Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.
Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.
The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.
It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.
Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.
1. Be T-Shaped
Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.
“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.
Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.
T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.
Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.
2. Test, Fail and Learn
Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.
Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.
One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.
3. Leverage PR 2.0
PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.
Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?
Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.
Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.
4. Bootstrap It
If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.
Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.
As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.
5. Open Up to Feedback
Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.
Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”
John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.
This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.
More Business Resources from Mashable:
- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline
Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins
For more Startups coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
It's time for the U.S. Senate to ratify the new arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia (New START).
The treaty's benefits are clear and concrete (PDF). Each side would reduce its nuclear stockpile by about one-third. Each side would adhere to an effective, multi-faceted monitoring scheme -- including satellite reconnaissance, on-site inspections, and extensive information exchanges -- that would ensure compliance with the agreement. The treaty would also set the stage for enhanced U.S. and Russian cooperation on urgent issues such as curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions and securing nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. And it would signal to the rest of the world that the United States and Russia -- which together account for over 90% of the world's more than 20,000 nuclear weapons -- are serious about their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty calls for existing nuclear weapons states to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals in exchange for other signatories agreeing not to develop nuclear weapons.
The fewer nuclear weapons there are, the safer we all will be. New START offers an important step in the right direction.
So why hasn't the Senate ratified the treaty yet? First, the administration needed to make the case for the treaty, with a particular focus on Republican skeptics whose votes were needed to reach the 67 vote total needed to ratify a treaty. But that case has been made. There have been 18 hearings, dozens of briefings, hundreds of questions answered at the request of individual Senators, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports, analysis, and testimony. An impressive bipartisan group of experts, including national security advisors and secretaries of state and defense from the Reagan, Bush (father and son) and Clinton administrations, has endorsed the treaty. So have all of the nation's top military leaders, along with key retired leaders like seven former commanders of U.S. nuclear forces.
So what is the holdup? Laura Rozen of Politico got hold of a memo by a staffer from the Senate Republican Policy Committee that purports to supply the reasons why the Senate should delay any vote on the treaty. In fact, the memo acknowledges that two of the main objections raised by the treaty's critics have already been addressed.
The first issue is "nuclear modernization" -- the ability to build a new generation of nuclear delivery vehicles and to preserve the reliability of existing warheads in the context of an upgraded nuclear weapons complex. There are serious questions about whether spending in these areas is in fact needed at a time when U.S. and Rusian arsenals are being reduced. But whatever one may think about building a shiny new weapons complex at a time when a growing number of world leaders are calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the Republican memo notes that New START will "preserve the ability of the United States to modernize its nuclear forces." The real complaint is that the Obama administration is not doing so quickly enough, even though it is spending more on the nuclear weapons complex than even the George W. Bush administration did.
As Linton Brooks, the head of the nuclear weapons complex in the Bush administration, said in April, "I'd have killed for that budget and that much high-level attention" during the Bush years compared to the Obama years.
A second major issue raised by Republican skeptics has been whether New START constrains the United States from developing whatever kind of missile defense system it chooses to. It does not. The Republican memo notes that this "may be a true statement," but that the real question is how much money and effort the Obama administration is willing to devote to missile defense. As with nuclear modernization, this is an issue of administration policy that has no direct link to the New START treaty. The treaty allows any administration to pursue as extensive a missile defense system as it desires; it does not, and should not, dictate what shape that system should take, or how much should be spent on it. That is an ongoing policy issue.
Holding New START hostage to the policy preferences of some -- not all -- Republican skeptics makes no sense. New START is valuable in its own right, and it will make us all safer by reducing the number of nuclear weapons in both Russia and the United States. Debates over what kind of missile defense system to build, or how much to spend on modernizing nuclear delivery vehicles and the nuclear warhead complex, should be pursued on their own merits, outside the context of the treaty.
