In the process of thinking through what kind of business I might like to start for myself, I chose to start with a survey conducted by RSW/US, a ‘matchmaking’ company that brings clients and advertising agencies together.

As usual, satisfaction with current agency ratings are quite low, at about 41 percent, and nearly half wouldn’t ask their current agency back in a review.  Clients don’t believe traditional full service agencies have the expertise to deliver great digital ideas; but they’d rather give their business to a full-service shop.

It’s the following two charts in the report that are the most illuminating:

Right time-right place, recommendations, and just ‘fitting the bill’ – being the right kind of agency – are the most influential factors for clients selecting agencies.  Awards, search, trade associations, matchmakers – these are minor considerations for clients.  They want to have heard good things about you, and see you on their doorstep when they need you.

So why do they change agencies?

The biggest issues that lead a client to put the account in review are about their perception of the quality of the work: either the strategy isn’t there, or the creative isn’t.  In my mind, I’d combine “Lack of proactivity” and “Worsening relationships with agency team” because they both seem to be essentially about perceptions of service – together these would come in to tie at second place.  Costs are in a distant fourth place.

If clients put their business into review because the work wasn’t up to expectations, this puts the offending agency at risk for future business, since so much hinges on word of mouth.  So I spent a great deal of time this morning and afternoon thinking through the main categories of dissatisfaction, and matching those against the chief complaints I’ve heard working with or for advertising agencies about clients.  There’s a rather shocking alignment of concerns that express themselves as a kind of he says-she says account of the apparently worsening relationship between agencies and their clients.

This is step one in a process – my intention is to spend some time over the next few months examining what a Lean advertising agency would be like, perhaps even for a book (!).  I’m curious about where clients see the value coming from in what agencies are, or should be, offering.  I’m equally curious about testing the belief that while you might be able to build cars in a lean way, you can’t make a TV commercial using lean principles.  But today we’re going to just start by looking at the problems.

Product-Market Fit

Talk to any venture capitalist or start-up founder – they’ll spend a fair amount of time describing the importance of product-market fit.  This isn’t about changing the product to fit the market, or even changing the market to fit the product – though it could ultimately lead to either outcome – but rather about positioning the product in a way that demonstrates value to the potential market.  There are a lot of start-ups that fail not because they’ve made a bad product or because there is no natural market for their product – but because they haven’t clearly and compellingly articulated why that market might want or need the product.

It seems that agencies are facing a challenge in this regard as well.  Over the hundred or so years that advertising agencies have existed, the mission has become rather fuzzy.  At the outset the role of an advertising agent was to purchase advertising space on billboards or in newspapers or magazines on behalf of businesses.

After awhile, customers started asking for more: ideas about how to produce advertising that stood out and increased sales.  The agent, not wanting to lose a good customer, hired a typesetter and an illustrator, maybe wrote the ad copy himself or hired someone to write it for him.  He called up his contact in the publisher’s office of the newspaper and this time sent over an ad along with the money for the placement.

The agent became an agency.  The customer became a client – he’d be back, because the agency knew how to get this kind of work done.

And this is how advertising has evolved, as an industry of agents designing, producing and placing advertising on behalf of the client.

What the client used to want? An advertisement that drove sales.  Send us five cents and we’ll send you a Sunkist juicer so you can make juice out of Sunkist oranges.  Write to this address for a complete Sears catalog of all our tools and parts.  Visit this Ford Motor showroom to test drive a new car.

But the market changed. It became more complicated – more brands, more media, more channels. It seemed you had to spend more and more to see that sales curve lift. It became a kind of arms race between brands to see who could reach the most people.

Clients still want to see the sales curve go up.  Read the feedback at the end of the report and you’ll see a lot of concern with ROI, effectiveness, sales and volume increasing, business results, and so on.  But unlike those early days when the guy with a few dollars in his pocket to place an ad in the Gazette sold more widgets than the other guy who hadn’t thought to, the ability to track results against communications activities has become diffuse.  A campaign lives in simply too many channels; the drive for differentiation now means that there might be no direct, trackable call to action; other economic factors (pricing, distribution, competition, etc.) cause signal interference for brands that advertise widely, sell multiple product lines, distribute through multiple sales channels, and face many competitors.

It’s complicated.

But clients don’t feel sympathetic towards advertising agencies for having to muddle alongside them through all this complexity.  Increasingly, this survey suggests, clients feel a great deal of disappointment and bitterness about the failure of their agencies to clarify and simplify the complexity, while still bringing home those obvious, measurable results.

