HOW TO BUILD AN AGENCY THAT LASTS

It is hard to believe that one of the most consistently creative agencies – Ogilvy & Mather – will actually be 60 years old next year.

Founder David Ogilvy, who departed this world nearly a decade ago, started his agency in 1948. He started it with absolutely no clients. Cold turkey. Zero base. Brave soul.

I have never worked directly with the agency over the years. But I watched it from afar as it grew from a mostly-Manhattan ad shop to a complex and international communications giant. It never lost its ability to execute brilliantly and creatively.

I never met the great man himself. The brilliant Shelly Lazarus, however, who serves today at chairman and CEO at Ogilvy, did. She actually began at the agency when the master himself still walked the halls. I envy her.

Here’s how Shelly's team at the agency now elegantly remembers David on the agency website:

“… David worked relentlessly to instill the belief that our job is to make advertising that sells, and the advertising that sells best is advertising that builds brands. We practice what he preached. Over the past 50 years, Ogilvy has helped to build some of the most recognizable brands in the world: American Express, Sears, Ford, Shell, Barbie, Pond's, Dove, and Maxwell House among them, and more recently, IBM and Kodak … ”

For those of us in the creative communications biz who didn’t know David, we can still read what he wrote before the "turn of the century." Most of it still rings wise.

For the best still in print, try Ogilvy’s luminous book On Advertising. It has been on my bookshelf at various workplaces for more than 20 years. It is still in circulation on Amazon. A dear friend slipped me a rare bound volume of his internal correspondence some time ago. This later book was published in-house a decade ago when the agency passed the half-century mark.

To build a creative enterprise that lasts is a daunting task. Survive just one year with a new communications agency of your own creation and you have accomplished a lot.

But there are reliable secrets to the task that work – and David Ogilvy, a Scotish transplant to this country, was the frankest of great lairds ruling the creative highlands in the post-war era. He gave what he knew freely, to all comers.

Recorded in his books and his accumulated correspondence is advice that still delivers. It delivers whether you are in the ad trade, a PR person, or engaged in some of the more exotic forms of public persuasion that depend on creativity to get noticed.

Here are some of my favorite mots penned by Ogilvy himself – some clearly meant to also amuse. Most are still reliable counsel in our own day. Each note from "D.O." is followed by a crack or two of my own.

DAVID OGILVY - “First, study the product you are going to advertise.”

My Comment: Amazing, isn’t it, how many of our most creative “geniuses” roar into an assignment without ever seriously reading up on the client and it products – beyond the RFP? The most neglected source? The annual report.

For a public company, at least, blood and treasure are spilled creating this “consensus” document. The annual report's operations review section provides the most consistently revealing insight into what your client thinks about itself and its products. Best of all, it is free. Most annual reports are but a click away on the client website.

D.O. - “(F)ind out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products, and with what success.”

My Comment: You do want to stand out and away from your competitors, but you get there quickest when you have seen first what the competition is actually doing in your market space. At the very least, competitor ads or PR work give an education in what is already working or not working against your client. At the very best, rigorous competitor marketing analysis will reveal the weaknesses of your market opponents and suggest a creative opening.

D.O. - “Find out how (consumers) think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them, and what promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand.”

My Comment: Ogilvy and pals were mostly known for extraordinary, outside-the-box creative ideas. But David was actually more passionate about the research end of things. Get out there and ask the consumer what they are thinking in a systemized way– and then use what you learn to your advantage. Don’t make it up. Don't assume you know.

D.O. - “Decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality."

My Comment: Some of the weirdest and most dysfunctional communication campaigns are those where the feel and texture of the communications are starkly different across media or across regions. What were they thinking? That can happen when authority for marketing communications is dispersed inside a client company.

Your agency may be the single unifying force across these client fiefdoms. Help the client figure out “who” your product is. It's as important as "what" it is. Then stay as much in character across media and borders as much as culture and company allow.

D.O. - “(S)tart the year by writing down exactly what you want to accomplish, and end the year by measuring how much you have accomplished.”

My Comment: Even the most creative bosses have to worry the bottom line and plan and measure. Don’t blow past unexpected opportunities. Do set some stiff goals and keep to them as best you can.

David Ogilvy was among the first to admit there were a lot of ad men more talented that he was. But he kept his ship battened down and moving forward during the roughest of gales.

D.O. - “It is a tragedy of the advertising business that its best practitioners are always promoted into management.”

My Comment: This happens in every business – and it is every time a real tragedy. Make sure that the best of your client-facing talent are compensated to stay client-facing. How many clients bail when they realize that the experienced wise-guys who pitched the business are too diverted by management and administration work to ever actually work on the account, once it is won? Too many.

Find a way to apply the best talent to the task, no matter what their billing rate. Law firms had this problem in years past, but they finally sent the so-called managing partner back to practice. They gave over most of the day-to-day administration of the firm to professional MBAs and accountants who report to a committee of client-facing practicing law partners.

D.O. - “Make your people settle their fights face to face.”

