May 2013
2 posts
I feel bad about my hip.
It takes a certain amount of courage to watch yourself present on videotape. If you’re like me, you have this notion of yourself as a presenter: commanding, in control, occasionally funny.
And then you watch yourself, and see and hear all the stumbles, non-fluences, and other semi-embarrassing moments as you parade yourself in front of an all-too-kind and generous audience.
As most of you know...
A man walks into a bar...
If you didn’t watch last Sunday’s Mad Men episode, save this post until you do, then read it.
If you did watch, you know that Don Draper couldn’t sleep the night before Sterling Cooper’s pitch for a piece of the Chevrolet account. He got up, left his hotel room, and went to the bar for a drink. Soon thereafter, in walks Ted Chaough, one of the owners from competing agency Cutler Gleason...
April 2013
6 posts
A second opinion.
In July of last year I posted a piece called “Separation of powers,” in which I attempted to define the various “voices” that represent an agency.
This is hardly original with me, but I suggested that the agency’s strategists and planners serve as ”the voice of the consumer.”
Because the creative people are responsible for the body of work that best represents and differentiates the agency, I...
It was my pleasure.
Many thanks for your note, Marilyn, I very much appreciate it.
You and your colleagues might want to stayed tuned for a second post I’ll make next week, on “the voice of reason,” something we discussed in our meeting. I have a few additional thoughts to share, accompanied by an apology.
Best,
Robert
Director of Planning
Hi Robert: Thank you so much for coming to visit us and for your nice words about SSX. You are too humble - your presentation was wonderful and stimulated the good conversation we had. We enjoyed your war stories and you made us feel welcome to your world. Brings back memories of New York City. All the best. Come again soon. Marilyn
A sense of where you are.
April 16, 10:00 pm, on a flight from Northwest Arkansas to San Francisco, via Cincinnati
I write this on the plane ride home from my visit to Springdale, where I spent the better part of a day presenting to and meeting with my colleagues from the shopper marketing agency, Saatchi & Saatchi X.
This engagement came about in the best way possible. A couple of agency folks read The Art of...
How to be good.
In a blog post a couple of years ago, I suggested an anthem for account management, replicating the, “First, do no harm” physician’s oath. Borrowing a line, but not its intent, from director Spike Lee, I proposed, “Do the right thing.”
It seemed to me the line captures what constitutes great account people: when faced with an opportunity, an issue, or a crisis, they inevitably do the right...
The one thing that matters.
I’ve often said the best posts come not from me, but from you.
The other day I received an email from Matt Singer, a young account guy working in my former hometown, Philadelphia. Matt had some kind things to say about The Art of Client Service; I responded, as I always do, with gratitude – I am always delighted to hear that people find the book helpful – and in our exchange of emails, Matt...
March 2013
4 posts
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Okay, it’s an old joke, and I won’t insult you with an answer, at least not until the end of this post, but I will tell you a story about Jerry Seinfeld. Not my story, exactly, but rather, one I read in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.
I was on vacation in Mexico, catching up on all the old Times magazines I never read, mostly because I am forever catching up on the old New Yorkers I never...
What David Geffen and I have in common.
Okay, David Geffen has his own jet. I don’t. He’s worth billions. I’m not. He’s celebrated. I’m anonymous. We are as different as different can be.
Except for one thing. Near the end of PBS’s American Masters Documentary, “Inventing David Geffen,” there is a moment where Geffen says,
“I never dreamed I would be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and here’s why: I have no...
Ideas are hard to come by; solutions are in short...
In September 2011 – my god have I been blogging this long?!! – I wrote a post called, “The art of listening,” in which I sang the praises of a TED (Technology, Education, Design) talk by Julian Treasure, – called, “The Art of Listening.”
Treasure’s point is elegantly simple: listening creates understanding.
I bring this up now because the other day I received an email from a client. She had...
The myth of multi-tasking.
Derek Hickey emailed me. He’s a student at the University of Missouri, engaged in the National Student Advertising competition, who finds himself needing to coordinate multiple teams simultaneously. His point about the challenge of managing multiple teams leads me think about people who are considered great multi-taskers.
We generally consider multi-taskers to be people of great competence, able...
February 2013
4 posts
A legion of extraordinary teachers.
I never was trained, at least not in the formal sense of the word. Yes, I was lucky enough to attend a session here and there over the years. I was able to spend time at a few conferences and workshops that were helpful. And I benefited from the friendship and mentorship of people vastly smarter and more talented than me.
