Tag Archives: business

David Ogilvy & The Business of Marketing

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My apologies for the long delay since the last post. Life has been very busy. I’m planning to be more consistent again now…

Few legends of advertising are quoted as often as David Ogilvy. How many of us, moving at Internet-speed do what David Ogilvy supposedly did in pursuit of big ideas? Let’s go line by line through his best practices: (Click here and open Mr. Ogilvy’s “Letter Of Note” in another tab for side-by-side reference).

1. Many of us work late. In fact most of us do. Probably more than is healthy, honestly. But despite flex time and easy telecommuting many of us clock hours in noisy offices, full of distractions with lots of additional things vying for our attention on our numerous internet feeds.

2. Background research. Man, I can’t tell you the last time I had the opportunity to really dig into competitive work in a category I was working on. How about you?

3. Research material? Not when the brief is Monday (assuming the client signs off by then) and the ‘big ideas’ are due for a conference call on Wednesday. Not when you need a couple days to comp it up on a computer to make it ‘presentation ready’. Good ideas were supposed to come through on a cocktail napkin sketch. Haven’t seen one sold that way in my entire career.

4. Client buy off on the brief. This one is sticky. Even when we get it, the age of digital development has trained us all that changes are possible wherever and whenever. They are, of course – but at a cost that no one ever seems to want acknowledge let alone bill for.

5. You might find time for a brain dump, sure, but with little to no research to map it to, choosing the best ideas from the batch becomes fairly subjective and nearly impossible to measure beyond office politics (what does the senior most person like) and entertainment factor.

6. Brainstorming. We all do this. How many of us get to go deep though? The pressure, under timelines and tight budgets, is to make a choice early. The choices are usually from a pool of thoughts that come ‘top of mind’ – you know, the same concepts everyone has in a single, one-hour brainstorm.

7. Hitting the wall. I remember being terrified the first time this happened to me. Then I read about ideation and learned its usually in the moments after purging all the top of mind thoughts – when you think you’ve run dry – that the real creativity starts. That’s usually right around the time the brainstorm ends (because the conference room is booked and we’ve successfully convinced ourselves we can’t think productively for more than an hour).

8. Heavy self editing. Again, how often do we get the time to think broad (#6), think deep (#7) and then go back and edit it all down?

9. Walking away. Forget the substance abuse and gramophone mentioned. A lot of ideation happens subconsciously. Read up on it and you’ll learn the best ideas come from brains that like crock pots, slowly cook ideas rather than trying to call them forth like an on/off faucet of brilliance.

10. More editing. Man, this guy lived in a golden age! You and I would be two weeks late and possibly have lost the account by this point.

11. Secretarial work. Today we all do it ourselves. We can type our own words, comp our own ideas. This is generally a good thing, though I wonder how much time we spend formatting text that could be spent improving ideas.

12. The idea of being a lousy writer but good editor gets to something critically important that I’ll be hitting in my next post – on reduction. Ideas are messy, sometimes they feel random and out of nowhere. Editing turns 24 hours of footage into a great half-hour film. It turns a rambling novel into an intriguing short-story. And it can take the hodge-podge of notions, blurbs, bits and pieces and craft them into a cohesive story. But it takes time.

I’ve often thought our industry has been shooting itself in the foot by accepting tighter timelines, cheapening the value of our concepts in favor of the slickness of our executions, and willfully giving up our seat at the strategic table in favor of focusing on finding cheaper (read less manpower, with less experience) ways to crank out more work is less time. Clients won’t stop us from doing this. They’ve got shareholders with quarterly earnings on their minds. (Curse you Wall St.)

But in the recesses of our minds I think we all know we’re moving so fast that we don’t have the time we’d like to learn our clients’ businesses better, to research their competitors more, to think broader, look deeper, and to throw away the first 20 ideas we have (because we know everyone has those same ideas).

Our client’s don’t have enough time to do this either I’m betting.

I wish we all did though.

Why social media is a monkey wrench in business models.