The Senate should ratify New START before the end of the year, during its lame duck session. There is no good reason to wait, and there are a number of very good reasons to move forward now.
benchcraft company scamTablet-only Publication Coming from News Corp. ... Talking to press outside an investor conference in Spain, James Murdoch said that News Corp was working on a tablet-only publication focused mainly on the U.S. market (Reuters). ...
caption id="attachment_100064194" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="An anti-racism workshop in progress"] Yesterday, after I wrote that “the EU, multiculturalism, the Equalities Act, anti-racism, hat...
Good news: Feds to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks for some reason.
benchcraft company scam Pedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.
Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.
The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.
It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.
Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.
1. Be T-Shaped
Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.
“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.
Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.
T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.
Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.
2. Test, Fail and Learn
Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.
Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.
One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.
3. Leverage PR 2.0
PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.
Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?
Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.
Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.
4. Bootstrap It
If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.
Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.
As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.
5. Open Up to Feedback
Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.
Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”
John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.
This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.
More Business Resources from Mashable:
- What’s the Value in a Brand Name?/> - HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads/> - HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence/> - Top 5 Qualities to Look for in Startup Job Candidates/> - Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline
Images courtesy of MadMenYourself & class='blippr-nobr'>Flickrclass="blippr-nobr">Flickr, jolien_vallins
For more Startups coverage:
class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Startupsclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Startups channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad
It's time for the U.S. Senate to ratify the new arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia (New START).
The treaty's benefits are clear and concrete (PDF). Each side would reduce its nuclear stockpile by about one-third. Each side would adhere to an effective, multi-faceted monitoring scheme -- including satellite reconnaissance, on-site inspections, and extensive information exchanges -- that would ensure compliance with the agreement. The treaty would also set the stage for enhanced U.S. and Russian cooperation on urgent issues such as curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions and securing nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. And it would signal to the rest of the world that the United States and Russia -- which together account for over 90% of the world's more than 20,000 nuclear weapons -- are serious about their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty calls for existing nuclear weapons states to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals in exchange for other signatories agreeing not to develop nuclear weapons.
The fewer nuclear weapons there are, the safer we all will be. New START offers an important step in the right direction.
So why hasn't the Senate ratified the treaty yet? First, the administration needed to make the case for the treaty, with a particular focus on Republican skeptics whose votes were needed to reach the 67 vote total needed to ratify a treaty. But that case has been made. There have been 18 hearings, dozens of briefings, hundreds of questions answered at the request of individual Senators, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports, analysis, and testimony. An impressive bipartisan group of experts, including national security advisors and secretaries of state and defense from the Reagan, Bush (father and son) and Clinton administrations, has endorsed the treaty. So have all of the nation's top military leaders, along with key retired leaders like seven former commanders of U.S. nuclear forces.
So what is the holdup? Laura Rozen of Politico got hold of a memo by a staffer from the Senate Republican Policy Committee that purports to supply the reasons why the Senate should delay any vote on the treaty. In fact, the memo acknowledges that two of the main objections raised by the treaty's critics have already been addressed.
The first issue is "nuclear modernization" -- the ability to build a new generation of nuclear delivery vehicles and to preserve the reliability of existing warheads in the context of an upgraded nuclear weapons complex. There are serious questions about whether spending in these areas is in fact needed at a time when U.S. and Rusian arsenals are being reduced. But whatever one may think about building a shiny new weapons complex at a time when a growing number of world leaders are calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the Republican memo notes that New START will "preserve the ability of the United States to modernize its nuclear forces." The real complaint is that the Obama administration is not doing so quickly enough, even though it is spending more on the nuclear weapons complex than even the George W. Bush administration did.
As Linton Brooks, the head of the nuclear weapons complex in the Bush administration, said in April, "I'd have killed for that budget and that much high-level attention" during the Bush years compared to the Obama years.
A second major issue raised by Republican skeptics has been whether New START constrains the United States from developing whatever kind of missile defense system it chooses to. It does not. The Republican memo notes that this "may be a true statement," but that the real question is how much money and effort the Obama administration is willing to devote to missile defense. As with nuclear modernization, this is an issue of administration policy that has no direct link to the New START treaty. The treaty allows any administration to pursue as extensive a missile defense system as it desires; it does not, and should not, dictate what shape that system should take, or how much should be spent on it. That is an ongoing policy issue.
