Is that an oxymoron? Of course not. We’ve had eight of them as of today. Right now we have four, maybe more. Time will tell. (But that is out of  a total of 316 clients over the years). Recognizing a great client takes practice and experience. They come in all sizes and in all industries. Budget size at the start of the relationship predicts nothing. Chemistry predicts nothing. Bad clients are adept at conviviality almost without fail. One thing is predictive however, does the new client have the capacity to listen and to learn, or are they pronouncive and arrogant always putting themselves first? One meeting should do it. I have left the polished mahogany boardroom of a multi-billion dollar bank relieved to depart and never return. I have left the garage-office of a one person shop so excited about the prospects of working with that individual that I was back on the phone while I was driving home.

The two most important criteria are: courage and confidence. In the former category I am speaking of moral courage and not the animal variety. And in the latter category I am speaking of competence, really.

Competence and Confidence

In a study of competence and confidence in The New York Times published a few years ago it was noted that in all of the case studies and commensurate statistical compilations competence and confidence had an inverse relationship. When the “confidence” level was exhibited at its highest level, competence was at it lowest level. And, as you would expect, when competence was exhibited at its highest levels, confidence, expressed and proclaimed, was at it lowest, in fact it was often denied entirely. Think about that for a minute. The more you actually know about a topic leads you to deny any level of real competence, even though your performance is at the highest levels. Why is that? The more you know, the more you know you don’t really know anything.

To be conscience that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
– Benjamin Disraeli

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
– Benjamin Franklin

Stupidity is without anxiety.– Johann von Goethe

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.
– Benjamin Franklin

Working with truly competent people is fun. They always no talent when they see. They always love honesty and truth. They are tireless in discovery. They are loyal in every way. And their prospects for success are unlimited, so finding them at the beginning, middle or end of their careers does not matter in the least. Finding them is all that matters.

Sad to say, truly competent people are as rare as true leaders. By the way, competent people are nature leaders.

More….

In our current industrial modality of making money, the art of leadership may have become a forgotten concept, lost in the dust of lucre.

When all you need to make money is a greed beyond all others leadership becomes just aggression. This hard-charging-almost-mindless capitalism without regard to others becomes the chariot of fire; the measure of senseless success. Slash and burn avarice in America is leaving a sad trail of social and cultural disasters, but who will accept responsibility? Accepting responsibility? Another bygone concept. Here are some more concepts of the forgotten past. Where have all the flowers gone?

• Never blame a subordinate for something that went wrong on your watch.
• Always put the well being of others above your own.
• Give credit where credit is due. Success is, after all, always a team effort.
• Take a personal interest in the welfare of people around you, especially your employees.
• Make decisions promptly.
• Be a teacher and mentor. Always teach only the right thing to do. “Don’t do that” is not teaching.
• Be fair to all, no favorites.
• Expect people to do their best and allow for people to make mistakes. If your plans cannot withstand a mistake or two along the way, then it’s the plan that is the problem.
• Leadership is not a commodity, it is an art and it takes true unselfish talent to be a real leader.

Leaders build consensus with vision and, most importantly, by setting a good example. If your team is not really a team, it’s your fault. If you don’t see that, people won’t see you as a leader. People want and deserve respect. A true leader knows this. Insensitivity, aloofness and arrogance, untrustworthiness, uncontrolled ambition, inability to delegate and build teamwork, bad hiring, lack of a clear strategy, and constant self-referentiality are all hallmarks of bad leadership. They are easy-to-spot signs of someone who has no business in a leadership role.

True leaders are exceptionally hard to find today. The hallmarks of bad leadership are everywhere. Credentials are just paper proclamations of worth in the place of true performance that needs no paperwork. America needs to demand a higher form of leadership in our government, our companies, our organizations and in our own lives. Leadership is a team enterprise and in great organizations it is found at all levels, from the maintenance team to the corner office suits.

Leadership is an art and it needs people with creativity and vision to practice it. When we finally stop accepting the cheap imitations over the real thing, then things will get better.

The best definition leadership: “The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.” — Albert Einstein.

Advertising in general is still hot, but some so-called hot stuff is looking a lot more ordinary these days.