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Like many disruptive technologies, incorporating social media into a business model has proven challenging for both agencies and corporations. Social media seems to straddle at least two traditional functional groups within a business: marketing and customer service. And of course social media can be used in R&D, HR and operations as well depending on the business a company is in.

This post will deal with what I feel are the two most common implementations of social media technologies – as tools for marketing and as tool for customer service. In truth, these are the harder to work with, the others are internal only, which makes for a smoother integration process in some ways. With marketing and customer service though, the consumer plays a part, which is exactly the sticking point.

Let’s begin with marketing and communication. That social media has forever changed marketing few will argue against. In addition to providing more opportunities to engage, social media has allowed customers to do their own product research and review through peer opinions above and beyond what the marketer wants to communicate

A conflict of pace.
A business may choose to do its social media marketing internally or to include it in an agency relationship. Either way, the pace (and expectations) of social media are far more immediate than the traditional marketing process which includes development of concepts, revisions and review, legal approval and then publication. This creates inevitable conflict. Social media requires near-continual attention and sometimes instantaneous response (as with the case of customer inquiries on Facebook or Twitter). Community managers are not afforded the luxury of time by their customers, even as the company’s lawyers insist that all posts and replies be vetted through them. Without a high degree of trust and training in the community managers, a company will always be behind expectations in social media dialogues.

The devil is in the dialog.
Of course the lawyers have a whole additional set of worries with social media – what the company’s customers will say. These comments are often published on the company’s Facebook wall or directed to its Twitter account where they are searchable by hashtags. While the lawyer’s desire to review outbound postings does not jive with the pace of social media, the concern is understandable given how quickly a situation can escalate online. Though every company by now is used to hearing a certain degree of mild discontent from some consumers, the stakes can get quite high and be very, very public. Compliance issues around healthcare, finance or insurance make the free-wheeling world of social media even harder to work within. Again, community managers who are not well trained and therefore trusted represent a certain liability from the legal perspective.

Isn’t digital supposed to be cheap?
Lastly, there is the matter of ROI. With each new technology a business’ budgetary pie is cut into thinner and thinner slices. Money must continually be reallocated so that the company can be in all the important places it needs to be. As consumers come to expect customer service through social media, companies must invest in community managers online but cannot necessarily cut back on their call centers. Similarly, in addition to the budget for traditional media, and tradition digital media (banners and SEM) now budget must be made available to manage a Facebook presence (in addition to a company’s website), possibly a Twitter account (or several) and perhaps tinkering with other platforms like FourSquare, Tumblr, YouTube and the latest shiny object, Pinterest.

Yet for all the budgetary demands, the return on investment in social media remains stubbornly hard to quantify (at least in the way shareholders like to see it). There is the table stakes nature of it – meaning companies that aren’t on Facebook can look old fashioned to modern consumers. But the value of fans, cost of engaging them and ultimate tieback to sales are anecdotal most of the time. The customer service front may be more measurable in terms of the cost of running a Twitter service account vs. the number and length of calls at a call center, but continually monitoring these costs to determine if the Twitter account saves in costs at the call center itself costs money in the form of the salary for the analyst.

What’s ‘Trust’ worth?
Since its inception, digital has had the reputation of being cheap. Compared to other media it has always been cheaper from a marketing perspective. Costs have risen, naturally, but they’ve not come close to the costs of a TV campaign. Then again, they also don’t tend to have the reach of a TV campaign. Digital is a one to one medium in many ways which means its better at informing than building awareness because online everyone is spread out over a near infinite number of websites and apps.

Digital has also been portrayed as a young person’s game. Most social media community managers are late 20-somethings or early 30-somethings. As such their salaries have been cheaper comparatively. Which has been good for corporations because that ROI issue noted above has been harder to prove and most companies, absent hard ROI, will try to keep costs down on the ‘experimental stuff’ into which social media is often categorized.