Holding New START hostage to the policy preferences of some -- not all -- Republican skeptics makes no sense. New START is valuable in its own right, and it will make us all safer by reducing the number of nuclear weapons in both Russia and the United States. Debates over what kind of missile defense system to build, or how much to spend on modernizing nuclear delivery vehicles and the nuclear warhead complex, should be pursued on their own merits, outside the context of the treaty.
The Senate should ratify New START before the end of the year, during its lame duck session. There is no good reason to wait, and there are a number of very good reasons to move forward now.
bench craft company scamTablet-only Publication Coming from News Corp. ... Talking to press outside an investor conference in Spain, James Murdoch said that News Corp was working on a tablet-only publication focused mainly on the U.S. market (Reuters). ...
caption id="attachment_100064194" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="An anti-racism workshop in progress"] Yesterday, after I wrote that “the EU, multiculturalism, the Equalities Act, anti-racism, hat...
Good news: Feds to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks for some reason.
benchcraft company scambenchcraft company scam
benchcraft company scamTablet-only Publication Coming from News Corp. ... Talking to press outside an investor conference in Spain, James Murdoch said that News Corp was working on a tablet-only publication focused mainly on the U.S. market (Reuters). ...
caption id="attachment_100064194" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="An anti-racism workshop in progress"] Yesterday, after I wrote that “the EU, multiculturalism, the Equalities Act, anti-racism, hat...
Good news: Feds to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks for some reason.
benchcraft company scamPedro Sorrentino is the first international student to attend Boulder Digital Works, a graduate school based in Boulder, Colorado that exists to build the next generation of digital professionals. Prior to moving to the States, he was the head of marketing and PR for Mediamind (Nasdaq: MDMD) in São Paulo, Brazil, his homeland.
Although startups and Madison Avenue agencies are perceived to have little in common, coffee shop-hopping entrepreneurs and modern “Don Drapers” actually share more characteristics than you might think, and they can learn a lot from one another.
The most valuable assets for startups are time and team. When working on a big idea with little money and a short time to make it real, Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate mantra “move fast and break things” is particularly a propos. Getting user feedback and making (and then fixing) mistakes as quickly as possible can help startups avoid bigger problems and bring home the bacon in the long run.
It seems that now, more than ever, it’s time for “Mad Men” everywhere to heed the advice of the entrepreneurs setting up shop in basements and coffee shops around the world.
Here are five lessons Madison Avenue can learn from startups. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.
1. Be T-Shaped
Big multinational advertising behemoths that hit their stride before the rise of the web often struggle to deliver high-quality digital and interactive work. In many cases, a hesitance to move forward or a lack of technical knowledge within a company’s talent base are at the root of this.
“Startups are most likely to have a small team. Consider eight people and a situation where four or five of them are programmers. They are not just going to do technical stuff. There’s a demand to have a broader line of thought, since there’s no one else around to do the work,” says John Keehler, principal at ClickHere, the digital division for The Richards Group.
Marketers should strive to be T-shaped professionals. This concept was born inside the creative agency Ideo and is about professionals with versatility and the ability to think like a designer or a programmer, even if you work with marketing.
T-shaped professionals have a broad view of things. In startups, this is a reality, but when it comes to big agencies, people tend to be divided in silos.
Advice for Madison Avenue: It’s important to have a wide vision and understanding of everyone who’s involved with the campaign that you’re working on. This versatility saves time and brings more ideas to the table.
2. Test, Fail and Learn
Brent Daily is the COO and co-founder of RoundPegg, a Boulder-based TechStars startup that provides online HR solutions for discovering professional personalities. He thinks that a good startup culture is one that believes “it’s OK to make mistakes and be a spectacular failure.” On the other hand, he agrees that agencies can’t easily bring this acceptance of failure into their ecosystems — after all, if they fail, their clients also fail and that can represent a huge loss of money.
