A change in perspective.

A few months ago I sent out an e-mail to promote my freelance advertising services. It was a quick way to reach out to business owners, so I cast my line literally hundreds of times and waited for bites.

The law of averages paid off and I attracted six potential clients. The first company to respond was an adult entertainment club. I met Steve, the middle-aged strip club owner who had a very common problem with slow weeknights. He explained that he’d worked in hospitality for sixteen years and that it makes no difference whether you’re the local fish and chip store or the trendiest university bar in town, the weeknights are always quiet. Having lived in the heart of the Auckland CBD I knew what he meant. Even Auckland’s most prominent bars, restaurants and clubs rely on a good All Blacks game to stay afloat.

Speaking with Steve, I quickly learned that the common marketing solution to the Monday - Friday drought is to come up with a big weekend idea and a plan to suck every cent out of anyone looking for a good time. Hopefully by the end of the night you’ll be counting the cash and the low weeknight turnaround will be insignificant.

We explored a number of ideas that would make weekends more exciting and eventful but we arrived at one conclusion: consumers are tired of clichéd advertising lines that promises an unforgettable weekend experience. Besides, it’s always risky to give customers great expectations because if you can’t deliver, they might not come back.

After mulling over the brief for a few days, I realised that Steve’s biggest challenge was one obvious solution: a quiet strip club has a higher ratio of dancers to customers, which of course means that one customer can enjoy the attention of more dancers. This would allow Steve to let in only a handful of customers at a time and thus make his club exclusive instead of quiet. Best of all, the idea wasn’t difficult or expensive to trial. We had simply turned a negative situation into a positive situation through a change in perspective.
 
Ogilvy Executive Creative Director Rory Sutherland suggests “advertising adds value to a product or service by changing our perception, rather than the product or service itself.”
 
In Steve’s case he had identified a problem, namely quiet weeknights, but he hadn’t asked why. As a strip club owner he initially struggled to come to terms with why a strip club would even need to advertise. Surely the lure of scantily clad women was enough? Tapping in to his customer’s mind-set, and changing his own perspective, proved to be the way Steve improved his business.
 
The next time you’re stumped for a good marketing solution, change the way you think about how your customers interact with your business. It worked for Steve, and more importantly, it worked for his customers.

Vodafone's advertising is wasted

Every company has some kind of advertising budget.

Even the smallest one-man bands have to set aside some money for marketing their business, whether that’s printing flyers, running a simple website or placing an ad in the Yellow Pages (when they actually were yellow and pages).

The big players on the other hand pour money into advertising and marketing the same way I pour money into food and travel. A quick look around town and a few hours spent listening to the radio, watching TV or browsing the Internet should give you an idea of the sheer reach and depth of pocket of the larger corporates. As an ex-advertising manager, I’ve had years of exposure to the thought processes of corporations and their ad agencies desperately trying to stand out from the herd. From innovative new campaigns to name changes and total shifts in direction, I’ve more or less seen it all.

And after my years in sales and marketing, I’ve come to a final conclusion re. advertising, and it’s one that should be obvious to everyone who’s in business but for some reason, it’s not.

It doesn’t matter how much you spend on advertising, if your products and or services aren’t up to speed, then you will never be as successful as you could be.

This brings me to Vodafone New Zealand as an example of rendering advertising worthless, or at least worth less than it should be. I’ve been a Vodafone mobile customer since I first arrived on these fair shores 15 years ago. The service has generally been okay, much of a muchness compared to all the other players… well, let’s make that the other player seeing as there was a duopoly in place for much of that time. Arguably, there still is but that’s a tale for another day.

I’ve never used Vodafone for home Internet or landline services, preferring to just stick with Spark but after being out of the country for the last year or so, I ended up encountering Vodafone landline-based Internet in a big way for the first time. I’ve been staying with family and friends for the month I’m in New Zealand, and all three of the places I’ve stayed have had the familiar white and red Vodafone router stashed in a room somewhere. The sight of that router has begun to fill me with intense trepidation.

