ad agency

Ad Agency CEO’s: 1 Facebook Reason To Pay Attention To Mobile

Peter · May 2, 2013 · Leave a Comment

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:

4 Insane Advertising Agency Home Pages

Peter · April 30, 2013 · Leave a Comment

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.

2 Pieces Of Advice For Ad Agency CEO’s

Peter · April 29, 2013 · Leave a Comment

The big idea is that your agency should be making things — for yourselves (and your clients.) It is simply too easy and you have the brains, talent and energy. What’s more, you will walk the design talk. One idea is futuristic and the other is simply something you should be doing anyway.

Here are two ideas.

1. Learn 3D Printing

Buy a 3D printer, experiment and be much smarter and on the ball than all the other agencies in your town.

My suggestion is buy the the soon to be released Form 1 from Formlabs. As Formlabs says,Form 1 is…”An end-to-end package. Printer, software, and post-processing kit that just works. Right out of the box.” Check out their video.

$3,300 puts you right in the middle of the 3D printer explosion. And, its so damned beautiful. Put it on that expensive front desk that really does zero for your agency’s street cred. Go here if you need to geek out on this big idea.

Make Some Tee Shirts

It’s summer. Need I say more?

I have a few more ideas. Most are about how you can make more money. Now, that’s a cool thing for an advertising agency to make.

30% Of Advertising Employees Will Leave In 12 Months

Peter · April 24, 2013 · 1 Comment

And you thought that Cannes was just about sun, sand, booze, sex, ads and awards.

From Arnold’s Cannes: Fixing Advertising’s Talent Crisis Campaign website:

The purpose of this campaign was to advertise a speech given by Arnold Worldwide Global CEO Andrew Benett, centered around the “Talent Crisis” in advertising. The crisis as he defines it revolves around improper training and under-appreciation of employees leading to long hours and massive turnover unbeknownst to upper management. These posters were placed around Cannes, in order to drive traffic to the event. They were also supported by postcards with the same creative.

Make sure you check out the poster series.