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Do you like using white boards?  Or does the very idea of a “brainstorming meeting” make you want to run for cover?  Our advertising agency trade association Second Wind, www.secondwindonline.com, recently had a discussion about how their member ad agencies approached concepting and developing ideas.  Here are some of the techniques used:

Floor-to-ceiling cloth tack boards:  good for tacking up sketches and concepts,  fun for cats

Galvanized metal walls: add giant magnets, large pads and markers and voila, your industrial space is instantly creative times ten

Gigantic sticky notes: Any smooth surface becomes a showplace for your creative energy.  Great for those-who-will-not-be-ignored

Cork boards: Old school, and remember tacks can be tons of fun.  Cork is ugly too. 

Erasable white boards:  Beware of the danger of sniffing the erasable markers.  Also, for big fun, mix in a few permanent markers with the erasable ones. 

Walls painted with chalkboard paint:  Now any workspace can become a chalk dust choked den of creative output.

The absolute very best thing about a creative wall is the idea of just leaving things up for collective individual commentary.  Now all the snarky comments you were afraid to voice publicly can be posted anonymously, provided you can disguise your handwriting.

What do you use?  Does it enhance productivity?  Do you have a “community comment wall”?  What is best about it? Is it fun or a time waster?

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Here’s a great quote:

The advertising person’s role on any side of the business is to help a company understand its customers and their needs better; to help a company respond to and speak to those needs, efficiently and effectively. Advertising is an honest business, a noble business, the engine of the American economy.-Bob Lauterborn

Lauterborn, James L. Knight Professor of Advertising a the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, can take a complex concept and condense it to its most brilliant and concise truthfulness.  Really, the guy creates intellectual diamonds. 

So what does that quote mean to us in the advertising business?  Simply said, everything in advertising starts with the customer, involves the customer and ends with the customer.  The minute advertising becomes “to” the customer instead of “about” the customer, it begins to be a waste of time and money. 

Look at the best advertising:  it tell the customer more about THEMSELF than the PRODUCT.  Every aspect of the message addresses the customer and the customer’s need. 

When you see an advertisement that you don’t get, know that you are NOT SUPPOSED to get it.  It isn’t about you and it isn’t for you.  And then try to figure out how you happened to see the message… are you a 60-something watching MTV?

“Know thy customer” is worth repeating.  And Bob Lauterborn explains why so well. 

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The other day, I was asked to speak at Robert Lauterborn’s class at UNC-Chapel Hill. He teaches a really interesting class on how to be a good client. Last year after I spoke to the same class, I wrote ten ways to be a good advertising client on my other blog, Life Is Marketing.

This year, Bob passed out an article by Lee Anne Morgan where she talks about the relationship between clients and agencies. She makes some excellent comments, including:

Many advertisers no longer perceive their agencies as partners but as vendors. There are differences though between being a partner and being a vendor. And these differences affect motivation, inspiration, dedication, truth, skin-on-the table…and an environment where creativity is easily birthed.

Lee Anne understands that agency-client relationships are not all about analytics. Check out this comment:

Every time an agency is fired, every time an advertiser feels it is not receiving value for their investment, and every time an advertiser and agency split asunder before taking all the steps they can towards partnership retention, then some ‘thing’ more intangible than metrics and profits, yet equally yoked, is at stake: that fragile space in which human values and creativity are cradled.

Well said, Lee Anne. Her whole article is worth reading. I hope you’ll spend the time to do so.

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With more and more traditional and non-traditional marketing opportunities available to companies these days to build their brand, it’s no wonder the death of the 30 second spot continues to be a topic of much conversation.  And one example of the untruth to that discussion is coffee juggernaut Starbucks’ recent launch of their first national TV campaign earlier this month.  

Starbucks, a company who has mastered the art of non-traditional marketing with a storefront on almost every corner, and has traditionally turned up their nose at TV advertising, is suddenly embracing the idea of mass media advertising through TV.  Yes, they’ve run spots before for their packaged product Doubleshot (the “Gene, Gene, Gene” spot is still one of my favorites), but with increased competition in the retail coffee biz, and more importantly slower sales and decreasing share price, Starbucks believes it needs to reach out to a broader audience.    

“As a national leader, we have an opportunity to make sure our voice is heard in the all-important media of TV. This is the beginning of a new opportunity for us,” Chairman Howard Schultz said at the announcement of the campaign. “We are up for the defense, and we will get on the offense.”

