ad agency

What Do Advertising Clients Want? I Asked A Real Mad Men Man

Peter · November 11, 2019 · Leave a Comment

I asked a real Mad Men man, a senior exec at the Association of National Advertisers, and a long-time playa in the industry, about the current state of the advertising industry. Most importantly, “what do advertising clients want?”

Here are some answers that should be digested and could impact your agency’s business strategy no matter your agency size. This is Part One of my interview. Stay tuned for Part Two.

Michael Donahue is a Senior Director at the ANA (check out their member list); he was a long term EVP at the 4A’s (their digital futurist) and EVP and board member at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Worldwide. He even invented the Creative Brief format that the 4A’s uses. Decent creds, huh?

He was also my boss for a while. Yes, I have some stories.

Peter: Let’s talk a little bit about the clients and what they’re looking for today from their advertising agency partners. What are the top, let’s just keep it simple, three marketing communications related pain points that marketers are experiencing today? Can you give us an overview of that? [Read more…] about What Do Advertising Clients Want? I Asked A Real Mad Men Man

Fire Your Advertising Copywriter

Peter · October 25, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Is it time to fire your advertising copywriter? OK, I am just kidding. I like copywriters. In fact, many of my best friends are copywriters.

OK, OK. I recently played with an AI writing tool called Talk To A Transformer. From the website:

Built by Adam King (@adamdanielking) as an easier way to play with OpenAI’s new machine learning model. In February, OpenAI unveiled a language model called GPT-2 that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time.

For now OpenAI has decided only to release three smaller versions of it which aren’t as coherent but still produce interesting results. This site runs the largest released model, 774M, which is half the size of the full model.

Play with this. It just might write your next novel… or headline. (Yes, that is Bill Bernbach in the pic.)

Go here to see Talk To A Transformer.

Need More AI Copy?

Ad Age recently wrote about another AI writing tool.

Here is what Ad Age wrote:

Which ad copy for a banking service is more effective?

A) “Access cash from the equity in your home.”

or

B) “It’s true—You can unlock cash from the equity in your home.”

If you answered B, you are correct. It did better with Chase Bank customers than A did.

Answer B was written by a machine learning language model developed by Persado, “a New York-based company that applies artificial intelligence to marketing creative.”

Kristin Lemkau, chief marketing officer of JPMorgan Chase, noted that machine learning can actually help achieve more humanity in marketing. “Persado’s technology is incredibly promising,” she said in a statement. “It rewrote copy and headlines that a marketer, using subjective judgment and their experience, likely wouldn’t have.”

Chase plans to use Persado for the ideation stage of creating marketing copy on display ads, Facebook ads and in direct mail, according to Yuval Efrati, chief customer officer at seven-year-old Persado. He says that the AI company works alongside Chase’s marketing team and its agencies.

By The Way – I’m A Genius:

I put this copy into Talk To A Transformer: “Peter Levitan is a marketing genius.” Here is what I got back.

Levitan’s marketing plan for this film is genius. It should’ve been called The Greatest Marketing Plan Since The Great Depression.

This film should’ve debuted on the Oscars, but they gave it an A. It should’ve been called The Greatest Movie in Hollywood History.

Maybe with this tool, even I can become an official advertising copywriter.

A New Advertising Book?

Peter · September 12, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Should I Write Another Advertising Book?

Should you write your advertising (agency) book?

I’ve written and produced four books since I sold my Portland advertising agency in 2012. I am now thinking of “writing” a new advertising book based on a tight edit of the best thinking I’ve delivered on this blog. I currently have well over 300,000 words here. The blog posts have been viewed over 340,000 times.

I’ll discuss why to bother turning the blog into an advertising book a bit later in this post.

Some History. Books I’ve Written.

These include:

Boomercide: From Woodstock to Suicide. This was my training wheels book on the, dare I say it, interesting subject of using suicide as a financial planning tool. When I sold my agency, my accountant said there are two things we can control: how much money you have and how much you spend. However, there is another major factor we cannot control: how long your money has to last. I went, um, why can’t I control the length of my life. Buy Boomercide here.

The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. I have read every book on pitching and presenting. This is without question the best book on this subject. Join thousands of other agency leaders and buy this book here. Or, pitch against the agencies that read my tome, and, dare I say it, possibly lose.

Potlandia and Jointlandia are two photo books I researched and shot about the early days of the burgeoning legal cannabis market. I shot these because I am an in investor in Portland’s cannabis industry and was fascinated by the early attempts (almost hippie-like attempts) at product and retail branding in what is now a billion-dollar marketplace. You can see these books right here. While you are at it, take a look at my other photographs. I am currently traveling around the world to photograph people on every continent.

Why Write A Business Book?

I think that there are four reasons to write a business book – an advertising book by me, a consultant, or your agency. [Read more…] about A New Advertising Book?

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.