Emarketer forecasts that the national media buy will rise to $174 billion by 2015. Sounds far off… well most advertising agencies are already planning 2013 and 2014 now. That number is up from $155 billion for 2011. Almost 40% of all media buying is still on television.

Online advertising will push to 25% by 2015, up from only 5% in 2005, but remember that newspaper Internet sites are still the number one advertising resource online.

Print advertising, on the national scale, will slip to 11 percent (newspapers) and seven percent (magazines).

The “banner bubble” however has burst. Especially in the social media category. The best performers in the Click Through Ratio competition is a less than .04 percent of impressions. That is one million impressions gets you 4,000 click throughs without comment on conversions. Believe it or not, banner advertising is slowly abandoning the quest for clicks and is now considered a sort of image advertising.

And finally, a new study shows that advertisers now view their Facebook pages as a tool to improve the level of brand loyalty. (Source: Millward Brown, Dynamic Logic, and the World federation of Advertisers) Note: the call-out box above: “All but one of the marketers surveyed plan to devote more time and money to social media in the next 12 months, BUT half of them are uncertain of the returns on these investments.

SOME CONCLUSIONS:

1. The “new media” is slowing down in its growth. You will see a shift from percentage of growth proclamations to actual dollars of growth in the future.

2. Newspapers and print have survived by creating the best online advertising sites there are. This print and online blending will grow in significance.

3. There will an intensification of the “image” side on online and social media, de-emphasizing the actual results. I suppose this is natural in the course of things, but for companies that have been assaulted with all of the hype, and yet stuck to their guns of result-orientation, some vindication will be sweet.

4. In the end, cool heads will prevail. Our recommendation is to keep your “new media” budget to within 15 percent of your total budget and to concentrate on the one or two that most meet your goals in terms of demographic and content. Remember that brand management is much more difficult and expensive online and that brand management is the most important tool for success.

It looks weird. [Client is using Internet Explorer 5.1]. The colors are way off. [Client is using an out-of-date screen.] This site is so slow I’m yawning. [Client's computer is a really old one from home with the original MS Windows software.] The site is way too big, I have to scroll to see anything. [Client's screen is a 12-inch screen, way under today's average of 24 inches.]

The point is that today’s Internet is a high-technology environment. It is not like a telephone you buy once and you’re done. Computers, software, screens and everything else all need to upgraded constantly and checked almost daily. The saying that “the slowest rower rules the boat” cannot be allowed to “rule” the Internet. Either you keep up or you will be left behind (or thrown overboard).

This also applies to taste in websites. In the late 1990s Flash sites were the rage, today they are the scourge. No one wants that spinning thingy every time to they do anything and today content, not glitsy design, is king. People use the Internet in business for information not entertainment. Get the information to them easily and seamlessly and they will be back. Trap them with fancy graphics, flash screens, and “enter here” buttons and they are gone like one of those slowly assembling then quickly dissolving graphics you used to love in the days of your Internet adolescence.

Look around at the most popular sites today. They are almost all content management sites driven by WordPress or one of the derivative packages out there. Even Joomla is over graphic-ed now and tiresome. These sites are like clowns all dressed up with nothing to do but act crazy. Believe me, people want content, knowledge, experience, good writing, fantastic photographs, and easy drving around in the site. Even cumbersome dropdown menus that obliterate the copy under and around them are frowned upon. Much better than fancy button designs and animations are html links to site pages that are easily accessible from several places. Remember the old “back buttons” on every site… who needs it?

Believe it or not even automatic videos opening on entrance can radically reduce your traffic. CNN is finding this out. They moved from almost entirely html news articles and photos, with optional videos, to all videos, introduced with commercials… and the are paying a heavy price in viewership. There is a place for all of these graphic wonders but that place is in the “optional” basket not blocking the front door.

Today, almost all successful business site are white or light in color, html from top to bottom with nice photographs, information headlines, and plenty of “drill-down” copy for the inquisitive minds. People who don’t read say “there’s too much copy.” Readers know a simple truth, “I can always stop reading when the copy gets to be ‘too much,’ but I can’t invent more when the copy ‘not enough.’”