You see, my partner runs an online business that needs to have decent Internet access. She doesn’t need mega speed or gamer-type pings, just enough to make international Skype video calls or VOIP calls. But we apparently can’t do that with any degree of certainty in any of the houses with a Vodafone fixed-line.

Funny that. We managed in Bali, and not just in Ubub and Denpasar. We coped in some far-flung towns on the north coast of the Island; areas where the Internet infrastructure isn’t exactly flash. But not in NZ. How’s that possible?

We were of course also fine in the USA, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand. But in New Zealand, the calls drop out with unerring regularity, even in Auckland and Tauranga. This is when we need to fall back to the 3G or 4G on my iPhone (powered by Vodafone ironically enough). That connection is much more consistent, even if it’s not as quick but the price is just silly. I won’t grill Vodafone too much in that regard – the other players are pretty much just as bad in terms of their outrageous data pricing. I fondly remember getting 4.5Gb of mobile data (and 3G speeds close to 20Mb at times) on Thailand’s AIS mobile network for around $15, not the 1Gb for $29 that I get from Vodafone (and yes, I know about the unlimited texts and the 200 minutes). 

Anyway, back to the landlines – wondering if it was just our bad luck, I started asking around. I asked friends and family, and I asked on the social feed of a technology site I run. The verdict quickly became clear – almost overwhelmingly, Vodafone fixed line Internet access doesn’t seem to be highly regarded. The reason most people give for staying with Vodafone is that all the other ISPs are just as bad. So perhaps Vodafone is hanging onto some of its fixed line market share purely because of consumer apathy?

But this will eventually reflect on their bottom line. Sooner or later, one of the other players will start delivering measurably better service instead of something that resembles the bad days of early New Zealand ADSL when micro-outages were common. And they’ll find a compelling way to tell Kiwis about it, or just wait for word-of-mouth to make it plain. At that point, Vodafone can kiss a huge swathe of clients goodbye.

Which brings us to the moral of the story. How much money are you spending on advertising that’s being wasted because some part of your organisation isn’t quite running up to speed?

Is it your gruff-sounding, uninvolved receptionist who makes your customers want to call someone else? Eventually they will, and it’ll be your competition on the other end of the line. Or is it your call centre’s inability to think outside the box while rigidly adhering to their call scripts? Maybe a product with a lid that tends to spill liquid when the container is shaken? A rep in a branded company car that drives like a madman? Every one of these things can and will impact your company.

No business is perfect, which is why the people at the top need to be rigorously auditing every part of the machine to find and eliminate the weaknesses, whether that be product, people or processes. Find a way to improve your company in some small way every day and you’ll be stunned at what you end up with. Unless the rot does in fact come from the top, in which case, you might as well fire the marketing team and shut the doors because eventually, the competition will eat you alive.

Spend a dollar improving your company before you spend a dollar telling people about it. You’ll be far better off in the long run.

How can you work without passion?

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the staff just don’t care? They don’t have to walk over to your table and declare that they don’t give a damn; you just know they don’t.

I’m not too sure why, it could be a number of things but what happens when the management doesn’t care either? What happens when they care even less?

Last week I was at a client. We were having a meeting with a web design company; they’re very well known, they have 25 staff, posh offices with a foosball table, and for diplomatic reasons, I can’t name them, but let’s refer to them as “The Company”.

About a minute or so into their presentation I knew that “The Company” just didn’t care. I had my suspicions about this right from the start. You see, it had been exactly five weeks to the day since I first approached “The Company” to generate a quote to upgrade my client’s website. In all honesty, it shouldn’t have taken them five weeks to get the quote done, but it did.

Twenty minutes into their presentation, after they had spoken at great length about their own awesomeness and the majesty of their client list, they simply left without even going into the actual numbers they’d been asked to present. Instead, they handed us a bound document and walked out.

When I finally found the quote (and it was skillfully hidden in the middle of the doc and not on the last page) I was amazed. Amazed because they wanted $45,000 to do the job and they weren’t even prepared to discuss it or substantiate it or even allow us to query it.

