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A Coronavirus Ad Agency Business Plan

Peter · April 8, 2020 · Leave a Comment

A Coronavirus Ad Agency Business, Marketing, and Personal Plan

Noah Kagan and my thinking on your coronavirus ad agency business plan.

You know who I am, right? Regardless, here is my Advertising Agency Survival Guide. Please read and make adjustments to how you run your agency. I want you to view the video below so my guide will open up in a new window.

Next, I am going to continue to write about what I think you should be doing. Yes, I admit it, I know what I am talking about. Plus, maybe, more importantly, I know WHO knows what THEY are talking about. Like the video below from Noah Kagan – AppSumo guy.

Do you know Noah Kagan? He is the Chief Sumo at Sumo Group — where he helps entrepreneurs kick more ass. Before that, he was employee #30 at Facebook, #4 at Mint, and worked at Intel.

Key Noah Kagan Coronavirus Ad Agency Business Plan Advice – Important Stuff

This one from me… I think that anyone over 55 should go mostly cash. I mean, what part of this economy is going to spring back in the next 12 to 24 months? OK, maybe DTC, oil, three retailers, three airlines, Uber, online learning… + Companies with mucho cash.

Watch your costs. This is the only thing that you can control. Make the necessary cuts early.

Market your ad agency. More blog posts, more insight-oriented content, PPC ads. How about some research in your expert categories?

Partner. Maybe even buy a cheap but smart small agency that adds to your overall offer. Are you “full service”? if so, get really full service and buy a PPC agency.

Help your clients with their payments before they cut you off.

Now, The Video, Recession Proof Business Strategies

Noah’s Main Points. My Interpretation.

Pay very close attention to your revenues and adjust your net income. Every 7 days.

Look at your agency website traffic and conversion rates, email signups (you have an email program (right?) and whatever you track. Pay attention to your brand.

Market your agency. Keep at it. But, be cool about it. No sales pressure. Insights, show empathy, please.

Have 20 months of capital for business. 12 months personal (at least). Look, I know that having cash is hard for some people. Like, you need to live. But, I am putting my pessimistic hat on. If we are about to go into a depression rather than a recession… be ready. I do not want to be a downer. But, this is the advice I give to my kids too.

And, Please Talk To Me

Remember the.. Advertising Agency Survival Guide.

Gary Vaynerchuk Is Full Of Shit

Peter · April 8, 2020 · 1 Comment

Gary Vaynerchuk Is Full Of Shit. Too Harsh?

Before I get to the meat, as in the why of the “Gary Vaynerchuk Is Full Of Shit” blog post (the original, below) I want to point out that this post has received 6,369 views as of today. Clearly, the keyword Gary Vaynerchuk travels. Understatement. Saying ‘shit’ probably does not hurt either.

Plus, for all of you SEO geeks, Animalz told me to update this post.

Let me start with the word ‘shit’.

Here’s a story from my first days in Oregon after I purchased Citrus, my advertising agency. I am a born and bred New Yorker. “Fuck” is in our daily vocabulary. As someone who has lived around the world, I’ve modified the use of ‘fuck’ because some cultures are not as upfront as us. After I moved to Portland I found myself in an early AM meeting and I hear myself saying ‘fuck’. Being a highly sensitive type, I turn to the woman next to me and ask, “Oh, sorry, is it OK to say Fuck in a Portland meeting?” She says, “It’s OK to say it – but only twice.” I love Portland! That was one of my intros to the culture of Oregon.

OK back to Gary Vaynerchuk is full of shit.

Am I being too harsh? No. A while back I wrote on Linkedin about Gary’s take on traditional advertising. He did two minutes of dumping on the world of advertising which ran on an Ad Age Digital Crash Course segment. To maybe to make it easier for you, here’s the copy from the post from Linkedin…

I just watched the Gary Vaynerchuk episode of the Ad Age Digital Crash Course.

My take: Gary is full of shit. (OK, mostly).

First a moment of background. When I lived in New Jersey I was a happy customer of his huge wine shop and as an early digital media adopter, I was well aware of his significant social media foresight and skills. Gary was early and right. And, in a world of ad agency growth issues, he has managed to build a 500 person agency. Bravo.

Here’s the ‘shit’ part. In the video, Gary pontificates in ‘Gary Speak’ about how sales and marketing are not aligned i.e. agencies don’t care about selling products (only about winning awards); that emotion does not sell (tell that to “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 (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.

Look, I get self-promotion. But, please, do not be so insulting (even if you are a little bit right.)

But, But.