My Comment: David Ogilvy wrote that before there was e-mail, but his advice still stands in our present age of Digitopia. There are so many protocols and courtesies for peaceable dispute resolution that we learn even as children that are simply chucked when we are battling on-line through e-mail.

Electonic communication is all just too anonymous. It seems to invite discourtesy and rudeness in an uncanny way. Work it all out face to face when there is real conflict. Or at least pick up the damn phone and talk it out.

D.O. - “Never allow two people to do a job which one could do.”

My Comment: It’s easy to add talent to an account on the ramp up. But how about checking back in to see if all that firepower is really needed to get the job done? If you want to know where your profits went, check out the newest accounts and ask if they are overstaffed. Redeploy those work teams running on idle waiting for a client to make up their mind.

Want maximum flexibility? Cross train everyone to master all basic tools and don’t let overspecialization harden into impenetrable silos. That biopharmaceutical tech expert should be able to write and pitch an effective press release or ad for a toy company, when needed, and not think they are above the task.

D.O. - “Never allow yourself the luxury of writing letters of complaint.”

My Comment: You can complain and tease about companies and campaigns at home to let off steam. But stay positive in the workplace. Watch what you write, particularly in e-mail these days. It all now lives on forever.

In pre-digital days, Ogilvy popped off a whining and intemperate letter by snail mail about service on the Queen Mary. He was banned because of it from competing for the Cunard Line account for years to come. Rudeness ruins everything, doesn’t it?

D.O. - “When your people turn in an exceptional performance, make sure they know you admire them for it.”

My Comment: Appreciation works even for the most arrogant creatives. Give it up generously when it is deserved. It will pay back tenfold in dedication and enthusiasm. Dish out money as well as praise.

D.O. - “Do your best to educate your people, so that they can be promoted as fast as possible.”
My Comment: Even in the low-tech days when an IBM Selectric typewriter was a great leap forward, technology change left many otherwise talented folk in the lurch. Keep training to keep all staff current.

When a tool becomes accessible to all – think of PowerPoint, which used to be a specialized skill, like web-design still is a bit – make sure all learn it, up and down the ranks.

D.O. - “Seek advice from your subordinates, and listen more than you talk.”

My Comment: Many of our account leads in the public persuasion business have parsed and studied the product and consumer so that they understand it better than anyone inside the client firm. But the same super-achievers know next to nothing about their own workmates and frontline subordinates. Shut up and listen once in awhile – you might learn something.

D.O. - “Never leave the bridge in a storm.”

My Comment: Agency leadership should not be below deck and away from the scene when an account hits rough water. Stay visible when you are in command and steer through the maelstrom. Your team will build memories of shared adversity and strong loyalties that will bind you together forever.

DOES ADVERTISING WORK?

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing communications has always been a dubious science.

Sometimes goods sell, well, because people like a product whether or not they like the ads or PR stunts launched to promote it.

We all know the old canard: “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. If I only knew what half, I would cut the budget.” Or some such similar tease.

Daniel Starch, author of The Theory of Advertising in 1923, also founded a measurement service – today known as GfK Starch Communications – which still provides the most reliable statistical survey evidence of advertising's impact in print media.

But is the evidence convincing? Do print ads actually work? There are some celebrated dissenters.

Try Al and Laura Ries. They have argued for years that the impact of advertising (print or otherwise) is grossly overrated, that measurement systems are at best unreliable, and that public relations is actually the only reliable way to kick off a marketing campaign – at least for the newest brands.

The Ries’s in their pieces and in their books are always respectful of the role of advertising in sustaining brand loyalty. Say they, Al and Laura, however, it’s just that nobody really believes a new product launch ad if it’s only the ad-buying seller standing behind the thing.

For a new product, third party endorsement is what gets it moving -- and however the public originally finds out about it, media coverage of the phenomenon is much more powerful that self-congratulations in an advertisement.

Even if you are a devout advertising believer, ad media have diversified so dramatically in our day, it is child’s play in our Tivo and Google age to simply ignore or “go around” even the most elaborate advertising snares that are set these days against a search engine or download ritual.

(Except the child in the house can operate the Tivo better than dad or mom – so maybe we should say, it is “adult’s play.”)

In any event, the heat is certainly on from clients as never before to prove print advertising effectiveness.

So now comes a substantive response to all that from Starch itself– read about it in Stuart Elliot’s powerful advertising column in the New York Times for Tuesday, October 9.

Says Elliot, “Starch has been surveying advertising readership for more than 80 years, interviewing consumers in person. The new service will also report responses gathered online from readers of magazines and newspapers in which the ads appear.”

And I think the changes will make even Al and Laura Ries happy. Starch will also measure in a much more reliable way whether the readers took any action after encountering the ad – and whether they recommended the product to others.

Measuring engagement and involvement – isn’t that what PR agencies have been doing for years now to prove their worth to clients?

It is about time that advertising also step up and put its metrics where its mouth is.

