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The Six Fatal Mistakes
Having owned or worked at public relations agencies for 25 years, I have never been on the client’s side of the table. I have noticed certain characteristics, however, that would drive me to distraction (or out the door) if I were a client.
This led me to write what I view as the six fatal errors agencies often commit against clients. It was instructive for me to write them down, and, though obvious as rainwater, perhaps useful for others.
1. Declaring Guerilla War Against A Client.
You're talking popguns against cannons, and if you have to ask who has the cannons, you’re in the wrong profession. I don’t mean open warfare, but the daily griping that occurs in some agencies about clients they deem difficult.
Assume that all clients are or will be ‘difficult’ in some way. It is the nature of the relationship of a company that wants to get the most value from its agency. If the agency harbors ill will toward a client, it will always be frustrated. I have never met a perfect client - or a perfect agency.
2. Thinking That Because A Client Is Large, A Golden Egg Has Been Laid At The Agency’s Doorstep.
The most successful clients I have met over the years are the ones that paid its agencies fairly, but at the same time questioned each hryvna, dollar, euro or pound spent. Showing the client that you also care about its money builds trust and gives the client the confidence to ultimately spend more.
While it might be instructive to ‘suspend the budget’ in the creative process, being too wide-eyed will lead to disappointment when expectations are diminished.
3. Romancing A Prospect At The Expense Of A Client.
To paraphrase ad man David Ogilvy, each client should think it is the only pebble on the beach. Perceived exclusivity has value. Better yet, divide your time such that you actually deliver real exclusivity, regardless of the client’s size. Microsoft didn’t start out being Microsoft writ large.
4. Treating Clients As Though They Are Hot-Wired For Idiocy.
After all, few are. They might be wrong, however. Don't argue. Begin your reply to a client with "That's an excellent thought, but another way might be to...." In other words, put your diplomatic skills into high gear.
In our business, dogmatism rarely works. We might be really smart people, but the client generally knows his or her business much better than we do.
5. Failing to Listen to Clients.
In a new business meeting, it should be 70 percent client and 30 percent agency. Clients and potential clients want to tell us about their problems, their ideas, and their dreams. Let them. Inquire about them. Show a mutual passion for them.
Do so, and when the time comes to offer your ideas, they will be better received.
6. Being A Serf Instead Of A Servant.
Being a servant is a high calling. Being a serf is toadyism. You need to have a certain status with a client. You are a professional that has a lot to offer, including strategic advice and star-spangled ideas that will make your counterpart on the client side a hero.
Servants should become stars in the eyes of clients. I look on every meeting with a client as a performance. Every meeting is opening night.
While I realize my six fatal mistakes possibly could be a list of 60, these rise highest on my personal open-ended Richter scale of agency bobbles that I would imagine drive clients out the back door.
The Future of Journalism
Editor's Note: The following is Michael Willard's speech May 22 to Ukrainian editors at the Conference on Professional Journalism in Kyiv.
Good afternoon. Yes, you're right. I'm a PR guy. I once was a newspaper guy.
And as a guy in the news business, I didn't particularly care for PR people like me. I mean, I might say hello to a PR guy if no one else was around-but I sure wouldn't ask him down to the pool hall for a beer and a game. And it is for certain I wouldn't introduce the fellow to my young sister.
Such was the attitude of news people to PR people in the 60s and 70s. But, I believe, times change….a little.
Let's go way back. How many of you remember the old Linotype machines for setting what was called hot type? . How many of you remember off-set printing called cold type before computers.
Many of you have come of age in the day of the computer. I first started working for newspapers when I was 19-that's 46 years ago. And yes, I remember hot type and the gradual evolution to cold type and now, of course, we have the ease of the computer. And, one can guess, another decade will bring new methods of news delivery.
The point is this, the business of newspapers and publishing is always evolving. The theme I chose for this discussion today is The Future of journalism. From the start, let me say this: I believe in Gazeta.