I actually like Gary and his Garyvee persona. I have super respect for his personal branding and VERY high energy. And, I dig that he has been well ahead of the curve re new technologies and marketing platforms like Instagram and now TikTok. Frankly, way too ahead of many advertising agencies.

And… I’ve said nice things about Gary in the past. Old school advertising CEO.

Side note: Gary will also star in one of my new videos.

Now This: My 2020 Advertising Agency Survival Guide

Here is another well-viewed post… The Advertising Agency Survival Guide

Three Must Have Social Media Content Strategies

Peter · March 8, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Repeated For Effect: Here are three important social media content terms and strategies to add to your advertising agency’s 2020 marketing plan.

The world of social media “content” (what a strange, and a bit anti-descriptive, term) is going through major changes and increasing challenges. Getting seen is muy difficult. Example: there are now over 500 million blogs. There were 150 million in 2010. Instagram addicts upload over 95 million posts and 400 million stories every day. Given this content and brand attention-seeking barrage… How does one stand out in an overrun world of social media content?

I could give you more stats that show how difficult it is to break out from the clutter. I won’t here. All you have to do is a quick search to see lots of websites that list stats for every corner of the social media landscape.

So, back to the question… “how do you stand out?”

Three Social Media Content Terms and Strategies You Should Be Thinking About Using.

1. Omnichannel.

Today one has to think through getting past a one or even two-channel strategy. Too often I see advertising agencies concentrate on one channel. Examples… blogs or LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter – or you name it. Simply put, in a world of serious customer ADHD, you and your sales prospects will use Youtube, Netflix, multiple phone apps, maybe a blog, and on — today. The way to get out in front of this craziness is to go Omnichannel. Just do it, use more than one channel in your marketing. Here is a Wikipedia definition.

Omnichannel is a cross-channel content strategy that organizations use to improve their user experience and drive better relationships with their audience across points of contact. Rather than working in parallel, communication channels and their supporting resources are designed and orchestrated to cooperate.

2. Content Sprouting.

For years I have been advocating what I have called content amplification. [Read more…] about Three Must Have Social Media Content Strategies

The Advertising Agency Of The Future

Peter · February 22, 2020 · 1 Comment

What Does The Advertising Agency Of The Future Look Like? How About Your Agency?

The advertising agency of the future needs some serious planning and agility. No surprise here. But, what is surprising to me is the lack of attention paid to how to craft an advertising agency for the future.

Just for the hell of it. I’ll start with the good old days.

My first job in advertising was at Dancer Fitzgerald & Sample. Back in the 1980’s DFS was New York’s largest advertising agency. We were sweetly based in the iconic Chrysler Building. At that time, we did not spend lots of gray matter on thinking about the future of the advertising agency business because we were making a 15% commission on media and 16.5% on production. We had a sweet client list that included General Mills, P&G, RJR Nabisco, Sara Lee, Northwest Airlines (I ran the account and our annual profits were $6 million on $9 million in revenues), HP and Toyota. As you might expect, we were not too concerned about reinvention. All this client and revenue firepower helped Saatchi & Saatchi love and buy Dancer in 1986.

Today advertising is a radically different business and ad agencies need to be thinking about how to be positioned for a future where multi-year AOR clients; 15% media commissions; three primary media types (TV, print, radio); a positive global network effect and loyalty are attributes of the past.

Not to get too down, but today the advertising world is about project work, crazy price consciousness, competition from all sides (large consultancies, in-house agencies and your ex-Creative Director who does just fine as a freelancer).

Bummed Out?

Look, for many agencies, it is kinda fucked up out there. As the famous Chinese curse says,

“May you live in interesting times”.

But, but, there are still agencies that grow and make bucks. You can too.

So, in preparation for this blog post – yes, it is ultimately about how to position your agency for the future – I read a bunch of articles on “the advertising agency of the future.” Not too surprising, this is a hot topic.

Interesting (as in ‘Uh Oh’) the first page of Google has articles on your future from traditional agency killers like Deloitte, Accenture, Adobe, CMO.com (an Adobe site).

The agency industry perspective is not on Google’s page one. It isn’t until page two that Inc., AdAge, The Drum and the ANA get to chime in.

I stopped trying to find an actual advertising agency perspective delivered via this search term by the time I got to page four. Do the big guys (even WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, etc.) not want to discuss the future?

Some Findings On The Future on Advertising

Here are some of the highlights from my research. I’m listing these in random order. I’ll have my personal thoughts a bit later. [Read more…] about The Advertising Agency Of The Future

Advertising Agency Outsourcing: An Opportunity and… New Competition

Peter · February 17, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I wrote this post about advertising agency outsourcing seven years ago. I am resurrecting it for a couple of reasons.

