Insights
3 Ways for Floundering Advertising Agencies to Find Growth
Hubspot’s article “3 Ways for Floundering Agencies to Find Growth” is mighty fine take on how agencies need to act if they want to grow care of a guest post by Agency Post’s Jamie Oetting.
Jamie highlights three areas for agency concentration.
Find A Focus. Being everything to everyone (an agency malaise) is as far as being single-minded (a point pitched to agency clients) as possible.
Invest In Education. Training your employees is a very good thing. It, well, educates them (and you agency manager too) and should make them more loyal.
Acquire More New Business Strategically. Having a new business plan and systematic approach is critical to keeping the agency shark swimming forward. Or, else. Oh, and I’m quoted inside.
Ad Agency CEO’s: 1 Facebook Reason To Pay Attention To Mobile
I’ve written about how ad agencies, and digital agencies for that matter, need to move into mobile much faster.
A Wall Street Journal article on Facebook’s growth, “Facebook’s Hard Desk Job”, reported that Facebook is seeing phenomenal growth in mobile advertising (from $0 to $374 million in the 1st quarter — this kinda amazing factoid hammers last year’s fear that Facebook was missing the mobile parade.)
But, the point that really is the wake up call for agencies is that Facebook U.S. saw a decline from 153 million unique traditional computer visitors to 142 million during the same time period. Think about it… Facebook saw a DECLINE in uniques from the desktop.
What to do Ms. Agency CEO? If I were running an agency I’d be dialing up my mobile chops. Get this… we’ve moved from worrying about Internet advertising killing traditional to mobile killing everything in a blink.
Need more info… From Comscore:
Jeff Bridges, Widelux & Me
Widelux Camera & Me
This is a Widelux camera. It is a rather unique 35mm swing lens film camera and as I have discovered over the years, it is loved by Jeff Bridges and, yes you guessed it, me.
As Wikipedia says: “The Widelux is a fully mechanical swing-lens panoramic camera first developed in Japan in 1948, with both 35mm (the F6, F7 and F8 models) and medium-format (1500) models available. The WIDELUX cameras manage this trick because of a 26mm lens pivoting on an axis.”
The New York Times article, “The Dude Abides On The Other Side Of The Lens”, just highlighted some of Jeff’s film set work and his thoughts about this strange tool. He is also one of the few Widelux information resources on the web. Here he is on the camera and how he deals with its delights…
The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn’t accurate, and there’s no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It’s something I aspire to in all my work — a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what’s there in the moment and to let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist.
Here are a couple of shots from a series I did on very tight Japan retail – click them. You can see more of my Widelux photographs from Cambodia and beyond on my photography website.
4 Insane Advertising Agency Home Pages
I’ve been studying advertising, branding and digital agency websites using my Pinterest Advertising Agency Directory. I’ll be writing about my findings over the next few weeks.
Let’s Start With Insanity?
Here are 4 local and international agency home pages that are insane. Can you imagine an agency that is in the business of branding and digital marketing — and being creative — having a home page that announces: “Coming Soon?”
Allow me to state my somewhat obvious (but not apparently to some agencies) POV.
An existing agency should never, under any circumstances, have a Coming Soon home page. Visitors will come, see that you have nothing to say, have no creative approach to transitioning from one site to another and will split fast. Will they ever come back? Are they going to keep coming back to see if and when you’ve finally launced the new home page? My bet is not often and maybe never.
One more obvious point, this is not a good thing for your new business program.
The solution: be patient and wait until you make any changes until you’ve designed the new home page ready to go. Here is my little secret. I guarantee that no one is wondering when you are going to update your website. So, sit tight and live with what you have intill you are ready to relaunch. tell your CEO or ECD to chill.
Here are the 4 agencies. I’ll end with my “favorite” serial Coming Soon home page agency and, interestingly, its a big one:
Carrot Creative. This is a savvy digital agency. What’s up?
TBWA/LONDON, a rather large agency, OK a very big agency with clients like Nissan, Absolute and GSK, had the Coming Soon page on your left up for at least a couple of months.
Baron & Company. A Bellingham Washington agency with the tagline, “Technically Creative.”
Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Get this… the first Coming Soon page is from April 2013 and the second is from 2003. Yikes, these guys are repeat offenders.