Insights

Improve Your LinkedIn Profile Fast (2023)

Peter · September 27, 2023 · 2 Comments

Go To My LinkedIn Profile To See How To Seriously Improve Your LinkedIn Profile In Four Minutes

I’ve added a video and audio to my Wowzer LinkedIn profile here. Go click on the photo and the little speaker.

You can have one of your own little powerful videos instead of just your photo and your voice / audio message care of those baby speakers in your LinkedIn profile. Both of these active audio and video assets are a better way to tell the world what you do or who you are. Plus, you can change these out whenever you want.

How To Maximize Your LinkedIn Profile

To add the video, click on your photo and follow the instructions.

For the audio, go to your profile and hit “the pencil” to edit your section. You will see “Your Audio Recording” and then edit “name pronunciation”. Use it to add your fabulous audio message.

Why Improve Your LinkedIn Profile?

Allow me to be obvious: Tell your story, sell yourself, sell your company, and entice people to click onward. This is your opportunity to make your personal brand shine and STAND OUT!

2 More Things.

Pass this newsletter on. I need more subs. Please. Pretty.
2. Buy my new book: “How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency”

12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes

Peter · September 6, 2023 · 2 Comments

12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes

Here are my 12 favorite advertising agency pitch mistakes. Delivered as a ‘must do’s’ cartoon series – see below.

Now that my new book How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency is on the market (and doing well, thank you – buy it) I thought I’d revisit a core message from my first advertising agency advice book.

The fact is that way too many agencies continue to make avoidable mistakes – especially in the world of Zoom-like meetings.

One of the biggest mistakes is that advertising agency leaders do not recognize the importance of interpersonal chemistry. The agency pitch consultants I interviewed for The Levitan Pitch book all told me that many agency selection decisions are made by the client determining that they LIKE the agency and its people. This is because way too many agencies are kinda look-a-like. OK, and sound alike. Work on YOU, INC.

Here they are… The 12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes

I’ve purposely served the pitching mistakes up as advice, as things to do. Why? As you will see throughout my paperback and eBook, The Levitan Pitch. (especially in the interview section) many advertising agencies, pitch leaders, and team members, make these crazy mistakes. According to the 18 agency search consultants interviewed in the book, these pitch mistakes are made all the time. Agencies make them despite knowing that they will lower their batting average. This is quite baffling.

Here are five of my all-time favorites:

The agency hasn’t worked at being distinctive. There might even be a fear of being “too” different. Strange, but true.
The agency hasn’t done a good job of planning the flow of the presentation. They haven’t approached the pitch as theater.
Agencies often leave their best presenters behind because it is someone else’s turn to go to the pitch. Huh!?
The agency presents way too many strategic and creative ideas.
The big one: the agency spends way too much time talking about themselves and not the client. Here is an example from the book:

“Agencies spend far too much time talking about themselves and not enough time addressing the problems of the client. Clients want to hear solutions to their problems, not how great the agency thinks it is. Best advice to agencies – focus on the client, demonstrate real understanding of their issues, unearth commercial as well as consumer insight, keep it simple, and make it memorable!”

C/O Brian Sparks, Managing Director: Agency Assessments International, UK and Ireland…

How did we all get to this not-so-special place? I think that some of the primary issues haven’t been addressed:

The speed at which agencies start to work as soon as they are invited to pith an account. Rarely do they stop and think through the entire process before all hell breaks loose.
Most agencies do not have a clear methodology for how they are going to run pitches. It is almost as if they are starting with a blank page every time they are invited to pitch for new business. I recommend a few things to do to manage the pitch including having a standard agency checklist. You can see one in my Pitch Playbook.
Worse, most agencies don’t even have a master business development plan.

To help resolve this dilemma, I offer my 12 deadliest advertising agency pitch mistakes as counter-intuitive must-dos illustrated by a series of cartoons from my friend Steve Klinetobe.

How To Win New Advertising Agency Business

Peter · September 6, 2023 · 2 Comments

How To Win New Advertising Agency Business

My thoughts on how to win new advertising agency business from those wonderful clients that you want… was one of the first blog post messages I ran for my advertising agency business development consultancy. I started the consultancy in 2013 after I sold my Portland agency. Whoa: About 850 blog posts ago.

It was a great, useful blog post about, yes, how to win new advertising agency business and got the attention of my ad agency market. The idea is still useful.

“Wait a minute, who are you guys?”

That was the question we got from Harrah’s Las Vegas after they received our iTunes gift card. We told them who we were, thanked them again for their help and a relationship was born. Here’s how we got there.

About 10+ years ago, my Portland ad agency Citrus needed a more distinctive brand positioning. As I suspect you know, finding a new brand position for an advertising agency, especially a “full-service” agency like ours, isn’t easy. While full-service is a highly relevant service offer that many clients seek, it isn’t a particularly distinctive sales proposition in a world with thousands of similar ad agencies. The fact is, full-service sounds rather platitudinous.

There are probably 2,000 advertising agencies called full-service.

Here is how we broke out.

To refresh our brand (and get more notice) we initiated a strategic branding process. We employed the account panning skills of Lynette Xanders, one of the Northwest’s best strategists. Lynette helped us gain a better understanding of the agency’s existing positioning, insights into how our staff perceived the current and future agency, an examination of relevant industry shifts, and a deeper view of our goals and dreams. We added in a competitive review to advance our understanding of what clients need and want from an agency.