I, myself, am a magazine publisher. Formerly I published the rather eclectic Ukraine Observer. I lost a quarter million dollars over seven years, but boy it was fun. Now, I publish the more modest Willard Marketing Monthly. I really enjoy it, and believe it is a good service to the marketing community.
The word in the west for Gazeta is newspaper-one word. The important part of the word newspaper is not paper, but news. The delivery system for news is changing and will continue to change, faster in some geographic areas than in others.
In Ukraine, news printed on paper will exist many years into the future. But we can't be like the ostrich. We can't bury our heads in the sand and think that the news delivery revolution that has impacted much of the world will not impact Ukraine. It will.
In the U.S., the industry saw a transformation. When I went back to visit a year ago, well-known and respected broadsides had become tabloid-size publications. Some well known papers in large cities had moved to online only. Some ceased publishing all together. Famous but niche magazine titles died, starved for advertising.
Just recently, I bought a Kindle, the device manufactured by the online book store Amazon on which one reads books electronically. This isn't me. I love the smell of books, particularly old books. I love to feel them. I love to have a library stocked with great books to which I can return. But, I bought a Kindle. Now I have 4,000 titles at my finger tips for less than 10 bucks each. I can read Massie's 800 page book on Peter the Great and it comes in a slender, 10 ounce device I can carry anywhere. Just lifting the mammoth Massie book nearly gave me a hernia.
We're talking change here. You embrace it or it embraces you. You can control change-you can direct it-but you can never stop it. It is in the nature of things. It is, in essence, why we walk upright, and have pet dogs named Guff, Guff on leashes. If we didn't control it, Darwinism would suggest Guff, Guff have us on a leash.
Who in this room doesn't have a mobile telephone? Everyone, of course. Some of you probably have smart phones from which you can download your email. Fifteen years ago the gadgets were a rarity and weighed a couple of kilo. In most cities, the mobile phone has virtually killed the pay telephone industry. For that matter, who needs a home landline when everyone has a mobile telephone? In my office, we have no desk sets, no landlines. We are all mobile and wi-fi.
Is this good? For my business and my comfort, yes. For the land-line industry, no. But, you don't see telephone businesses such as AT&T going out of business. They evolve.
After I left daily newspapers, I worked for a great old wire service, United Press International. When I began, I still punched tape on a teletype. I could read the holes in the tape as if were written copy. I was an expert at folding the tape. Boy, those antique skills and 30 hyrnva would get me a Big Mac and a Biggie fry at McDonald's today.
Things have changed. Today we have what is known as citizen journalists. I don't know about you but I don't want to get my news from a journalist who doesn't know the basics of writing a good, factual news story. I don't want my news brought to me by amateurs. When I read something in a news column-whether on paper or electronically-I want to know it was brought to me by a pro and not a would-be, want-to-be. But, it is the age we live in.
Why is an ad and PR guy talking to you about these things? What do I know? What insights do I have into the future of your profession? Well, in truth, probably no more than you. But, I am a generalist in communications and a student of trends.
When I started in the news business, there were great civil rights struggles in America-where African Americans were taking to the streets in anger. I covered the turmoil. When I started in the business, America was trying to catch up to the Soviet Union in the space race. I covered the early unmanned moon launches. I stood in the backwaters of history-watching news being committed. I covered it, and I loved it.
My first newspaper job was with the Orlando Sentinel while in my first year in college. I worked the city desk. I learned to take dictation from reporters in the field and to type faster than grease-lightning. If I had a hyrnva for every obituary I wrote, I would be a rich man today-even with the various devaluations. I remember my first by-line-a story about a country music performer, Johnny Cash, not showing up for a concert because he was wasted on drugs. The next day I proudly went off to school thinking the whole world had seen my by-line. No one had. You don't get famous in 12 point type.
