Financial Fractals.

Now, I don’t know much about fractals. I remember they are like an ever repeating pattern – no matter what size, always the same. Like a fern frond. Which I remember vividly from my wonderful childhood and liberty allowing Mom (by that I mean, I could do whatever I wanted as a child – as long as no one got hurt. I’ll be ever thankful for that).

It just struck me last week that one of the crazy things about employment, the search for, the intent for promotion and most importantly the responses, requirements and questions from recruiters (with whom I’ve been dealing with for a project right now) is the questions they ask – one one in particular…

And that is, the question they all seem to ask of people who’ve run agencies, which is ‘what’s the revenue, how big was the business you managed’. Now, if you’re going for an account handling role – and you want to demonstrate the scale of work you can undertake, or the amount of clients you can ‘liaise’ with on a daily basis (although in most of my experiences running an agency the world liaise normally means ‘I left a message on his/her voicemail’) then maybe it is relevant, although I don’t really believe it.

Was Obama discriminated against because he’d never held a nation’s budget before? Did Tony Blair get asked ‘well do you have experience of a multi-billion pound defence budget’. The answer is no. It’s about fractals – scale, if you can manage 100 dollars effectively then maybe you could manage 100′000 as well? The fundamentals, the rules of economics (and I’m learning more about THOSE every day) stay the same. The numbers change, but not the formulas.

Good leadership isn’t the volume or value of your business, it’s the quality, wisdom, decisiveness and passion of your leadership. The former is only a by-product of the latter.

People I may know… take a look.

Apologies if you’re named in here – you did put yourself on LinkedIn didn’t cha?

 

Andrew – may YOU know him too?

It’s time to steal back our tricks from politics.

Politics, PR and Marketing are inextricably linked. The race to the Whitehouse is without doubt the finest example on the planet that a 360 degree approach to communications is both what works and what is needed. It’s funny and tragic then that our industry is still struggling and in fighting to mimic this collaboration. Whilst we watch the most impressive viral campaign in history from Barack Obama bring in millions in donations, we are still holding inter-agency meetings and arguing over who’ll write the contact report.

Why is it that whilst the political engine, with little historic experience of brands, marketing and technology do our work so well whilst we still can’t stitch together PR and Advertising,  media and digital or even planning and creative? To say the political world is eating our dog-food is a gross understatement, what’s happening so successfully in politics today is humiliating our industry and we have to shape up pretty quick and take back what’s ours.

My first point and probably the simple answer to this is to go out there and start hiring the people behind the campaigns (I don’t mean Mark Penn – he’s doing fine). What I do mean is the new young bright political evangelists that have given up their time, freely to find ways to market their candidate to the press and people so effectively. Instead of worrying about the next op-ed opportunity or panel to put the ECD on, I’d be briefing recruitment companies to start tracking and attracting the power behind these political campaigns and creatives.  You never know,  we might just succeed there, we have a lot to offer – higher salaries (probably) a vast array of different and exciting work and career longevity.

However, what we lack is passion. My next observation is that we need to harness the passion and loyalty that the political parties bring to their people every day. There was a time in this world – which we’ve all been recently reminded of thanks to Mad Men when our industry was exalted, we were the dream job – it was the place to work. Less so now. Why is that and how did we lost our pride?

Much of it might be down to the homogenization of marketing businesses and not the disciplines which is necessary. By that I mean the buy, sell, acquire, trading, merging of ad agencies and other marketing companies which slowly chips away at what makes them special and gives them their ‘edge’.  Hung governments are never captivating, they are compromised and leadership invariable fails. Maybe we’ve fallen foul to this. it’s a truth that the new agencies, the super cool agencies seem to attract the bright people – is that because the are ‘small and boutiquey and push the envelope’ or is it actually because they are independent that they fundamentally stand for something like the parties do right now?

Isn’t it telling that you can follow a CMO of an advertising agency from one group company to another – probably using the same rolodex, the same approach and no doubt the same jokes from corridor to corridor. What does that say to us about the power of our brands? Doesn’t it, in some way, make a mockery of all we tell our clients about standing for something. What do today’s large agencies actually stand for?

Leadership is my next point. I have no doubt that we’re not going to see a Obama & Co agency starting any time soon but how do we instill the real power of leadership into today’s agency leaders. What is the succession management plan for advertising. Looking back at recent history, Bullmore, Ogilvy, Chiat & co helped define what their firms stood for – and lead from the front creating insanely loyal and driven people completely committed to their job. Today who do we really have? 

Richard Edelman has done a phenomenal job of continuing to lead his business forward with the drive and dedication that’s so evidently missing from his other marketing leaders. Now some of this, again,  might come down to the holding company squeeze on independence and drive. However, are today’s marketing CEO’s too addicted to quarterly results and margin and not enough the the product they actually make and the people that make it. 

