Miklos

“For some time now, the conventional wisdom at most agencies has been to partner with experts in specific fields—social networking, gaming, mobile, or any other discipline—in order to “get the best people for the job.” But given the success of AKQA, R/GA, and so many other innovators, perhaps it can be argued that to be truly holistic in our approach, it’s better to grow innovations from one’s own stem cells, so to speak, than to try to graft on capabilities on an ad-hoc basis. Some would no doubt argue that it makes the most economic sense to hire experts to execute as needed, rather than taking on more overhead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But it should be pointed out that it’s hard to have the original ideas themselves if your own team doesn’t have a firm grasp of the technologies. Without a cross-disciplinary team of in-house experts, who knows what opportunities you—and by extension, your clients—may miss. “It comes down to the brains that you have working with you to make it a reality,” John Butler, cofounder of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, tells me. “The history of the ad agency is the Bernbach model—the writer and art director sitting in a room together coming up with an idea,” he says, referring to legendary adman Bill Bernbach, cofounder of DDB and the man who first combined copywriters and art directors as two-person teams. Now, all that’s changed. “[Today, there are] fifteen people sitting in a room. Media is as much a part of the creative department as a writer or an art director. And we have account planners—we call them ‘connection planners’—in the room throwing around ideas,” he says. “That facilitates getting to work that is about the experience, about ways to compel consumers to interact with your brand in a way that they become like free media” by actively promoting the brand for you. If his team worked on the old Bernbach model, Butler adds, they would never have created something like those cool MINI billboards that display messages to drivers by name that I described in the last chapter. The idea actually spun out of a discussion about 3-D glasses for print ads. “Someone in the interactive group said, ‘We can probably do that same thing with [radio frequency identification] technology.’” By using transmitters built into the billboards, and building RFID chips into MINI key fobs, “when a person drives by, it will recognize him and it will spit out a message just for him.” He adds with considerable understatement: “Through having those capabilities, in-house engineers, technical guys who know the technology and what’s available, we were able to create something that was really pretty cool.”
― Rick Mathieson, The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World

“Roosevelt's productivity resulted from how he chose to spend his time. He read frequently due to his belief that efficiency did not come from packing in scheduled activities down to every last minute of the day. Rather, it was through the regular feeding of his intellect. Even during the height of a presidential campaign, he packed in nearly four hours of reading a day. He enjoyed works of fiction, science, political philosophy, and history. One can imagine a nervous political aide bursting in his study, telling Roosevelt to put down his copy of Cicero because he was scheduled to begin the day's fourth speech in only two minutes. Researcher Robert Talbert notes that a second explanation for Roosevelt's productivity was his method of splitting up his schedule. His reading times were broken up into 45 minute-increments, divided between three half-hour time slots and three one-hour time slots. There is no way that Roosevelt could have known this, but such a segmented approach to reading is the best way for the brain to retain information. A 2008 study from the University of Illinois found that the brain's attentional resources drop after a long period of focusing on a single activity. Even brief diversions can significantly increase one's ability to focus on a task for a long period of time.”
― Michael Rank, The Most Productive People in History: 18 Extraordinarily Prolific Inventors, Artists, and Entrepreneurs, From Archimedes to Elon Musk

“Culturally one of the most difficult things that happens is to get creative people to understand [that] the world is no longer just defined by television. The thing that happened, and has been happening for some time here, is that our work was much more diverse than even we knew it was. And I think as we began to change, the way we tackled problems and the way that we looked at problems was completely and utterly holistic in a way that I’d probably not ever really experienced before.”
― Rick Mathieson, The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World

“Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the legendary San Francisco-based ad agency behind such classic campaigns as “Got Milk” and the Foster Farm Chickens, had found itself in a funk—and felt increasingly irrelevant in an emerging, transmedia world of social networking, user-generated content, mobile, Internet video, and more. So a few years ago, the agency set an ambitious goal to completely revamp itself for the digital age. “Our goal is to be unrecognizable twelve months from now,” creative director Jamie Barrett said at the time. The idea: transform an agency known primarily for eye-popping television spots into one badass, multiplatform marketing machine. It was well worth the effort. In less than a year, Goodby saw revenues leap 20 percent to $102 million. At the start of its transformation effort, 80 percent of the twenty-five-year-old agency’s revenues came from traditional advertising campaigns, while less than 20 percent came from digital initiatives. Today, after three years of reinvention, those numbers are nearly flip-flopped, with 60 percent of revenues now coming from digital initiatives, and 40 percent from traditional. Now, a team once vexed by what it called “Crispin Envy”—for all the attention Crispin Porter + Bogusky receives for its groundbreaking work in digital media—has found its own footing, and then some. While many have driven the transformation, no one has received more credit as a catalyst for change than Derek Robson, forty-two, whom Goodby recruited from adverting agency powerhouse Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London.”
― Rick Mathieson, The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World