Flackety flack flack flack.

The Chief Communications Officer has left the building. I’ve written about this before but it is relevant right now given the impending changes in the NY agency landscape. The economy is driving dollars out of the industry and cuts will and have to be made.

I’d start with the in house communications people. I know, I’m off killing my profession again, but when will advertising agencies wake up to the principle of outsourcing reputation management? Surely the most fundamental rule of PR is that it is not what you say about you – it’s what others say about you. So why duplicate agency support with a ‘Chief Communications Officer’. You don’t need that, you need a PR co-ordinator, someone who can pull it together, is paid a managers salary  and doesn’t influence the incredibly intricate and business lead challenges of marketing CEO’s.

The reason I thoroughly enjoyed JWT was that I wasn’t a ‘Chief Communications Officer or Publicist’ – I was a communications strategist. The best publicity comes not from that which you beg for, but from good ideas. As soon as the road block goes up on the latter, there is no former.

Hollow PR campaigns, mismanaged account wins and losses and hatches, matches and dispatches take seconds to manage, and yet so many of the big PR people in big agencies make it look like an art-form, using the same ‘wool over the eyes’ tricks that the same agencies use to get more time and more money from clients.

It’s interesting to note that I have yet to meet one corporate communications person at a large marketing agency who has ever run or even worked inside a PR agency. I think that’s a ringing endorsement at the lack of creativity, strategy and respect that agency flacks receive – and many of them simply deserve it.

I’ll caveat by saying the happy medium, at least, is those PR types who’ve even run business for agencies, at least they understand, in part, the power of the brand and the impact of ideas on reputation.

Until the marketing industry understands that managing its own reputation is as critical as its clients – we are set for more endless PR newswire appointment releases and the captivating news that yet another advertising agency sub-brand has been created, sweet joy.

At least the marketing trade press is evolving, more stories about the power of brands, more diversification, more probing analysis – the 2 American titles are actually great reads – with the lack of interesting agency news, they delve into some of the real issues this industry faces. Long may they reign.

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.

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.

The power of the Op-Ed

Working, as I do, with a number of well known CEO’s and industry leaders, it has come to my attention that it is slowely becoming easier and easier to place comment pieces. There seems to be a genuine insatiable urge to put the opinions, views and philosophies of these types of people up there with the independent editorial stance of the publication concerned.

I think it raises a couple of interesting points.

1. I’m furtunate to be on the advisory board for an innovative new product aimed at pushing more news out to more people – direct to consumer (it is called NewsForce). Whilst working with them, admiring their confidence and a clearly very  smart product, I came across a proof-point which I now believe carries some weight. The fact is there ARE less journalists to go around. AdWeek has just laid off more people (it’s a miracle how in the face of such adversity it still manages to get all the real news first)… the NYT is looking at cuts and the print industry is absolutely contracting. So less press. That’s good for Op-Eds, but is is good for independence of thought? Is this content being rigourously fact checked – or is it a free for all sounding board?

2. Where’s the Op-Ed for Joe the Plumber? The whole world is bottom-up now (so we are lead to believe) so why isn’t mother media welcoming in all types of people to have their say. Don’t tell me they do via the letters page – I mean, who really reads that? Isn’t that where the subscription details and cartoons are? Isn’ that really the little condescending area where editors toy with readers views and just let them vent? I’d like to see Op-Eds for the people.

3. How safe are Op-Eds for those that draft them? And how many of them are truly drafted by the person who’s name they appear under. So how true are they really? Or are they just a time-pressured CEO signing off an idea they think won’t cause too much trouble? I don’t think many journalists ghost write… it doesn’t feel quite so true does it?

Anyway, here’s an Op-Ed that’s currently running on HuffPo, drafted by Bob Jeffrey, global CEO of JWT. I like the concept a lot. And I didn’t write it. Click here.

You know when your taste is perverted.

I’m not kidding. This isn’t about the failure of London Fashion Week, or my declining interest in Project Runway this season – this is medical.

When Holly and I used to work at Freud’s (an outstanding PR agency in its time) we took on a client who wanted us to promote a range of weight loss products. Now these products were non-prescription so therefore non-effective, unless of course you were praying at the church of Saint Placebo.

They had wonderful names though, the two I remember are ‘Exercise In A Bottle’ and more importantly ‘Dessert Avert’. The former was full of some poor Amazonian’s back garden and the latter contained some type of berry that changed the taste of sugar into the taste of well, lard.

Now of course, there’s only so much PR can do for products which frankly could only be bought by stupid people and the clinically dumb, so we put advertorials straight into OK! magazine, the perfect target for this highly regarded demographic. They flew off the shelves at the rate of, ooh, at least 2/3 a day and of course the shame of such a low hit rate and such a frankly humiliating campaign led Holly and I to quite rapidly wash our hands of the whole business.

Anyway, cut to today, and a 6 monthly at the Dr’s. I won’t go into why I was so relieved that I’d trimmed my chest hair, but the story above is related to a new tablet I was given today for Cholesterol. In amongst the ‘contra-indications’ on the leaflet was the phrase ‘Taste Perversion’ – I laughed at such a ridiculous side effect.

My Diet Coke tastes like plasticine and the bagel I just tried to eat tasted like concrete.

So frankly, I may very well be putting off a heart attack – which is a good thing, but if you happen to see me in the street eating a girder or a bus shelter, just give me a sign.

 

PS. Mom, family etc. It’s a drug that’s made of fish oil.

Is full time a waste of time?

 

I’ve been thinking recently if business needs full time Chief Communications Officers. I understand the concept of this is biting the hand that has fed me for some time. But I’ve always thought looking a gift horse in the mouth was worth two in the bush.

When I’ve been at marketing cos in the past I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasted an awful lot of time and consequently I think my employer probably wasn’t getting best value. Also, if you’re going to be a true communications professional you need to be totally immersed in ALL types of communication whilst being able to give independent counsel when required.

I think you can have heads of comms. who may just drink a bit too much of the Kool-Aid; people who get so submerged with loyalty, conviction and passion that they lose focus on the fundamentals:

1. What is news?

2. What is a reputation issue?

3. What is true?

Look at it this way, if Communications Consultants were provided by Bain they probably wouldn’t be 5 days a week in the office. They would probably work in a number of different categories, with the same discipline and cross-pollinate ideas, thoughts and outputs.

That’s fresh thinking, and it’s the sort of thinking that’s worth paying for. This might all look like a vain attempt to promote what I do, but it’s been more of an enlightenment for me.

I was speaking with a prominent journalist at an extremely highly regarded business national here this morning; she vehemently agreed that this philosophy was the right way,. She told me that it happens this way it gives her far more information from a more credible party who can see both sides of the PR fence.