So in an effort to get people in the doors and sales and share value moving upward again, Starbucks decided that their plan of attack in the coffee wars would be through a new warm, fuzzy, animated TV holiday campaign that uses the tagline “Pass the Cheer.” 

But on top of all the competition with other coffee chains and independents, Starbucks also has to defend against the deep pockets of McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts who are spending considerable budget on marketing their coffee drinks.

Will the “new” tactic work?  Only time will tell who’ll win this over-caffinated battle, but it’s nice to see recognition of the power TV advertising is to the importance to a brand. 

Let us know what you think.  

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It’s fall. A glorious time for changing leaves and television media buying. Heroes is back on. Chuck is taking off. It gets dark really early, so you curl up with the warm glow of the LCD flat screen and absorb billions of dollars worth of advertising messages.

But there’s a writers strike. And advertisers are evaluating their options. With the writer’s strike in its second week, production has ceased on most prime time shooting, including Desperate Housewives, the Office and 24 (which is probably good since Kiefer is in the slammer anyway). So far, only the talk shows have been sent to reruns, but that will have to change if the strike continues for too long.

The big losers in this won’t be the advertisers, but the stations. If ratings plunge, the media buyers won’t lose because they have guarantees of viewership in their buys.

But if the strike continues and media buyers pull their budgets, where will all the $$ flow? Good question. What do you think?

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OK, this is not about holiday gift giving, this is about creating and maintaining a database for business.  There are lots of sophisticated and complicated software packages out there and some excellent industry-specific systems available.  I am not going to review those but rather I am addressing ideas and techniques for your average small business.  A digital mailing list is worth its weight in gold.  <<WARNING: STUPID METAPHOR… digital lists don’t weigh a thing!>> If you have any stupid metaphors you would like to share… please send them along.  ANYway, as I was saying, lists are valuable.  And costly.  And require a lot of attention.  But well worth the effort. 

A well-maintained mailing list lets you quickly and easily communicate with you best prospects for new business.  It keeps your name and good news in front of your friends, influencers and champions.   Properly deployed, it builds your business, builds goodwill and can have a positive impact on your bottom line.  But like any powerful tool, it can be misused, too. 

How To Build A List: Purchase lists of prospects from various sources.  Build your customized list from organizations and associations.  Add personal contacts.   Make it someone’s job to enter names into a database and discipline yourself and others in your organization to enter names into the database.

How to Maintain A List:  Assign someone to call and confirm names and titles at least once a year.  Perhaps this could be some sort of punishment. 

List Tips:  If you have Microsoft Outlook, use it.  Learn it.  It is great.  Buy yourself a DYMO LabelWriter, a nifty little printer, inexpensive and powerful.  It checks addresses, prints labels.  Really worth its weight it gold. 

What To Do With Your List:  Develop an opt-in e-newsletter.  Send out company “good news”.  Send seasonal gifts to your best prospects.  Send out white papers.  Send sensible direct mail.  

What Not To Do With Your List:  Send unsolicited, unsubscribable emails.  Send dumb, unbranded stuff.  Neglect it. 

In Conclusion:  Yeah, this is so NOT the latest and greatest technology news.  Nor is it deeply insightful.  Or sexy/cool/trendy.  It is plain old fashioned good advice.  From your Mom.  Or someone who could be.  Except she’s in your office.  Or managing a snappy smart ad agency.  Now go wash your hands.  And send everyone in your database and email about it.

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Meetings suck.  How many times have you felt like your entire day was hijacked, taken over by other people’s mysterious random agendas?  Of course, meeting have their good side.  We are social animals, and communicate best face to face.  So much more is accomplished when we actually can see the people with whom we are communicating.    So, why then do meetings feel like torture sometimes?

Without rules and structure, meetings, just like children, can get out of hand and turn into ugly, annoying monsters.  Never allow a meeting to take place without publishing: 

The purpose

An agenda

Start time and end time

And here is my pet peeve, the non-sacred start time.  Five people waiting ten minutes for the sixth person to show up is a waste of nearly an hour of productivity.  It is cruel to add onto everyone’s already long day by disrespecting the start time of a meeting.  Make it a policy to start and end on time.  Latecomers can catch up.  Last one in the room is elected the note taker!

So, with just a little forethought and sticking to some simple and basic rules you can tame the meeting monster.   Hell, you might just start enjoying meetings!  (I think the guy in the red hat is actually having a good time…)

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