So, before you start complaining about your site to your designer, be sure you are not the problem. If your designer is designing a site for you today, he or she probably knows a whole lot more about what is working and is not working than you do. Ask questions, listen to the answers, and then explore something new outside of and beyond your own forehead.

It might not be that your site is weird, it might be that what is weird is that you don’t know what is actually going on. Just because you surf around day and night, does not make you web designer. Anymore than driving can make you an architect or even a good driver. Learning from the experts, that’s the way.

Things seem to keep getting more and more complicated, but maybe not. Where once it was “early to bed, early to rise, advertise, advertise, advertise,” now the choices seem more complex. Target audiences, market share, segmentation, optimization, media mixing, CTR, preemptability, extramercial advantage, findability ratios, and keyword density are all important. but in another way they just represent a re-jargoning of marketing terminology that has been around since the beginning. In a world of diminishing marketing returns and accelerating media expenses, there may be some traditional methods of seeking new business that still work as well as ever. If you know how and remember some timeless truths.

The anecdote to media over-dependence is marketing curiosity. And, there is no cure for curiosity. Once you start it is impossible to stop. It is not difficult for a company to become preoccupied with one media resource to the exclusion of others, because it works. But in a highly segmented consumer marketplace the effort to reach new customers can be scary. To often, like a partygoer who stays all night in one room, you may eventually see everyone, but you won’t see everyone in different settings. So by adding a new mix to your program, you may suddenly find that responses go up from new and, interestingly, for existing customers as well.

In quality advertising agency/client relationship two things happen. (1) both sides stop thinking exclusively about money heading into their individual pockets and (2) both sides realize that they are part of a powerful team. The agency makes recommendations that are the best for the client. The client realizes that for this independence and honesty, the agency is to be paid fairly. When one side mistrusts the other, chaos ensues. X+Y will never=Z. Things just won’t add up. Direct mail is especially difficult outside of a quality agency/client relationship. An agency has no axe to grind in terms of direct mail packages. All the agency wants is success for the client. All a good agency asks is a creative opportunity to accomplish the client’s goals.

Direct marketing should come under the umbrella campaign that your company is working hard to deliver thoughtfully to all of the target markets and audiences. Direct marketing should be conducted within a context that is consistent and believable within the marketing culture of your enterprise. This means that unless you get really lucky the logic of your direct mail program will be inductive, moving from your specifics to the large generalities of advertising. Said another way, if someone comes to you with a direct mail package that is pre-conceived, pre-packaged (a gimmick, if you will) there is virtually no chance that it will fit authentically into your program, even and especially if this package is touted as already “industry-specific” and “industry-proven.” There is a force that tries to commoditize everything. Don’t ask me why, but it’s there. When you sense its presence, the amygdala’s orienting response, which saved us all on the evolution trail from things lurking in the jungle or in the dark, should snap your attention in its direction and be ready to fight. Commoditization is antipathy to creativity and creativity is the heart and soul of new sales.

So design a genuinely creative and unique direct marketing program without any hesitation. The seductive “savings” of off-the-shelf plans and packages will be long forgotten in awkward and inauthentic impression they make in customers who know you and the inconsistent and incorrect vision they will make on new customers. Tread carefully on direct marketing devices. Remember it is direct. A direct connection between you and the customer. If upon first meeting a new customer you begin the conversation by offering a deep cut in price, or a large percentage off, or some come-on to entice them, then that will be what they always expect. As I said, tread lightly. There may be a better way. Remember it is ideas that change everything.

Just be sure it is a good idea.

In an advertising agency setting the only real mistake is one that is actually published. Back and forths with the client have a sort of client/agency confidentiality protection, with amnesty. If it stays in the relationship, then no harm, no foul.

