experience matters

In part one I discussed the false-choice the Marketing/Advertising industry has created for itself… What will be the SINGLE organization model for Agencies in the future. This entry will discuss the fact that

Client Types

Some clients prefer to work with a group of Best-in-Class agencies from each media type, regardless of holding company affiliation. These clients are willing to take on incremental work required to coordinate the agency interfaces to get the best possible marketing assets for every channel. Some clients prefer the efficiency of using a single holding company and are willing to accept a little bit lower work quality in some mediums to avoid coordinating across multiple agencies. Of course, some folks will take issue with my assumption that one gives up some quality when one chooses a one-agency approach. However, experience tells me that a marginally sub-optimal result is the typical outcome of choosing a One Agency model. The synergies promised from working with a single Agency/Holding Company can also be elusive, but that is a topic for another conversation.

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Admittedly, this is more of a question than a statement, but make no mistake — I’m not merely asking if this is true.

For the last several years, Google has been a juggernaut, able to release whatever they felt like and it was received with open (and anxious, often with reckless abandon) arms. We’ve all enjoyed such wonders as Google Search, Google AdWords, Google Maps, Google Translate, Google Earth, Blogger, Gmail, Google Groups, Google Analytics, Google Desktop, and the Google Search Appliance.

But I wonder if Google’s run out of cool stuff to freely hand out, and are beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

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This may be the shortest post ever on this blog. But what the heck—the blog is supposed to be about experiences. Critical Mass is a Canadian owned company, and Canadians already celebrated their own version of Thanksgiving—but it’s never a bad idea to think about something you’re thankful for. So why not now?

Here’s an experience I’m thankful for. I left home. Everything I knew—all my friends and family, everything I identified with. I left home to live in a city I never stepped foot in and knew very little about. I only knew that it could get “windy”, had “big shoulders” and that the people who lived in it were the some of the most down-to-earth folks you’ll ever meet in a big town.

Though I still consider myself a “New Yorker”—I’m thankful for the experience of shaking things up for myself and moving to a town which has been very good to me over the years. It wasn’t always easy and I still occasionally get homesick—but it’s an experience I’m thankful for. One that’s helped me grow in ways I never anticipated. Sometimes we have to look back in order to appreciate experiences for what they actually are.

So, what experience are you thankful for?

Welcome to the second installment of “3 Quick Questions”, where we ask CM’ers to answer three “top of mind” questions of interest to our readers. If there’s a particular topic you’d like us to tackle, leave us a comment or drop us an email.

This week, I asked three of our information architects, Scott Anderson, Cameron Ley and Laurence Lue about their efforts to learn Flash, the implications for their work and (the age old question about the future of IA’s tools (which they handily avoid …).

After the jump: This isn’t Visio anymore, Toto.

Forrester has an excellent report out this week on how to find an interactive agency. “How To Hire The Right Interactive Agency” was penned by Kerry Bodine. It’s a telling summary of the key challenges the interactive industry faces when prospective clients approach agencies on new business opportunities. Kerry discusses the challenges, key areas where RFP and RFI processes go wrong, and the reality of what it really takes to find a great match between client and agency – whether for a project or a long-term relationship. She goes on to suggest areas where clients need to focus their efforts to find the right agency.

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See that person over at the desk next to you? Take a close look. Closer. Nothing looks out of the ordinary does it? They could be sitting at their computer—busily typing away. Their desk may not look any different from yours—there are pictures of family, friends, pets and photos from vacations. Maybe they’ve got a fresh cup of Starbucks sitting next to their screen. Nothing looks out of the ordinary—they’re just another corporate citizen making a living for themselves right? Well, not exactly.

Uber-connected And Amplified
When you think “social media” a few names and images come to mind. You might think of Robert Scoble who is essentially a “Weblebrity” or Jeff Jarvis who leveraged his blog to amplify his gripes with Dell’s customer service creating “Dell Hell”. But there’s a new reality that’s much less dramatic and becoming more pervasive if not mainstream in the modern day office. Some of your employees may be leading double lives which often blurs the lines between personal and career—they are “super-connecters” who leverage social media tools to amplify their communications and conversations with hundreds and possibly thousands of people across the globe…

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It’s not very often that I get to have fresh experiences as a customer anymore. After 7 years as an IA practitioner, it becomes all too easy to spend more time with Visio than getting out into the world and paying attention to interactions. In mid-October, however, I took a four-day vacation to Paris. My goal (aside from having fun and eating as many croissants as possible) was to be attentive to the experience of visiting a new city: what was easy, what was difficult, what was frustrating. Here are some lessons I came home with: Read the rest of this entry »

We keep a clean shop here, making sure that client-sensitive information remains secret and safe. But not every meeting is solely about client work, and sometimes you find something interesting sitting in a meeting room.

In this particular case, I happened to glance up at an easel sitting in the corner of the Ancho Room (the second floor in Calgary has meeting rooms named after peppers), and witnessed a wonderful diagram created by Chrissie, Senior IA in our I&P group.

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In a recent blog post (Is your brand a rebellious teenager?) I shared a paradigm for how Marketers should be thinking about brand “ownership.” This entry explores the impact of two of the three parties in that paradigm (i.e. Brand Team and Agencies). The quality of the work delivered by the individual agencies within the family are driven, at least in part, by strategic decisions the client makes about how to choose the members of the agency family.

This post provides a simplified view of the most basic, yet most impact full decision every client must make.

The Cocktail Party

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