Search Results for: pitch

Ad Age Small Agency Conference Podcast

Peter · September 3, 2019 · Leave a Comment

The Ad Age Ad Lib podcast recently interviewed Sunday Dinner’s Lindsey Slaby just ahead of her appearance at the 2019 Ad Age Small Agency Conference. Since many of you did not attend the conference or religiously listen to the Ad Age podcast (sooo, much to do!), I thought I’d share a few of Lindsey’s insider gems to give her perspective on the advertising industry and what clients want.

From Lindsey’s Twitter account: Founder of Sunday Dinner. Helping brands navigate how to work with the best and brightest agencies through consulting, workshops & partnership search. … Made In Brooklyn Summit speaker, Lindsey Slaby @lasslaby, is the founder of groundbreaking brand consultancy firm, Sunday Dinner.

Lindsey works with a wide range of well-known clients including Diageo, Target, Union Pacific, NBCU, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Kate Spade, & MassMutual and sits with dozens of advertising agencies a year (she mentions that she had sat through over thirty pitches in a recent month.) Her perspective offers a deep inside look at today’s advertising industry – what it gets right and wrong.

To help isolate Lindsey’s golden nuggets, I transcribed the podcast interview and pulled out a few of the shiny bits. I’ve edited some of the copy for clarity and brevity. I also offer some of my own thoughts… Of course.

Lindsey Slaby’s Ad Age Golden Nuggets

Small Agencies Are Doing Well, But

Lindsey: There’s so much appeal right now to work with the smaller agencies. They’re incredibly busy, incredibly busy.They’re building these businesses. My fear is sometimes that they are, they started, they got a client, they got going, they got a lot of momentum, they have relationships, and they’re just going to keep driving towards revenue, versus actually figuring out, what’s the business model we want to have internally? How are we attracting and retaining great talent?

How do you scale the right way? And how do you make sure you really deliver for those clients? Because one of the things I guess I say a lot is, if you get an A in client service, you’re going to keep my business and earn my business, even if you get a C in creative. If we’re hiring, especially if you’re a brand that’s taking a risk to hire a new agency, which is essentially working with a startup, you need them to deliver for you, keep you informed, and have amazing client service.

How To Follow-Up With Your Future Client

Peter · July 1, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Once Connected: Stay In Touch & Follow-Up With Your Future Client

I am going to keep this blog post brief. In fact, I will concentrate on one feel-good idea: do some follow-up touching.

Do The Client Follow-Up

No, it isn’t a 1960’s James Brown song. Follow-up means stay in touch with past clients, referrals that have not signed up yet and clients that you’ve pitched and did not win.

Need three reasons to have a follow-up plan?

Ex-clients can recircle to become a new client. I had a casino client that did just that after a couple of years of their wandering in the agency forest. It took them a while to re-realize just how wonderful my agency was.
Your ex CMO, the one that left your account in the lurch, will resurface someday at a new client organization that will want you.
Client prospects that did not choose you in a pitch will eventually tire of the agency they selected and might eventually realize that they want your brilliance. After a pitch loss, do not say, “oh, they didn’t select us – boo hoo” and crawl into a hole. Nope, stay in touch. After all, that client once put you on their new agency shortlist.

Here is a how-to from my book: The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. (LOL, given the book’s sales figures, there is a good chance your competition has already read the book. Go buy it).

The Post Pitch Follow-Up

You’ve busted your ass to get into and then pitch the new client. Sorry, you did not win. Now what?

Chances are good that it has been at least a couple of months since the client or consultant first made contact. This major league pitch might have included an RFI, RFP, a kick-off meeting, phone calls, questions, and your own special strategies designed to make you look smart, passionate and well, you fill in the blanks of what you did ahead of the big presentation.

After the presentation, you graciously handed over your leave behind, smiled, hugged, and walked out. Now what? Really, now what? You could sit by the phone like a 1950’s ingénue on a Friday night waiting for that call or be a bit more aggressive. But, how aggressive? And how long should you take before you make contact? How passionate do you want to look – because there can be a fine line between looking passionate and, well, desperate.

As I have said before: every pitch lives in its own little world and has its own pace. Some clients recognize that you are anxious, there is a need for speed, and that they should get back to you quickly. Some are not so caring. Or worse, after going through the pitch process, they may be revaluating their initial business objectives and requirements. Need more maybes?