For example, we recently did a rough draft of a 331-word press release for a new client and made some mistakes in how long a person was with the company and how long this person had lived in the state. For the new client it looked catastrophic and they flipped out. This reaction was primarily because the agency/client process was new to them and also they did not actually read the attached email which clearly stated that this firs pass was a rough for review. And it said it twice. They thought it was a final, done deal. Hence the freakout. However, on this project, we were hired to draft a release that would get attention at various publications, websites, trades shows and trade journals. That is, we were hired to come up with an approach, a copy angle that the various editors might find interesting. At the first pass level, THAT was the issue, not that we had every detail and every word correct. The original, client-supplied material, said that the employee had 10 years of experience in the industry; our first draft assigned her as having 15 years with the company. We also stated she was a native of the state, which was later corrected that to read a “resident” of the state. No harm, no foul. Routine.

The overall theme and drift of the release was never questioned. Just the small details that were easily and routinely corrected prior to publication. However, our contact on this project actually ridiculed us for getting minor facts wrong. When we said it was a “review copy” he accused us of avoiding responsibility. When I again pointed out that our original email clearly stated twice that it was actually a review copy, he grudgingly admitted that the “review” statement was there, in “the fine print,” but went on disparaging our agency practices anyway. I could have pointed out that this is our normal process: rough draft–client review–changes–final draft–approval–publication. I could have said that almost every project goes through a correction or two, sometimes more. I could have told him that by playing this “gotcha” game he had damaged the relationship, increased the costs of the release unnecessarily, and dampened our future creative efforts by introducing such an unfortunate lack of trust in a routine matter.

But actually I said nothing. I tried to respond to keep things moving ahead positively, and hoped that, as the project reached its conclusion, the client would see that our proven process of ready–aim–fire protects both agency and client from errors in the end. Dealing with anxiety, gotcha games, and inexperience about working with a quality advertising agency are all part of changing a new client into a great client. It doesn’t always work out, but it is a process, sometimes longer in some cases than others.  As an advertising agency with 16,900 projects and 30 years of experience, we have seen it all and we have seem them all.

As they say in golf, “Many a great round begins with a double bogey.” Sometimes these things deepen the reationship with understanding. But sometimes, in golf, a bad player does stomp off the course after throwing his clubs in the pond. It happens. The rest of the foursome generally plays on, perhaps remembering that golf, like life and advertising, is a game of next shots.

It does nothing for me. These five words have destroyed more advertising careers than all the late nights, heart-pounding pressure, and slow payments combined. When, in fact, they should never have been spoken in the first place.

Imagine the creative team working all weekend, intellectually digging for a concept worthy of their client’s assignment which came in late Friday afternoon. They work up 20 concepts and brainstorm them from every angle: humor, serious challenge, poetic inversion, and straight-talking sincerity, among others. They find the right approach in a careful mix of them all. Each word is selected with care. Then artwork is arranged to support the words. The designs are explored from every perspective until one is selected and integrated with the concept and copy. Everyone in the agency has put everything they had into the final presentation. It is Sunday evening 9:00 p.m. when the agency lights go out and the “click” of the lock on the office door was finally heard over excited conversations among the creative team about how great things would go with the client in the morning. It was a long, hard weekend, but it was going to be worth it.

As the client walks into the room he was thinking about the report his wife had received from the home inspector: asbestos lining on all the pipes in the house they had just purchased. “It’s going to cost $28,000 to remove and dispose of it all. Men in white hazmat suits for God’s sake,” she had said to him. When he had arrived at work, three of the company trucks had been vandalized the night before, the new phone system was down, and of course the computer system had crashed. As he listens to the agency, he knew that his decision-making quotient was down in the dumps, his confidence level is nearing all time lows, and there was this sense of deep annoyance with everything which was mounting an assault on his usual open-mindedness. He realized that he was in a very bad mood. The agency has just made the best presentation he had seen them make in the two years they have been working together. He could see the sincere and talented effort. It IS a good idea, with promise, he thought. He noticed his assistant looking at him. She was always assessing his moods and mental directions like a long-tailed cat gauging a room full of rocking chairs. Today she could see his mood was dark. This agency has been good, even great, but no one is perfect. They have always had good ideas but some have been better than others. The CEO was indicating, “what do you think?” He often does this when he doesn’t want to be the bad cop. Then it happened. Those five words that cause such damage. She looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, then looking into the room’s middle distance where eye contact was impossible, she spoke them: “It does nothing for me.”