Agencies should consider testing marketing campaigns and products on the web as “beta tests.” Getting feedback from users via the web is a low cost way to get a feel for how the community will take to ideas. After optimizing based on user feedback, campaigns would then be better prepared to launch on other mediums, such as TV or print. When it comes to digital, users tend to enjoy sharing their opinions and giving solid feedback. “There are so many places to go and test advertising rather than doing expensive focus groups, that the result is usually a pretty low-cost test bid for them,” says Daily.
One good example of open innovation is the startup UserVoice. The service positions itself as “customer feedback 2.0″ and allows companies to ask for feedback on an organized web platform. Perhaps some day more companies will substitute the traditional focus groups for this lower cost web alternative.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Before starting a huge ad campaign and spending millions of dollars on media, use the web as your test arena and get quick feedback from your customers.
3. Leverage PR 2.0
PR 2.0 is the art of using social tools to reach and communicate with key stakeholders. There used to be a time when public relations was all about relationships with journalists and sending out press releases. Taking clients to lunch, picking up the check and smiling was the way to go. This method still exists, but is on its way out.
Public relations is now about the art of dealing with, well, the public. Journalists are still very important, but nothing beats the credibility of your customers, and they are probably already talking about your product. The question is: Are you listening?
Fortunately, there’s less and less space for companies with bad products to succeed by deploying exceptional marketing. We as consumers just don’t accept that anymore. Product quality is the true advantage — attaching that strength to a sound PR strategy enables companies to listen to what consumers are saying, engage them and build brand awareness.
Startups take advantage out of this. When a startup offers a great solution with its product, normally there’s an engaged early adopter community ready to give free feedback. Agencies should take advantage of it, too. What better way to improve your business and its product than getting direct feedback from your core users? Initiatives like Starbucks’s customer feedback and idea generation site mystarbucksidea.com are the right way to go.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that having a great product is key. But listen and allow your early adopters to influence the next meeting with your client’s R&D department.
4. Bootstrap It
If a startup can run for months (or years) without without getting funded, Mad Men can dabble in testing and running campaigns without buying media. Agencies could learn a lot by testing out the old startup method of bootstrapping; that is, getting by without external help and being cautious with expenses.
Startups, for example, use free social tools like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook and YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube all the time to save money and still reach large, influential, highly-targeted audiences. Increasingly, agencies and large advertisers are beginning to catch on and test them out; the Old Spice guy campaign is a very good example of this.
As that campaign proved, a Twitter account and some YouTube videos can go a long way. What’s better is that using these tools is cost effective, even if you count time invested. We know that the Old Spice guy videos were not a simple production, but this campaign was comparatively inexpensive because starting with social media is much cheaper (and oftentimes more powerful) than a TV commercial.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Remember that you can do more with less when you have a good idea and a strong plan for execution.
5. Open Up to Feedback
Good startups spend a lot of time crowdsourcing opinions and getting feedback from their communities and mentors in order to improve their products. Agencies, on the other hand, usually won’t share copy or ideas with one another or their communities until a campaign is ready to launch.
Some agencies though, are finding that it doesn’t hurt to ask others for creative or production input — that’s what Victor & Spoils is all about. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the ad agency calls itself “the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”
John Windsor, Victor & Spoils CEO and former VP of strategy and innovation at CP+B, understands how disruptive new technologies can be, especially when they relate to the ad world. “We’re moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. The rise of the curator class has a new generator of social creative/digital directors,” says Windsor.
This is a company that has tapped into the startup principles and made its business faster, global (it has people from all around the world giving input) and without the legacy issues that you see on Madison Avenue. As time passes, we can draw a line between businesses that embrace change and the ones that fear new ways of doing things.
Advice for Madison Avenue: Embrace change and don’t fear the unknown. Others can help your cause if you give them the right opportunity.
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It's time for the U.S. Senate to ratify the new arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia (New START).