The trouble is, a 28 year old making a low to mid five figures with about 5 years business experience under his belt is really probably not experienced enough to make the right calls to earn the trust of the lawyers and stakeholders in a corporation. This is not a failing of the community manager, just a reflection of their modest experience. Anyone who’s put 15 years into their career realizes in hindsight how much they didn’t know those first few years in business. Yet, these inexperienced employees are often put on the ‘front line’ of a businesses contact with customers. They are the people handling the customer service, responding to incendiary posts by frustrated customers and trying to make sense of the volumes or data and ever-changing “best practices” (a generous terms in a 5-year-old industry) in the area of social media. It is no wonder then that senior leadership and  the legal department want to have everything reviewed before it goes out the door.

Of course the price paid for this review process can be heavy if impatient customers are expecting a reply to their queries.

Trust is the ultimate quality senior leadership must have in its community managers. Yet the legacy of the digital space, and the groundless assumption that only young people – native to social media – can work in that space, mean most community managers, while likely very good, smart people, probably can’t entirely be trusted to respond properly because they simply do not have the experience to make the right judgements at crunch time.

Good, fast, cheap – pick two.
So this is where we find ourselves. Companies have new technologies they must adopt lest they look behind the times. They have legacy processes to review communication that are not compatible with the user expectations set by social media. They hire junior people because they ‘grew up with this stuff’ to serve on the frontline of social media with customers and prospects of the company. Yet senior leadership and the legal department, with some justification, do not trust these young people to necessarily represent the company properly without stringent oversight.

For customer service this can sometimes be handled the way call centers are, where responses are pre-approved and scripted and a troublesome situation can be ‘kicked up’ to a manager with more experience. This layering process, however, comes with a cost in employees which may undermine any savings gained by moving some customer service from the phone to Twitter.

The marketing side is all the more challenging. Using an agency rightly brings up legal concerns. Even the most experienced agencies cannot expect to be as aware of the regulations in complex industries like healthcare and finance. And clients in general have a hard time letting go of the review process and trusting the agency’s community manager to run their business. After all, this person is not a member of the company and most businesses, at the end of the day, realize that if something goes very wrong, the agency will not be as liable as the company itself.

For companies doing it inside, the trick is hiring the right person and building an internal process which meets the speed requirements of social media. This is usually no easier than when working with an agency, especially since the cost-conscious company that chooses to keep such things ‘in house’ is most likely to hire the 28-year-old thereby requiring the supervisory layers that slow things down.

As always, you get what you pay for.
There’s no easy answer. It you lock social media down to scripted responses so that legal doesn’t need to review every missive, the communication become stiff, unnatural and unsatisfying from the consumer perspective. If you let go and trust your agency or community manager without legal review, you run a big risk of missteps because those community managers are young and inexperienced.

The nearest solve I can see is to hire more senior for that community manager role. A veteran of communication on the customer service side or marketing side, with good industry knowledge is more likely to make good, smart decisions in a pinch. S/he is also more likely to ‘get’ customer service and understand the stakes of what s/he is doing on the frontline. While this won’t alleviate entirely the need for legal oversight, it will keep things moving along.

However, that means taking the jump and deciding to pay more to invest in a community manager. For companies who believe they need a ‘social media native’ that may mean waiting another five to ten years to find someone with “10 years of solid community management experience.” Personally, I think that’s the wrong direction. Rather, it seems more sensible to find a progressive, technologically-oriented executive with good people skills and solid business savvy. The mechanics of Facebook, Twitter and the rest can be taught relatively easily. Experience can’t be. Yet it is experience that allows senior management (and even the lawyers, sometimes) to trust the community manager. This in turn does the best job of addressing the conflicting needs of social media to be immediate but also to mitigate the risks associated with dealing with customers in real time.

Shugyo and choices.

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Shugyo – a term frequently heard in Aikido circles – is generally defined as austerity or intensity in training. However, this does not necessarily mean simply training more or harder. (How then could an 80-year-old martial artist be the embodiment of shugyo as they so often are?)

Another term – musha-shugyo – dates back to Japan’s feudal era. Musha-shugyo is a pilgrimage whereby a serious disciple of the martial arts embarks on a journey across the countryside to visit other schools principally for one of two reasons:

One, to prove the superiority of their own lineage, school and skills or

Two, to improve their own skills by experiencing other schools and approaches.