The resulting loss of money and enthusiasm in the client-agency relationship in such a situation rivals only the death of the agency president or the client’s place of business burning to the ground.

Creative people have, at best, a tentative connection to reality. The fragile nature of the client-agency relationship is always based on the last thing that happened … both ways. The axe blow of those five words may cleave apart a creative union that was promising and productive, leaving it irreparably damaged. The creative edge that the agency resources bring to a client’s business future is built on trust. They must feel free to be wrong, to make creative mistakes if they are ever to hit it out of the park. Hangdogs learn no new tricks and run when opportunity knocks. Instead of tbe client-business’s best friend, this agency could now be looking for alternatives to escape their captivity to thoughtlessness and directionless negativity.

But sometimes leadership rears its beautiful head.

In this particular case, the CEO saves the day. The bad beginnings to his day swept aside, he looked at his assistant with a stern gaze and says, “Who cares whether or not it ‘does anything’ for you.” Our customers buy our gaskets by the millions for projects you don’t even come close to understanding. They are all over the world. Our agency has given us a thoughtful and creative campaign idea here, based on hard work and research and probably a hundred years or more of combined experience. Let’s start the discussion on how we move ahead from here.” He smiled at the agency team. Like a breath of fresh air, the atmosphere in the room changed from tense to teamwork. Over the next hour, adjustments were made, give and take generated strong discussions, some laughter, and in the end a program for promotion that was exciting and exhilerating to everyone. Over hand shakes and a few hugs the meeting broke up, assignments made, missions accomplished. The assistant was understandably quiet.

The CEO on leaving the meeting was met by his IT manager. The computers were up again. His production manager was next in line with three new rental agreements and a comment that the company’s insurance agent was already on the site in the garage with the appraiser. It looked like the company was covered, including the deductible. His cellphone vibrated, he looked at its screen, his wife had sent him a happy face, which meant more good news on the home front.

His assistant was trailing along behind him, looking pretty down. He said to her, “I want you to follow up with the agency on the timetables. Spend some time with them. Let them see the reasons I trust you so much. Don’t worry. Our reputations in business are formed over time, no one thing is make-or-break. This campaign is important and you are going to be a big part in its success. Okay?”

What a change in her. She was now walking beside the CEO thinking about what a great opportunity the agency had given her. From a moment of deep embarrassment to a rich opportunity… all in less than an hour. Her boss was speaking again.

“And, always remember,” he said, “the power of a kind word.”

Reviewing the agency/client relationship should be a routine event that occurs during everyday business-to-business contacts. To suddenly throw open the doors to all comers and put your advertising agency on notice that their hard work, creativity, and loyalty mean nothing can be a disastrous mistake with repercussions no one intended and certainly no one wanted. But by the time you realize this, it may already be too late….

Remember that to achieve great advertising takes an extraordinary agency and a great client. Without those two elements nothing great will happen. The agency always has more than one client. The client is feeling pressure from multiple sources as well. The agency/client relationship can be full of potential problems unless there is trust. Trust comes from familiarity and time together. It’s pretty simple. If the agency is taken for granted, its focus shifts to clients who are more encouraging. If the client is neglected, then its focus shifts as well. With shifting focus, the account relationship staggers blindly into the ditch. Whose fault? It takes two to tangle, and tango.

There are many wrong reasons to conduct a review:

• When the agency is doing a bad job and you want to slap their hands.
• To compare your current agency to some new suitors who have been persistent
• Because your sales went down.
* Because a new team on the client side has taken over
• Because someone believes the agency is making too much money
•  Just to see if you are getting “the best of the best” from your current agency

There is only one right reason to conduct a review:

• To continuously improve the performance of the advertising agency and the agency/client relationship. This will lead to a better advertising agency more surely than anything else you can do. It could result in a change in agencies, but not usually and not as a first option. If it does lead to an agency change, then some things were allowed to get out of hand long before the review was called. There is plenty of blame on both sides of the equation when this happens.