Maybe the client is now wondering about what type of agency they really need. Do they want a huge agency or a specialist? Maybe a decision maker just went out of mobile range to climb K2 for three weeks. Or, maybe, just maybe, the budget has shrunk.

Or, bam! After getting to know a few new agencies, they’ve realized that they really love the incumbent agency.

Lots of maybes. But fear of follow-up? Get over it. I mean, get over over-thinking. The deal is that you have no choice but to follow-up. You have to look like you care, a lot. Clients, good clients, respect passion. Here are my 3 follow-up rules.

Do it. Find the balance between looking very interested in working with the client and being respectful of their time. Being a nuisance does not work. Acting interested does. The other agencies will follow-up. Just do your own follow-up scenario smarter.
Find a value-add reason to follow-up. Chances are good that the client asked a question in the meeting that could be the basis for a follow-up call. It is quite possible that you didn’t have the time during the presentation to answer a question in detail, or you might have some new related research to impart. Maybe you held back some information, and it’s now time for your pre-planned reveal.
Be you. Maintain the personality you used in the presentation. Be genuine, professional, and if you can, add some humor if appropriate.

A Pitch Planning Tip:

Don’t wait till after the meeting to create a follow-up plan. Think ahead and have a follow-up insight or document at the ready. Consider embedding a preplanned reason to follow-up in your presentation. Let the client know that you will be sending them something and get it to them fast. Get it in their head that you are on the ball and are proactive.

Give me a call. Let’s discuss your last or future pitch.

How To Name Your Advertising Agency: Part One

Peter · May 17, 2019 · 4 Comments

A Strategic Guide To How To Find Your New Advertising Agency Name

This is Part One of a two-part series on how to name your advertising agency (or, most businesses for that matter).

Other than the gyrations that agencies constantly go through with how to position their agency (go here to see my advice on agency positioning); design and redesign their website… how they name themselves is one of their most important branding decisions.

I worked for three advertising agencies. Two were “founder” agencies: Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (remember “Where’s the beef?”) and Saatchi & Saatchi (which bought Dancer) and the other was my very own Portland agency and its “current usage” name: Citrus. Or, as one of our creative directors thought was critical to our success, citrus, with a lower case “c.’

A Question…

Do advertising names matter? Wow, this is a tough one to answer. As you will see from the different naming conventions listed below, how one chooses a name is a broad journey. However, just for the hell of it, here are some of the names for AdAge’s 2018 Small Agency Awards. Do any of these agency names instill immediate confidence? A must call reaction? Are memorable?

Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners
Mistress
Johnxhannes
The Chopping Block
Funworks
Oberland
Walrus (cool website)
Phenomenon
Brownstein Group
Steak
Yard
G&M Plumbing
Spawn ideas
Next/Now

My favorite (at least for this one second) is Next/Now. This name kind of meets a client pain point.

Part One: The Wonderful World of the Advertising Agency Name

I recently asked one of my advertising agency clients how they selected their name (note, it’s a word you use every day in your kitchen.) They said that they went through a fairly random process with the goal of finding a name that was easy to remember and not taken. Well, that’s one way to do it. Another is to apply process. [Read more…] about How To Name Your Advertising Agency: Part One

10 Ways To Advertise Your Advertising Agency

Peter · March 27, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Do you advertise your advertising agency?

Based on my industry experience, most do not. This means that agencies are not aiming and tailoring their primary sales messages to their target audiences.

This post offers 10 ways to advertise your advertising agency as well as the why you should to it, like, yesterday.

Caveat: You should seriously consider advertising your advertising agency. However, you should first run a smart, consistent account-based marketing program to directly drive agency awareness to your best prospects.

Advertising – A Definition

Just for the heck of it, and to get us all on the same page, here is a definition of advertising. I use ‘advertising’ as a universal term for marketing communications companies.

Advertising is a means of communication with the users (or, non-users) of a product or service. Advertisements are messages paid for by those who send them and are intended to inform or influence people who receive them, as defined by the Advertising Association of the UK.

Why An Advertising Agency Should Advertise

There are four reasons an agency should advertise.

You want to be where prospective clients look for agencies.
You want to put your agency right in front of the right prospects (and even busy agency search consultants like Laura Bajkowski) 24/7.
You want to borrow the interest that on and offline publications can deliver.
You want to prove that you believe in advertising and that you are super creative.

10 Advertising Platforms Your Agency Should Consider

WARNING: Most likely, your agency cannot create and run efforts on all of these platforms. Roll them out based on your marketing plan.

