Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
I’ve written about the potential of chatbots as an advertising agency revenue and new business source. Read about it here on HubSpot and here on my blog.
If you have any reason to think that chatbots are NOT going to be a major part of the digital world & your marketing, listen to the leaders of Facebook, Microsoft and Google on what they are up to.
Check out my article
My article offers three big takeaways (I mean immediately actionable takeaways) for your ad agency and its new business program:
On the subject of reach… after only a couple of hours, my post was shared lots. See….
Last point. Here is the video ActiveBuddy made 14 years ago to launch our company. You’ll see that I thought bots were a big fucking idea then. I still do.
Before I get into my personal story, I want to make it clear that my definition of being fired is not necessarily the usual one. Traditionally, being fired means that you’ve been axed, sacked, canned, let go, terminated, or dismissed. In most cases, people get fired for poor performance, misconduct, breaking company rules, or other issues related to their work or behavior (plus the lovely phrase: downsized often due to a corporate reorganization).
To be very au current, given today’s evolving work universe, someone might have been AI’d. To be more direct, let’s just call it what it is… many careers are about to be brutally fucked by Artificial Intelligence. Not yet rampant. Stay tuned, as some bigly disruption is coming fast.
My firings were never due to poor performance (well, my Adidas case might be an exception). Stay tuned for that intriguing story.
Firing has gone in two directions. In my management career, I unfortunately had to fire people. In every case, letting someone go was extremely painful and upsetting for everyone involved.
Because the act was so painful for me, I have been fascinated (and repulsed) that the term “You’re fired” became part of our vernacular and was even applauded by fans of Donald Trump’s TV show The Apprentice.
This humiliating public dismissal became a bedrock vibe that helped elevate Trump’s popularity and belief in his business acumen. It proved to the unwashed just what a great businessman he has been. Americans have an interesting take on what makes a boss great. They also seem to love Trump’s use of gold…. Everywhere.
1. Fired Number One: Northwest.
I started my advertising career in 1980 at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, New York’s largest advertising agency. We had multiple floors in the iconic Chrysler Building. DFS’s clients included major brands like Toyota, P&G, General Mills, RJR Nabisco, HP, and Wendy’s.
Not a bad place to launch a career. The 1980s advertising world rocked. My own clients included General Mills (cereals and Yoplait Yogurt), Sara Lee, and Western Union (yes, Western Union, its EasyLink service, get this, was the first commercial email app). Since the term email had yet to exist, as brilliant marketers, we called the benefit “Instant Mail.”
In my third year at DFS, I was asked to run the Minneapolis-based Northwest Airlines account. At the time, the third largest U.S. airline. Not just run the account; I was asked to move to Minneapolis and become the GM of our new office dedicated to this $60,000,000 advertising account. It was a rather good career move as it allowed me to move past my tier of account execs.
DFS inherited the business because our client, Republic Airlines, had been purchased by Northwest, and, well, good news, Northwest liked our style vs. Republic’s existing advertising agency.
Northwest bought Republic to build out its domestic routes. At that time, Northwest, then known as Northwest Orient Airways, was best known for its international service, particularly its leadership in North America-Asia routes. The airline’s “Great Circle Route,” developed in the 1930s, carried more flights to Asia than any other airline.
Back in the 1980s, Northwest was not considered a quality product. The planes were old. The seats were worn. The in-flight service kinda sucked.
To get ahead of the airline’s service failures, we brought in innovative marketing. We launched the most lucrative frequent flier program. We gave away more miles and therefore trips than any other airline. The airline’s largess worked at a time when domestic and global business travel was starting to boom. Good timing.
On the positive side, Northwest was the U.S. to Asia leader in terms of the number of westbound flights. The airline flew to China, Guam, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Unfortunately, the international product was uncompetitive and increasingly at risk due to superior service from leading Asian carriers. Northwest was like a Volkswagen compared to a Ferrari. The airline’s dominance was also at risk from United Airlines, which was introducing new Asia routes.
To save the international business, we turned to what I called ‘information as a service’. An uncommon brand attribute in the 1980s.
Our Asia Series was designed to help newbie American businesspeople learn how to conduct business across unfamiliar Asian cultures. Examples: we taught Americans how and when to bow in Japan, how to deliver the right gifts in China, and how to survive a karaoke night in Seoul. These business tips were delivered via a series of TV commercials, 90-second radio infomercials, booklets, and even 900 numbers (yes, those were mostly porn in those days).
The Asia Series was so successful that we won a bunch of creative accolades and prestigious EFFIE Awards for the client and agency. EFFIEs were awarded by the American Marketing Association in recognition of marketing excellence and proven results.
Back to getting fired. [Read more…] about I Was Fired – A Lot – A ‘Happy Ending’ Story
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What you are about to read is a mélange of life experiences. These include growing up in Manhattan, getting loaded in Puerto Vallarta, being an LSD expert, killing it on a TV show, a bit of HDHD, getting tossed out of college, finding “art,” and getting banned from LinkedIn.
To tell you my very own truth, I’m a skilled liar. Not psychotic. Just good at factoid manipulation.
I can prove it. Stay tuned.
I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, across the street from Central Park. When people I meet ask me where I’m from… I say Manhattan. After a few minutes of conversation, they say, “Oh, yeah, I get it.”
