Marketing

Gary Vaynerchuk Loves You And Your Ad Agency

Peter · December 2, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Contrary to (some) popular belief, Gary Vaynerchuk actually loves you and your advertising agency. He wants to help you grow. Here is my take on today’s Gary Vaynerchuk plus a rather inspiring B2B marketing video.

FYI: One of my best-read blog posts is “Gary Vaynerchuk Is Full Of Shit.” It is a response to his early damning of the advertising industry. Take a read. By the way, it has been read over 5,000 times. Why? Well, putting “Gary Vaynerchuk’ and “Full Of Shit” in your headline gets Google’s attention and speaks to my audience.

My original sense of Gary being full of shit stemmed from Gary’s 2015’s “Do you know the problem with Marketing?” episode of the Ad Age Digital Crash Course:

Here’s the ‘shit’ part. In the video, GaryVee pontificates in ‘Gary Speak’ about how advertising agencies don’t care about selling products (only about winning awards); that emotion does not sell (tell that to Apple’s “Think Different”); that ‘traditional’ advertising is inefficient (like much of digital isn’t); that creatives might want to consider shooting 10 spots for $300K each vs. one for $3 million (this is a new idea??? what world is he living in?) and that maybe we should think about testing advertising before we run it (hmm… that’s a new one).

I love self-promotion. And I get railing at the old ways of doing business to further one’s cause. But, please, cut the way too obvious crap and don’t be insulting.

Gary Vaynerchuk Is Not Full Of Shit – He Wants To Love You (And Your Ad Agency)

OK, that was Gary in 2015 when he was building Vaynermedia and needed some service differentiation. Let’s cut to 2019. He recently spoke to a meeting of the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts. Watch the speech and Q&A below. Gary has both mellowed and has a lot of insight to deliver – to any B2B marketer. Just like your advertising agency.

A couple of Gary’s key points:

Buy underpriced attention for your agency marketing. This includes hammering underutilized LinkedIn. Hammer. Post like 40X a day.

Create longer content, like Gary’s videos, and cut them up for distribution. Amplify everything.

Don’t go out and hire a “social media expert” to run your program. YOU spend the 50 hours to learn it before you can ever judge the value of the freelancer/expert. I remember asking advertising agency CEO’s at Advertising Week if they ever placed a Google ad. The answer was no. I was like, are you kidding me? Do you even know WTF is going on?

Gary was asked how he finds the time to get things done. His answer – you probably waste three hours a day on really stupid shit. That 1-hour meeting should be 15 minutes.

If you run a local advertising agency, let’s say in Raleigh Durham, create a local show. Do a podcast, a local newsletter, a blog… just become known locally for your agency voice.

Big One: Romance your clients. Ever say thank you? Call up a client one year later to discuss that great project you did 12 months earlier? Send an unexpected gift? Call back a prospect that has fallen off your A-List? Find a good reason to say, Howdy.

The GaryVee Video…

A New Advertising Book?

Peter · September 12, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Should I Write Another Advertising Book?

Should you write your advertising (agency) book?

I’ve written and produced four books since I sold my Portland advertising agency in 2012. I am now thinking of “writing” a new advertising book based on a tight edit of the best thinking I’ve delivered on this blog. I currently have well over 300,000 words here. The blog posts have been viewed over 340,000 times.

I’ll discuss why to bother turning the blog into an advertising book a bit later in this post.

Some History. Books I’ve Written.

These include:

Boomercide: From Woodstock to Suicide. This was my training wheels book on the, dare I say it, interesting subject of using suicide as a financial planning tool. When I sold my agency, my accountant said there are two things we can control: how much money you have and how much you spend. However, there is another major factor we cannot control: how long your money has to last. I went, um, why can’t I control the length of my life. Buy Boomercide here.

The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. I have read every book on pitching and presenting. This is without question the best book on this subject. Join thousands of other agency leaders and buy this book here. Or, pitch against the agencies that read my tome, and, dare I say it, possibly lose.

