How do you get to Trust? Drink your clients' Kool-Aid

In Forbes today a survey conducted by a marketing consulting firm tells us that advertisers continue to be frustrated with their agencies.

A client of ours asked me today what I think the cause is.

It starts with money.  But it comes down to one thing:  Trust.

Why does it start with money?  Because of our flailing economy, there’s just less of it to go around.

When there’s less money to go around, that goes double for marketing, as companies look to maximize resources in ways that can show better proof of spend, like sales, supply chain, and finance.

Because there’s less money to go around, margins are thinner.

Because margins are thinner, the level of fear is exponentially increased.   Every decision is scrutinized and questioned.

And when fear goes up, trust goes the opposite way.  And trust is everything when it comes to partnership and collaboration.

The symptoms are numerous:  Clients may feel that agencies don’t make their business a high enough priority or put their best people on it; they may feel like they’re paying too much money or not getting enough value. 

Or they just might not feel like they’re getting the strategic and creative thought partnership they crave (and pay for).

So how does an agency get to Trust?  It’s not so complicated.  

Throw yourself into their business.  Learn what makes them tick, dig into their category, interact with their brand and product, live a day or week in their shoes. 

Study their past successes, talk to people who’ve been part of them, learn from them.   Really believe in what they do and how they’ve succeeded.

Drink their Kool-Aid. You'll be surprised at what a big difference it can make.

Agencies are struggling to be trusted because they have a hard time dedicating the resources for their people to have even just a sip of Kool-Aid.  They're just stretched too thin. The irony is, the survey finds that advertisers want agencies to deliver “more for less.”  

One good way to do that is to have a more efficient, more nimble agency.  Which explains the rise of small and medium sized independents. 

So if trust is everything, one way to get there is clear:  reduce the size of your agency or create a not-so-big one from scratch.

Or as Steve Martin once said, get small. 

Can't beat fun at the old baseball trapezoid

Collaboration in sports is usually a good thing. Just about every team has a huge amount of talent in the locker room, and often it’s chemistry that separates champs from chumps.

How often do you hear of a team making a late season acquisition of a player who has won championships on different teams? It’s not often the most talented guy available; in fact, more often that not, it’s a just-above average player who’s an excellent “clubhouse guy.” He’s a natural facilitator—he keys great collaboration and he helps get people to perform.

(And conversely, you only have to look as far as my beloved Wrigley Field to see two cases of the opposite of great clubhouse guys-- Milton Bradley and Carlos Zambrano--people whose poisonous attitudes have been able to take down a team all by themselves.)

So when is collaboration a bad thing in sports? When it comes to building baseball stadiums.

The interesting thing about ballparks, compared to football fields or basketball courts, is that no playing fields are the same. Football fields are 100 yards long, basketball courts are 94 feet from end to end and 50 feet from side to side. Baseball stadiums are all wonderfully uniquely different.

This was brought to my attention by some smart folks at snippets.com who used Google Maps to trace the shapes of all uncovered Major League baseball parks. The variance in shapes and sizes are truly amazing. While some teams actually do play on baseball diamonds, others play on baseball rhombuses and baseball trapeziods.

I won’t rant about this being another reason baseball is the best, most interesting and unique sport on the planet (despite most humans being unable to make it through more than an inning or two without going go get something to eat.)

I will suggest that the very best cultures allow for individuality to thrive even when great collaboration makes the difference between success and failure.

Pablo Picasso was right (and wrong) about computers

“What good are computers? They can only give you answers.”

Thank you, Pablo, for criticizing computers in a way that doesn’t make you seem like a curmudgeonly old complainer like the other 40+ers who love computers 98% of the time but once in a while curse them for hurtling the world along faster and faster each day, and specifically, for the continued contraction of deadlines they’ve caused. If negativity is the enemy of creative thinking, then Time is its best friend. Give a good amount of time to some healthy collaboration and cognitive dissonance, allow time for Ideation, and watch the ideas explode in million wonderful directions.

Among the many things I wonder about Gen Y is if they ever curse computers and their very existence. Digital natives live with computers as appendages and don’t consider their continued minute by minute use as causing progress, as much as facilitating every day doings. Mason Bates is one example.

I would guess he’s made every tux-wearing symphony subscriber nauseous, and caused every classical musician to create Mason Bates voodoo dolls and stick hollow point pins in the eyes and hands. It’s interesting work, and it’s certainly art. And with all due respect to Mr. Picasso, I’d bet Mr. Bates’ compositions have created far more questions than answers.

