Inspired Thinking

Marcus Thomas launched its new website this week, four days after moving into a new, larger office space.

The redesigned site, www.marcusthomasllc.com , showcases the agency’s culture, people, talents and award-winning work. Site visitors can view integrated work examples sorted by ad media, discipline (i.e. “Branding,” “Public Relations,” “Trade Show,”) or advertiser.

Yes, all the agency executives (a.k.a. “partners-fartners”) are profiled. But pushy clients, crafty vendors, ambitious new hires and anyone else looking for some insight into Marcus Thomas’ inter-personal dynamics can also see one hundred and twenty-one staffers identified by name and photo and ranked by personality type.Who are the “Rule-Makers”? the “Peace Keepers”? the “Brainiacs”? the “Lives of the Party”? The evaluations are “scary accurate.”

The Careers page has been integrated with the social networking HR tool, Jobvite to enhance the application process for future employees. There are also links to Facebook and Twitter.

The site uses a mix of HTML5 and AJAX coding techniques to make the presentation fluid and engaging. And a streamlined version of the site is touch-enabled and load quickly on mobile phones and tablets.

By Jessica Folger, audience insights strategist
Special thanks to Ian Verschuren, Scott Chapin and Tim Laubacher for their contributions!

I’m always excited by the start of a new year. (And no, I’m not talking about New Year’s resolutions.) A new year means the roll-out of marketing predictions from all of our wonderful research partners. Well, this year … in our new space … with our new DigiKnow friends…and some inspiration from third-party experts, we decided to come up with some predictions of our own. Take a look, and let us know what you think!

1. Group buying sites will sink

They haven’t quite figured themselves out. At first there were many, then some folded, and then others became victims of buyouts or industry consolidation. The management of relationships between brands, consumers and platforms is still pretty messy, and in turn, models are on the fritz. You also have to wonder how often a sale results in a long-term relationship, when more often than not; consumers use group buying sites to indulge in high-end products and services they wouldn’t invest in otherwise.

2. Consumers will expect checkout rewards for their check-ins

Consumers are over bragging rights. They want deals, discounts and loyalty points for their check-ins via foursquare, Facebook Places and other location-based services. Technology is allowing for geo-targeted messages by location, not just zip code, and the most sophisticated users have already caught on. Heightened consumer expectations shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for more cutting-edge retailers and locations, but others may face some challenges.

3. Enhanced social filters will become a “must have” not a “nice to have”

Consumers are seeing the long-term ramifications of oversharing. The fact that nothing you share online ever “goes away” is scaring the living daylights out of people and creating concern about personal safety. Additionally, HR screening procedures have heightened consumers’ awareness of their various digital personas, and augmented the desire to keep those identities separate. “I’m a professional.” “I’m a mom.” “I’m a 20-something who has fun on the weekends and occasionally one too many cocktails.” The launch of Google+ got the ball rolling. Not only will consumers take advantage of Google+ Circles, they will have a newfound appreciation for Twitter Lists and Facebook Groups. An increase in social filtering may result in decreased accessibility for brands.

4. Organized chaos via pinning, snipping and posting will skyrocket

Prepare for Pinterest to surpass some of the largest social networks on the map. (It’s already well on its way.) So why are so many consumers hopping on the digital pinboard bandwagon?  First and foremost, consumers are experiencing information overload. They are being drawn to platforms that offer simplicity, organization, and complete control over content exposure. Sites like Pinterest, Wanelo and Snip.it do just that with their minimalist approach to content sharing – simple visual cues. Secondly, these sites fulfill consumers’ needs for self-expression, especially as it relates to topics like home décor, crafts, fashion and food. Brands that are playing nicely on these sites are seeing increased site traffic from pins, snips and posts.