The treaty's benefits are clear and concrete (PDF). Each side would reduce its nuclear stockpile by about one-third. Each side would adhere to an effective, multi-faceted monitoring scheme -- including satellite reconnaissance, on-site inspections, and extensive information exchanges -- that would ensure compliance with the agreement. The treaty would also set the stage for enhanced U.S. and Russian cooperation on urgent issues such as curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions and securing nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. And it would signal to the rest of the world that the United States and Russia -- which together account for over 90% of the world's more than 20,000 nuclear weapons -- are serious about their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty calls for existing nuclear weapons states to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals in exchange for other signatories agreeing not to develop nuclear weapons.
The fewer nuclear weapons there are, the safer we all will be. New START offers an important step in the right direction.
So why hasn't the Senate ratified the treaty yet? First, the administration needed to make the case for the treaty, with a particular focus on Republican skeptics whose votes were needed to reach the 67 vote total needed to ratify a treaty. But that case has been made. There have been 18 hearings, dozens of briefings, hundreds of questions answered at the request of individual Senators, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports, analysis, and testimony. An impressive bipartisan group of experts, including national security advisors and secretaries of state and defense from the Reagan, Bush (father and son) and Clinton administrations, has endorsed the treaty. So have all of the nation's top military leaders, along with key retired leaders like seven former commanders of U.S. nuclear forces.
So what is the holdup? Laura Rozen of Politico got hold of a memo by a staffer from the Senate Republican Policy Committee that purports to supply the reasons why the Senate should delay any vote on the treaty. In fact, the memo acknowledges that two of the main objections raised by the treaty's critics have already been addressed.
The first issue is "nuclear modernization" -- the ability to build a new generation of nuclear delivery vehicles and to preserve the reliability of existing warheads in the context of an upgraded nuclear weapons complex. There are serious questions about whether spending in these areas is in fact needed at a time when U.S. and Rusian arsenals are being reduced. But whatever one may think about building a shiny new weapons complex at a time when a growing number of world leaders are calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the Republican memo notes that New START will "preserve the ability of the United States to modernize its nuclear forces." The real complaint is that the Obama administration is not doing so quickly enough, even though it is spending more on the nuclear weapons complex than even the George W. Bush administration did.
As Linton Brooks, the head of the nuclear weapons complex in the Bush administration, said in April, "I'd have killed for that budget and that much high-level attention" during the Bush years compared to the Obama years.
A second major issue raised by Republican skeptics has been whether New START constrains the United States from developing whatever kind of missile defense system it chooses to. It does not. The Republican memo notes that this "may be a true statement," but that the real question is how much money and effort the Obama administration is willing to devote to missile defense. As with nuclear modernization, this is an issue of administration policy that has no direct link to the New START treaty. The treaty allows any administration to pursue as extensive a missile defense system as it desires; it does not, and should not, dictate what shape that system should take, or how much should be spent on it. That is an ongoing policy issue.
Holding New START hostage to the policy preferences of some -- not all -- Republican skeptics makes no sense. New START is valuable in its own right, and it will make us all safer by reducing the number of nuclear weapons in both Russia and the United States. Debates over what kind of missile defense system to build, or how much to spend on modernizing nuclear delivery vehicles and the nuclear warhead complex, should be pursued on their own merits, outside the context of the treaty.
The Senate should ratify New START before the end of the year, during its lame duck session. There is no good reason to wait, and there are a number of very good reasons to move forward now.
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caption id="attachment_100064194" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="An anti-racism workshop in progress"] Yesterday, after I wrote that “the EU, multiculturalism, the Equalities Act, anti-racism, hat...
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caption id="attachment_100064194" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="An anti-racism workshop in progress"] Yesterday, after I wrote that “the EU, multiculturalism, the Equalities Act, anti-racism, hat...
Good news: Feds to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks for some reason.
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caption id="attachment_100064194" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="An anti-racism workshop in progress"] Yesterday, after I wrote that “the EU, multiculturalism, the Equalities Act, anti-racism, hat...
Good news: Feds to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks for some reason.
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