“What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?” — Rosser Reeves

Looking through the complaints I jotted on post-its as I read through this report and the complaints I heard working with and for agencies, I noticed that a lot of the problem seemed to rest under a few overarching concepts.

Strategic Expertise

Clients complain that agencies don’t think or act strategically enough, that they don’t come to clients with a case about how the proposed approach will help them gain market share, increase volume, or otherwise steal sales from their competitors.  They complain that agencies don’t know their consumers, their market, their competitors, their sales and distribution channels.

Agencies complain that sales numbers and ROI are all that clients think about – they don’t ‘get’ marketing, they don’t appreciate the concept of building a brand.  They complain that the client’s goal or definition of ROI is unrealistic.  They complain that clients are not transparent about their business objectives, that they don’t engage agencies as partners, or include them in future plans.  They believe that clients sometimes perceive themselves as competing against the wrong people, or that they want to target the wrong consumers.

Transparency & Accountability

Clients complain that agencies are bad at strategy and analytics.  They believe that agencies lack the competence to effectively measure the results of what they produce, or worse, conceal those results from the clients. They want more accountability from agencies – for agencies to follow-up on the results of a campaign, and to report these results to the client.  And they want these results to be tangible – sales, volume, measurable ROI.  I’ve had some clients who’ve wished that the agency could offer a theory about what success would look like if it isn’t going to be sales or volume or share price.

Agencies on the other hand, feel that there is more to advertising than analytics, or feel that campaign measurement is more complicated and nuanced than mere sales figures.  Agencies often feel that the work of planning and account management – where this strategy and analytics would likely be managed – are under-valued by clients, who care (they believe) only about the creative and the costs.  Often, agencies feel they are provided with instructions from a brand manager or CMO that are unrelated to the company’s business goals.  They worry that clients test ideas to destruction, that they make their goals moving targets, that they aren’t transparent about their actual business goals, and that they don’t give credit to agencies when they do have a successful campaign.

Creativity

Clients say they want – but do not get – enough new, fresh, innovative ideas from their agencies.  They say that they are often not happy with the creative output.  They say traditional agencies lack digital skills.

Agencies say clients lack taste and sophistication, are scared of new ideas, are overwhelmed by fresh or innovative technologies, don’t ‘get’ digital/social/mobile, and prefer the safe, me-too route. Those who do ‘care’ about creativity are just in it for the awards or the chance to rub shoulders with celebrities.

Trust & Service

Clients complain they don’t feel agencies listen to them, they don’t get enough attention, they get pawned off on junior team members.  They complain agencies do not bring them unsolicited ideas; they don’t bring enough ideas; they don’t bring fully realized ideas - overarching strategies with executions for each of the channels.  They complain that agencies set themselves apart and above the internal client marketing team; that they do not recognize the capabilities, talent and expertise that clients have about their own business and market.  They complain about being condescended to.

Agencies complain that clients are not loyal – that they lost business to other agencies or competitors without getting a shot at it first.  They complain that clients don’t trust them – that they don’t share information, or set up ‘gotcha’ scenarios where the agency is being tested rather than engaged in a collaborative way. They complain that when multiple agencies are used on a single campaign, the client plays favorites, undermines some players, elevates others.  They complain that clients are not responsive to requests for feedback or approval, that they unnecessarily delay signing off on scope of work agreements. And they complain that clients can be abusive to some members of the team.

Costs & Capabilities

Clients complain that agencies nickel & dime them for basic service that should just be ‘included’ in the project – for advice, revisions, or projections.  They complain that agencies are bad at projecting costs and managing them throughout the lifetime of the project.  They complain that agencies can’t tell them what the results based on spend will be.  And they complain that agencies can not do everything well, or respond nimbly to their changing needs.  They want a more innovative full service model.  Clients don’t actually want multiple agencies – they want one agency to handle all of this on their behalf, to coordinate the production and placement and management of an integrated campaign for them.

Agencies say that clients want more and more work for free – work that is outside of the agreed-to scope of work.  They say that clients don’t pay enough (in that commission on placement and production structure that most agencies still use), or negotiate them down on the agency fee for coordinating and managing the campaign, thereby making every additional request from the client an opportunity to lose money on the project.  They say that clients lack the internal structure to implement or manage the approval process for integrated campaigns.  They say that clients start with one budget, set goals and KPIs off that budget, and then cut once the project is approved – but still expect the same ROI as the higher spend.  They say that they are the last to know when the client’s needs change. And they say that the era of the big account or project seems to be waning – that it’s tough to find a true ‘full service’ piece of business these days.

What’s it all mean?

