Advertisers at Work

by Tracy L. Tuten

“Conversations with some of the sharpest minds in advertising lead the reader gently into the heart of the business. A great read whether you’re starting out in advertising or simply want to pick up some tips from the greats.” ― Mark Tungate , author of A Global History of Advertising and Branded How Marketing Changed the Way We Look    “In  Advertisers at Work , Tracy Tuten conducts interviews with some of the ad world’s biggest players. The interviews―ranging from advertising legend Mike Hughes to leaders of the next generation like David Oakley and Susan Credle―reveal much about the nature of creativity and why we all respond to certain ads either with a laugh or a purchase. Tuten’s skillful questions also highlight how these men and women learned the craft, found mentors, and landed jobs doing things they 'didn’t know you could get paid to do.' They talk about successes and failures, their hopes and dreams, and the direction of the industry as we move into the age of social and branded media. If you are in the field of advertising or one of those people who often say, ‘Hey, did you see that commercial . . .,’ you’ll find Advertisers at Work  a valuable addition to your bookshelf.” ― John Sweeney, Distinguished Professor, School of Journalism University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;Former Associate Creative Director, Foote, Cone & Belding In Advertisers at Work , readers will gain insights from the most interesting people working in the field of advertising today, told in their own words. Guided by interviewer Dr. Tracy Tuten , 18 advertising leaders share their favorite stories, debunk the myths of advertising, make predictions on the industry’s future, pay homage to the lions of the past, and offer insights into what it takes to win in the ad game today. Each chapter is devoted to one advertising executive, showcasing that person’s unique vision and perspective into the world of advertising. Who are these leaders? Talent, perseverance, creativity, and pure grit set these people apart―and that’s where their similarities end. With a mix of senior contributors and up-and-coming talent representing the creative crafts, media, planning, and account services from a variety of agencies and locales, this book pulls back the curtain and invites readers to live each leader’s experiences up close. They’ll learn from the advertisers at work. Every interview shows how advertising leaders have an impact on a day-to-day charting strategy, making effective pitches, managing clients and key partners, calling in the creative muse, reading the public’s mood, developing the right mix of media to launch a campaign, or pouncing on opportunities the rest of us can’t see. This    Other books in the Apress At Work  

322 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2012

Reviews

[Nathan]

A large part of the Computer Science culture was defining ourselves in opposition to suits, sales weasels, and associated corporate "overhead". As I've attempted different things over my life, I've learned to appreciate those other areas. One world I've never had much to do with, though, is the traditional world of the advertising agency. This book, interviews with notable advertising executives about the industry and their work, was an excellent introduction to the mindset and structure of the advertising industry.

Of particular interest to me was the industry structure. As the introduction (which reflects on the changes in the industry from first edition to this second edition) says:

Holding companies rule the industry. Avid watches of Mad Men know that the Sterling Cooper agency was bought by a holding company in the third season. Ownership limited the decisions the leadership could make. Ultimately, the limitations imposed by the holding company spurred the major players to launch out on their own. Once upon a time, agencies were truly run from the vision of their leadership. Today, four holding companies (the Interpublic Group of Companies, the Omnicom Group, the Publicis Groupe, and WPP) control much of the global industry. Holding companies set corporate strategy, direct collaborative relationships among agencies within the corporation, and dictate operational and fiscal management of their agencies.

The other lesson was the obsession on awards. Again, from the introduction:

Awards are still important. There are many awards sought after in the industry, such as Cannes Lions, One Sow Pencils, Clios, Addys, and Effies. The interviewees and their agencies hold many of these awards. Mike Hughes discusses the role awards can play in driving the work of creatives, and Susan Creadle explains in her interview how her team uses Leo Burnett's HumanKind scale to evaluate and judge the quality and potential of their ideas. Though awards aren't the only measure of an idea's success, they are critical to recognizing the value and influence of ideas. They are important to agencies as recruitment tools for both top talent and new clients.

Some choice quotes.

[Raih] I’ll tell you something my uncle taught me. I was home for Thanksgiving or something a couple of years ago. I asked him, “How do you decide what to take on or what to tackle?” I am going to butcher this relatively slick piece of advice he gave me, but I will do my best. He basically said, “Think about a bull’s-eye. In the center of that bull’s-eye is where you bill out at a high hourly level.” Not to make it all about dollars and cents, but basically what he was saying is that as a founder, I am the center of this bull’s-eye. I need to spend as much time in that bull’s-eye to further the company’s interests. The further I get out in those concentric circles, the less I am serving the best interest of the company. That is something that I took to heart. I try to stay in that bull’s-eye as much as possible while not becoming detached from the front line.

