What Companies Need to Know to Make Their Advertising Agencies More Effective

Go through a magazine and pick out the advertisements you like best. You will probably pick those with beautiful illustrations, or clever copy. You forget to ask yourself whether your favorite advertisements would make you want to buy the product. --David Ogilvy

What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same. Go through a magazine and pick out the advertisements you like best. You will probably pick those with beautiful illustrations, or clever copy. You forget to ask yourself whether your favorite advertisements would make you want to buy the product.David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising

Does this sound familiar: you hire an agency for a campaign, but what you get back doesn’t fully capture your brand or it isn’t in line with what you thought you made clear during preliminary meetings? And, you end up running the ad anyway because there’s no time or budget to do anything else.

This isn’t out of the ordinary.

Many agencies try to convince their clients that they have unique expertise and creativity that the client doesn’t have access to without them.

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November 15, 2019 by

Reward The Creative Process, Not The Outcome

To create a company where creativity is driving force, you have to reward the creative process--the behavior--not the outcome.

Yet everyone should be cautious not to make something impossible that nature would not allow, unless it would be that one wanted to make a dream work, in which case one may mix together every kind of creature.Albrecht Dürer, Four Books on Proportion1

When people think about creativity, they typically think of it in terms of three Ps: Person, Problem, and Product. A person solves a problem in a new way and creates a new product.

The problem with thinking about creativity in this way is that it ignores the fourth and most important P: the Process.

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November 8, 2019 by

Fail Forward

When you’re creating innovations, you’re likely not going to get it exactly right the first time. You’re going to fail. 

Failure’s relation to producing creative results has to do with how people perceive failure. It is related to what psychologists call goal orientation. Goal orientation operates at the individual level and is driven by both individual and environmental factors. Continue Reading

November 1, 2019 by

Constant Learning Increases Creativity

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experience. But if you have the same experiences as everybody else, you’re unlikely to look in a different direction.Steve Jobs in Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head

Highly creative people don’t have special abilities. But, many of them naturally do what others have to train to do.

And, training to be creative begins with constant learning. 

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October 25, 2019 by

The Two Biggest Problems With Data

Don’t get me wrong: I love data. But, I have issues with the way businesses treat data.

There are two main problems with data: one is the way it’s collected and the other is the way it’s used.

The problem with the way it’s collected is that more is treated as better. 

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October 19, 2019 by

The Power of Consistency in Branding

Consistency-Heinz-Branding

Successful Brands Are …

Successful brands are many things. To appeal to customers, organizations must be credible, with actions that are in alignment with their messaging. There must be no disconnection between what a brand promises and what it delivers.

A brand must be meaningful, with specific relevance to customers’ lives. Successful brands are unique, with a distinct identity in the marketplace. Successful brands are holistic, meeting customers’ needs on multiple levels. Successful brands are sustainable, engaged in business practices they can maintain over the long term.

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October 11, 2019 by

3 Forces That Motivate Your Customers’ Decisions

3-Forces-That-Motivate-Your-Customers-Decisions
Do you know what motivates your customers to buy from you?

Do you know why they choose one brand over another?

Do you know what drives one customer to become loyal while many others do not?

These are important questions, the answers to which will inform virtually everything your organization does.

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October 4, 2019 by

Clarity: The Most Important Advantage in Business

Make Purpose Your Bouncer -Priya Parker

Make purpose your bouncer.Priya Parker1

If you had 100% clarity, every decision would be obvious. How great would that be?

Although 100% clarity isn’t possible—none of us are oracles that can predict the future—it is possible to achieve much greater levels of clarity than your competitors because if your competitors are like most businesses, they’re operating in a light fog instead of clear air.

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September 27, 2019 by

Only Coachable Managers Should Lead Teams

Your job as a manager is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together. —Julie Zhuo

It seems obvious that you should hire managers that want to make the organization better. Yet, few organizations evaluate people based on their desire to serve the organization’s purpose. 

This often results in a broken leadership system that is about self-promotion rather than the betterment of the organization and everyone the organization affects.

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September 21, 2019 by

Does What You’re Measuring Matter?

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.Marilyn Strathern, “Improving Ratings” in European Review

In the face of the current complex business environment, most businesses strive to seek the simplified so that they can gain clarity and make effective decisions quickly.

It’s this desire that has produced flawed metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a single measure that supposedly predicts business growth.1 Despite the desire, there is no holy grail metric: The original NPS study only verified past behavior, despite claims of being able to predict future behavior; and, there is enough evidence that should make any company hesitant to use it as an indicator.234

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September 13, 2019 by