STORY POWER

Former journalists, I think, often face a rocky transition when they first decide to join an advertising or PR firm – or the in-house corporate communications staff of an enterprise.

If they succeeded at all as reporters or editors, they nurtured a kind of instinctive skepticism with which they challenged the endless false promises and self-promotions that nag for media attention. Too often, they bring that skeptical attitude to agency work, too ready perhaps to disbelieve and dismiss whatever a client may profess as their mission and market.

I think the best practitioners in the advertising and publicity trades take on a different attitude – naturally positive, they are able to slip easily into almost any client’s belief system and be instantly supportive. That cheeriness never comes naturally to a trained newshound.

Too bad for us, however, when we don’t find a comfortable home for at least some skilled journalists in our agency mix.

Why? Because former reporters and editors are extraordinary storytellers – and too few of our professional publicists, fresh out of PR school, can shape a client’s message into a believable and true narrative that tells the client story in a way that people want to hear it.

You have to dig for that. In fact, more often than not, you have to ... report.

It’s nice to see that exceptional story-telling skills are also behind the success of some of the most extraordinary leaders in business and politics. That’s the case presented by author Stephen Denning in his book, the Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass-Wiley).

We can see this best when it goes awfully wrong. Denning discusses at some length Al Gore’s presidential run in 2000. Gore was then confusing, uncommitted, ineffective in creating a narrative that undecided voters wanted to hear.

How things have changed. In his current pursuit as climate-change guru, he has been able to leverage a fairly inexpensive PowerPoint presentation into a box-office dynamo. There aren’t many actors that could pull that off. Much of the strength of the new Al Gore is the fact-based nature of his presentation. Somebody actually did some … reporting.

Of course, some storytellers with journalism backgrounds do quite well in the agency world. Michael Sitrick, chairman and CEO of Sitrick and Company, is probably the most prominent crisis communications guru in the PR business. Sitrick is the very King of Spin, at least in Hollywood, and the very first call in the entertainment industry when starlets or studio chiefs are hauled off to the hospital or the county jail from their luxury hotel suites – and Sitrick is now increasingly popular among CEOs with legal woes.

Mike Sitrick is a master of preemption and keenly aware that the first major story – the narrative – sets the tone for almost all the coverage that follows.

A natural leader, of course, knows this without any prompting from professionals. The idea that a business leader is actually directing the day-to-day operations of a large and complex enterprise is mostly an illusion – and transparently false.

What probably keeps the best of enterprise leaders at the top is the ability to investigate and report on the contributions of others in the company … and to control the narrative.

I agree with Denning: Good story telling is the secret language of leadership.

NICHE NATION

If you work with a communications firm, you probably think of yourself as something of a trendmaster – always alert to and stalking market movement and consumer desire.

I remember when I became aware last year of the mainstreaming of jeep-style army caps. One of the women in my office was sporting the thing -- wearing it all day long.

There were probably, oh, about a million first-adopters already parading around in the style capitals of the universe with the wide-side hats before I finally figured out something was up.

Mark Penn, whose day job is running PR goliath Burson-Marsteller as CEO – when he is not advising Hillary Clinton – does a better job , I think. Penn is a true trendmaster. His expertise is not based on hanging out the local mall like the rest of us, but on that truly weird science of polling. WPP owns Burson and bought up Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates six years ago.

If you are about to be thrown out of your local Starbucks as an ogler, do your lurking the easy way: Check out pollster Penn’s new book, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, from Twelve Books. Coauthor is E. Kinney Zalesne, a brilliant refugee from the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign and former counsel to Janet Reno. She is a continuing colleague of Penn’s at PSB.

If there were a pollster hall of fame, Penn would be in it. It was he who deployed Hillary’s husband after those “soccer moms.” The rest is re-election history. Among the book’s new finds that I love – and he and Zalesne identify more than 70 in the book –are the philo-Semites and Protestant Latinos.

The philo-Semites are goyim who want to date and marry Jewish men and women. Not sure how Hilary will turn that to her favor unless she dumps Bill for a handsome rabbi.

The understanding that Penn and Zalesne show about Protestant Latinos may prove more useful in restoring the Clinton dynasty to office. The authors argue that this group of ten million went mostly for George Bush in the 2004 election and was the most significant factor in his victory.

Keep an eye on Hillary’s outreach to this group; it may not succeed if the Republicans can find a properly pious and evangelistic candidate. (The Catholic Hispanics – 70-plus percent of the total Hispanic population in the U.S. – mostly stayed in the Democratic fold.)

The Internet, which is rapidly becoming the principal communications highway for all Americans, is the big enabler of all these small trend-forward groups – it’s easy on-line to find your co-believers for event he tiniest unorthodox undertaking – whether it is philo-Semites looking for love and scripture, or extreme commuters who travel great distances and create markets in in-car entertainment and lobby against high fuel taxes.

Small was beautiful. Now it’s powerful too, in the marketplace and in the public forum.

The Economist, reviewing Microtrends in its September 22 issue, says it best: “America is no longer a melting pot. It is becoming a nation of niches.”