For more on Pinterest, check out my recent blog post: http://blog.inspiredthinking.com/2012/02/01/take-your-interests-to-pinterest/

Too girly for you? Check out this manly pinboarding site (thank you, Jason Perkowski): http://gentlemint.com/

5. Devices will be used differently as the “cloud” is embraced by the masses

Cloud-based streaming is putting everything within reach, allowing consumers to access ALL of their content (music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, etc.) on ALL of their devices. The folks at trendwatching.com put it best: “Screens will be an interface to everything and anything that lies beyond the screen.” Devices will not be used based on what content is accessible, but on how and where users want to experience the content. Apple’s iCloud and Amazon Cloud are among the most accessed clouds, but expect other big players to emerge. Also, embrace the unlimited access while you can. It won’t be long before content owners fight to jack up licensing costs.

6.  Consumers will experiment with technology that showcase memories

We are a culture obsessed with making memories and, more importantly, preserving them. Millennials in particular have been tagged as a “reminiscent” generation. Preservation is increasingly taking a digital form, although consumers still like the tangible stuff, too. Hello scrapbooking culture!  Facebook’s Timeline is one of the more recent forays into the digital memory-making territory. Another is Timehop, which surfaces memories from Facebook, Twitter, foursquare and Instagram. So what about the more tangible memory-making technologies? Little Printer allows consumers to send digital files to a tiny portable printing device, while Instaprint was designed to serve as a location-based photo booth for Instagram enthusiasts.

7. Microsoft will double its share in the mobile market

Windows 8 is big. Windows 95 was big. For those that don’t remember the drastic change to Windows 95, Windows 8 promises to be a similar departure, and it’s Microsoft’s step towards unifying desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Given the continued marginalization of BlackBerry®, enterprise is looking for a new platform, and Windows 8 is going to fill the void and make Microsoft a player in the mobile and tablet space. With enterprise integration and a significant developer market already in place, apps will be coming quick and steady. It’s even likely that the new Xbox console will have a Windows 8 variant on it.

8. Anticipate convergence in the console space

Webtv? Google TV? Web-enabled TV’s? A number of attempts have been made to bring interactivity to television sets with minimal success. Building off of the success of Netflix running on top of gaming platforms such as the Xbox 360®, PS3, and Nintendo Wii™, consoles will finally be the Internet bridge to the television. Apple is likely to make a more dominant play in the space (possibly with an Apple TV), and at the same time existing consoles will add apps to further integration to not just gaming communities, but social networks and online tools. Next-generation consoles due out in 2013 will more resemble desktops/tablets, and touch screen technology will eventually make our televisions oversized iPads.

SOURCING  

Prediction #2

eMarketer “Top Digital Trends for 2012”, December 2011
Forrester “2012 Interactive Marketing Predictions”, December 7, 2011

Prediction #3

http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ten-digital-trends-set-mass-market-2012/231653/

Prediction #5

eMarketer Top Digital Trends for 2012, December 2011

http://trendwatching.com/trends/12trends2012/?screenculture

Prediction #6

(http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ten-digital-trends-set-mass-market-2012/231653/)

By Jody Sadler, director of connections planning/media

Super Bowl XLVI was the most-watched television program in U.S. history. According to updated Nielsen data from Monday afternoon, 111.3 million viewers tuned in for the game (that’s 7 percent higher than the last time the Giants and Patriots met in 2008 for Super Bowl XLII). Not surprisingly, four of the Top 5 most-watched programs are Super Bowls. (The fifth is the M*A*S*H series finale, in case you were wondering.)

This year was also the most expensive for advertisers. A 30-second spot cost an average of $3.5 million, up from $3.1 million last year. The last time these two teams met in Super Bowl XLII, a 30-second spot was a mere $2.7 million.

While the outcome of the two games was the same (sadly for me, as I live with a Patriots fan), there was a definite change in the advertising. Unlike four years ago, 2012 saw advertisers make the most of their ads by taking advantage of new technology and the two-screen experience.

In an effort to gain additional exposure, many advertisers posted their ads on the Web before the game. They offered teasers, long-form video or the actual commercial – along with a lot fewer game day surprises.

According to Nielsen research, 70 percent of tablet users and 68 percent of smartphone users watch television with their devices in hand. Advertisers incorporated applications, both existing and custom, to make their ads more engaging. Approximately one-third of the ads were “Shazamable,” allowing consumers to enter sweepstakes, view special content and download free music. The Chevy Game Time app gave users a chance to win prizes or drive home a 2012 Chevy by answering trivia questions and polls.