It’s pretty simple, when you look at the complaints all lined up on a wall, as I did today.  Clients have business needs, challenges, and goals.  They try to solve for these through advertising.  They believe, however, that agencies are poorly equipped to help them achieve any of these goals or surmount any of these challenges. So the two have become antagonists. – people who do not trust each other.

I think the real culprit is procedural.  Sales and marketing may not be sharing goals with one another.  Marketing may not be incentivized by sales goals.  Marketing commissions advertising based on what some in the Lean Startup movement call ‘vanity metrics’ – likability or brand perceptions or awards.

Advertising agencies aren’t paid to become experts on the client’s business, so they become experts on advertising.  They don’t have the time or the relationships to go deep on the structure of the market; they aren’t rewarded for challenging the client’s assumptions.  They don’t have access to the right people in the client teams for the information they need to make the best recommendations and the best work.  They don’t have the budgets to get that information on their own.

“Good” advertising doesn’t have a clear call to action, isn’t direct marketing – it’s lifestyle based, taps into hidden desires or unspoken needs, creates cultural icons or foments generational movements.  They fear research as a sure-fire path to killing their creative darlings. They limit their financial exposure by bringing fewer ideas to the table.  They defend them fiercely, even at the risk of seeming condescending, because it is the only asset they feel they have.

And because they fear research, and lack the client’s willingness to invest in it, they do not gather data on the efficacy of a campaign, or do not gather the best data, and therefore, do not learn from one campaign how to make the next one better. But then, often, neither does the client.

In the end, relationships falter because of hurt feelings, unmet needs, disappointment, and an erosion of trust.  These come from a misalignment of expectations with capabilities.

It’s hard to say for certain who is in the wrong here – are clients asking ad agencies to solve problems they can’t solve?  Or have agencies intertwined themselves too tightly with the services they provided as agents, and not the outcomes those services were used to create?  In other words were clients buying something agencies didn’t fully realize they were selling?  Is what clients want from ad agencies not really advertising, per se, but increased revenue, sales volume, or market share?  And in today’s complicated world, is advertising always part of the solution set?

It seems to me the fundamental problem is that advertising agencies have thought, this whole time, that they were in the business of selling access to the development and placement of advertising, while their clients were trying to buy increased sales.

Perhaps clients don’t really need advertising agencies anymore (though they will still need creative production and media placement/negotiation).  Maybe they need business-model-seeking agencies that create roadmaps to carry out consumer, product, channel and marketing strategies.  Maybe those agencies facilitate the creation of assets that are placed into those channels or campaigns on behalf of their clients.  Maybe they are paid to be trusted experts who guide clients through the ever-evolving landscape of their market.

Maybe.

Update: Together with the 4As, we made progress!  Check out the changes below…

The Jay Chiat Planning Awards

Not all of the judges have been named, yet. But they are quickly filling out the roster.  There are 10 committees; 2 are chaired by women.  Out of 47 53 judges named so far, 14 20 are women.  29 38% female. A much better – in fact, an industry-leading ratio. Congratulations to Jen Seidel & Nancy Hill for supporting their jury chairs to name women to these juries. Not bad until you break it down by committee:

• Campaign for an Existing Brand: 2 women, 5 jurors.
  Katie Harrison (BBH) and Miranda Cresswell (Polo Ralph Lauren)
  40% female
• Campaign for New Brand: 1 2 women, 4 5 jurors.
  Andrea Ring (R/GA) and Claudia Batten (Victors & Spoils)
  25 40% female
• Idea for New Product or New Content: 1 2 women, 4 5 jurors.
  Barrie Berg (What If Innovation) and Allison Mooney (Google)
  25 40% female
• For Good: 3 women, 6 jurors.
  Kierstin De West  (Ci: Conscientious Innovation), Debra Johnson (Pratt Institute), Kristina Pifer (Change.org)
  50% female
• Research Innovation: 1 2 woman, 3 5 jurors.
  Diane Hessan (Communispace) and Rene Huey-Lipton (GSD&M)
  33 40% female
• Brand Experience: 1 2 woman, 4 5 jurors.
  Kristen Cavallo (Mullen) and Geralyn Breig (Avon)
  25 40% female
• Communications/Media Strategy: 1 woman, 5 jurors.
  Coleen Kuehn (MediaVest)
  20% female
• Innovative Design: 4 women, 6 jurors.
  Deborah Adler (Deborah Adler LLC), Jennifer Kinon (The Original Champions of Design), Emily Pilloton (Project H Design), Debbie Millman (Sterling Brands)
  66% female
• Social Media: 1 woman, 2 jurors. Only the chair has been named, a man.
  0 50% female
• Creative Technology:  1 woman, 9 jurors, all male.
  0 11% female