I moved on after college to the Tampa Times. I covered federal courts. I covered gangsters, the Tampa mob. I covered poverty and wrote a prize-winning series about Lucky Lane, an ironically named row of dilapidated homes where unscrupulous landlords collected outrageous rent by the week and never repaired the homes. The newspaper sent me to Turkey to cover NATO exercises. This 22-year-old man-child loved it.
I moved on-but the Tampa Times didn't.
It was an afternoon daily in an America that could no longer support a two-newspaper town. It doubled in price from five cents to 10-and then it folded. But I had moved on to United Press International. Times change.
UPI was like school recess every day, every hour, every minute. As someone once said about advertising, the news business is the most fun one can have with his clothes on. I covered politics. I wrote an international country music column. I became a state manager and editor of the news.
Then, one day I left it.
I left the news business to become communications director for a U.S. Senator who was just about to become the leader of the entire Senate.
Times change.
UPI, the wire service I loved, exists today, but is a shadow if its former great self. It is owned by Reverend Moon, of the Unification Church. The Moonies. I eventually changed as well after a decade of working for U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, and later a year with Gov. John D. Rockefeller, I started a business.
But my DNA-my genetic make up-is one of a beat reporter and green eye-shades editor. In fact, I once bought the rights to the Potomac Guardian, the oldest newspaper name in America. Though I never published the publication, I cherish the fact I could one day.
This, my friends, is why I feel comfortable speaking to you about the future of newspapers. I am one of you.
The fact of life is that one of the greatest periods of my life was waking up on my boat, the Kelly Dawn, docked in Southwest Washington, D.C. on a Sunday morning and leisurely reading the mammoth editions of the New York Times and Washington Post cover to cover over several hours and a very long breakfast.
But that was long ago. Today I live abroad - and have for the last 16 years - but I still read the Times, the Washington Post and my hometown newspaper, the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette on line. It is the only economical way-both in money and time - I can enjoy those publications.
While there is no requirement to pay for the content, there should be. Yes, I'm one of the only 20 per cent in America who say they would be willing to pay for the content in newspapers. In fact I do, year after year after year I pay for the Wall Street Journal on-line and don't complain.
While I publish the Willard Marketing Monthly in printed form, both you and I know that it is not economically feasible, and so decisions to continue it are based on strictly aspirational whims and, perhaps, emotional dotage. Its reason for being is not to make money through advertising or sales.
But daily and weekly newspapers in much of the world have a different problem. They hang on to the past-and this is understandable, particularly in Ukraine where absolutely no one-to my knowledge-is saying it is end of days for print newspapers. However, I believe that part of embracing change is seeing further than the blind man tapping with his cane-into the future, whether it's 10 or twenty or thirty years away.
Because. And I will say it again, the important word in newspaper is what-that's right-NEWS.
It is certainly true that most newspapers today have mirror websites that contain most if not all the stories in the printed version. In my view, in preparing for the future, you need to concentrate your energies into making those sites economic powerhouses. If you are writing for an electronic version, you have to make yourself adaptable to 24-hour news and, in essence, a deadline every nano-second.
It seems logical that if someone is willing to pay for a printed newspaper with a local slant that same person would pay to view a website with the same or similar news value. And, by this same logic, wouldn't local advertisers also find benefit in selling their wares on this well-viewed site.
But, as I said earlier, only 20 per cent of Americans say they would be willing to pay for content on the web. This plays havoc with any sane business model, and defies basic economic theory. But there is a reason for this. Newspapers have been giving away on-line content for years and have created a near entitlement for the consumer. Social networks have toyed with charging members-but members-who might spend several hours a day being entertained on Facebook-- use the social networks own space to organize protest to keep the site free.
This, my friends is loony-toons.
What are newspapers-and, for that matter-social networks going to do?
Both have created a cultural conundrum where consumers feel entitled to free content, free news, and free entertainment. I admit that this is a great big boat to turn around. The vast majority of newspaper websites have always given away content. The problem I have with newspapers in the West is that many seem to have already surrendered the day, cutting back on quality coverage as they slim down the newspaper package. The Washington Post recently shuttered three bureaus in large cities.
