Small Agency Diary

Dinner With a Few Small Agency Bloggers

A Brief Glimpse From the Big Easy

Posted by Phil Johnson on 07.19.10 @ 03:02 PM

Phil Johnson

Be warned, you will derive no business value from this post. On July 14, I met my fellow Small Agency bloggers -- Bart Cleveland, Marc Brownstein and Tom Martin -- in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in New Orleans. Jennifer Modarelli would have joined us but we didn't know that she was in town. We all got in Tom's white Escalade (remember this detail) and drove to Clancy's for dinner. We were in town to participate in a panel at the first Ad Age Small Agency Conference, and this dinner was a chance to get to know each other before Ad Age's Ken Wheaton interrogated us on our panel the next morning.

How To Get Ad Agencies to Work for Free

And Other Tricks of the Trade

Posted by Phil Johnson on 07.14.10 @ 09:00 AM

Phil Johnson

To provide some light summer reading, I've made a list of a few of the strategies that clients occasionally use to get an agency to throw in some free work, cut its pricing and in general sacrifice profit for a gamble on the future.

Lest you get the wrong idea, I don't buy that clients are wolves preying on innocent agency lambs. When it comes to hiring freelancers and other services, agencies don't hesitate to use their leverage to drive down costs and ask for handouts. Hell, I do it myself. We all negotiate. It's the art of business. The smart agency understands that it's not always about the money and that sometimes it still makes sense to play the game, even when the terms are less than ideal.

A Better Way to Pitch

Time to Trash the Old Way of Doing Capabilities Presentations

Posted by Phil Johnson on 06.24.10 @ 10:22 AM

Phil Johnson

I took an oath when I started an agency that I wasn't going to whine about clients, spec work, and unfair pitch practices. As my grandfather, a carpenter, used to tell the grandkids, "It's indoor work with heat. What's the problem?" I've always gone on the assumption that every business has its own peculiar miseries, and overall we've got it pretty good. Still, being grateful for all the positive parts of our industry doesn't stop me from thinking about how we could make some changes for the better.

How Small Agencies Can Gain a First-Mover Advantage

Time to Make Your Move into Mobile Space

Posted by Phil Johnson on 05.26.10 @ 10:19 AM

Phil Johnson

One of the most difficult challenges for an agency is to recognize early on when a trend goes from being a novelty to becoming an important part of the marketing mix. You jump in too soon and there may not be an audience for your innovative program. You act too late and you can spend years chasing the competition.

It's ironic that often the exuberant early adopters find themselves in heated debate with the armchair skeptics. Unfortunately, both groups often end up stranded on the side of the road. Timing is everything.

What Do Agencies Care About?

Eighteen Months in the Life of The Small Agency Diary

Posted by Phil Johnson on 05.05.10 @ 05:16 PM

Phil Johnson

There are no limits to how far some people will go to waste time. Take me, for example. Faced with a long list of pressing priorities, I decided to reread all the Small Agency Diary posts from the last 18 months and categorize them in some way to see what matters most to bloggers and readers alike. Well actually, Katie Stein, an extremely talented researcher (and niece of Stein Rogan founder Tom Stein, one of my competitors), put together a comprehensive spreadsheet. She created categories for Title, Topics, Post Description, Author, Number of Comments, and Date. We wanted to decipher what agency people like to read about and what topics drew the most passionate responses.

What the Hell Is a Creative Director Supposed to Be?

An Evolving Take on a Key Role at Any Agency

Posted by Phil Johnson on 04.13.10 @ 04:33 PM

Phil Johnson

Looking back over my agency career, I find it frightening that in the early days of PJA Advertising, I was the creative director. Tell that to our current staff, and they would stare at you with disbelief and probably break out laughing. But there was a time when I wrote copy, pitched ideas to clients, built the creative organization and approved all the work that went out the door. This was not always a good thing. Like anybody, I was limited by my own particular tastes, style and judgment. It became increasingly clear that hiring a creative director was what we needed to expand our range.

A Vision for the Future of Account Management

Account People Should Be More Like Entrepreneurs

Posted by Phil Johnson on 03.24.10 @ 02:48 PM

Phil Johnson

Whenever we hire a new person, we engage in an internal debate that always irritates me. It's always about choosing one talent attribute over another. In the creative arena, do you want a great manager, or do you want a creative genius? When it comes to account people, do you want a brilliant strategist, or do you want organizational and project management skills? Maybe it's temperament, but I don't want to choose. If you're reducing people to their component talents, you're thinking too narrowly.

Making an Agency Digital to the Core

Why Digital Natives Are an Essential Ingredient

Posted by Phil Johnson on 03.12.10 @ 01:36 PM

Phil Johnson

I continue to be fascinated by how agencies change and how extraordinarily hard this can be to accomplish. Regardless of the difficulty, it's an essential agency survival skill. Great agencies learn how to continually reinvent themselves to the core, while merely good agencies often only change their outward structure. In some ways this pursuit of change, particularly as agencies define their relevance in the digital world, has been the great advertising drama of the last two years.

The Absolute Best Super Bowl XLIV Ad

It Wasn't What I Expected It Would Be

Posted by Phil Johnson on 02.08.10 @ 04:14 PM

Phil Johnson

It was like a breath of fresh air. It was like walking out of a noisy party into a peaceful spring night. It was remarkably striking in its simplicity. It put the furry animals in perspective. It made all the digital wizardry disappear into the background. It put my consumer exuberance on pause for a brief moment. I actually put down my beer, wiped the grease from the chicken wings off my hands, and picked up my phone. I'm talking about the public service message that flashed across the screen: "Text 'HAITI' to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti." That was the best ad.

The IAgency: How the IPad Will Change the Advertising Business

Or: Why We Should Emulate the Dying Publishing Industry

Posted by Phil Johnson on 02.03.10 @ 11:37 AM

Phil Johnson

For a while, I've been arguing that advertising agencies can learn a lot from the publishing industry about the creation of content, skills they will need if they want to provide more than traditional advertising services. When I made this point in a presentation recently, someone immediately asked why anyone would want to emulate a dying business. My answer was that, even though publishers may be suffering, they know how to create a steady stream of content and distribute it to consumers better than anybody else. They're just struggling with how to make money from all the digital channels.

What a difference a week makes. With Apple's announcement of the iPad last Wednesday, publishers may have just gotten a reprieve from their death sentence, and agencies may have just been handed a convenient way to get into the content business.