So Ed Cotton has done a great job of balancing his committee; Katie Harrison is in good shape too.  And Brian Collins is a #changetheratio superstar.  Jim Russell can do did (!) the right thing on the Social Media Jury; Ben Malbon – as much as I respect and like him – delivered a goose egg changed the ratio for Creative Technology by adding the fantastic Chloe Gottlieb! Good job to Gareth Kay, Alain Sylvain, John Kearon and Kristen Cavallo for changing the ratios on their juries as well.  As ever, if you are still filling out your juries, you can click on the #toomanywhitemen tab, and you’ll find many women working in digital, as creatives and creative technologists and strategists.

The head of the 4As is a woman, Nancy Hill.  I met her the other day; she’s very nice and very smart and wants more women on the dais.  The coordinator for the judging panel is Jennifer Seidel, also very nice and wants to get more women on the panels.  Who picks the jurors for the Jay Chiat awards, though?  With 20 members on the Strategy committee, 13 are men, 7 are women; the chair is a man.  Ratio: 35%.  UPDATE: The Strategy Committee is committed to changing a lot of ratios – age and seniority, gender, expertise.  After spending some time with them yesterday, I feel confident that this is going to be a group that leads the industry in diversifying voices and perspectives.

The 2011 Clio Awards

What’s wrong with this picture?

At first glance, nothing – a friend of mine is in this picture.  Smart people.

But look again.  These are the jury chairs for the 2011 Clio Awards.  All of them are male.  All but one is white.

Take a click.  Drill down.

• Content & Contact/Integrated Campaign.  9 jurors. One woman on the list, Amber Finlay.
  11% female
• Design: 5 jurors. No women.
  0% female
• Interactive: 9 jurors. Two women, Diana Hong and Sophia Lindholm.
  22% female
• Print/Out of Home/Innovative/Direct Mail: 9 jurors. One woman, Dorte Spengler-Ahrens.
  11% female
• Print Technique: 12 jurors. Two women, Katrin Oeding, and Andrea Stillacci.
  16% female
• Radio/Radio Technique: 17 jurors. Two women, Keka Morelle and Stephanie Pigott.
  11% female
• Film Technique: 46 jurors on 4 sub-committees. Five women, Diane McArter, Mandy Walker, Charlotte Bavasso, Cheryl Berman, Michell Curran.
  10% female
• Film: 9 jurors. One woman, Sarah Barclay.
  11% female
• Public Relations: 11 jurors. Four women. Simone Drewry, Heidi Hovland, Liz Kaplow, Mary Ritti.
  36% female

127 jurors. 18 women. 14% female jurors for the 2011 Clio Awards.

How did this impact the winners?  [Caveat: These numbers are not precise as they are based on names, and oftentimes people are listed more than once within an entry. I should note - it's entirely men who are listed more than once.] 44 women were recognized. 16 of those women were in creative roles. One was an account planner. 14 were producers. The remaining were in account management or project management roles.  The total number of recognized individuals? Approx. 200.  The ratio of listed women to listed men is approximately 22%.

The Clio Awards is helmed by 5 men and one woman.

The Effie Awards

The Effies North American Committee is made up of 3 women and 5 men.  Not a bad ratio (37.5%), particularly when one of the chairs is a woman, Ellen Hyde Pace.  But the list of Grand Effie jurors tells another story entirely.

Out of 9 jurors, 2 are women. 22 percent women again. Those two women are MT Carney, President of Marketing for Walt Disney Studios, and Sheila Hartnett CEO of OgilvyAction for North America.

To quote Rick Webb on Twitter today:

This was what I presented at #planningness last week.  The attendees were awesome – great energy, great ideas, loads of curiosity oozing out of everyone.  Thanks to everyone who indulged me, and to Mark and Claire for making it possible.

Greetings, account planners.

The annual Planner Survey is out, and it’s really important that you all fill it out.  Here’s why:

• Greater transparency into salaries by position, experience, region, size of agency, etc. help us better negotiate for our salaries.  It helps us figure out what the high and low ends are and therefore gives us leverage: we know what the agencies are willing to pay, and we can start the salary discussion from a better educated, and therefore more advantageous position.  TRUE TESTIMONIAL: I used the survey to negotiate my last salary – it worked, and it worked to my advantage.  I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask for that salary otherwise.
• It also helps us see where the discrepancies are – do men and women make the same amount? Are more senior planners at smaller agencies under-valued compared to their colleagues at big agencies, or vice versa? What do we gain or give up in making the choice to take certain roles, in certain cities, at certain agencies?
• Sunshine, as they say, is the best disinfectant.  The more we know about how much and how hard we work, how we’re paid, what our benefits are like, where the opportunities for career growth are, and so on, the brighter the light shines on agency practices, and hopefully encourages them to behave better.