There are two forms of agency reviews: formal and informal. The informal is just that: an informal spot check from time to time, with a pre-arranged agenda with a discussion of how things are going. The other, more useful, review is a formal review. This is a formal review of the relationship done once or twice a year. If there is a contract, this should be part of it. Both sides should be evaluated and be part of the evaluating. For the agency there can be impediments to productivity that need discussion: delays in approval; changes, changes and more changes; sudden deadlines; and difficulty in reaching the client for important project discussions and updates, to mention a few. For the client there can be frustrations: long delays in creative unveiling; sloppy first passes, out of control costs, lack of communication, and lack of results, to mention a few. Regular discussion of these sorts of topics, with open give-and-take, can head off big problems that accumulate in conflict averse situations. Regular reviews legitimize the positive and supportive critiques that lead to solutions and maintaining a highly-productive relationship between a qualified and willing advertising agency and a client who wants to achieve quality in all things.

For the client, a proper and regular evaluation will:

(1) clarify and prioritize the services that they want and keep fresh the way the client likes things to go;
(2) help clarify and assess the role being played in the relationship by the client’s own people and provide an early warning system for problems brewing;
(3) keep the lines of communication open between the people who originally created the relationship and offer a chance to keep that partnership fresh;
(4) identify wasteful areas of interaction and help the agency and client judge what is important and what is not;
(5) de-stress the relationship and create a more stable one that the client can continue to have confidence in.

For the agency, a proper and regular evaluation will:

(1) help to maintain a close and understanding relationship with the client;
(2) constantly inform the agency where they stand with the client and allow time for correction of problems before they get out of hand;
(3) provide a forum for expectations and airing of difficulties;
(4) allow the agency an opportunity to comment on strengths and weakness in the relationship that they see and to discuss impediments to creativity and, more importantly, the areas of strengths that allow for quality work to occur.

A review should be a time to express friendship, gratitude and to plan for the future. Reviews are only life and death meetings when both sides have failed miserably. So, invest in success and review regularly, informally or informally as best suits your relationship. Remember, a good agency in hand is worth a hundred in the bush. Most advertising agencies have terrifically creative people and knowledgeable production and service teams. The average lifespan of an advertising agency/client today is under five years. It should be over 15 years. Imagine a long-term relationship with a creative team that knows you and your company and continuously turns out top-quality, effective marketing at very reasonable rates.

Our internal slogan has always been, “Our best clients get our best work.” Better handling of the agency/client relationship will ensure that you become one of the best clients at your agency. When you think of that as important, you are on the right path.

If there is anything we have learned in all these years of professional advertising it can be summed up in a few words: everything works. But having said that, it is also clear that some things work better than others. And, that the underpinnings of what we say — how we say it — remains far, far more important.

Here are a few things to always remember.

1. Credibility: Communication begins in a climate of credibility, built by the advertiser. Without it, communication will not occur. Credibility comes from honesty, sincerity and putting customers first. There are no corners to cut.

Performance is the key. When Alexander Graham Bell said, “Come here, Watson,” the resulting action confirmed the communication. So, the “climate of belief” is trust.

2. Context: An advertising/communications program must square with the realities of its environment. Your daily business activities must confirm, not contradict, the message. Lack of context, even occasionally unsells your customers.

This means, take a long, hard  look at the behavior of your company, as well as the “sizzle” of the advertising. How many times have you called a company and heard the operator say or do something that made you wonder, “Why do they have this person answering the phone?”  Or worse, “Why do they always answer with voice mail.” The conduct and professionalism of the company precedes and handicaps or accelerates the marketing message. Your context is who you are.

3. Content: The message must have meaning and relevance. Content determines the audience not vice versa. Content is and always has been king.

Be careful what you ask for; you might get it! Too many times, clients have insisted on messages that pleased their Board of Directors and people around the president or around the decision-makers. The only litmus test for the message is how it impacts the target audience. Be strong on this point. Your board of directors, your president and officers are probably not in the same demographic setting as your customers.

4. Clarity: The message must be put in simple terms. Words used must have exactly the same meaning to all involved. Complex messages must be distilled into much simpler terms, and the farther a message must travel over time and demographically, the more its basic meaning dissipates. The stone makes a splash but ripples are soft on the shore.

