I’ve had the honor of working at some of the best agencies in the world: McCann-Erickson, FCB, and Ogilvy & Mather. I worked for creative genius George Lois, and financial genius Sir Martin Sorrell. I worked with Tom Cunniff – who for my money brought branding to the Internet; and with Steve Hayden, whom I believe created the greatest ad of all time. I was a general agency guy, then a direct guy, then an interactive guy, then a mobile guy, then a social guy.

Now I’m just a marketing guy. On good days I get to work with Chris Colbert, who’s in the same league as those other titans. I love my job.

And I can tell you – without reservation – that the level of thinking this place delivers is as good or better than anything I’ve been a part of before.

If you’re looking for someone small enough to care, but big enough to trust, give us a call. And get a taste of the big time.

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The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

Here at Holland-Mark, we’ve been thinking out loud for a while now about how the agency business has changed for good. It’s no longer good enough for marketing to just be interesting – it must be imperative. As CEO of our resurgent business, Chris Colbert has been asked to join industry heavyweights from Mullen, Razorfish, Sapient, and W2 Group to discuss his perspective on the new age of agencies. The event by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) will be held on February 25 from 6-8 p.m.

Keynoted by Sean Corcoran of Forrester Research, the group will discuss how agencies will adapt to new marketing paradigms, the impact of technology, and agency/client relationships in a new era.

“When I restarted Holland-Mark in 2007, I did it because I knew it wouldn’t be business as usual. The economy has allowed us to reinvent how advertising agencies work – and it’s a good thing.”

We’ve been thinking about this for a while, and we look forward to being a part of this new conversation. Come by and have a listen.

More details on this MITX event can be found on the event website.

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So what can you expect from us in 2010?

Well, while we’re still going to call ourselves an “agency,” it’s just so folks have a box to put us in. The truth is we’re becoming something very different than that.

Now… I know you hear that from every advertising agency these days. Next time you do, ask whether they’ve actually turned down opportunities to create advertising for paying clients. We have, and I must say it’s been pretty liberating.

We’ve done this not because we think advertising is dead, although that makes better copy than the truth. We’ve done it because we think advertising is the wrong place to start.

The Imperative Economy

We start with an observation. It is that people — in both their business and personal lives — are only spending money on what they consider imperative. Think about how your own behavior has changed over the course of The Gateway Recession. When was the last time you plunked down the Platinum card on something that was just interesting, or even something with just the potential to influence your life? I bet it’s been a while. We buy what we need now, and it’s the same for the spending decisions we make on the job in the “B2B” marketplace.

Becoming imperative has become imperative. And doing so isn’t about “small-m” marketing, meaning, primarily, outbound marketing communications. Good advertising can make a product more interesting, no doubt. But it cannot make it imperative. “Consumers” — as we used to call them — decide what is imperative, and they communicate with each other at a volume and frequency that drowns out all but a very few deep-pocketed commercial entities.

Reality Is Perception

The implication of this is significant: Where once you could focus on driving the product reality by shaping market perception, now you must also gather market perception to shape the product reality.

What I’m saying is what we all know… that Marketing needs to step up, put the crayons down for a bit, and take a seat at the grown-up table. Getting the topline moving in the Imperative Economy will take more than advertising. It will take “big-M” Marketing, meaning a willingness to tackle the substantive issues related to:

1. the relevance of your offering,
2. the clarity of your message,
3. the consistency of your communication, and
4. your ability to drive engagement among a group of brand advocates large enough to support your business.

Holland-Mark’s Role

We think our job is to help clients establish that cycle… to “corrupt” their vision with the external reality. In a nutshell, Holland-Mark helps businesses connect with, respond to, and benefit from the truth about their customers, products, and brand relationships.

If you come across someone who needs that — and who recognizes the need to change more than just their tagline to achieve it — please drop us a line. In the meantime, we’d love to hear what you think about our conclusions, our approach, and our prospects.

Look for more details soon right here. Be sure and subscribe to our blog if you’re interested.

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What is social media?

How do marketers really feel about social media?

What is the power of social media?

Thanks to everyone!

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Among the implications, is that to do great work, you need great clients.

So what makes a great client? Here’s my list of client attributes that help me to do my best work…

1. A single decision-maker, empowered with final decision-making authority
2. A personal relationship, with trust and respect in both directions
3. A focus on clear articulation of the problem and/or business objective
4. The courage to face the truth and deal with it
5. Crisp and direct feedback, whether positive or negative
6. On-time payment
7. The sincere belief that marketing is important
8. A personal experience where great marketing changed the game
9. A sense of humor
10. High standards and expectations

What’s on your list?

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More specifically, it’s about the troubling observation of fact that sometimes, a pair of fun bags beats a full house of all the things we celebrate here in the advertising blog-o-sphere.

At some level I am troubled by this. I am an enlightened man, an educated man. While I’m as curiously fascinated with the female form as any such man, I can say truthfully that I actively dislike the “Go Daddy” guy, and that I think his advertising diminishes us all.

He defends it in the context of four other “rules of entrepreneurship” in this piece, which I believe was originally titled, “Why I’m So Freaking Great, And You’re Not”:

Whatever, dude. Go knit yourself a Harley cozy.