I have another reason that filling out this survey is important.  Four women (all planners!) in four countries put this thing together – and no one pays them to do it.  Heather Lefevre (Amsterdam), Julie Lee (Madrid), Megan Averell (Boston), and Bori Toth (Berlin) do it for free, share the results for free, and they do this for all of us.  We should make this easier and more useful and more influential by participating.  This is how we honor their effort.  Okay, that’s the end of my guilt trip.

So – go here to take the survey.  Tweet about it, share it on Facebook; get your colleagues to take it, get your bosses to take it.

On December 28, 2009, I posted this on my name site. It was not a manifesto, to be sure, but it was a promise I made to myself.

The Goal: Quit my job and be working as an independent by June 30, 2010.

Goal achieved. In fact, I was out of my job on June 15, and sitting at this desk, looking out onto a tree-lined brownstone street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Then, in January I posted this on getting my financial and physical house in order. I had grand plans of having six months income socked away before I started my new life. That was before I remembered that I’d blown my savings on some family obligations. I don’t begrudge those expenses (much) but it has definitely made things a little more, um, pressing. Yesterday I had $50 in my checking account; today, a client’s payment arrived and I am back in good shape. By the end of September, I’ll have enough to get me through the end of the year, even if I didn’t do another job. That’s a liberating feeling, even if it was a nail-biter for a few days.

A little later that month, I ruminated on my procrastination, my disaffection for the job I had (or really, the industry I was in), and also noted that I wasn’t that into a guy I was certain I wouldn’t go out with again, but instead dated unproductively for 3 months. Oh my, how I can wallow in something unpleasant for awhile because coping and dealing and figuring out can provide enough cognitive load that I don’t worry about anything else (though that’s because I become a big ball of worry).

Anyway, it’s now the last full week of August. A lot has happened. And as I look back on those early posts – those little prayers tied to the fence posts, I have realized something very interesting: I don’t have a process for this. I can map out a strategic plan for a client, sketch a campaign, develop a methodology. But for me…

I do leaps. I do tricks. I get from here to there on what feels like and sometimes looks like wild instinct. I react. I make moves out of the pure sense of growing panic, that if I do not do this thing, I never will, that if I never do, I will go crazy, or worse.

Then I second guess, I question my own credibility, I wonder if maybe the headhunters are hinting at something, that maybe I need to build a brand at some hot agency before I can do this on my own. But I also know that I will lose a part of me if I do, that I won’t be any closer to doing what I want to do, and that I will be doing it under someone else’s aegis. Fuck that.

So anyway. This past week I dwindled down to my last $50. I put Drano on a credit card to fix my clogged tub. I tucked into my cupboards and freezer. I permitted friends to buy me a drink or two. And this morning, with my housekeeper coming, and a doctor’s appointment later in the day, I poured the change in those two Ball jars into a hot pink nylon shopping bag, tucked it into my purse, and carried it like a baby on my hip to one of those banks with the ‘penny arcade’. There were $106 in those jars. Enough to pay the housekeeper and the co-pay, and buy a sandwich later on. I would make it through today, even if the check didn’t come. I’ve been this close to the wire and on the other side of the zero balance before, but it never gets easier.

I thought of my dad, talking about days when he had half a tank of gas in the car, and the knowledge that today he had to make a sale, because the baby needed shoes, or the baby needed diapers, or they needed to pay the electric bill. He’d hope the car wouldn’t break down and the half a tank of gas would be enough. And to remind him what he was doing this for, he’d come into the baby’s room and look down, and there I was, smiling back up at him, so happy to see him. That image would motivate him to get his ass out the door and on the road and in those offices, selling, selling; that image would break his heart.

I have nothing like that at stake. But I relate to the sense of urgency, the sense of responsibility. Just as he wanted me to be happy and cared for, to love and respect him, I want to feel that way about myself, provide that to myself.

So at about 2:30, I went downstairs, sure that the check would be there, half-believing it would never come, unlocked the mailbox and took an envelope from the stack containing the payment for consultancy on a project. I took it to the bank, and deposited it, and am breathing easier. It’s all going to be fine. It’s all going to be awesome, actually. But at this particular moment, I feel like I got pulled back from falling onto the subway tracks, just as the train came barreling into the station. The adrenaline rush is quite something. Here’s to no more of that.