This is wrong. The public deserves quality and full coverage by legitimate professional news gatherers. It deserves insightful commentary and not blog blather from arm chair pundits. The blogosphere has its place-but it is not news. It is at least 90 per cent opinion.
I have several suggestions:
1.) Bite the bullet and charge for on-line content, but educate consumers you are doing this out of economic necessity and they will get their money's worth. You will, of course, lose subscribers. My bet is that they will eventually come back for a very basic reason: They obviously liked your product, or they would not have been reading it.
2. Get creative. It is not about just offering the better mouse- trap; it is also about being able to creatively market the better mouse-trap. One idea is bundling. While it would hurt to pay separately for the four newspapers I receive free on-line, if I received a fair, reduce price for the lot, it would certainly make me feel better. Magazines have been doing this for years.
3. Build your own credibility, whether it is with the print publications or on-line. For Gosh sake's if you are letting companies buy stories in your publication-stop it now. If you don't, you will never be a real newspaper, merely an advertising sheet masquerading as a news publication.
4. Most of all. Offer a world class product. Keep up with the trends. Don't let your on-line newspaper be the stepchild of your print newspaper.
As noted, this is probably not a problem for today-but it will be one for tomorrow, and tomorrow will get here sooner than later. Change is good. Be the master of it-don't let it be the master of you.
Thank you very much.
The Nike Swoosh Would Have Failed in a Focus Group
A design student from Portland, Oregon developed a symbol for a small sporting goods outfit. She was paid $35. The owner of the store indicated he wasn't wild about the design but thought it might grow on him.
That store owner was Phil Knight, owner of Nike. The design, of course, was the famous swoosh.
I can pretty much guarantee that had that design been put to a focus group it wouldn't have passed muster. Too simple, some would say. Too abstract, others would opine. Too, too nothing would be the collective chorus.
The greatest fraud perpetrated on marketers over the last 50 years is the focus group. This is my opinion, and I am going to keep on preaching this until I or someone else put a dagger in the squishy heart of this pseudo research.
If you believe the earth is flat and created 5,000-10,000 or so years ago as the good book says and not five billion years ago as science dictates, then you should also believe in focus groups.
If you believe in the tooth fairy, that Stalin was a terrific papa, and that the dead zone around Chernobyl is perfectly safe, then you should also believe in focus groups.
If you believe in the song that, yes, pennies do fall from heaven, and that holding a toad frog in your hand will get rid of warts (or cause warts), then you too, my friend, should believe in focus groups.
I was moved to write these words when I got a message from a director friend of mine from Nashville, Tennessee. He said after the movie The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Award from America's Academy of Performing Arts, "They didn't do one focus group."
It came on a day in which we had a commercial put into the ringer of one or more focus groups. If it had been put into 20 to 30 focus groups I would have stood up and taken notice, even applauded. It would be some semblance of research.
However, the focus group people long ago sold the advertising industry (as well as the political and PR industry, as well as other industries) a bill of goods. Focus groups dumb down creativity. They represents Dante's rung of hell where the lowest common denominator resides. It is called mediocrity city.
I have ridden this high horse now for about 25 years, ever since I was introduced to my first focus group nearly three decades ago by pollster Peter Hart and Bill Hamilton and a political team called Campaign Strategies. They knew the limitations of focus groups.
They knew that focus groups should only be used in connection with quantitative research, something that rarely happens when television concepts are being tested in Ukraine. This is sad, for the research becomes a crutch for justifying poor judgment.
I have also served as a moderator of focus groups. It was here I began to see the utter futility of this phony exercise unless it is part of an overall survey. I began using what I called advocacy focus groups, where the moderator tests messages by actively arguing the merits.
