RFPs Are a Waste of Precious Time

There’s a wealth of highly specialized marketing talent available to brands today, but few brand managers know exactly where to look to find a good fit for their most pressing needs. 

Sure, the brand manager may read the trades — and maybe she has a robust network of peers to tap for recommendations — but that’s not the most reliable pathway to take when the business need is acute and the need for an answer is long past due.

Enter the request for proposal. RFPs are commonplace today, and they are often dismissed by savvy new-business professionals as a waste of human resources. If a client sends out 20 or more RFPs and then has a handful returned to sift through and assess, there will be more losers than winners. That’s just math.

Read the entire piece on Builtin.com.

For Better Results, Understand the Relationships Between Creativity, Productivity, and Accountability

For Better Results, Understand the Relationships Between Creativity, Productivity, and Accountability

People are being asked to do more with less. In the ad agency business, this has been going on since the first days of Digital Disruption. Today, with COVID-19 raging across the land and the globe, so-called “thought workers” who can work from home are doing so, but at what cost to themselves and the economy at large?

While it is true that some people excel in a home office and everyone saves on commute time, not all people, nor all teams are meant to work remotely.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development:

In the longer-term, productivity performance could improve to the extent that the crisis catalyses wider and smarter adoption of efficient telework practices, raising worker well-being and efficiency and lowering firms’ costs. This could speed up the transition into a “new normal”, which would have been more gradual in the absence of the crisis, given uncertainties and costs around the necessary organisational and management changes and other hurdles – cultural reluctance or legal constraints.

Emerging evidence provides support for this notion: 61.9% of hiring managers interviewed in a recent US poll stated their intention to rely more on remote work in the future. However, against these positive longer-term productivity effects stand potentially adverse effects arising from increased spatial distance among employees, e.g. impaired communication resulting in lower innovation or the fusing of work and personal, family and social life leading to hidden overtime.

“Hidden overtime” is a nice way of saying that with no division between work and home or work and play, We, the People are fast becoming automatons.

The process was well underway prior to the pandemic. Now, it’s worse and the impacts are rippling through our society. Overworked and underpaid productivity hounds burn out and lose their edge and effectiveness. When this happens, we all lose. Unhappy and unproductive workers are not exactly the best shoppers or most pleasant people. No sustainable work practices, no disposable income, no stoking of the economic engines.

The Eternal Question: Where Do the Best Ideas Come From?

Question: Where do great ideas come from?

Answer: Great ideas come from the minds, hearts, and souls of people who are experts at connecting disparate dots.

To do this deep work and connect disparate dots, people must have the room to relax, and the room to let their minds wander. Ergo, I want to present to you what I consider the ideal office space for a creative worker today:

No alt text provided for this image

Creative People Need Some Space to Think, Okay?

In a work environment where Slack, text, email, and project management software are always on and always dinging for attention RIGHT NOW, the team’s performance is bound to suffer.

Ad agencies can become pressure cookers where people have too many meetings and too many tasks on their plate. When this happens, people are not their best selves, which means their best ideas are not being sought, nor found.

People must be free to think, free to speak truth to power, free to go for long walks, and free to dream. When anyone or anything impinges on this creative freedom, trouble ensues.

Stress kills people and ideas. Ergo, the conditions that create stress must be managed successfully. You do this by becoming more accountable to yourself, to your team, and to your customers. When those are your north stars, you’re in alignment and when you’re in alignment you can do the “heavy lifting” required to achieve great things.

More Twitter Love from CA!

More Twitter Love from CA!

The person who runs the Communication Arts Twitter account likes the #AdLegends series on Adpulp.com. I am grateful.

CA is the creative industry’s standard-bearer, and each Tweet sent from @CommArts is seen by a segment of the magazine’s 81,300 followers.

To see previous Tweets that CA sent to promote my writing, visit this page on DavidBurn.com.

The Answer To the Brand Riddle Is Consistent Investment

The Answer To the Brand Riddle Is Consistent Investment

Differentiate or die. That’s the mountain that all tech startups must climb. I wrote an article about it and BuiltIn.com was kind enough to publish it.

When the Product Does All the Talking, Where Does Brand Marketing Fit In?

Reaching the Builtin.com Audience

In the article, I discuss how the cultures of an agency that builds brands and tech startups are fundamentally on separate pages.

Going to market with a minimum viable product is common practice, but it’s not good for a new brand. From a brand impression perspective, anything you do that is underwhelming is a major ding to your image. Yes, iterating rapidly is required, but in brand communications, you do not “move fast and break stuff.” You make a map of the customer journey and meet your VIPs (a.k.a. customers) at every step along the purchase consideration path. 

My team moves faster than most. We are lean and we can do that. Even so, we follow a well-developed process that produces desired results, and it all takes time. And time requires trust, a financial investment, and a long-term vision.

Who has time for such things?

Companies that invest in ‘brand’ and truly care about the experiences they create for customers are the companies worth significantly more at the end of the day. This is why it’s worth it and why great brands make the time and invest the money to do it right. They’re playing the long game.