It is here that a useful interpretation of shugyo might be extracted. The first agenda above I might typify as an articulation of the Western Ego. The second agenda I would typify as of Eastern Ego. I have written about Western Ego vs. Eastern Ego before. As I see it, few of us today are 100% of either. Mostly we are a dynamically shifting blend of the two. As young children, white belts in martial arts or junior executives we see the size of the world before us and eagerly absorb as much knowledge as we can.

As we get older and more experienced we begin to believe we know something. With that knowledge often comes a sense of entitlement and a nagging desire to protect our hard-earned status and knowledge.

I have observed this watching my older daughter boss my younger one around. I have seen this in my dojo where relatively new students with a little training suddenly begin ‘teaching’ in class when working with anyone junior to them. And I have seen this in office parks where VPs push the repercussions of their own failings down the pyramid so that  some junior is coming in on the weekend to make up for lost time. Worse still I have heard these things glorified as ‘paying dues’, ‘good training’ or ‘good experience’. They can be, but not when offered or forced upon the junior as a means of taking advantage of status.

I have argued before that experience is a requisite for expertise. However, earned expertise brings with it temptations. These temptations are well-known to anyone who has become even a little ‘good’ at something. There is the temptation to boast. There is the temptation to compete with people you know you can beat. There is temptation to shut out new ideas and different approaches. I have felt and acted on all of these temptations at points in my life. Try as I might, it is very hard to resist them.

Shugyo is a means to do so. Shugyo, to me, is a mindfulness to make choices that counteract complacency and homeostasis. In this sense it is ongoing training inside the office, the dojo, or anywhere.

In Aikido these are some of the choices to be mindfully considered:

  • Do I clean the toilet in the dojo or wait for someone else to do it?
  • Do I partner with people smaller and easier to throw or find someone bigger and more challenging?
  • Do I attend beginners class to refine my basics or to ‘help’ the junior students (meaning show them what I know)?
  • Do I train day in and day out, consistently, or heavy up right before rank exams?

Among executives these choices might also be considered as shugyo:

  • Do I hire and encourage people who will tell me what I want to hear or instead people who will give me their honest assessment even if it potentially offends me? (And can I choose not to be offended in such case?)
  • Do I do research simply to validate my beliefs and assumptions or instead do I sincerely endeavor to discover something I did not know?
  • Though I ask for them, do I really want out of the box ideas? The kind that challenge my expertise and perhaps are better than my own ideas?
  • Do I empower people working with me to make decisions even if they might make different decisions than I would?
  • When someone is arguing a point, am I listening with an open mind or just waiting my turn to counter their opinion with my own?

I come up against all of these questions again and again in my life. At times I behave the way I would hope I do. At others, I do not. This is the process of shugyo and why it is ongoing.

Of course, the pendulum swings the other way too. Equally dangerous to the tunnel vision of me-centric Western Ego is falling into a rut of romanticized ‘selflessness’ that becomes an insular bubble.

The Aikido student who hides behind the phrase ‘I don’t care about rank’ in order to avoid the challenge and stress of testing is akin to the executive who never forms an opinion of her own, never takes a stance, and never sticks his neck out by challenging group-think or offering a contrarian perspective. It is easy to hide behind ‘putting others first’ and in doing so to miss numerous opportunities to develop one’s self.

Shugyo is ultimately about choosing to act on the more challenging option – whatever that option is. It is about looking inwardly at our own tendencies to protect our status quo and place in the scheme of things and then making a decision to go against those impulses. In this way, shugyo is a thousand decisions made every day and it changes as we change. This is intense and exhausting training indeed.

As the year winds down I find myself reflecting on my own tendencies as both an Aikido practitioner and teacher and as a businessman. Though often dismissed, the quintessential ‘New Year’s Resolution’ can be useful when taken as an opportunity to earnestly consider how to improve ones self in the coming year. I am evaluating what shugyo will mean to me in 2010. It is an interesting exercise.