But… dammit… from a 16% share of all new domain registrations to a 25% share of the same market, worldwide. Nine share points. Overnight. DAMN.

And thus my dilemma.

I think great advertising is advertising that delivers great results. Awards are nice (and I have a few, thank you), but we want to be an agency that — first and foremost — gets results. Period.

Does that mean, by our own definition, that this is great advertising? If we delivered something less offensive, and likely less effective, would we be breaking our own rules?

Now, don’t wimp out and give me that “Shock works for a while but great brands endure” stuff either. GoDaddy is still killing it, even after all this time.

So which is it? Is obvious crap like this “great” if it delivers the goods? Or is it always better to trade off business impact for work we and our fellow PBS-supporters can celebrate?

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Among the key themes of the panel was that, as far as these reporter/bloggers were concerned, PR agencies aren’t worth much. In a roomful of PR folks, you can imagine what happened next. As John Wall of Ronin Marketer described:

There was one question from the crowd asking why PR firms were not represented. David said it was because they wanted a panel of first person accounts from the reporters. I think a key point on whether or not you need a PR firm is your ability to tell your story effectively. You either want a PR firm that has existing relationships with the specific publications or channels you need to get into, or to help you craft your message if you are not a passionate and effective storyteller.

That question was asked by Bobbie Carlton, and she was first out today with her thoughts:

A lot of the statements from the panel this evening came straight out of a time warp. A time warp where press releases are written for the media, where PR = media relations, and all a PR person is good for is writing said press releases and carefully “managing” media relationships.

There was a lot of great information served up in the panel but if I was an entrepreneur, all I would have heard was, “Run away from PR people, they are useless to you. In fact, probably worse than useless because top reporters look down on them as a breed.”

Lora Kratchounova posted a pretty balanced summary of the panel’s advice, including:

Best way to get journalists’ attention? Seek and get a personal referral — otherwise whether you do it or your agency does it for you, your pitch will go unnoticed. Then try and meet these journalists in person and tell them your story. Got the impression that journalists are looking for the raw material, that more often than not, they avoid media-trained people. Because they are after the juicy details, the things people don’t tell you — so the more authentic, first-hand info they can get, the better the chance that they will listen to your story.

Chuck Tanowitz posted a thoughtful critique, climaxing in this juicy anecdote:

After the panel, as I approached Wade Roush, I found myself in a very interesting conversation with one of the panel’s targets: a bootstrapped entrepreneur whose company is targeting application developers. He had a few questions of Wade that frankly were out of Wade’s range. The entrepreneur wanted to know how to talk with specific application development message boards and what impact news and information presented there would have on gaining coverage from Xconomy. He and I then had a nice conversation about communications strategy leading up to his launch. We agreed that getting coverage in the Globe, for example, wouldn’t help him reach his audience, but later may be useful in reaching potential investors, a move that affects his communications strategy. We also talked about his need for a “community manager” who would focus on working with the various application development forums.

And that leads to my main problem with the panel: they preached the misguided notion that PR is only media relations.

Look folks… It’s a fair comment to say the contrarian view should have been represented. And if PR agencies really didn’t add value, they’d be in worse shape than most of them are now.

For the record, as I stated in a comment to Bobbie’s post:

…the reason neither David nor I thought to include a PR person was that the panel’s subject was “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR.” I’ve never seen a PR shop that would get out of bed for less that $4K/month, so the vast majority are off topic.

As for the individual practitioners who’ve broken with the old PR practices – people focused on networking and relationship building, on adding real value… there are a few out there, but in defense of the panel I would say those folks are the exception, and not the rule. Given that, the fact is most entrepreneurs who require coaching on the skills you describe are ill-equipped to distinguish the shamans from the shysters, so going it alone in the beginning does seem pretty good advice.

This isn’t really about PR at all, it’s about the whole broken marketing services model. I believe that social marketing / influence marketing / content marketing / inbound marketing / whatever-you-want-to-call-it marketing is going to take a big bite out of conventional marketing in the coming years, and that it’s already replaced conventional marketing for the kinds of businesses we were talking to last night. The marketing pros who want a seat at that table need to earn it by adding value, in the form of relationships, real-world experience, and the development of content that serves the interests of BOTH commercial entities and their target audiences.

I think what our audience heard last night is that the people who can do that are needed now more than ever. The problem with most PR firms is that their underlying economics are driven by a leverage model that surrounds a handful of the above folks with an army of earnest, underpaid young faces. In that sense the PR firm model is not something that serves the interests of entrepreneurs. In fact it’s something I think is destined for the history books.

We’re intimately familiar with this challenge at Holland-Mark, and are struggling with it ourselves. Is the “junior staff leverage” model really dead, and if so, what business model will support the next generation of great marketing services firms? The truth is I don’t know. But it seems to me that’s the conversation worth having among the “PR” digerati… not the semantic argument about what PR is or isn’t, but how, in the end, the people delivering it will build a sustainable and productive business.

I’ll post the video here when it’s available, please subscribe if you don’t want to miss it. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts – both on the question above, and on whether last night’s panel was fair or not.

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