“Ad Big Wig”

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.

But now that I own my own shop, in a different era, I watched last night's Super Bowl spots and thought, "What kind of creative talent does a small agency need in 2010?"

There was much debate on whether Pepsi made the right choice not to participate in the Super Bowl commercial spectacle. Ironically, most of those who bought commercials didn't participate either. No one wants to do a great commercial for the Super Bowl anymore. It looks like we're just out of ideas. But if the future Super Bowl commercials are like […]

A focus group is an extremely artificial environment in which to see an ad, where the viewers are attentively awaiting presentation of the commercials that they will judge. Sound familiar?

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.

Even as anchormen became anchorwomen and news teams became more racially diverse, a sameness of product emerged on the late local news. Each TV station followed the next. Man-and-woman anchor teams. Incessant coverage of house fires and crime scenes. Helicopters. Oh, and the weather. Hyperbolic coverage of weather, each with a different, but similar sounding […]

More and more, I'm hearing about agencies who are approaching the conference with aggressive business-development goals. And each year, there's a growing army of marketing folk in attendance, so there's likely a Texas-size gaggle of potential clients to share barbecue with.

I won't comment on why much of an agency's compensation has shifted from monthly fees to project-based ones. That is a whole posting unto itself. What I prefer to discuss now is how to prepare your agency to thrive in a largely project-based world.

As AgileCat enters its 10th year, I can look back with few regrets. But if I had to pick one, it's that I didn't put enough effort into making the culture extraordinary. Since the beginning of 2010, my focus has been wholly on our culture, and I can feel the positive results already.

Utopia does not exist. But while this type of rhetoric may sound ethereal, we do believe that talking about these values -- at the inception of a relationship -- can have a significant impact on agency-client relationships. Think of it as having the hard conversations with your clients, before they ever get hard.