But mostly, I was left to fend for myself with unforgiving clients,...
Two big agencies, one big screw-up.
It’s quite simple, really. You decide to merge. You make two lists of accounts, one for each shop, confirm there are no conflicts, inform your key people, swear them to confidentiality, then have them call individual clients before going public with the news.
Easy, right? It’s obvious, a given a no-brainer. A third grader could figure this out.
So how do you explain that Digitas and LBi: 1)...
Account people are magic.
Last April, in a post called, “’It seems so simple, why is it so hard?!?,’” my friend Kristi Faulkner said that being an account person, “requires one to be a ringmaster, a quarterback, a shrink, a cheerleader, a peace negotiator, a political strategist, a public defender and a field Marshall all in one. Not many people have the unique combination of skills it takes to do it well without cracking....
Getting it.
It was Saturday after a particularly long, tough week — I was looking forward to a well-earned day off – when my Ammirati & Puris colleagues Liz Deutch and Alison Fontaine Engel emailed me a copy of a presentation they were scheduled to give to MasterCard the following week.
I took one look and had an OMG moment; the deck was nowhere near finished. It was wholly lacking in what I now...
January 2013
4 posts
The next adventure.
I didn’t start out as an advertising guy; I wanted to be a college professor. When that didn’t work out — a doctorate and a disastrous first marriage proved far too daunting – I became an editor… for a magazine called Morgan Show, devoted to, yes, that’s right, show horses. To this day I’ve never even been on a horse, foreshadowing my future as an account person, but I didn’t know that...
A friend with money.
The other day I received an email from my friend and former Eastern Exclusives colleague, Mary Stibal. Only a few are likely to recognize the name, “Eastern Exclusives,” but nearly all of you know the agency into which it morphed: Digitas.
Mary wrote to catch up on my relocation to Napa. In the course of our exchange, she mentioned that the founder of our agency, Michael Bronner, invited her to...
A lesson in client service.
If you turn to page 163 of The Art of Client Service, you’ll find a short description of Tom Kelley’s book, The Art of Innovation. It made my short list of recommended books because, “it’s not about advertising — it is about how to create new products – and because it is about how to encourage a culture of creativity. Kelley talks at length about his firm Ideo, and all I can say is that I...
A problem best averted.
I’ve been known to say client service is an ephemeral business, hard to describe, harder to defend, short on theory, long on rules that apply part-time at best, my book included, by the way.
How do you teach client service, then? The simple, glib answer is: you don’t.
You don’t teach it, you learn it, and I’ve learned the best way to do this is through trial and error. Today I have an error...
December 2012
7 posts
To learn. To teach.
I remember the day, or I should say evening, given this was an evening, when I learned something revelatory about myself.
I was in Janine Schindler’s Organizational and Executive Coaching class at New York University – I don’t recall its name – when she asked each of us to write down what we value most, what drives us, what motivates us. She gave us 15 minutes.
Fifteen minutes to decide...
My pleasure.
I genuinely appreciate questions like yours, Michael; they are very much in the spirit of the blog,which is meant to serve as a community where we can trade information, share views, and occasionally agree to disagree.
I do wish there was a more definitive answer to your question, but the fact is, ours is an ephemeral business, inclined to shades of gray, rather than binary black and white.
That...
Great response!
Thanks for the great response, Robert. The “vast and deep” point is huge and often overlooked. In digital for example, developing good working relationships with a client’s IT department is critically important - and they are often part of the decision-making process when the agency selection process gets underway. Yet the agency / IT relationship is often adversarial with not...
The right question to ask.
Hi Michael,
It’s nice to hear from you; many thanks for reading The Art of Client Service, and for being even an occasional visitor to Adventures.
About your question, (which you and other readers will find following this post): there are two ways to respond.
The first is to refer you to a post I wrote two years ago, called, “Why client service matters, more now than ever before.” If you want...
Taking Stock
Hi Robert - I read your book and periodically follow your blog (I would like to say regularly but there’s very little I do regularly anymore as we all drink from the information firehose).
Something I’d been thinking about recently that I’d love your thoughts on: building client relationships has changed dramatically for me over the last five years - between client re-orgs, more...
Taking stock.