Next – We Used A Survey As A How To Win New Advertising Agency Business Sales Tool

Our next step was to create an online survey to show a set of alternative positioning statements to marketing decision-makers – our clients and target companies. We wanted to get past our own internal navel-gazing.

We took the branding exercise and added a new business spin.

We used our new business database to select a list of A-level client prospects and used the positioning research as an introduction to Citrus. The program had 6 low-cost elements.

A list of 5 positioning statements were listed in an agency research section on our website. In addition to the survey, this helped us to drive the responders to our larger agency story.
A Survey Monkey online survey.
An email list compiled from our The List Inc. database. Now WINMO.
Three-stage email outreach.The offer of winning a $50 iTunes gift card twas added as an incentive.
The prospect group’s response rate was surprisingly high at about 30%. Sometimes if you ask nicely people will want to respond.

Winning Harrah’s

One of the respondents from our outreach list (wanna-be client types) was a corporate marketing manager at Harrah’s (now Caesars Entertainment.) After the manager answered the survey we sent her a nice note and the gift card. Her response was, “Wait a minute. Who are you guys?”

This question led to more emails, phone calls, and a trip to Las Vegas. The meeting resulted in our working on Harrah’s national Las Vegas Meeting’s By Harrah’s program that sells thousands of room nights per year for Harrah’s 8 Las Vegas casinos. Our work included a new website, a direct marketing program, and a print advertising campaign.

This was a rather decent result from sending out a couple of emails, asking for some help, and the delivery of an iTunes gift card. Remember iTunes?

Oh, in addition to a new client, our research also netted a new agency brand positioning.

The Message – If you want to know How To Win New Advertising Agency Business – please be different. Or as I call it… be Unignorable.

Oh… I have written lots about advertising agency brand positions. Here.

TechCrunch on My SmarterChild, AI, and ChatGPT

Peter · July 31, 2023 · Leave a Comment

The Bot SmarterChild, AI, and ChatGPT

TechCrunch on AI and One Of My Puppies.

My Activebuddy co-founder Robert Hoffer and I were recently interviewed by TechCrunch’s Amanda Siberling about our intelligent bot SmarterChild as in. Sure, I sound smart (yeah, yeah). However, it is a good story about early-stage AI (way pre AI and ChatGPT)think fast conversational interface, and where we are today. No, SmarterChild was not #ai but, we had a super smart real-time/natural language instant messaging interface. Y’all (30 million of you) talked to a smart computer about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and lots of super fast to get to information.

The article is here: Twenty years ago, AIM chatbot SmarterChild out-snarked ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s younger sibling was ahead of its time.

A Bit From TechCrunch

And yes, read the whole article.

Far before there was ChatGPT there was SmarterChild, an instant message chatbot whose encyclopedic knowledge and quick wit could put Google to shame. Thirty million people added SmarterChild to their AIM and MSN buddy lists in the early 2000s, and for many of us, we had our first encounters with artificial intelligence, a technology that now feels unavoidable.

In the early aughts, millions of preteens raced home from school and hopped onto their parents computers, opened a chat window and typed… probably something like “” “” (I had to edit cause LinkedIn did not like the article’s words).

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” SmarterChild would reply in an instant. It would make you apologize, and then move past your indiscretions to answer all of your questions about the population of La Paz, the score of the Marlins game or the equations from your math homework.

SmarterChild was far less sophisticated than ChatGPT, but then again, this was 2001. The chatbot was special enough that it inspired to fund Siri, which paved the way for Amazon’s Alexa and other robot assistants.

Levitan has remained level-headed about the future of AI. But another ActiveBuddy co-founder, Robert Hoffer, isn’t as calm. Dubbed “the bot father,” Hoffer describes himself as “cautiously skeptimistic” and repeatedly references stories like “Frankenstein” and the myth of Prometheus. The common denominator of these tales? Perhaps humans have gone too far, just because we can.

Hope you enjoy it and pass it on to your very own “Buddy List”… I need more subscribers.

Best AI Directories For Marketers

Peter · July 28, 2023 · 1 Comment

A Short But Sweet List of The Best AI Directories For Marketers

We are all a bit (understatement) overwhelmed with the barrage of new AI tools. To help sort this overload, here is a list of what I think are today’s easiest-to-use AI directories for marketers. Note, this is a short list.

Futurepedia – From Google Bard: “This directory is one of the largest and most comprehensive, with over 3,000 AI tools and resources listed. It’s a great place to find AI tools for a variety of tasks, including machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.” Just today… 18 new tools. Yikes.

Zain Kahn’s Superhuman – The world’s biggest AI newsletter with 350k+ readers.

iLib – AI websites listed by popularity.

Product Hunt – As they say: “Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It’s a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.”

Crunchbase – A comprehensive list of AI startups. Wowzer, this is a hot venture universe. Go find your new marketing agency client here.

GPTE – Just in case you need MORE!

More directory stuff? Head over to my Resources list.

Just For The Hell Of It…

Here is a QUICK video I made with Opus Clip. It’s about predictions.