Other advertisers utilized Twitter hashtags and QR codes, or drove viewers to websites for further interaction. Audi sent viewers to Twitter to talk about their spot with “#SoLongVampires.” Go Daddy incorporated a QR code that allowed viewers to see additional ad content and download Go Daddy coupons. Universal Pictures partnered with Fandango to connect a movie trailer to advance ticket sales. Viewers were directed (briefly) to the Fandango website and mobile site, encouraging them to sign up for a FanAlert™ about the movie, as well as the chance to win five years’ worth of free movie tickets.

Whether or not the ads themselves are funnier or better than in 2008, this year advertisers have created a great opportunity to monitor user interaction and encourage further consumer engagement that didn’t exist with the 30-second Super Bowl XLII spot.

By Jessica Folger, audience insights strategist

We’ve had a number of clients asking about Pinterest, an invite-only, digital pinboard site that launched mid-2011.

I, for one, am hooked. I try just about every social platform that launches, but my interest typically fades quickly. Most platforms are too cluttered, extremely high-maintenance, just plain unoriginal, or (my biggest pet peeve) they exacerbate my ongoing struggle with information overload. I want something that makes my life easier. Pinterest has a clean layout, is user-friendly, keeps me organized, and above all, inspires me.

For those who aren’t familiar with the platform, Pinterest allows users to virtually “pin” items they find on the Web to their personal pinboards, which can be organized by themes. Additionally, users can browse their friends’ pins for inspiration – and snag them! Pinning is easy, using the official “Pin It” button. Sign up for an account, and then drag-and-drop the “Pin It” icon to your toolbar. When you come across a photo or video you like, click the icon and then select the item to place it on the appropriate pinboard. Leave a comment to tell others why you like it, or provide yourself with a reminder.

Example of a Home Decor Board on Pinterest

According to HitWise, Pinterest is #7 in the social networking/forums category, surpassing Google+, Tumblr and MyLife in monthly visits. In November 2011 it had 32 million visits – 11 million visitors during the week of December 17 alone. It’s different from traditional bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon that save websites or lists. Its content is visually inspired.

So where’s the opportunity for brands?

The site does not accept advertising, but most of the early adopters with a profile are retailers like Nordstrom or media outlets like Real Simple, primarily because they are lifestyle-oriented brands much like the platform’s most popular content categories: home décor, crafts, fashion and food.  Pinterest has a heavy concentration of women 25-44 and also seems to pique the interest of those going through major lifestage transitions looking for ideas.

As a brand, think about ways you can offer consumers value through inspirational content. If you’re toying with creating a profile, think beyond product. How can you express your brand persona? We know that consumers relate to their favorite brands and use them as a form of self expression.  How can you strengthen that bond through content that brings your brand to life and gives it a personality? Include other industry content that spans a variety of topics and comes from multiple sources. If you’re a CPG brand think about creating a recipe-focused or food-pairing board. A healthcare brand? Consider easy craft ideas for cheering up patients on the mend. Brands in the home space might go beyond their specific product category with DIY ideas that help complete an indoor or outdoor space from top to bottom.

Cross promote your page and watch for the Platform to launch a “Pin It” button for publishers. Above all, remember the site is reciprocity driven. You just might learn a thing or two about your consumers along the way.

Give it a try: http://pinterest.com/. I’m betting you’ll like it!

Written for The Christian Science Monitor by our very own associate partner and creative director, Jim Sollisch. Originally posted on December 30, 2011. The Christian Science Monitor is an international news organization that delivers thoughtful, global coverage via its website, weekly magazine, daily news briefing, email newsletters, and mobile site. http://www.csmonitor.com/

Here’s one of my favorite back-to-the-future stories. It’s 9:00 p.m. and a suburban mother runs out of diapers. So she has to pack her 4-year-old and her infant in the car to make a diaper run. The 4-year old, half asleep, mutters, “Why can’t someone make a diaper you can use over again?”

Brilliant. A simple solution to a very complex solution that has become a big problem. Disposable diapers rank third among consumer items in landfills and take up 4 percent of all landfill space.