I spent the last couple of days reading what I’ve written on Adventures these past two years. Yes, that’s right; December 8 was the second anniversary of my blog. If you go to the “archives” section to the right of this entry, you’ll see that my web host says it’s December 1. Ignore that; it was December 8, 2010.
I looked at the post I wrote a year ago, “Ideas are where you find them,” and...
The rewards of risk.
Years ago, my then college roommate, Ron Tipton, had a goal: to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. Now, this is no day hike; the trail extends from Georgia to Maine, covering 2,000-plus miles. We’re talking a good six months, easy, of trekking hours each day.
On the doorstep of 30 and about to be married to Rita, Ron quit his job, packed his things, and in March one year set off for Spring...
November 2012
5 posts
More proof of concept.
I took a pretty “out there” stance last month when I spoke about “The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing” at DMIX’s quarterly Yale Club lunch meeting. My claims were fairly tortured, but in essence what I said is small agencies will grow, thrive, and succeed, while large agencies will contract, struggle, and ultimately fail.
If you want some more context, or if you simply need something to...
Break/down.
I recall what a colleague once said after our agency won a piece of new business: “Damn, we won. Now we have to do the work!”
I am reminded of this as I sit in my new Solomon Strategic office, overlooking the Napa River, in the town of Napa, a week after we left New York for California.
Buying our house was the easy part; it was a bit like winning a piece of new business. But what comes after...
California dreaming, part two.
There are lots of ways to say goodbye to New York. Some people fill seats on theater row. Others wander the museums. Still others make a farewell trek to Central Park.
Us? Our goodbye is about food.
In a way, it figures. As a lifelong account person, one of the things I’m supposed to do halfway well is lunch or dinner with a client. I’d like to think that, over the years, I’ve become...
California dreaming, part one.
People leave New York every day, for all kinds of reasons. We are leaving in large part because we grew tired of winter; Napa California has spring, summer, and fall. Goodbye winter. If ever we needed confirmation, the terrifying advent of Sandy, followed by the pounding of last night’s snowstorm, serve as more than adequate notice it is time to head west.
Our packers are here today, swarming...
Subject to review.
There’s a saying, “Write a book, become the expert.” It explains why I wrote, Perfect Pitch: How to Find the Right Ad Agency for Your Company. I didn’t find a publisher, but I bring it up now simply to make the point I know a bit about the agency search process.
Still, when asked, I tell people I’m not a search consultant; I am a consultant who does search. Yes, I do search, but my consulting...
October 2012
4 posts
Who do you trust?
If you are a regular visitor to these pages, you know I use the word “trust” often. It is the thing that defines what it means to forge enduring and meaningful relationships with clients and colleagues. It is what drives great work. It is what separates great agencies from all the rest.
Thinking a bit more broadly, you could say trust is the one quality, characteristic, or defining trait that...
Stroke of genius.
As our date approaches to relocate to Napa, California, I am struck by just how many people to whom I need to say goodbye. Friends and family are pretty obvious, but then there are work colleagues, clients, neighbors, and — this might surprise you — doctors. Yes, doctors.
For the longest time physicians didn’t figure in my life. I was healthy; I was glad to have a GP and little...
Proof of concept.
At the outset of my DMIX speech last week, I make a point of saying that, “What follows is a highly personal, completely subjective, and a not at all data-driven look at what I think has, is, and will occur in the world of marketing in which all of us reside.”
To put this in plain language, what this means is, I had no proof, just an opinion.
I rambled through lots of opinions that day – some...
Not a train wreck, but close enough.
So, the speech I gave earlier this week to DMIX, at The Yale Club, didn’t go as well as I had hoped. The comments afterwards were complementary –no surprise; lots of people in the room were colleagues and friends, not to speak of my wife Roberta, my primary cheerleader — but there was something that fell short in my delivery.
As much as I rehearsed – I read through the speech six times...
September 2012
4 posts
What's football got to do with it?
I realize lots of you read Adventures from locations other than the U.S. — Melbourne, Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Mumbai – and probably don’t have a clue or give a damn about American football — not be confused with ‘real” football, which here in the U.S. we refer to as “soccer” — but on the odd chance you are a fan, you couldn’t help but notice that the NFL – that’s the...
The past, present, and future of marketing.
Years ago, when I was at the agency most of you know as Digitas, I remember a day when my friend and colleague Mike Slosberg returned from New York to our Boston refugee camp (we were an outpost for people fleeing Manhattan). “I was at the most amazing lunch!” I recall him saying, “The speaker was fabulous!!.”