First, the use of outsourced freelance talent, as in not full-time employees (FTE), is a solid part of running a 2020 agency in a world of business uncertainty:

Will I win that new client? Will I lose our largest client? Will I ever get an agency of record client again or just get used to living with projects?

As an ex-agency owner, I know that keeping FTE costs down is a good idea. Given ad agency gross margins, having a bunch of FTE’s at a 70% utilization rate is not sustainable. Duh. That’s why I was initially intrigued by Victor’s & Spoils agency model. If there ever was an industry that needed to explore new models… it was/is advertising.

Second, it is worth noting that the Vistors & Spoils’ outsourced advertising agency model (actually crowdsourcing model) discussed below did not work. The agency, which was acquired by Havas in 2012, closed in August 2018. Why did it close? There are lots of thoughts about what happened. Consider…

Was crowdsourcing itself simply unmanageable? Is crowdsourcing a tool versus the basis for an agency? Was it’s possibly brutal system too unfair to freelancers? Did clients not get it? Is it simply too difficult to build and manage a complex marketing program using “anonymous” outsourcing?

And, on.

Finally and just an FYI. Here is the Victor’s & Spoils crowdsourcing competition that netted the agency’s logo. So, $2,400 to the winner of an advertising agency logo? That’s it? No comment.

Advertising Agency Outsourcing

Note: This blog post was originally posted in 2013. The primary points remain relevant.

The advertising industry has been outsourcing for decades. Freelancers are woven into our daily fabric. We use copywriters to write website copy and gun-slinging art directors to beef up new business pitch concepts. In the past few years, advertising agencies have gone beyond the traditional freelancer to add technologists and digital service firms to work in the background to make us look like sharp database, mobile, and social media experts.

Our outsourcing options have grown exponentially through the use of digital tools. We now have easier access to more talent marketplaces which have also resulted in new threats to the advertising agency model itself.

There is the power of emerging market labor: Ogilvy, Wieden+Kennedy, and Sapient all have offices in India that tap into the subcontinent’s skilled lower-cost talent. Most multinational ad agencies also use into their vast systems to find talent in other lower-cost countries. According to Firstpost, “Group FMG produces video, print, digital and mobile ads and has more than half its employees based in India. “We are applying all the clichés of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” to the advertising world,” Aditya Sharma, co-founder and chief business development officer at Group FMG. And, why not? The latest rounds of Clios have been won by art directors in faraway lands.

Interest in crowdsourcing is on a growth spurt, see Google’s trend line for the term “crowdsourcing” on the left, and has become a new freelance agency model. Victors & Spoils is known for its use of distributed problem solving to create advertising campaigns for blue-chip clients like Axe, General Mills, Harley-Davidson, and Levis. For sure, despite the benefits from having a more open market, freelancers have had issues with this model. However, the efficiency of freelance crowdsourcing works for clients. I suspect that Victors & Spoils is finding the middle ground.

Online freelance markets are booming. Elance reported 345,000 new freelancers and 826,000 jobs posted in 2012. Behance reported serious growth last May when they received an infusion of VC capital. According to their blog, “Users’ projects have received over 1 billion views and over 75 million views in just the past 30 days. Behance now showcases more than 2 million creative projects – after passing our first 1 million-project milestone just eight months ago.” I can imagine that many agencies are posting projects in this heavily trafficked marketplace.

The new world of freelance services may become one of the tools that agencies use to resolve the social media beast – social media authorship and management is, to put it mildly, labor-intensive. I have been using an ODesk freelancer in the Philippines to assist me with pinning “every advertising agency” website to my Pinterest agency site. In this case, I have a simple task that can be easily managed. In just a couple of weeks, he has efficiently pined over 1,000 ad and digital agency websites. This has freed up my time to write mini-website reviews.

On the SEO side, I have worked with a search engine marketing company based in Budapest that uses excellent English speaking writers across the globe to help their clients write guest posts.

The opportunities for agencies to leverage the flat-earth marketplace of freelance services are clear. Given the current and expanding outsourcing options, agencies need to continually explore how the Internet has dramatically expanded their freelance network, talent base, technology resources and can lower the costs of doing business.

On the other hand, many of these new services pose a significant threat. Just as the Victors & Spoils model is often criticized (feared?), we need to keep up with and continually review new Internet-powered services because they represent a growing form of competition. Just like you, savvy clients can directly outsource their work to India, Behance and 99 Designs too.

Advertising Agency Models

If you are interested in exploring new advertising agency models, give me a shout. I’ve examined many options.