I went to McBurney School, a private high school in New York City. It was small – we had 61 students in our senior class. We wore blue blazers with McBurney emblems, gray wool pants, and striped ties. The school was on 63rd Street, sandwiched between Central Park and Lincoln Center. We had what I’d call a classical education. Despite being a smart guy in a smart school, I was not remotely interested in most of my classes, especially math. I was one of those kids who did not meet their “potential”. Frankly, school bored me. But I hung in.
One sunny fall afternoon, I was going to hang out with my good friend Jeff. After classes, he showed up in the school lobby to tell me that he couldn’t do the hangout because our headmaster had asked him to join a couple of other boys, uber math and science lovers, to go down to the TV production company Goodson-Todman Productions. Goodson-Todman was the leading game show company and ran hugely popular TV shows like Family Feud, The Price Is Right, and Concentration. Their office was on a high floor in Park Avenue’s iconic ultra-modern Seagram’s Building.
My classmates were going to audition for two guest slots on the popular afternoon panel show To Tell the Truth. I tagged along… the plan was to run around the city after they finished their audition.
Just in case you are not a baby boomer, To Tell the Truth was a staple of daytime TV from 1956 to 1978. The show was a fun game show where celebrity panelists tried to figure out which of three contestants was telling the truth about having a weird job or crazy experience. The other two were impostors who got to lie through their teeth.
Back to me. Here we are, three blazer-clad high school boys in the Seagram building on Park Avenue, sitting in a very snazzy reception area. Within a few minutes, a young production assistant came out and welcomed us. She asked if we were the boys from McBurney. My buddies stood up, and the woman asked why I was sitting. I told her that I was there as a friend. She said, hey, why not get interviewed too – you are already here. My buddies looked at me with surprise. I’m like, why the hell not?
The assistant took me into a small conference room and started with questions to get to know me. I happily told her that I truly loved math and science (LOL), and I demonstrated that I could put sentences together. Plus, I was telegenic with a workable and effective blush.
It was then that I found out that we were being interviewed for a To Tell The Truth episode about LSD, a drug just then making the rounds of my generation. One of us was going to be one of two non-truth impostor boys sitting beside a Midwest teenager who had won the National Science Award for reporting the effects of LSD on spiders – a 1948 experiment he had recently updated.
I’m like, LSD and arachnids. That’s cool… fits neatly into the zeitgeist. This was 1968, hippies were all over the TV news, and I had read a bit about two newly famous Harvard professors who had experimented with LSD and were becoming 1960s cultural icons.
A day after the interview, our headmaster asked me to come to his office, a rare event, and asked what the heck I was doing at the production company because he was rather surprised to hear that I had been selected to be on the show. I just smiled and shrugged.
I had a couple of phone conversations with the production assistant and was given a date for the show and a bit more detail on the science project. Guess what! The spiders wove crazy webs under the influence of LSD. Who knew?
An LSD Education…
I had two compelling incentives to be a brilliant faker on To Tell the Truth. One was simply my competitive nature. Like, why couldn’t I look and sound the part of a science nerd? This would sort of be my first “business pitch”. Pitching was something I would eventually master and write business books about. The other incentive was the cash prize for being believed that I was the real LSD science nerd.
Back to EDU.
After being selected, I went to the Donnell Research Library on West 53rd Street to study all about psychedelics and especially Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. My acid gurus were Harvard’s Timothy Leary, who became well-known for his mantra, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, and Richard Alpert. Richard eventually became the global Buddhist guru Baba Ram Dass, now famous for his mantra, “Be Here Now.” Leary and Alpert were moral evangelists, even entrepreneurs in the emerging field of psychedelics that captured the attention of the post-war cohort. They had been so good at their job that they were kicked out of Harvard. My goal was to become an expert like them. FYI: Dozens of years later, I got “Be Here Now” tattooed on my right arm to help tame my monkey mind.
The Show.
A couple of weeks later, I found myself in Studio 54, yes, that one, for the tapping of the show. I was one of three teens facing Tom Poston, Peggy Cass, Orson Bean, and Kitty Carlisle (famous people in 1968), plus the host, Bud Collier. The goal for the imposter boys was to stump the panel plus the audience, who also voted. Our maximum prize was $500, which would be shared.
What happened? [Read more…] about How To Lie: From TV to LinkedIn
Are you overwhelmed with AI Information? Of freakin course. Here are five sources for new AI information that I use to stay ahead of the daily barrage of AI news. I devote about 10 to 15 minutes a day—max to learning and keeping up.
Since the last thing you need is too much information, here is a short list.
Marketing Intelligence Institute: From Paul Roetzer (super smart marketer for eons) on how to use AI in marketing and advertising. Read it, attend their seminars, and listen to their “Artificial Intelligence Show” podcast. Do it!
Decode: A daily news and info resource. Decode “unlocks exclusive access to Decode’s ultimate AI tool book, with 500+ verified, vetted, and powerful tools across 40+ categories.” Includes AI tutorials, lists of what’s new, etc. A smart one.
Superhuman: Yes, more info and news. Their words — “Learn how to leverage AI to boost your productivity and accelerate your career. Join the world’s biggest AI newsletter with 650,000+ readers from companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and more.”
AI Tool Report: Yes…. More… “Learn AI in 5 minutes a day. We’ll teach you how to save time and earn more with AI. Join 500,000+ free daily readers from Tesla, Apple, A16z, Meta, & more.”
Matt Wolfe: A rather beyond decent YouTube channel dedicated to AI.