map the gross numbers for reporting purposes; users then take those 1000 hits and say, Look Boss - we're really rocking now, setting impossible, and highly inaccurate expectations for the future... you must look beneath the surface.  Very few spend the time to read the stories, scan the ads, uncover the insight, or test the hypothesis. They're blindly counting hits, web traffic, etc. as Actual Results.

Please.  Don't get suckered down this dangerous path or reporting gross output numbers.  As the technology improves your numbers will go down.  And, if someone looks below the surface, you'll look even worse.

Remember, stewarding your brand requires insight, understanding, and communication.

I hope marketers will put all their data together into a repository of learning.  Then tear it apart looking for actionable insight, for those elusive truffles.  We're building a company that facilitates the change. If you need help getting started, let us know.

"Encourage innovation.  Change is our lifeblood, stagnation our death knell"  - David Ogilvy

Double Blind: The Ultimate Brand Metric

Last night I shared a table with 12 friends whom I'd not previously met in person.  Most of us participate in an on-line community run by Mark Squires.  We all share an interest in wine, and gathered at Rathbun's in Atlanta to taste taste California Pinot Noir in a Double-Blind wine tasting.  Double-blind means you aren't told what wine is in your glasses, and you can't see any of the packaging in order to pre-judge what it might be.

So, before arriving we each selected a favorite wine to bring, took the foil capsule off our wine bottles, and covered them with aluminum so no labels could be seen and the others would be clueless what exactly they were about to drink.  Everyone brought wines that are hard to obtain and that aren't cheap - in an "off-line" like this, we get to taste 20 different brands and make informed decisions.

As Chef Kevin sent out course after course of food (amazing, btw), we tasted flight after flight of wines to talk about and decide for ourselves which ones we liked the best and learn about how each wine matched with certain foods.  And there were major taste differences apparent to all. 

This is a group of people that typically buys wine By The Case, and freely shares with others what they experience.  In marketing terms these are high volume, major WOM influencer's.  They prefer their own experience to that of the journalist experts or wine retailer, and all of this knowledge is shared among the BB community!

Of course we talked about the wine we bought and, for those of us in restrictive shipping states like Georgia, how we obtain the wines that we want but can't get at the store.

But I also heard stories about how wine influences how these people vacation, select restaurants, travel for business, socialize with others, trade wine with others, and make friends.  Yet we have all these wine ads out there showing a bottle shot or a vineyard, and new blogs/podcasts promoting hidden sponsors.

Which made me wonder:  with all these marketers "listening" to social media conversations - how many of them are actually participating in or listening to the real conversations before they become on-line short hand?  The ones where people are experiencing their brand, without baggage and without agenda.  In my previous life, that meant the good ole ethnographic kinds of things. 

My read is that many marketers have become more focused on skimming a thousand Blog posts than they are in living their brands. And, if they have hired one of these PR Me2 flaks to guide them, they're probably working to hijack the conversation rather than steward the brand.  What a shame.

If your job description includes "listening" to the customer - look for insights in places where your brand is served double-blind by people that matter.

P.S., I brought along Sea Smoke Southing, a wine that I'd bought but never previously tasted.  It turned out to be my favorite wine amidst the ones in its flight.  Boy was I happy about that because I'd bought a case on the suggestion of a friend without having previously tasted it! 

Oh and sorry to report, Sea Smoke is out of wine.  But if you want to sign up for their mailing list, include my email (efo3rd AT yahoo.com) as your referral so that we both get rewarded.

PRSSA - YounGuns of PR?

Richard Edelman highlights his PRSSA weekend, mentioning progress in diversity and other key take aways.  I'm sorry Richard, but the PRSSA picture of the leadership committee looks pretty white-bread to me; and, the stats he reveals are not encouraging IMHO that any progress in diversity recruitment is being made.  I was stunned last year to learn that the highly respected Grady School at UGA was struggling to keep its accreditation for lack of diversity.   During the past few years I've interviewed and hired eight interns from the school, all of which are fantastic kids who have done great work; but, I'm not sure they're getting an "up-to-date" education.  For the past two years I've been invited to speak to students there and my takeaway's mirrors Edelman's post - most students are women, most want to work in agencies (mainly because they've heard it's glamorous), most prefer NYC as a destination, *and* they have no experience or urgency to engage in blogs or other "new media".  Most consider the "social media" they use as "socializing" - perhaps a concept certain PR people need to accept.

The MadScam Artist

George Parker is a great ad guy.  I worked with him at Ogilvy; I hired him to do work for E3 Corporation; and, I love to trade barbs on his very funny blogs.  He swears a lot.  Drinks the good stuff.  He even looks the part of the hard-living-writer-turned-copyhack.  And he's completed a book.  It's hilarious, even without the F-word, and on the money.  He asked me to review it; I did, also posting a summary on Amazon.  Check it out.

Tempting Fate

I've been commenting on blogs for quite some time.  I believe there's a line we all must cross from being a participant in conversations, to initiating conversations.  After many encouragements, including from those with whom I've commented/connected, I've committed to have a go.

Let's see what happens.

But first, my disclosures.  I'm a communications guy, with stints at famous ad agencies and eye opening experiences on the other side of the desk at client companies.  The work I've done has primarily involved technology marketing, with a good bit of category insight in the Retail, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Security, and Networking/Telco spaces. 

One of the most powerful lessons I learned while researching and marketing collaborative supply chain software was how the transparency of data could be used by everyone in the supply chain to improve  everyone's profits.  This is a theme I'll come back to again and again, and a foundational idea for MediaHound.

I've had the good fortune to be involved in game changing marketing campaigns.  That doesn't make me THE expert - just lucky to be on teams of experts where we formed and built and tested ideas together.  I learned to use a wide lens, cut through the crap, weigh the impacts of gutsy decisions and respond quickly to change.  My career enabled me to travel the globe and get to know some amazing people, many upon whom I continue to rely for friendship and advice.

That said, here's the dark side: Hyperbole and mediocrity drive me nuts. I believe Pay-to-play should be disclosed.  Marketers who hide behind the size of their logo should be fired.  If you've read any of my earlier blogosphere comments, you notice that I call it as I see it. That won't change.

The company I founded is all about unearthing insights, establishing measurement programs, and applying what you know in your strategic planning.  No, we're not promising Six-Sigma or Balanced Scorecards or multi-variate econometric models.  If you've enough staff and money to do that, please contact Accenture or MarketingNPV.  Instead, we help companies without major resources.  The Challenger brands - all those small and mid-sized firms competing against SAP or Oracle in the ERP space, for example.  Companies with one poor soul sitting in Singapore or London trying to manage multi-national communication efforts across a huge region with no money and minimal market data. If you fit that category, I hope you'll visit www.mediahound.biz

Thanks for reading.

I appreciate comments, and will follow the advice I've received by moderating comments while I get my feet wet.