Walking home last night, a very clear, succinct thought passed through my head, and I wonder if it’s passed through yours, too: Action is the best expression of intention.

It seems pretty obvious, right? But how much time do we all waste in protesting that we ‘didn’t mean to’ do or say the thing we did or said? How much effort do we put in to letting ourselves off the hook for the things we don’t do by promising ourselves we’ll do it tomorrow?

And how much does fear, or the feeling of being overwhelmed, or self-doubt (which I suspect are all different flavors of the same intoxicant) keep us from doing what we mean to do?

The best line Mr. Morton ever uttered I’ve quoted here before, “Act, or be acted upon.” He had another one, though, that I think was one of my brother’s favorites: “In not choosing, you have chosen.” Choosing to do nothing is still a choice.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been choosing to do a lot of nothing. That’s not a fair statement – I’ve been working and dealing with the admin hassles of setting up a new bank account and paying my taxes and so on.

But this is not the meaningful work. This is not the work I need to do to set up my business or do what I love to do. It’s just work for its own sake, for the sake of cash flow, for the sake of having something to do.

Not doing something, it turns out, is at least as stressful as doing something. Two weeks ago I was sitting in my apartment trying to get started. I knew exactly what I should be doing – there were things I needed to read, blog posts to work on, a business plan to revise, all sorts of stuff – but I couldn’t get started. I thought I would sit and meditate for 10 minutes, try to clear my head, and begin again. I sat, concentrated on my breathing… In: 1. Out: 2. In: 1. Out: 2. Over and over again, I counted.

The next thing I knew I was bowing forward, as if in prayer, in tears. Sitting properly for a few minutes hurt like hell. My shoulder and neck were in spasms of pain, I couldn’t stop thinking about the aching, couldn’t feel anything else.

I hadn’t done anything to injure my neck. All I’d done was let stress and fear and anxiety build up in my back and neck and then, when I thought I would take some new-agey route to focus, it reached up out of my back and neck and punched me in the face.

It goes back to the stories we tell ourselves about what we are capable of, what we deserve, what is possible. We experience a failure, perhaps. It happened. But we tell ourselves that it happens. Or worse, we see someone else do something and succeed – but we tell ourselves that we are not like that person, we don’t have the money, personality, contacts, whatever to make it work.

So we have to let things be what they are, and what they were, and what they are going to be. And we have to know the difference.

Let’s go back to the top: action is the best expression of intention. I’m not talking about grand gestures, big roll-outs, major launches. I’m talking about simple, small stuff. Little things that add up to something important and enormous. Small actions that speak volumes about who you are and what you do.

Aside: Huh. Maybe this is the part where I do relate to Don Draper in the season premiere of Mad Men. Why doesn’t the work speak for itself, then? I do all this stuff, why isn’t that enough? Here’s my slight cop-out of an answer: action is the best expression of intention but you must do that for yourself and for the enactment of reality. Narratives, storytelling, framing – that’s what you have to do to help everyone else understand. (And they’re not that interested in what you do, they want to know who you are. Yet another thing to work on. Oh well.)

The first challenge then was to seek actions that would get me out of my funk.

1. Get a massage to do something about my damn neck. If you live in NYC and want a recommendation, I have the place for you.
2. Call some friends. Make dates for dinner with people who believe in me, inspire me, respect me. Who want me to succeed.
3. Come to grips with the fact that ADD is a negotiable obstacle. Start negotiating. Does that mean meds? Maybe. Might that help with focus and task completion? Maybe. Is it worth a try? Hells yeah.
4. The tricks of magical thinking. My to-do list (while I await the teuxdeux app’s approval by the iTunes store!) was becoming, frankly, the opposite of useful. It was too long, not specific enough, didn’t have due dates. I was punishing myself with a list that was unachievable, not giving myself clear enough instructions, and defaulting to triage as the only tactic for getting through the day. My new to-do list is little pieces of paper in a ziploc bag. I jumble the scraps and then pull one out. I do that one. The trick is to make them clear and achievable. “Spend one hour researching competitors’ offerings.” “Sign up for three meetup groups.” “Write blog post about The Fantastic Four: Issue #2.” Then what to do first is out of my hands. I can pretend it’s fate, or God, or the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Here is my to-do list:

Okay, those things done, I gave myself the leeway to simply say – this week has gone tits up. Who cares? Let it slide. I’ve been doing too much of that lately, though, so I had to put a deadline on it. Sunday, July 25 was a good date. The date of my dad’s birthday, three of my friends’ birthdays, the Mad Men premiere. And it was soon. Seemed auspicious enough. Plus it would mean that today would have to be different.