In this situation, the rot started at the top. The head of “The Company”, who’s been in charge for 15 years, took us through the presentation so I can’t say this is the fault of some junior execs that were too unprepared or cocky to believe they could fail. Right from the very start, it was clear to see that the only way to get passion out of “The Company” was to buy it. And apparently 45k simply isn’t enough.

There are lots of people out there who are passionate beyond belief and who don’t need Steve Jobs to tell them to do what they love because they knew it before they knew who Steve Jobs was. They know they will not find their passion in a call centre or behind a counter at a Burger King. They are the lucky few that will be labelled either crackpot or genius. To them I say don’t give up. Don’t let those that have lost their passion destroy yours. But once you find your success and you make your mark, don’t let your own success poison your passion like it did at “The Company”.

From one Junior Creative to another

There’s a true story about an advertising graduate who put herself into a coffin and had it delivered to a Creative Director’s office in Wellington. When the coffin arrived, she popped up and said: “I’m dying to work here”. She didn’t get the job.

Some advertising graduates go to extraordinary lengths to be noticed by a Creative Director. After all, seeking employment in an advertising agency can be a very daunting and challenging prospect for a young creative.  Like many creative industries there is an abundance of candidates competing for only a handful of positions. An Art Director once told me that advertising agencies are looking for someone who can “put a man on the moon!” When I asked him to elaborate, he explained that the ideal creative is someone who can find a way to do the impossible without going over budget and without going off brief.  Sounds pretty straightforward?  If you’re a graduate and you’re not still nodding away at this point then typically you’ll be the type to settle down in another department or rethink your career options altogether. Those who possess that killer instinct will be quick to put their hand up. The reality is that the right candidate probably wouldn’t be able to meet all of those expectations, but they would be prepared to give it a damn good try and that is what’s important. Apparently advertising agencies are looking for someone who is tenacious, confident in their creative ability and also incredibly resilient. These individuals view an advertising agency as a channel through which they can express their creative flare. They’re excited about a career in advertising because they’re confident that one day they may be part of a revolutionary Google campaign that will reach millions of people worldwide or perhaps they’ll put a man on the moon as part of a game-changing Red Bull campaign.  
 
It is plain to see why self-confidence is essential in the advertising industry - if the creative isn’t confident in their own ideas then why should the client feel any different? The industry is not always friendly nor is it very forgiving and young creatives are prone to being a bit sceptical and hyper critical of their ideas. This can lead to a state of paralysis. While studying at Award School of Advertising, every week I was required to present campaign concepts to experienced Copywriters and Art Directors at a critique session. Presentations involved standing up at long conference tables and sharing ideas to a room full of intimidating creatives and my twelve peers who were competing with me for the Executive Creative Director’s attention.
 
Initially I developed a terrible habit of discarding ideas that I felt weren’t impressive or eye-opening. But, when the work load increased, I couldn’t afford to discard ideas otherwise I simply wouldn’t have enough work to present. This taught me a valuable lesson. You don’t need to be afraid of bad ideas, instead you just need to focus on turning them into great ideas.
 
When I recently freelanced at Partisan Advertising this lesson became the law. Each week I would sit down with Greg Kramer for a few hours at a time and together we would create three piles of options. A pile of good ideas, a pile of potentially good ideas and a pile of ideas that need to be turned into good ideas. The process is incredibly satisfying, not only because it is exciting but because there really isn’t any other time when problems are resolved in such a matter-of-fact way. It is like going through a mediation process; only you simply must arrive at a positive outcome in a relatively short period of time because at the end of the day there is a client to please. Working in my first official Art Director role at Partisan Advertising I realise that I really am quite fortunate to be in this industry. Being employed to produce campaign concepts is an occupation that many naysayers believe is a myth.  There are times when the work does feel too good to be true. Aside from being paid to be creative, you also get to enjoy the satisfaction of watching your ideas be professionally executed and sometimes you get to bask in the client’s contentment with the results. A Senior Art Director warned me that eventually the novelty does wear off, but for the time being the challenges are absolutely worth embracing.