[Raih] At Zambezi, we try to keep the collective IQ high. We have instituted a multiplatform, internal entity called Bites. On a weekly basis, we curate and distribute an HTML recap newsletter of the eight or ten most pertinent stories in marketing, sports entertainment, and tech. We distribute it to not only to our people, but also to our clients, production partners, and media partners. We distribute that once a week and then we get together once a month for a Bites immersion session. These sessions are mandatory, all-company meetings. They are a chance to put the pencils down and get away from computer screens.
Sometimes we meet off site or bring speakers in. We may go see an art exhibit or a show. We may do a show-and-tell session. For example, our most recent session was Friday. We had a couple of different things going on. Some of our creatives presented side projects. These were cheeky videos which brought the freaking house down. Lastly we did a kind of deep dive on media. Our media staffers presented on key terms, industry developments, new metrics, and that kind of thing. It was very well received.
Last month we went to the Tim Burton exhibit at the LACMA, the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, and sometimes we will go to a Dodger game or what have you. We typically parlay a Bites emerging session with two goals: team building and keeping our collective IQ high. My perception, and maybe I am blind to it, is that our staffers really love what we do with Bites. It is so sharp and it’s good enough that six months ago we started submitting it externally. Every client gets a copy of Bites from Zambezi, which underlines and speaks to being on the bleeding edge of what’s new and relevant in marketing, pop culture, technology, and sports entertainment.
Bites is branded by Zambezi, and it serves as tangible evidence that Zambezi is curious and hungry to know more. Bites hits the inbox of all of our clients all the way up to CMOs and CEOs.

[Raih] You can’t sell to today’s young consumers. You have to provoke them.

[Raih, an example of wording that makes me dislike advertisers] With the provocative content and really strong social media engagement using Facebook and Twitter, the video became very well trafficked. We were able to hijack the mindshare around fantasy football.

[Raih] First of all, we get out of bed every morning and we still have flat bellies and sharp spears.

Kristen Cavallo] We toyed with the idea of my family moving to Boston and for various personal reasons that did not pan out. I withdrew from consideration for the job. I was really disappointed about it and I thought it just wasn’t in the cards. Then in February, Alex Leikikh [Mullen’s president] called back and said, “I am staring at Fast Company’s list of the top ten Most Innovative Marketing Companies in the country.” Mullen had made the list. He said, “It occurred to me that we are not being very innovative about this, so let’s start over. Let’s rewrite the rules and figure out a way to make this work.”

[Cavallo] Take yourself seriously, read, travel, be well-spoken. When you go into the room, take a seat alongside key decision makers. Believe that you belong there. If you don’t believe you belong there, or if you sit shyly on the sidelines, then you won’t be invited back.

[Cavallo] Mullen really has a sweet spot with thought-leader brands. By thought-leader brands I mean brands that tend to be outspent, brands that tend to not be the market share leader in that category. Thought-leader brands must challenge the product category and do business differently. These are brands that have to think their way out of a problem because they don’t have the luxury of throwing money at it. Market share leaders tend to have the lion’s share of money and customers. It’s a totally different situation in how to approach the market. With these brands, usually we move at a really fast pace and are constantly asking ourselves, “What’s next?”
Our clients tend to feed their consumer-based social conversations with lots of initiatives, or topics in succession, much more frequently than maybe a market share leader would. That’s because they are trying to turn the category conversation in their favor, always trying to pull people to their brand. And since they don’t spend more than the market share leader, they have to say more provocative things to cause consumers to reappraise their choice.

[Cavallo] Kohler plumbing is one of my favorites. I have worked on that brand twice—once at Mullen and once at Martin. Now every time I redo a new house, I redo it in Kohler from head to toe. I just love the whole mythology of that brand. I love the fact that Kohler is the name of the brand and the town it originated in, and the head of the company is the mayor of the town. The work they do is beautiful. They have a soul. They have one of the largest artists-in-residence programs of any company. Ten feet away from someone spray-painting enamel on a toilet, there is someone painting a fresco of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Mr. Kohler wants his employees to feel like artisans, not workers in a factory. That passion is reflected in the beauty of the Kohler products. I love that! I loved the whole spirit of the company.