So on Thursday I had dinner with a friend – someone I wanted to work for early in my career, who I was blessed enough to work with in the middle of my career, and who is a dear friend and potential partner at this new phase of my career. We had a lovely meal, drank some delicious cocktails, caught up on stuff. And I had a moment of knowing what needed to be done.

1. I need to write the elevator pitch for the new company. What is it, what does it do, what doesn’t it do.
2. I need to build a rolodex – resources I can use to execute the work I want to do so I’m not playing catch-up when the first project starts.
3. I need to build the brand, which means I need to build my brand.

My friend agreed that these things were critical, gave me some useful things to think about, and said once I was ready, there were projects he wanted to do with me.

On Saturday, my other friend, someone I met when I first moved to NYC on Friendster(!) who works in the event planning industry as the editor of a trade magazine gave me some terrific ideas for number 3 on my list.

And this morning, just reading the Mashable app gave me some good ideas for number 2 on the list.

All that’s left is number 1 – which feels the most daunting, but is also the most exciting. Number 1 should be reframed as this simple question: Who do I want to be? The first step to answering that question is writing a short paragraph to post on a website. That’s it. One tiny step that will begin to unlock all the other little steps to the near future.

In the meantime I started this day by simply getting out of the house. I found a new cafe with wifi and coffee and bagels and decent music, and I’ve been here, reading and working on this post.

Which pretty much brings you up to date on where the hell I’ve been and what the hell I’ve been doing. Answers: Under a rock, being scared of the world.

Right then, that’s over (for now). On to the next thing.

So, the moral of this very long, very self-indulgent bit of bullshit is this: Get out of your own way. Do something.

Or, to quote the Levi’s campaign: Go forth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’d like to start a list of words we use in marketing (online and offline) that are, it seems either losing value or losing meaning. They lack definition. What would you add to the list? Here’s my start:

eCommerce
Brick & Mortar
Time Shifting
Social Media
User
Consumer
Brand
User-generated
Viral

[Note: I posted this elsewhere awhile ago. Since then I've thought a little more about it...]

Much has been made of the specialness of brands that are adored, desired, and truly loved by consumers since Lovemarks was published. Only a few consistently come to mind, and you can see how they play out in the brand battles at brandtags.net. Sometimes it seems like there are so few true ‘brands’ that you can count them on both hands: Adidas, Apple, BMW, Coke, Ferrari, Google, Lego, Nike, Pixar, YouTube. They stand for something, they have meaning, they evoke imagery and feeling and spirit. They are, in other words, lovable.

But for many years now we’ve been convinced that anything with a trademark or a .com or a business card can be a brand. It isn’t true. Not everything – or everyone – is a brand. Sometimes they are just people, companies, products, services.

A friend and former colleague told me about a client who wanted to make a button on one of their remote controls a brand. A component piece of a component piece of a utility service – made into a brand. I’ve had clients who want the silhouette Apple iconography – now. I’ve had others muse that if they just had the Intel chimes, they’d stick in people’s heads longer. They’d completely forgotten about the work those companies had to do to earn the right – and the privilege – of being so recognizable. We had to have “1000 songs in your pocket” and “Rip. Mix. Burn.” in order to get to the iconic iPod earbud cords. We had to to see stickers on every PC tower and see the dancing technicolor ‘bunnysuits’ and get excited about the Pentium (remember that?) to give Intel credit for that sound.

And as we know, love fades. Brands that once deserved, even demanded our love, have grown distant, tiresome, old. Some brands have deserted us for younger consumers. Others stopped bringing us flowers, thinking we’d settle for something a little less. Many make us work harder to get their attention and their affection. You see, the problem for years was that marketing managers, companies believed it was their right to demand our love. They believed if they were loud enough, repetitive enough, big enough, we’d all adore them.

Over the last decade – the one just ended – many marketing managers concluded that the brave new world was upon us; that the monologue had been supplanted by a dialogue. That was the nice way of putting it – what many really thought was that they’d opened up the doors to all the riff-raff and found themselves deafened by the cacophony of consumer voices. Control of the brand was threatened by this transparency, by all this commenting and linking and reviewing and forwarding and tweeting.

But a new age is upon us – everyone’s going digital, everyone is, in the parlance of The ARF, “listening” – or in the framework of Henry Jenkins, fostering participatory culture. Yet even this winds up as a one way street. Many agencies are interpreting digital solely as online direct response marketing – and leaving creativity, demand creation, brand building in the dust. Many researchers and brand managers interpret listening as eavesdropping, getting consumers to do the work for you. It reminds me of how Tom Sawyer pulled a con – I’ll let you paint my fence if you’ll give me your apple. Who’s getting the better deal? As it turns out, no one.