I will wrap this up with one of my favorite maxims. It comes from a translation of the Book Of Five Rings and I find it is appropriate in almost everything I do:

“Too much is the same as not enough.”

In relationships. In diet.  In exercise. In learning. In playing. In resting. In working. In everything. Something I like to dwell on as I look out at the blank slate of 2010 with high hopes for a great new year.

Seizing Chaos – A Martial Perspective on Multi-tasking

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The Myth of MultitaskingIn addition to working in businesses I’ve spent nearly two decades in the martial arts. Today I run a school with students of my own. Part of that entails doing public demonstrations. In these demonstrations I try to connect martial concepts to real-world needs. The reason is simple; while many people may get into the martial arts to learn ‘self defense’ most will not get into physical confrontations. Therefore martial arts must be made relevant in other ways.

To me, the world of business is one area that can greatly benefit from martial concepts. At the dojo a week ago, we focused training on randori (literally ‘seizing chaos’). Randori is a multiple person attack where three or four or five people come at you simultaneously (vs. one at a time as they conveniently do in the movies).

In the past, doing public demonstrations, I like to end the presentation with a brief randori demonstration. Along with it, I offer a metaphorical translation of the idea. It goes something like this:

Having lined up four or five people, I individually point to them one at a time. “This guy is my email. This one is my boss, nagging at me. This guy is a telephone. Over here, this one is my monthly paperwork at the office. And lastly this guy is a presentation I have to make by the end of the day. Now let’s watch what happens when I try to take them all on at the same time…”

A demonstration ensues and flailing wildly I try to grapple with two or three of my attackers at a time. They pile up quickly and overpower me easily.

Usually breathing hard at this point, I look at the crowd. “This (gasp) is how (gasp) many of us (gasp) feel at (gasp) work (gasp).”

Once I catch my breath I go on, “We have this insane concept called multi-tasking. It’s a myth. An illusion. There’s scientific evidence galore that it doesn’t work. It’s being outlawed in cars because it’s outright dangerous. Yet we don’t need any of the science or laws to know inside that when we multitask we’re erratic and unfocused doing three things poorly rather than one thing well. This is the reality of the human brain and no matter how many devices we wire ourselves up to, we have finite capacity to get things done. When we try to do more or focus on more, quality drops.”

“As an alternative, I recommend dealing with a work day the way we teach dealing with multiple attackers in an Aikido dojo.”

I then line the five guys back up. We begin again. This time I address one at a time ignoring the others. The object of randori is to keep moving and to focus on one person at a time. You also have to be careful not to waste too much energy on any one person. If you meet resistance, it’s sometimes best to move on and come back to that person again later (they’ll be there, just like work and everything else).

NOTE: This is not me or anyone I know. I just thought it was an interesting (if poor quality) video on the execution of randori in Aikido.

Done properly, an individual can fend off multiple people for far longer if they focus on them one at a time. This translates quite literally into the workspace. Focus on one task at a time and do it to completion. Most importantly, do not divide your attention. Check all our email, then put it away, then answer your voice mail and move on after that. Do the presentation. Go talk to the boss. Do your paperwork. With discipline and focus you can get much more done and you work much more efficiently. Focus is obviously integral to putting your best foot forward, yet when we multitask we divide that focus.

The randori approach to getting through a work day takes practice. There are many pressures and distractions to our day – from social networks, to web surfing, to people barging into our offices while we’re trying to get things done. In my experience the wise business person asks people who barge in to come back later. They set aside time for email and Internet surfing and avoid responding every time a message comes in. The majority of these messages don’t truly require immediate attention anyhow and if we’re not careful our devices control us not unlike the bell for Pavlov’s dog.

I offer the randori approach as something to experiment with at the office. Try it for a half a day, or a week. See if it doesn’t change your work patterns and result in better quality to everything you do. At first it will be a concerted effort on your part, but with time it may become the way you do things and you may even find you have a little more energy left after a long day.