Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

New Business

Ad Agencies: Follow The Mobile Advertising Money

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Advertising, design, PR and digital agencies are always searching for the next pot of gold. Determining which revenue pot to aim for (I know “pot” sounds kinda awful) is part of business development planning. As we move deeper into the digital age, we need more tools and insights to help us figure out the best plan and agency structure to meet our client’s rapidly evolving needs.

old emarketer mobile charteMarketer, with their daily charts and information, has been a very insightful guide for business planning. For example, they called the future of mobile advertising fairly early. Some smart and increasingly successful agencies figured out that mobile could be their future and built an agency around delivering mobile services.

Radel Artida of Staff.com, a global recruitment platform, recently sent me the infographic posted below that  shows the IT jobs with the highest pay. I think that it could be used by agency planners to help determine where the money is and is going. The fastest growing categories for IT professionals are mobile development (with Android jobs up 129% and iOS up 190%), cloud computing and gaming. Website development continues to grow, however at a slower pace.

My bet continues to be on mobile. Here’s an idea: I suggest that agency managers start to think through having a thought-leadership program that explores and explains the mobile space for their clients. This serves a couple of purposes. It would force a mobile-lite agency and its staff to begin to learn about the mobile advertising platform, it positions the agency for the increasing move to mobile and it starts to build some mobile SEO honey for the agency blog. It is also a powerful business development strategy.

Staff-infograph_IT-jobs

 

 

8 Vine Ideas For Ad Agency New Business

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I’ve written about the opportunity for an ad, digital or PR agency to leverage the growing awareness and use of Twitter’s Vine, its short-form (as in 6 seconds) video service that runs on iOS and Android, as a new business tool.

I suggested that there has to be an ad agency out there that sees the potential of becoming the first 6-Second ad agency. No, you don’t have to shut down your other services. Just create a Vine division. I think that this could take about 2 hours. Hey, your agency’s new business program probably needs something new to talk about.

Well, here is more fuel. Vines are now shared more often that Instagram photos.

Instagram-vs-VineFrom Memeburn: “According to insights from Twitter-certified analytics partner Topsy the number of Vine posts shared on the site passed the number of Instagram posts late last week, just days after the previously iOS-only Vine launched on Android. It’s an interesting trend, considering the fact that Vine has a much smaller user base than Instagram — it has just 13-million registered users against Instagram’s 100-million active users.For all I know, an agency is doing this.But, I bet that there is still room to grab this tool and run with it. Here are a few thought starters.”

So to help you get going, here are:

8 Ideas For Using Vine For Ad Agency Business Development

  1. Write about Vine on your agency Blog.
  2. Write a Vine (and video marketing) white paper and send it to current and prospective clients.
  3. Run a micro-information-oriented Vine Twitter strategy. Do 3 to 5 Tweets a day for a couple of weeks and watch the stats.
  4. Create a Vine Pinterest site. Think “Best of Vine.”
  5. Do some sample Vine “ads” for client types.
  6. Hire a local comedian to do 6-second comedy skits for your agency.
  7. Get your Vine out: do Vine local reviews of anything: products, services, bars, clubs, bands, dogs, cats (people love dogs and cats.)
  8. Do a Vine about everyone in your agency and add it to your website.

I could keep going but… I’ll save more ideas for my agency clients.

Oh, just in case you need a bit more info, here is today’s infographic.

introducing-vine_5155dc0b885cc

 

 

 

The 10 Most Important Ad Agency New Business Actions

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10Here are the 10 most important actions that an ad agency must do to build a killer new business program:

 

 

  1. Have a business development plan. The plan could be a one-pager but it must include objectives, target criteria for categories and individual clients, strategies and actions.
  2. Treat your agency’s new business program like a client job. Have timetables, crystal clear internal staff assignments and responsibilities. A business development calendar with deadlines will help with planning and implementation.
  3. Put a senior manager in charge. Give this person the time to do the job. Consider a way to get past the billable hours issue. This job is too important to the health of your P&L.
  4. Think really hard about how to use and manage the power of social media for inbound marketing. The key here is to have a sub-plan for your social media efforts. This is how I rank the value of social media on a need to have basis: search engine optimized blog posts (and agency website copy), then Twitter and LinkedIn (both tied to broadcast your blogs), YouTube, Pinterest, SlideShare and then Facebook.
  5. Build a client prospect database (Excel works. Salesforce works even better — if someone has been assigned to manage it) and, most importantly, track all in and outbound marketing activities. Data is good.
  6. Be consistant. Don’t wait until you lose business to ramp up your new business program. Here is a guarantee – you will eventually lose business so keep filling the pipeline.
  7. Hold periodic status meetings. But, not too many.
  8. Track all activities. Data and analytics are your best friend. Do what works over and over. Kill what dosen’t.
  9. Make sure your CEO is involved. Hungry CEO’s are a very good thing. In my experience, No CEO attention = No ACTIVE business development program.
  10. Stay hungry. Be audacious. Kick ass. This is your chance to look and sound different from the other 3,999 advertising agencies and to drive awareness of a unique door opening message. Need some idea stimulation? Take a look at how London’s Joint uses humor to drive home the idea that they have a few open client categories.

If you need some help  developing your program, building your lists or managing your process give me a call.

Ogilvy, Pinterest and Ad Agency New Business

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ogilvy on pinterestTake a look at how Ogilvy is using Pinterest as a new business tool and as a rich information resource for their global employees. They have over 110 boards, 1,000 pins and over 8,000 followers.

Sure, Ogilvy has cadres of workers to pin the globe but someone in management is clearly committed to this new (OK, relatively new) and massively growing social media platform. This site looks like it has more infographics than, well, who knows. It’s a great infographic resource and they add to it every week.

I use Pinterest as a business development tool as well – it delivers traffic to this very blog. To gain a footprint on Pinterest and to target folks like you, I built the Pinterest advertising agency directory.

Do you need some help in deciding if Pinterest is a good tool for your agency’s new business program? Here is my post:

10 Reasons To Use Pinterest For Advertising Agency New Business

A Critical Ad Agency New Business Mistake

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MistakenThrough my agency consultancy, I have been able to look under the hood of lots of advertising, digital and video agencies. One of the most apparent mistakes that some, not all, just some, are making is to not step back and take a hard look at their current assets.

Here’s one mistake.

Online and mobile video marketing is booming. By now we should all know the power of YouTube as a business development tool (well, maybe I should write about this more) and the astonishing growth of video marketing across all of our screens – especially on mobile devices. With all of this activity and daily press, I cannot understand why advertising agencies are not using video marketing in greater numbers as a business development tool. Agency clients are looking for video solutions but most agencies are not leading with their video skill set.

The mistake isn’t that the agencies aren’t using video. The BIG mistake is that they are perfectly positioned to produce quality video but don’t. Huh? Well, if you are a full-service agency then you know how to make videos because you have been producing commercials, and telling short-form stories, for eons. Yet, most of these TV savvy agencies haven’t used video to tell their agency stories on their websites, build compelling YouTube channels, emailed out videos or used new tools like Vine. This is a crazy and a serious missed opportunity.

Here is just one video factoid: Forrester Research reported…

85% of people choose to watch a video about a company online rather than read the rest of the website.

Here is a great example of how to promote your agency using video from London Advertising. Note that their video is up front and way center. It’s the first thing that London wants you to see. It is one of the agency’s primary new business tools.

There is more on online video and that some agencies get it right here.