Tag Archive for Innovation

The Future of Advertising Agencies

Forrester is selling a report titled, “The Future Of Agency Relationships” with a subtitle of “Marketers Need To Lead Agency Change In The Adaptive Marketing Era”.

The report encourages marketing leaders to re-evaluate their relationships with advertising agencies and in the process suggest that agencies should continually reinvent themselves to serve their clients. They suggest that we are entering an “Adaptive Marketing” era and must quickly adapt to changes in marketing strategy, media, technology, and society. In this era, mass media may no longer be the foundation of marketing communication, forcing yet more changes in the expectations of what marketing agencies can and should deliver.

Dean’s Mailing has many ideas and resources to help you use technology to be found and communicate with your customers and likely buyers in a way that they will appreciate and not view as an annoyance.

Tips for Giving Advice

What is the best way to give advice and feedback? Why do you want to get better at the art of giving good, old-fashioned advice. It is less about the quality of advice and more about the way it’s delivered. The way advice is given can inadvertently increase the receiver’s resistance to hearing it or acting on it, which is a shame, because that undoes the best of intentions. You want the advisee to come away with good advice, rather than bad feelings about the advisor. A post on BNET offered four tips on how to give advice well.

  1. There is a difference between solicited and unsolicited advice. Both are fine ways to be helpful, but remember that the unsolicited variety may not always be welcome, so the recipient might be more vulnerable to a bruised ego if you push the advice too far.
  2. Say thank you first. This applies to solicited advice. Before offering any of your wisdom, express some gratitude for being asked. After all, it’s flattering to be seen as wise and helpful. We don’t know anyone who doesn’t like being asked for advice. In fact, doing so is one of the best ways to deepen a relationship, because it’s a mutually gratifying human interaction and flattering without being obsequious.
  3. Make sure you understand the limits of the question. There’s nothing more annoying than asking for advice on one thing (like “What do I need to do to get a promotion?”) and getting advice on your marriage and your vacations plans, with a few golf tips thrown in. Stick to the subject at hand, unless somehow there’s a connection.
  4. Be confident, but not arrogant. This distinction is blurry for some. There really is a difference between coming across as authoritative (presumably the solicitor wouldn’t be seeking your advice if they didn’t think you knew your stuff) as opposed to authoritarian (using your power to compel someone to follow your advice, or being pathologically certain that you’re always right). Being authoritative can be done with humility, like saying “I’ve seen a lot of situations like this, and I’m concerned”. An authoritarian way of giving the same advice might be, “Look, you have to do this now, or I’ll do it for you.” The latter is obnoxious, off-putting, and not helpful.
  5. Give the recipient an “out”. This is related to No. 4. While there’s plenty of room for passion in the giving advice, a bit of humility also helps. You can say, for instance, that you’ve seen such-and-such approach work for yourself and for others, but it might not be for everybody. Or you can preface it with a turn of phrase like, “I’m not sure about this, but I think you could benefit from doing x, y, and z.” Or my personal favorite: “Have you considered…?”
  6. After giving advice, ask how it sounds. Often the best advice is created in an iterative way, rather than being delivered from on high. So after you’re done expounding, ask the recipient if that makes sense, or how they might feel about acting on your advice. Their reactions can help you refine it together and make it even more meaningful.
  7. Ask for follow-up. Not only does it show you care if you ask your advice-seeker to let you know how it goes, but it also conveys that you have a stake in giving good advice. Whether or not they take you up on the offer, it will leave them feeling even better about you and more confident in acting on what you’ve shared.

Giving advice is one of life’s great gifts, especially when it turns out that we were right. We are also grateful for all the good advice we’ve received over the years.

Cameron and Jobs: Passionate Leadership

To celebrate the release of Avatar on DVD we thought we would share some similarities offered by BNET of two innovative leaders by looking at traits which produce incredible innovation. In fact, following any of these styles could get you fired — unless you have the inspiration genius that can deliver results like Cameron and Jobs.

Bonding Through Innovation

Cameron. “Breaking new ground is Cameron’s raison d’être — nothing interests this man unless it’s hard to do,” wrote Rebecca Keegan on HBR.org. “But innovation has also become a way of bonding his teams… For Cameron, a sense of exploration isn’t just personally enriching, it’s a crucial tool for motivating and uniting his teams.”

Jobs. When Jobs created the original Macintosh team in the early 1980s, he moved the group to a remote building on the Apple campus, raised a pirate flag above the roof, and moved in a popcorn machine to give his people a sense of esprit de corps. Today, management experts prefer you unite your groups rather than pitting them against each other, but they also love the idea of inspiring your team with sense of purpose they can rally around.

More Perfection, Please

Cameron. On Avatar, Keegan reports, “Hours were spent on the smallest details, like getting alien sap to drip precisely right…. It’s hard to argue with Cameron’s nitpicky style, however, when audiences thrill to immerse themselves in the richly detailed worlds he creates.”

Jobs: Just weeks before launch of the original iPhone, Apple decided to replace the plastic touch screen with optical-quality glass. The change not only delayed the introduction, but caused its screen vendor, Balda, to reconfigure parts of its assembly line “causing a material impact on financials,” according to AppleInsider. For Jobs, however, the aesthetic of the product would have been ruined by an inferior screen.

Inspiration Through Fear

Again, not a great trait you’d teach to MBAs, but both Cameron and Jobs are stern taskmasters who demand the most of their employees, and occasionally cross the line to get it.

Cameron. “Many Cameron alumni will share a story from their first film with him, a day they were sure they were going to be fired, almost hoped for it. But Cameron rarely fires people. ‘Firing is too merciful,’ he says. Instead he tests their endurance for long hours, hard tasks, and harsh criticism. Survivors tend to surprise themselves by turning in the best work of their careers, and signing on for Cameron’s next project.”

Jobs. “”It was probably the best work I ever did,” former Apple designer Corsdell Ratzlaff told Inside Steve’s Brain author Leander Kahaney. “It was exhilratating. It was exciting. Sometimes it was difficult, but he had the ability to pull the best out of people.”

If these men, both brilliant in their own fields, managed by the book, they may not have been nearly as successful. What they share is passion for the work, and their management styles both demand and instill passion in the people that work around them.

How can we help you be passionate and innovative with your marketing?