Positioning and brand strategy have become empty vessels for a lot of companies. Getting people to love you is the result, not the strategy. What I’m interested in and passionate about is figuring out: what do you have to offer that makes you lovable? What can you offer people that shows them you care?  And how do you prove it?  When I talk to clients, we’ll talk about your brand, and your consumer – but we’ll have to talk about it in a slightly different way. We’ll need to reckon with your present and your past, but we must face the future.

If we don’t talk about who you really are as defined by what you do, what you make, how you present yourself – in other words, your products, services, employees, distribution methods, design, pricing and service – we’re only ever talking about window dressing. If we don’t align who you are with how you want people to feel about you – we’re likely to make products and messages that don’t break through and don’t stick.

And if we don’t keep our eyes open to the possibilities – to the people who do, could, and should love you – then we risk your business. To get love, you have to give it – all the relationship advice in the world can be boiled down to that truth. The way companies give love is simple: respect the people you want to sell things to, and make things they would want to buy. The hard part (read: the really fun part) is figuring out how to get there.

[gratuitous use of a puppy is within my rights]

i’ve been working in and around advertising for 12 or 13 years.  i’ve been a copywriter and a web designer and a planner and a strategic consultant and a qualitative researcher and an innovations lead and a ‘corporate intellectual’.  yesterday i was described on a phone call as an ‘expert on brands, strategy, research methodologies and implementation. and she’s a wild blogger.’  practically feral, i’d say.

but wait – “implementation.”

now that takes me back to the beginning, when i was making websites and ads and games.  and it reminds me of a really early conversation i had with a client who wanted to get into the e-commerce world.  this had to have been 1999, it was Ron Herman, who owns the Fred Segal store on Melrose.  he was turned on by Helmut Lang‘s website, but also by the Gap. but he didn’t have the fulfillment capabilities to ship everything anyone wanted, and he didn’t have the inventory system to know what he had and link it to his stores in both a virtual world and a brick-and-mortar one (remember how we all used to say that? i’m so glad it’s gone).

what he did have was a line called RH Vintage – which still exists, though at the time it was basically bedazzled vintage bought out of poundage.  the line was comprised of jeans or cords, t-shirts, and belts.  no two of anything was alike.  the prices were comparatively reasonable for a Fred Segal shopping trip.  we thought – let’s experiment:  let’s put up your jeans, your cords, your tees and your belts.  you have three choices to make as a customer: which of these 4 categories do you want to shop from, are you a guy or a girl, and what’s your size.  tick those boxes, and the good people at RH Vintage will pick out your clothes and send it to you.  it’ll probably fit.  it’ll probably be what you want.  it’ll definitely come in a branded bag, with a branded receipt.  it’ll make you think that you actually got in your car and went to Fred Segal.  you can pretend to your friends at Brown and Wesleyan and Amherst that you shopped there (and you sorta did), and you’ve got the threads to prove it.

Ron loved the idea – i’m not sure what happened next, but here was an answer that wasn’t an ad.  it was a micro-model for doing business.  it was a branded product line with a branded distribution system and a branded user/shopping experience.  yes, it would have a website.  probably taglines would need to be written and designs made &c.  but it wasn’t an advertising idea – it was a business idea.

the best stuff i’ve ever done in anything related to advertising has always been ‘this is what you should do‘ not ‘this is what you should say‘.

i was talking to Seth Wolk the other day at Saatchi about who in the business is making things.  (he’s so great – really smart and candid and clear and open.  frankly, a rarity.)  but he did cut to the quick: maybe i’m barking up the wrong tree.  maybe i’m expecting places who don’t, as a matter of course, do what i do, to want to do what i do – and to know how to package it, sell it, and implement it.  maybe people like me need to find a new roof. or build our own house.

it’s really important to not only think about what you do as the definition of who you are, but to make sure you’re in the right place, the place that will not only let you be you, but wants you to be more of you, is hungry for you, is receptive to you.  people like me should be in places where people say ‘this is what you should do’ – and then adds, ‘we’ll build it for you.’

and here, then, is my question:  where are those places, really? lots of places claim to be doing that, but are at heart still ad agencies or branding companies.  is it, as Seth suggested, media properties and platforms?  is it tech startups?  who are the companies that are looking at brands on a holistic level and then suggesting – and implementing - action instead of talk?