I walked into an agency once in Chicago (who shall remain nameless) to find on every one of their dozen plasma screens in reception work playing from other agencies. When I asked why I was told that the CEO wanted to show that they were passionate about the work for all agencies in their holding company. This struck me as entirely insane and without direction or passion. 

Bob Jeffrey at JWT made it rule number one that he had to see work regularly – every day and he does. He understands that to lose touch with your product (like a politician losing touch with the people) is brand suicide.  

So we need to prepare now for the leaders of tomorrow – identify the talent that can not just manage a p&l but bring together a philosophy and I think we’d be helped by looking a bit further a field than just our somewhat incestuous industry where recruitment is akin to the same old people throwing their keys in the bucket. 

But back to my opening point, the 360 approach. This, I think is the single biggest issue for agencies today and one that’s been talked about ad infinitum. I don’t want to harp on about it like every one in agency world does (saying but not doing) but I do want to make one point. 

How can you expect agencies to work well to together when they don’t know what they stand for apart?

Barry Diller talks of Creative Conflict, the need to push your ideas, positioning, beliefs and self even to find out what makes you tick. It’s time this industry created some conflict to blow away the past, unblock the pores of progress and take some pride in itself.  

Marketing has become so risk averse, so ‘safe’ and therefore dull. We seem to be scared to stand up for ourselves in case its not what our clients’ believe in – but we forget that our clients hired us for who we are – not what we want them to be. 

So let’s forget about 360 for now, about trying to date and smooch other companies, I believe we all individually as agencies need a makeover first; just like Tony Blair and his team gave Britain New Labour, we desperately need New Marketing. 

That’s change we can believe it.

Is the tide turning?

The very fact that North Carolina is now seemingly hanging in the balance is incredibly refreshing to me. As it the fact that Obama has really had a couple of bad weeks press-wise. It feels like the political playing field might just be looking a bit more level now.

It’s not that I loathe Obama (I don’t, I just don’t think he plays the game well enough to be president) but I wanted the press to turn a bit. The media have put him on such a pedestal that he to take a tumble and tumble he has.

He may still win, but now we see a bit more of the real issues coming through with Barack and the main one is beyond big speeches and rallies – he doesn’t cope well in debate. Although we say this through the lens of CNN – isn’t debate a critical asset of democracy? Should the American president be at the top if his or her game in this crucial category? And if he’s about hope and a new beginning, why wait so long to condemn the people and influences on his life that he has refused to do so for so many months?

And Guam, dear God I never thought I’d right about Guam, gave Obama a win by 7 votes. Hardly the touted landslides and ‘movement based politics’ of last year. And Guam aside, Pennsylvania was a good win for Mrs. Clinton.

Hillary – on the other hand – seems to fail a bit at public speaking, she seems distant, or exhausted or just aloof. I think she’s got to watch that. However, I think her relationship with real Americans seems to be more ‘real’ and ‘earned’ than the highly managed, single stump speech based Obama. That’s not to say that she’s down with the kids – her tax returns certainly show us how privileged her life is – but maybe because Americans trumpet success, living the “American Dream” as it were – they applaud her for her wealth.

I’d rather have someone in the White House who could work the internal machinations of America government than someone who can fill a stadium; I’d rather vote (remember, I can’t so these views are already irrelevant) for a candidate who’s been there and mostly done that.

You know, I’ve worked in radio, news and PR most of my career – there was such a momentum behind Obama at the beginning that it looked like a one horse race and yes, I was excited – Democrats are gifted with such brilliant candidates. But things change, the media has changed and it seems that those in the know might be starting to put experience and empathy above hope and haughtiness.

And those in the know seem to be real Americans.

A point of clarity.

Obama aint perfect; and in fact as an Englishman who cannot vote here, I think he’s sinister. I know you’re going to tell me I’m prejudging him, or not ‘getting’ it. But it’s my gut feel. I just don’t think being able to rally 100’s of 1000’s of people is the same as getting collaboration and consensus from politicians.

Like the Product:RED campaign, I think you need to be a part of the problem to help bring about a solution. People just weren’t coughing up enough money for AIDS globally; RED took away that need to ‘do’ something by building the solution into the sin of consumerism. You won, they won.

So I guess what I’m saying is this — Clinton screwed up, royally. But still, when the chips (or is that fries) are down, I want a President who knows the system from the inside – whether that’s as a First Lady or otherwise – and who believes in change that doesn’t just make a stadium audience hypnotically cheer – but change that really helps the lives of millions of Americans.

And basically I think we need more women leaders.