[Luke Sullivan] I often think there are three main chapters to a creative person’s career. Getting famous, getting money, and getting settled. When you first start, you’re all on fire and you want to show the world you can do this. Your focus tends to be on awards because the recognition is evidence that you can do the work. Then after you’ve convinced yourself, “Dang, I really can do this,” you think, “Hey, I should get paid more for this. I do it really well.” That comprises much of the middle of one’s career. And then there’s that time when you want stability more than anything else. You have kids. You don’t want to move around as much anymore. So you look for a long-term home, a place you can see yourself happy in for ten, fifteen years.

[Sullivan] Bertrand Russell said, “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

[Sullivan] When I was young, there was no boundary between work and life. Work was life. That may still be okay for those without spouses or children and for people who know how to keep sane in a business that does not promote sanity. But in my middle and later years, I drew a line in the sand and said this is work and this is home.
I always tried to be in the car at 5:50 or 6:00. I was fortunate enough to work at places that weren’t driven by what I see as a destructive work ethic. We all hear about them. These are places where you work until midnight all year long. Personally, I think such an ethic is destructive, even for young people. It’s not a sustainable model, not on a personal level anyway. It’s probably sustainable for the shops—they just need to keep the new meat coming in the side door as the burnouts are being poured out the back. But it’s not for me. Nothing is that important anymore. Only my family.

[Mike Hughes] Reporters—newspaper, magazine, and all kinds of reporters—they go out and cover what’s interesting. In advertising, the content may or may not be inherently interesting. We have to find ways to interest people in what we’re writing about. So it’s a different kind of discipline.

[Hughes] One of the things that I’ve been working on a lot for the last year and a half is this notion of storybuilding. Once upon a time we were brand storytellers. Now we start a story and the audience—our customers and our observers and everybody else—joins in on the conversation. We don’t tell the stories. We build them. That also means that storytelling is no longer media-specific. The story can be told through all the things a brand does. We’re trying—I’m trying—to encourage companies to be a little bolder and not so thin-skinned about what people say and how people add to their stories. It’s hard for a company to respond quickly to what happens online, for example. But, on the other hand, companies must be responsible with their responses to how others expand their brand stories.

[Hughes] I’m also getting involved in serious discussions at meetings. A couple of years ago, I was kind of frustrated because I’d go to meetings and I’d hear the same people speaking up in every meeting. I wanted everybody to speak up and I thought we needed to hear more diverse voices. I developed this thing I called “Beer and Popcorn.” People came into the room at four o’clock, and I put some subjects up on the wall. I said, “Let’s pick which one we are going to talk about today.” These topics had nothing to do with advertising or the agency. One day we ended up with this conversation about religion. Of course, that’s one of the things you’re not supposed to be able to talk about, but I wanted to demonstrate to people that we could talk about anything. We had a fabulous discussion that continued in e-mail messages for weeks afterwards. Being part of the conversation, being part of the thinking that goes on in a company that is supposed to be both strategic and creative, that can be an exciting possibility.

[Susan Credle] I think as a leader or as someone in this position—sometimes I just want to go kill everybody. But as a leader you want everything to be right, you want everybody to come through for you. I think if you’re not careful, your first instinct is to really be frustrated with people, and while that’s the feeling, I don’t think it gets you anywhere. So I’m trying to reframe everyday frustration into something else. If I’m frustrated, it means that people need me to help them do something that they’re not doing right now. To me, I’m blaming myself as much as the people that I need to do something. It’s like, “I must be doing something wrong because they’re not getting where we need to get.” So, that’s a hard one.
I did have a boss years ago who said something beautiful. I asked him, “How do you lead? How do you get people to do stuff?” And he said, “You know, interestingly, it’s not one leadership style. For every individual, I have to think about what would motivate them—because we’re not all motivated by the same things.” And that was really interesting. He said to really think about people. “What can I tell them? What can I do for them that will motivate them to be better?” There’s no one answer.

[Credle] My dad was asking me for some help. He’s with UNC Memorial Hospital and he needed to name a residents’ program that he was working on. We were hanging out, and so I said, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” About fifteen minutes later, I sent him an e-mail across the room with an idea that I thought would work. He e-mailed me back saying, “How much do I owe you?” And I e-mailed him: “$30,000.” And he said, “That only took you fifteen minutes.” And I replied, “No, it took me forty-eight years. You just saw the last fifteen minutes.”