Across media, there’s no doubt that the creative product thrives when computers are involved. It just means the art takes shape a little differently, which qualifies it for a spot on the evolutionary timeline that started when the first splash of paint hit the cave wall. It’s not about how it’s created, as long as someone is creating it.

Perhaps our friend Pablo said it best:

"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun."

A lesson from D-Day: Great Ideas can change the world

"In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

This from one of the most quotable men of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, describing the massive disinformation and deception plan concocted by the Allies prior to the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

The multi-spoked idea was to stuff the Nazi information pipeline with enough facts, figures and plans to convince the Nazis that a much larger operation was coming, spread out over a greater swath of territory, and they wouldn’t be able to properly defend the real invasion points.

The deception was so elaborate that it must have taken months to develop, as well as the cooperation of hundreds of minds across thousands of miles. It included the creation of completely fictitious military divisions, like “FUSAG,” the First US Army Group, which did not actually exist. But the Germans believed it did, due to fake radio traffic and the use of double agents.

It also included parachuting dummies behind enemy lines and dropping strips of aluminum foil cut to a length that corresponded to German radar waves to create phantom fleets of bombs and troops.

Imagine the precise coordination of the cognitively disparate people necessary to make it successful. If one person betrayed the deception—and there were incidents that came close, resulting in quarantines and demotions—the whole plan might have been blown, and we could be watching Hogan’s Heroes episodes today that end very differently.

65 years later, we’re free to have Memorial Day picnics to remember the heroes and watch amazing stories of D-Day on TV. Military terms are everywhere, even in the world of corporate America, where, ironically enough, we use “war rooms” to figure out how we’re going to capture market share.

The sessions that the Allied leaders conducted in the original War Rooms were filled with amazingly creative thinkers and tremendous creative problem solving. Talk about an impactful ideation. Shows you what truly inspired collaboration can do.

Life > Marketing

There’s life, and there’s marketing, and anyone who’s good at separating the two will be more likely to succeed at both.

There’s almost always a way to solve a tough marketing challenge. Good foundational strategic thinking, a little ideation to get the creative juices flowing, some strong, sincere collaboration, and you’re on your way.

But some of life’s tougher challenges offer a thornier prognosis and it takes some truly creative thinking to get to not just smart, but workable solutions. So let’s hear it for Tim King and Urban Prep.

You can wiki his history. Or you can read the latest about Urban Prep, the inner city Chicago High School, which just announced that 100% of their graduating seniors will be attending four-year colleges or universities. Not bad, considering only 4% of them could read at grade level when they started four years ago.

Mr. King and his faculty did it with a laser-beam focus on academics, by providing good role models, and judging from the khaki-tie-and-blazer uniforms, an enormous amount of structure and discipline.

But they also twisted the way students are considered: the school’s motto is “We Believe,” which speaks volumes about how the teachers approach their challenge—and their students-- and every student is addressed as “Mr.”

I like to talk about Twisting Your Thinking to find smart, unexpected solutions to tough marketing problems. “Tough problems” takes on new meaning in the Englewood neighborhood where Urban Prep educates kids and helps them succeed in life.

While marketing will never be as important as life, the success of Urban Prep shows the tremendous power of thinking creatively to meet a challenge.

A healthy dose of Belief doesn't hurt either.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

This is (by far) my favorite time of year. My favorite things happen right around now: Baseball gets started (the teams I coach in my community, and the ones I watch on TV). Passover, my favorite holiday, hits right about now, and needless to say, as I write this to the hum of dueling leafblowers and lawnmowers outside my window, brown turns to green and snow shovels get replaced by deck chairs and the air just smells damn good.

There’s a reason “Hope Springs Eternal” has been appearing on T-shirts and bumper stickers and various media since Alexander Pope’s 1733 poem “An Essay on Man.” And it’s not just because it’s a great first line for a Haiku.

We all want to have Hope, whether it's for something better or tastier or easier or fluffier. It's human nature and without it we'd be lifeless, uninteresting lumps. Thing is, Hope seldom actively comes to us. Which is why Spring is so awesome.

It not only represents regeneration and recognizes the circle of life, it gives a nod to rebirth, as anyone who’s ever celebrated Easter or Passover can attest. I’m sure many of you seder-celebrators ate eggs last night, and I’m assuming you talked about all of the various significant explanations related to New Life. And coming from a Cubs fan, believe me, this is greatly appreciated every March.

Spring is the official season of Re. So rejuvenate, resuscitate, revitalize and revisit. Use this time of year to recharge your engines, take a step back from a daily challenge, and look at it a little differently. Try some collaboration while you're at it. Can't hurt.

Twist things up a little bit, and Hope will come to you.