Excitement and Challenges

I started this business almost 20 years ago because I felt our industry—which is exciting and a great way to make a living—could be more fundamentally important to our clients’ businesses. I left other agencies and created my own because I felt advertising and communications could make a stronger contribution than they have. I personally enjoy a business that combines the challenges of strategic and creative thinking, and this business is unique since you must be able to link the two ways of thinking. Finally, it’s interesting to have only people and their minds as the assets that help build businesses. We do not have plants and equipment. We do not have giant factories. What we do have is a community of people and their talents, their goodwill and their intelligence. Having a talented group focused on helping businesses with tangible goods to sell is an incredible experience, for us as an agency and for our client partners. This is a fascinating business, and there is a lot of opportunity to make it more important with clients and with marketers.

The exciting part, and part of our enormous responsibility, is manifesting what a company tries to say, do, or be. While a lot of people look at our business as show business—we do television commercials and are perceived to be all about creativity—our real responsibility is to translate a business, promotion, or offer and make it publicly visible. It is an exciting thing to do but also requires responsibility because a business plan is a business plan and a strategy is a strategy, but until it becomes visible and creative nobody knows about it. We make visible that to which a company aspires, in the most visible of ways.

One of the challenges is trying to help a company get focused and energized about what they are offering. Often clients and companies are not in entire agreement internally about who they are, what they should be, and what they should say. We work very hard on behalf of our clients to make sure they are focused and unified. I think that is a big obligation for agencies and a major pitfall if it does not happen.

There is always the other challenge of investing a client’s money properly. We are given lots of room to spend and invest. A big challenge is how to best spend and invest on behalf of a client’s business and brand. By investing in only what’s important (what makes sense for the target audience and what will build the brand and drive sales concurrently), an agency can truly help grow its client’s business.

Finally, we have a social responsibility. We are operating in an environment of incredible economic and social change. The context in which people receive images and messages about companies, clients, and marketers today is dramatically different than it was only a few decades ago. Our industry really needs to be socially conscious as we make our clients visible.

We also need to stay abreast of the changes that are going on in the advertising world, in our client’s businesses, and in the business world at-large. What do you do to stay on top of your advertising knowledge? You check in with several different worlds. The first is the client world: you can never lose touch with what real clients are dealing with every day. You learn a lot just from your client immersion and understanding in real time what is going on. We subscribe to all sorts of information services and get real-time perspectives on our clients, their categories, and business at-large. A number of outside consulting firms keep us abreast of what is going on in a given industry. I am fortunate to be involved in several forums and think tanks where I am with people who are also thinking about what is next. Staying immersed and educated in as many dimensions as we can and using that to fuel our idea of how we help our clients is vital.