The primary definition of the word “simple” is: “consisting of one thing” and does not of course imply stupidity or lack of creativity. The fakirs of India fell asleep on a bed of nails. But no one has ever fallen asleep on a bed of one nail. The message’s simplicity is its penetration power.

5. Continuity and Consistency: Communication is an unending process. It requires repetition. Repetition contributes to learning. Studies have shown that human beings take on average 27 repetitions to fully integrate a message. 27 times. Communication is an unending process. It requires repetition. Repetition contributes to learning. Studies have shown that human beings take on average 27 repetitions to fully integrate a message. 27 times. Or did I say that already?

Long after you’ve completely tired of a campaign and are “sick to death” of seeing it, the general public is just beginning to hear it. That’s when it starts to pay off. That is, if you haven’t already cancelled it at great expense to your company, at great loss of response, and out of ignorance. Give things time, and reap the rewards of patience and professionalism. Listen. Give things time.

6. Channels: Use established channels of communication– channels the receiver uses and respects. Creating new channels is difficult. risky, and fraught with failure.

This applies to “special promotions” and “special sections” by the print and broadcast media as well as start-up venture media, including social networks and online advertising. Too often the “special” in the special section means more to the publisher than to the reader. There are exceptions, but follow the rule and you won’t be sorry. Be innovative in your statement of the message, but conservative in your choice of channels used to communicate it. Don’t be afraid to experiment but remember it is just an experiment.

7. Capability: Communication must take into account the capability of the audience. Communications are most effective when they require the least effort on the part of the recipient, and certainly one they are fully capable to doing.

“Effort” can sometimes be defined as a combination of physical effort and incentive. Be sure to include a fulfillment for the reader/customer/viewer/listener. Don’t assume that they are all just waiting for you. Institutional advertising is a great idea (if you’re an institution). Coupons are seductive for result-oriented advertisers, but what are you asking a person to do? (a) buy the product because is less expensive or discounted, (b) to reform whatever opinion they had of the company to a new “special” opinion, and (c) look for more discounts in the future. Good luck! Sometimes it’ll work but what you’ll get are increasingly disloyal customers. Grocery stores love it, but if you’re not behind a deli counter, think about other avenues of response generation. There are plenty. Be imaginative. Use a great advertising agency.

INTRODUCTION: the reasons for writing and reading this are….

• To continuously stimulate clients to ask themselves all the important questions about advertising over and over again.
• To encourage clients to stop assuming things about the agency/client relationship, and really think things over more deeply.
• To reinforce the notion that advertising is an honorable profession which requires honorable people on all sides to keep it that way.
• To show that the client/agency relationship is a very important relationship to both both of us, and that both of us have serious responsibilities and standards to live up to.
• To show that while the advertising agency has classically been the one responsible for worrying about the client’s “bottom line,” it is also in the client’s best interests to worry about the agency’s profitability as well.
• To prove that great advertising doesn’t just happen, it’s planned, researched, executed, and that is always a synthesis, ultimately, of all of these elements along with another essential ingredient: inspiration. And that inspiration is always a product of cooperation.
• To discuss the idea that the advertising agency’s new business acquisition is an important element of the relationship, and that clients should be aware of this and they should actually be actively helpful in the agency’s search for new clients becoming a referral partner for their agency, just as their agency is for them.
• To demonstrate that the idea of “key personnel” involvement in every aspect of the relationship is an idea long held high in the advertising relationship. But today, things are too expensive, way too complicated, and too involved to leave it up to just the key personnel, on both sides.
• To show that the agency’s cash flow and profitability are just as important as the client’s cash flow and profitability. And that in this too we are partners
• To remind clients that advertising people are different from other people. To choose a career like this, where the normal day is spent interacting with creativity and other creative people, one must be a little different. Or a lot different. As clients understand how thoroughly different advertising people are, they will become more comfortable with them. We specialize in doing things differently. That’s why our clients come to us, and why they stay with us. But, honestly, advertising people and client people are usually very, very different people.
• To remind clients that their advertising agency is not just another vendor.

Bill Purdin
President and Creative Director of Legend, Inc.