Potlandia and Jointlandia are two photo books I researched and shot about the early days of the burgeoning legal cannabis market. I shot these because I am an in investor in Portland’s cannabis industry and was fascinated by the early attempts (almost hippie-like attempts) at product and retail branding in what is now a billion-dollar marketplace. You can see these books right here. While you are at it, take a look at my other photographs. I am currently traveling around the world to photograph people on every continent.

Why Write A Business Book?

I think that there are four reasons to write a business book – an advertising book by me, a consultant, or your agency. [Read more…] about A New Advertising Book?

More Advertising Agency Resources

Peter · August 30, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Even More Advertising Agency Resources – August 2019

Its Friday 30 August, the ‘end‘ of summer, so I thought I’d shoot y’all some new advertising agency resources that could help you grow your agency. Or, at least, provide some much-needed efficiency. I’ll list these here and then add them to my The Big Advertising Agency Resource List.

Side note, thanks to all of the people that send me their favorite resources that I can have my huge staff of resource-munchkins review and pass on.

Go Ahead Play With These

Awesome Screenshot. Awesome Screenshot captures images, the whole image or a selected area, and records my screen so I can put the images on this very blog or use in my white papers and recommendations. For convenience, it sits on my Chrome bar.

Bulk.ly. I use Buffer to schedule and send out (as in LinkedIn and Twitter) my current and best-of past blog posts. But, I have to admit that it can be a pain in the ass to remember to do it on a regular basis. Bulky helps to automate the system and keeps a Buffer queue full-up.

Checkbot. Checkbot check’s your site (or others) to see and fix SEO, speed and security issues. Are you doing better than your competition? How are your clients doing?

ContactOut. I’ll use ContactOut’s words: “Find anyone’s personal email and phone number.” And, “ContacOut is used by recruiters at 30% of the Fortune 500.”

FormSwift. FormSwift has forty or so forms on their website that you can use to create and edit important documents. Documents include employee handbooks; employment contracts, non-competes, lease agreements, balance sheets, and my favorite: a resignation letter.

No Mas Verano

That’s it for summer, well soon. And for today.

Seasonality is interesting. I know from my years of working with advertising agencies on their growth and profitability strategies, that my incoming lead email will light up a bit once the summer passes. While I know that we’ve moved beyond the days when ad agencies got real quiet in the summer, there is still a deep-seated sense that September means that we all should get our business development acts in order. So, go ahead… give me a shout.

Let’s talk about growing your business. You are in a hurry, right?

Contact me now and take me up on my impossible to refuse 15-minute Vito Corleone offer.

Anatomy Of An Advertising Agency Pitch: Part One

Peter · June 14, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Anatomy Of An Advertising Agency Pitch

This interview with Tony Mikes, Founder of the Second Wind Network, is a first-person perspective by an advertising agency management and business development leader who sat on the client side of an important ad agency pitch. It is an enlightening review of how advertising agencies performed, or didn’t, in a new business pitch for the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Frankly, A Must Read

The interview and perspective on agency new business pitching will be highly instructive for small, medium and large agencies… to say the least.

The interview first appeared in my book, “The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches.”

It is very rare to have an advertising agency veteran sit on the client side of a pitch and give his impressions of the process and how the agencies performed. You will hear about what the winning agency did and what the losers failed to do.

The interview is over three thousand words so I broke it into two parts. I urge you to read both.

At the end of part two, I will give you my impressions on the lessons that every agency can learn from Tony’s experience and insights.

Tony Mikes

Tony Mikes was the Founder and Managing Director of the Second Wind Network, which today has over 800 small to mid-sized agency members.

Tony consulted with and advised advertising agencies and their leadership on best practices for almost 20 years. He provided members and clients with ‘old school’ agency wisdom and combined it with cutting-edge strategies. Before starting Second Wind, he was President of Pennsylvania’s Mikes & Reese Advertising from 1972 to 1988.

My Portland agency Citrus had been a member of Second Wind, and Tony was one of our advisors. Tony was an experienced mentor that could always help me resolve an agency-related issue or grab an opportunity and turn it into success. Sadly, Tony passed away in 2015.

The Anatomy Of An Advertising Pitch Interview

PL: You were on the client side of the agency selection table recently. How did that go? [Read more…] about Anatomy Of An Advertising Agency Pitch: Part One