Between Tears

by David Burn

Between tears
Room for unbridled fears

A change of gears
Open ears

Seeing with mirrors
Doubt reappears

The unruly crowd leers
There are facetious cheers

A cascading veil of years
A quiver of spears

Between tears
News smears and confusion interferes

Alienation among peers
Rumors that no one and everyone hears

Still, we dream of deers
We reach frontiers

We are brazen cavaliers
We enter far out spheres

The rent is no longer in arrears
Time for starry premiers

More promises from pamphleteers
More conversions from profiteers

New bridges from engineers
Let’s head to the Berkshires

There will be souvenirs
There will be mutineers

Between tears
Love adheres

Best New Music of 2020

2020 has been a mess of a year on so many levels. For one, live music came to a total standstill. We are still standing still during this last week of the year.

Thankfully, when times get tough, artists get busy.

What did not stop this year is the writing and performing of music (in socially distanced studios). In fact, you could argue that 2020’s recorded music is truly outstanding by any measure. But why discuss such matters, when you can push play and listen?

The 21 songs in this playlist are standout tracks. Each track is also a signpost to the artist’s new album.

Laura Veirs, Jerry Joseph, Margo Price, Alicia Keys, Destroyer, Wolf Parade, Chuck Prophet, My Morning Jacket, and so many more musicians offered us songs of beauty and harmony in 2020—exactly what we need to shift from chaos to peace, and from collective despair to a new hopefulness.

Two Copywriters, One Shared Vision for Fostering Creative Excellence

Two Copywriters, One Shared Vision for Fostering Creative Excellence

I was honored when a colleague reached out to me recently and requested an interview to run on his company’s blog. Todd Anthony and I have been in the same social media orbit for years. Todd, who is executive creative director at Pinwheel Content in the Bay Area asked to meet on Zoom. He recorded our chat and then transcribed it, which gives the text a conversational tone that it would otherwise not possess. Here’s a small sample from our chat. Click over to Pinwheel Content for the full interview.

Todd: How would you describe copywriters as a group? What are the unique qualities about them?

David: Honestly, they’re all over the place. Writers are artists. Narrative artists. They can be difficult, strange, and un-business-like. They’re misfits, yes, but I think of all that as being a very good thing. If you can bring that to the suits and their corporations, who are stiff and boring and scared, you can make a difference for their customers…and that’s important.

If we have to be the court jester, well okay, there’s something to that, too. I remember many times going over to Coors and the clients were looking forward to it. They’d say, “Here come the creatives, they’re going to tell us stories and make us laugh for an hour.” That’s really valuable.

So we’re the court jesters of the advertising and marketing world. It’s because we’re the storytellers. We’re ready to walk into a room and captivate. And that’s not done with your notes and screens. That’s done with your personality and your intelligence.

Design Internship Featured in Franklin & Marshall College News

Design Internship Featured in Franklin & Marshall College News

I graduated with a B.A. in English from Franklin & Marshall College in 1987.

Yuhang Wang graduated from F&M in May with a B.A. in Art.

Last summer, Yuhang reached out to me via F&M’s True Blue Network, and asked if I could help her find a job or internship. She showed me her student work in theater set design, plus her fine art, and I knew right away that she’s an extraordinary talent.

I extended her a paid internship offer and it was one of the best decisions that I’ve made in years. She’s an outstanding intern and a wonderful person.

“You want to see the fine artist in a designer, just like you want to see the writer in a copywriter,” Burn said. “Thanks to what we’ve learned at F&M, we’re prepared to infuse the business world with art, writing, and meaning.”

One of the goals of the internship is to help Yuhang find and land a great job. Thanks to recent client wins at Bonehook, I am now hopeful that I can provide the job she wants, starting in January 2021.

Ad Chatter, the New Podcast from Adpulp.com

Ad Chatter, the New Podcast from Adpulp.com

Once upon a time, we used to stand around the water fountain and or coffee pot and discuss ads for a few minutes before heading back to our designated cubicle.

Today, Dan Goldgeier and I meet on Zoom to chat about the business. New tech, same compulsion.

New logo by Yuhang Wang

Did you know?

Current Podstats:

  • Brands that advertise their products and services on business podcasts enjoy an average 14% rise in purchase intent
  • 54% of podcast consumers say they think about buying advertised products
  • 2 million podcasts are registered by Google
  • The podcast advertising market grew 48% last year, to $708 million, according to an IAB/PwC report

All episodes of Ad Chatter are now available on Buzzsprout \ Apple Podcasts \ Spotify \ Stitcher \ Amazon Music \ Listen Notes \ Deezer \ Podchaser \ Podcast Addict \ Google Podcasts

I Am A Guest on The Adland Podcast

I Am A Guest on The Adland Podcast

Åsk Wappling, the founder of Adland.tv started a new podcast recently.

I was honored to join her on a recent episode, where we discuss several timely topics that are impacting the ad industry today.

Listen now via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

David Burn and I had a lively discussion about what it’s like to create a media that predates the existence of Youtube, Twitter, and even Facebook. How much the advertising and media world has changed since. How Internet advertising keeps missing the absolute basics of marketing. How students need to grow a thick skin because your ideas will be shot down a thousand times over in this business, and it’s nothing personal. The death of the holding companies. The trade magazines who are in bed with the companies they write about leaving us with no journalists properly reporting on our industry, and much more.