This still wasn't scientific research, but it was fun, and had a purpose in testing the strength of messages. Still, I would never have bet the farm on it. Today, some marketers will bet thousands of dollars of production and media fees on the strength of less than three focus groups. They give better odds at the horse track.
My first experience with focus groups in Ukraine was years ago. I produced several spots. The moderator of the focus groups said the couple of panels didn't like the spots. "It made them think about things they didn't want to think about," she said.
I asked the logical question: "Did it move them to action. Did it make them want to do something in favor of the issue we were presenting?" She said she had not thought about it that way, and would rewrite her report. The commercials were successful.
I realize with most marketers in Ukraine I am beating a dead horse. The use of focus groups in the absolute wrong manner will continue. However, I have added my two cents to the debate and I will do so again.
Probably tomorrow.
It's the Message and Not the Medium
Marshall McLuhan is momentarily famous for five words: "The medium is the message."
With those few words, he got it wrong.
While he wasn't specifically thinking about television-even a common light bulb is a medium-he wrote these words during the golden age of television. Television at the time was the most important medium.
Today, the most important medium, in my view, is digital or internet or social media. Some people call it new media. I think the word "new" gives too elementary a focus to what is merely an evolutionary process, probably an inevitable one.
No one can question the current and future impact of digital media. Sir Martin Sorrell reduced his giant conglomerate during the recent recession by nearly 14,000 employees, 12 per cent of the work force. Now he is ready to hire back-but only in the digital area.
However, digital will always be, I believe, an important supplementary medium. The reason for this should be obvious to anyone in the communications business for any length of time. The fact is, in terms of what we do, it is about the message-not the medium.
If the medium were so important, we would be communicating today by smoke signals.
My feeling is the communications disciplines are merging. The 30-second television spot, while still hanging on, is diminished in importance. The hum-drum news conference, still effective, has been splintered by more personal communications techniques.
Advertising and public relations, once kissing cousins, now find a convenience in marriage. At our company, we try to train people in both disciplines. If we don't, the ad solution to a client problem might come form Mars and the PR solution Venus. When that happens, it is a disservice to the client.
The problem is the focus on delivery systems or platforms. The emphasis should be on the content, and that was secondary to Mr. McLuhan who felt the medium was paramount in the 20th Century.
McLuhan died in 1980. I think if he had somehow stuck around to the age of digital, he would realize the message will trump the medium every hour and day of the week.
After all, the influences of delivery platforms come and go. Messages can also change. They are ever involving. However, that is the point: Messages are fluid while delivery platforms are finite and static.
It could be, someday in the distant future, that messages are communicated by telepathy. The emphasis here-even if the pronouncements were by a latter day Galileo-would not be either on the means he used to communicate or even on the personality. It would be on what he had to say.
In other words, everything we do in any sphere of the communications business is about the effective delivery of messages. If that were not true, what relevance would we hold for our professions?
It's About Attitude. Not Age.
Surviving professionally after 50 is all about attitude, not age. But sometimes it is hard to convince the 35-year-old boss in the corner office whose historic frame of reference is Aerosmith--not Elvis.
When I was in my 20s, I looked at someone approaching 35 as middle-aged, slightly mildewed; someone at 50 as definitely over the hill and someone my age, close now to mid-60s, as a fellow who plays checkers all day and waits for the grim reaper's visit.
These days, if you are looking for a job at 60, you have about the same chance of landing one as being caught-as they say about 40-year-old divorced woman getting married-in the crossfire of a terrorist attack.
It's not easy out there.
I think the same perception-versus the reality-carries over to older professionals who have jobs in advertising and public relations. There is a feeling they have lost a step, and probably need to retire or take a less challenging or less creative job in the agency.
This stereotype is sometimes reinforced by people in the industry, such as Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, or even business philosophers like Charles Handy.
Sorrell, himself 65, said recently ad agency management is too old to really understand new or digital media. Business philosopher Charles Handy, nearly 80, once wrote that creative directors are less creative as they grow older.