TEST: Test everything. Do more of what works and less of what does not. Yeah, I’m being very obvious. But, testing is the mantra. Your clients want ROI. You do too and running your own programs may make you a better judge of how to judge success across advertising channels.

In addition to listing the ad platforms, I am also giving some, not all, of the reasons that a local/regional agency and an expert agency (example, lead gen B2B agency) should choose the platform. This is meant as food for thought. There are too many types of agencies for me to give every iteration. But, you get it.

Update: It is five hours after I wrote this. I now have number 11. It’s at the bottom of the list.

1. Google AdWords.

Every client in need of a new agency searches on Google. If you are not on page one for the search, buy the position.

Do keyword research and buy the keywords that meet your reach objectives.

Local/regional agency. It would be insane to not try to be on Google’s page one for your location. Example: if you are based in Seattle, buy ‘Seattle advertising agency’ or ‘Seattle SEO agency.’

Expert. Buy ‘Lead generation agency’ or ‘high tech leads agency.’ Do you want Purina as a client? Think about what their marketing team searches on.

2. YouTube.

I have an agency client that produces an interview with marketing leaders every month. They blast them out in emails, on their blog and… yup, leverage the power of the number two search engine to aim their videos at their audience. The agency also retargets. Since there are fewer results on YouTube than on Google, the agency gets more attention (and, yup, these videos also turn high up in Google searches.)

It would real easy for a local agency, most are, to ‘own’ their town’s video world. How about a weekly where to eat in Kansas City series shot on an iPhone?

Need inspiration? Here is john st.’s rather viral video (as of writing it has 2,447,266 views) about the power of Catvertising. Frankly, has any other agency ever had over 2 million views?

3. Advertising Agency Directories.

This is a serious no-brainer that many agencies do not take advantage of. In many cases, an agency directory is on Google’s page one and lists your competitors.

Make sure you are every relevant agency directory and spend the cash if it nets you a higher position or allows you to deliver more information (i.e. your work) and, especially, a link back to your website. [Read more…] about 10 Ways To Advertise Your Advertising Agency

How Strategy and Brains Drive Attention and Sales

Peter · March 7, 2019 · Leave a Comment

The Art Of Strategy And Sales

You are about to read one of many interviews with advertising geniuses that are in The Levitan Pitch. my book on pitching and presenting. You can buy the book from Amazon and I make is really easy at the top of this page. If you are in a hurry, just click here.

But, first…

The Wonderful World Of Strategy From the Effervescent Mind Of Faris Yakob

When I first moved to Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising London in the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of entering the golden age of account planning. Even New York agencies hadn’t truly grasped the benefits of account planners vs. America’s traditional researchers. One of the definitions of account planning is that it brings the consumer mindset into the process of developing advertising. Here are two more definitions that directly relate to most client pitches.

“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.”

– Stanley Pollitt, founder Boase Massimi Pollitt and wrote the book, Pollitt On Planning.

“Planners are involved and integrated in the creation of marketing strategy and ads. Their responsibility is to bring the consumer to the forefront of the process and to inspire the team to work with the consumer in mind. The planner has a point of view about the consumer and is not shy about expressing it.”

– Lisa Fortini-Campbell, Kellogg School of Management

Earlier in the book, I discussed that the Internet and a wide array of easy to use strategic tools have helped us all become more adept at research and being able to deliver many of the benefits of account planning. That said, being an expert in strategic planning and innovation is a full-time job. Here is one of the worlds most famous full-time experts.

A Strategic Expert Talks

Faris Yakob, Founder and Principle, Genius|Steals and… his book “Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising For A Digital World”

Faris Yakob is the Founder and Principle of Genius|Steals a global planning, idea and innovation consultancy that works on new product concepts, new communication ideas, workshops, inspiration, strategy, content creation, and new ways of thinking. Genius|Steals’ clients include: Fast Company, Grey Advertising, Marriott, Microsoft, Ogilvy (NY), and P&G.

Prior to founding Genius|Steals, he was Chief Innovation Officer MDC Partners/KBS+ and EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson. To top it off, among other kudos, Faris was Chairman of Integrated Jury and Content&Contact Jury at the 2011 Clio Awards.

PL: Do you call yourself an account planner?

Faris: That’s a good question. I have been an account planner, a media planner, a digital strategist, a communications strategist, and I’ve been a management consultant. So I guess, loosely in the area of strategy, I’d say yes. [Read more…] about How Strategy and Brains Drive Attention and Sales