I don’t recall the name of the speaker; I do recall the name of the organization that...
A short trip to an old neighborhood.
The last thing I expected when I wrote my June 20 post, “Credit is for creative Directors” was a reply. Some of you do comment on issues or situations that are germane to client service, but this post was about something admittedly not about client service; instead, it was completely inner directed and self-absorbed.
I wrote about receiving an award, my first, from my sixth grade elementary...
Build to stock vs.build to order.
After I was fired as CEO of Rapp New York, before I was hired a few weeks later at Gardner Nelson & Partners, and in need of something to soften the blow of dismissal and distract my mind from the loss of my job, my former client and friend Richard Shaw called. Would be interested in pitching an assignment to the Cheesecake Factory?
Now, I think of myself as a foodie, and The Cheesecake...
August 2012
6 posts
Training day.
Ever since I read James Surowiecki’s “Mind the Gap” story in The New Yorker, I have been thinking about training, or about the lack of it, for the people who work in our business.
Surowiecki attributes much of the ongoing, all-too-large U.S. unemployment rate to what he calls a “skills gap,” meaning the gap between the skills employees have and the ones employers need. He goes on to say that...
Daryl Hine
Daryl Hine died last week. The name won’t mean much of anything to most of you, but to fellow poets who knew him, it is a loss, and to me, it signifies a memory.
If you read my March 22 post called, ”The gift of teaching,” you know that I was once a poet — yes, that’s right, a poet — who had a piece accepted by the famed magazine Poetry. The editor who accepted my submission? ...
A lifetime guarantee.
I’ve done all sorts of things as a consultant – brand strategy, new business development, agency search, speechwriting, coaching, teaching, whatever a client needs – but I got my start in something decidedly last century: traditional direct marketing.
I am the first to admit there are good reasons to throw stones at the discipline – with junk mail, junk television, and junk telemarketing leading...
Source code.
No, this is not a comment on the Jake Gyllenhaal movie; it is a comment on the recently-sorry-now-fixed condition of my websites.
In early June I wrote a post called, “An interim solution,” in which I lamented (whined, actually) about the loss of the custom coding that drove my consulting site, my book site, and this blog.
I repaired the blog by moving it to an existing format that my web host,...
Judgment rules.
If you work in client service, there are two subjects you learn, early on, to avoid with clients and colleagues. The first is politics. The second is religion.
This explains, in part, why I have avoided writing about this year’s presidential election. But after watching the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, convert a relatively benign overseas trip to three countries to something approaching a...
Alex, Annabelle, and legacy.
There are lots of reasons to become a book author: fame, six-figure royalty checks, movie rights, Oprah, you name it.
I wrote my first book, and now am in the middle of my second, for all these reasons, except for a few small exceptions, namely: there is no fame; my royalty checks are four digits, not six; movie rights are a fantasy; and, Oprah’s producers never call, and never will.
So why do...
July 2012
5 posts
Talking vs. doing.
I just finished watching Charlie Rose’s interview with David Remnick, which came hard on the heels of Remnick’s New Yorker story on Bruce Springsteen.
Remnick, as most of you know, is Editor of The New Yorker. Editing any magazine is a challenge; editing a weekly magazine with the standards and reputation of The New Yorker is a larger and more challenging responsibility, entailing both greater...
Do the right thing.
In November last year I wrote a post called, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” that talked about the fall from grace of one of America’s greatest icons, Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno.
If you live in the U.S., you know the story all too well, football fan or not. For those of you who live elsewhere, college football is like a religion in this country, similar to how many of you view...
Separation of Powers
For years I have been better at book titles than book content. Clients from Hell, Advertising that Works, and Night and Weekends are a few of the more notable failures.
This time, however, I might have content equal to the title. My latest effort is called Day One: Succeeding in a World Gone MADD. By “MADD” I don’t mean crazy; instead, MADD is an acronym for “Marketing, Advertising, Digital,...
We bought a house.
Ambition is a funny thing. Some would say it’s about career. Some would say it’s about love. Me? I think about geography.
I remember the day, more than 20 ears ago, when I accepted a job at Foote, Cone & Belding. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, given I was trading Boston – a city withholding in love – for a city I could embrace, the emerald city, the city of San Francisco.
I...