This is nonsense.
The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright did his best work after 60; world-renowned heart surgeon Michael DeBakey helped oversee Boris Yeltsin's by-pass surgery in his 90s, and the famous fried chicken man, Col Harland Sanders created a fast-food empire, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), when he was a pensioner.
In my view, Picasso, Matisse, and certainly Monet, did their best work after age 60. And then there is Harold Burson, PRWeek's Man of the Century a decade ago. His creative and strategic advice is still sought by Fortune 500 companies. He's 88.
But what I find is that many older professionals simply don't know how to handle themselves, whether in job interview or even when approaching potential clients who just might be younger than their children.
For this reason, I put together my list of pointers for professionals who have already journeyed into what some of us call the "yellow leaf" period of our lives and careers:
1. Remember--tattoo it on your arm or somewhere--survival in the business world is about attitude and not age. Steve Jobs will, we all hope, one day be 65. My gues is that no one will think Spanish moss is hanging on his persona.
2. Live in the present. Corporate war stories are great around the bar but make you sound stale in a job interview or when being interviewed by a perspective client about your agency's services.
3. Don't get into the "been there, done that" syndrome. In most businesses, particularly the ad and PR business, it isn't about what you have done but what you know you can do in the future. Give the person sitting before you a glimpse of how you are going to increase his or her business.
4. Don't be tone deaf to current culture. Yes, I watch MTV and VH1 on occasion and subscribed most years to Rolling Stone magazine. This doesn't mean one is trying to re-capture youth. It does mean that one's frame of reference is something other than the 1960s.
5. Bring different dimensions of your personal brand to the table. In other words, continually add to your professional portfolio new talents-talents that will impress a job interviewer or a potential new client. We're not talking about the ability to do magic tricks here.
6. We live in a technical world. Introduce yourself to it if you haven't already. Don't brag that you once stood in front of the printer waiting for a fax to come out, or that you are lost in any other computer program than "word".
7. As a corollary of No. 6, be technically social. We once heard of an agency in New York not being hired because those making the pitch were not on Facebook. Be familiar with social networks, and use them.
8. Don't be yourself. Be your re-invented self. This goes contrary to a lot of business wisdom out there. However, is you are consistently adding to your portfolios, you will be an interesting subject for a job interview or a client interview.
What can we say. It's a jungle out there and getting tougher. You need to learn to play the game with finesse, or settle for an under-funded retirement and a shuffleboard court in Sun City.
Tough Love with the Omniscient Pablo PistachioWe had a news conference the other day, and though my boss had something important to say, he didn't get quoted as much as the other company on the platform.
Olga Gromova: From Classical Pianist to Fashion Designer
Olga Gromova is the embodiment of the George Elliott quote: "It's never too late to be who you might have been."
An ad can win awards without winning over hearts and minds. An ad can strike one's funny bone and leave the consumer laughing, but without a clue as to the name of the product or its attributes.Survivor Jorge Intriago: Go-To Guy for FDI
Having eschewed the safer career path that led through Moscow, Jorge Intriago came to Kyiv in 1995 with a two-year contract and a sense of adventure.
One of the legendary quotes to have come from the American space program was. "Failure is not an option." The words were supposedly spoken by NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz in Mission Control..Playing the Brand Game
Facebook and Amazon keep customers in a perpetual state of discovery. Whether it's to stay in tune with what your friends are doing, or to discover a new artist...That Cost Too Much
In media training, we always say there are no bad questions, only bad answers. The same is true when meeting sales objections.A Note on Social Media Relevance
The good people over at ExactTarget and CoTweet recently released a study detailing some interesting stats on consumer interaction with "social" brands...Natalia Fesyun: The Belle of Bel Ukraine
For Natalia Fesyun, life has come full circle: She began her business career in the food industry after completing a degree as a food industry engineer at Kyiv State University of Food Technology.