[Marshall Ross] I think that all successful marketing people are successful because they understand how to link desire with solution.

[Ross] I think that’s a very nice, succinct way of saying that the art of persuasion is to make sure that your idea is actually their need. That’s why I call it “linkage.” I think sales is about connecting. The art of persuasion is making that connection feel obvious, innate, and inarguable. If you’ve done a good job of making their issue and your solution become indelibly connected, their response is, “Well, what else would I do?”

[Ross] I remember when I was at a large holding-company agency [Foote, Cone, & Belding, part of the Interpublic Group] and recognized one of the motivations for starting my own agency. I literally just started to keep track on a piece of paper where my time was spent. I figured out I was spending something like seventy percent of my time negotiating internally for what I could show to a client versus working with clients and working on the craft of making things great. That statistic just sort of blew my mind. I said, “This is insane. [...] You know, we’re a bigger hurdle than the world is."

[Edward Boches] I got bored with just delivering other people’s messages to other people’s audiences with other people’s money.

[Boches] For a long time, we made ideas out of words, pictures, and stories. And now ideas are also made out of technology and applications and utility.

[Boches] I think the brief ought to start with the problem that we’re trying to solve. The problem, by the way, may not be an advertising problem. It’s what kind of problem are we trying to solve that would make our brand of more value to this consumer?
I think the second thing it has to address is the use of media, technology, content, and community by the users, customers, or target audience or community members. Thinking about how somebody interacts with stuff beyond just the brand and the category is really important. I would actually go so far as to have every brief basically say, “You can’t solve this problem with an ad. You have to solve this problem with an idea that isn’t an ad.” Then you get to invent this idea or creative that might be worth advertising, right? I think another way to look at it is to really figure out the problem behind the problem. The problem can’t be, “Oh, we want know about this product.” The problem might be, “Well, what problem do these people actually have that we could solve?” And maybe solving it and actually doing something of value in the world of social media, etc., might be the reason that gets them to pay attention to us and might turn them on to the product we want them to know about. That’s almost coming at it from an extreme perspective in order to fight the inclination to solve problems with a TV commercial.

[Boches] Now all of a sudden, these three, four things crashed into my brain and I came up with an idea. The basic idea is “can mandatory social media service save America?” My thought is instead of having mandatory military service and mandatory community service, what if we had mandatory social media service? What if the basic idea was you get recruited and you get put into a circle, a Google circle if you will, with eleven other people from different regions, different ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., and you get handed a problem? The problem could be obesity, or poverty, or unemployment, or the fact that young men get all their sex education from watching online porn. You get handed the problem and you have to solve the problem as a group, not unlike a jury. You have benchmark goal setting and procedure. There’s a proctor who pays attention to this thing and the result comes out and gets posted on a common web site, where legislatures and the press and academia and business can get ideas and begin to implement them.
Maybe we will solve problems and maybe we won’t, but the idea is that we’d have a pretty good likelihood of increasing empathy, interdependency, and an understanding of other people’s perspectives by having mandatory social media service. The service would not be that demanding since basically every eighteen-year-old in America is on social media already. And yes, there are three or four things we have to figure out, such as the multilingual thing, access to technology for everybody, and how to actually implement this thing. But it’s the best idea that I’ve had all year. Do you think it’s any good?

[Doug Fidoten] at the little shop I was kind of a jack-of-all-trades. In a real agency, nobody does everything. This was exacerbated in that at the small shop, nobody was really giving any credit to what I was doing. Plus, I couldn’t point to any of the clients as being anything anybody would actually pay any attention to!

[Fidoten] It was my first opportunity to bring a brand into a category where it was so hard to distinguish one brand from the next. Literally, the only thing that would distinguish one brand from another in this product category was the name placed on the box. [...] we really hit on this idea that we would separate the product by claiming it. By identifying it on the packaging, by creating this notion of the gold standard, creating literally a seal, making it part of the box, making it part of the campaign. We introduced the brand as the gold standard, in a product category where there was no standard. There was no way of distinguishing one from the next. This concept meant that when a prospect looked at the packaging, immediately it was clear that there’s something about this brand that’s different than the others.

[Fidoten] No matter how many steps you take from the first time you’re sitting at a desk to years and years later, you don’t actually shed any job.