Cloth diapers can be used over and over again. They cut down on late night trips to the store, and they don’t get thrown away. In fact, when they’re done being diapers, they live a long and useful life as the world’s best rags. (Before you throw your dirty diapers at me, I have five kids and so I get the convenience of disposable diapers, of which I’ve used my share. But we also used cloth diapers and the adjustment was a small sacrifice for the big cost savings.)

I’m fascinated by simple solutions. I make a note of them when I spot them in books or articles. Especially ones that are right in front of our faces and don’t cost anything but a small leap of imagination.

I don’t buy the idea that every complicated problem needs a complicated solution. So here are four more simple, low-tech solutions to some deeply ingrained, multifaceted problems.

The first two come from the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness,” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They call these solutions “nudges,” because they gently push people toward behaviors that are better for them or the planet without regulation or coercion. Many of these nudges are so simple and elegant that they feel as obvious as gravity once they reveal themselves.

Problem: Utility companies are mandated by law to get their customers to reduce consumption. So they do advertising campaigns, print expensive brochures, and design websites to encourage consumers to use less. The result? Minimal reductions that may have happened anyway. A waste of paper, ink and server space.

Solution: Smiley faces. Seriously. In San Marcos, Calif., 300 households received bills that illustrated how much energy they had used in the previous month along with how much energy their neighbors had used. The households that were above the norm dramatically decreased their consumption. But the households that were below the norm increased their consumption slightly.

So in the next month’s bill, households that were below average received a smiley face emoticon. And they stayed below the norm. According to Thaler and Sunstein, this is a great example of a social nudge.

My favorite example from “Nudge” is a no-cost solution for companies that want to increase the number of employees who contribute to their 401(k) retirement accounts, which hovers at around 30 percent nationally.

At the vast majority of companies, new employees are told that in six months (or whatever the prescribed period of employment), they can fill out a form or go to a website to activate their 401(k) account and determine what percentage they want taken out of their pay. Inertia takes over and six months later, only a small percentage of employees have started saving.

The solution: Change the default. Instead, everyone is automatically enrolled in six months at a certain savings level. That’s the default. To change it, employees can fill out a form or go online to opt-out or change the contribution percentage. Some companies that have changed the default report 90 percent enrollment in their plans.

Here’s a solution so elegant that it solves two problems at once. You know those funny, blurry words you have to type in before you buy tickets online or send an email from a website? They’re called CAPTCHA, which stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” The name was coined by a team of professors from Carnegie Mellon University. Apparently computers aren’t very good at making out blurry, misshapen letters. And we are. So CAPTCHA stops people from setting up programs to spam or game website transactions.

But it turns out that the CAPTCHA come from old newspapers and old books that are being digitized, with computers unable to read the documents because of the odd lettering. So while we’re proving that we’re humans and not machines, we are actually helping archivists determine what these letters and words are. A wonderful, painless form of crowdsourcing.

No problem seems more intractable right now than our polarized political system. Partisan politics are rampant and voter turnout, especially in smaller elections, is low.

The answer, despite what every politician on both sides says, is not to reform Washington. If that were the answer, it would have been done already. William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former policy advisor to President Clinton, makes the case for a simple solution in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times: mandatory voting.

He argues that mandatory voting would force parties to move to the middle. If 90-plus percent of the population votes, then politicians can’t cater to the extreme fringes of their parties. Policies will inevitably get more moderate. But this isn’t just his theory. He cites the fact that 31 democracies have some form of mandatory voting, including Australia, which has a voter turnout of about 95 percent with much less gridlock than we experience.

The beauty of simple solutions is that they are typically low cost and low risk. But in order to adopt this kind of thinking, we need to reset our default for problem-solving. Right now, I think it’s set on complicated. We need to be more open to the power of simple.

By King Hill, senior vice president

The holiday season is a time of joy for many. Hardship for others. And often the intersection of the two, when those who have much share with those who have little.

It doesn’t get any simpler–or complicated– than that.

In the advertising business, we understand that simple truth, too, but we can’t leave it there. Nooooo. To those of us who ply the creative arts, there’s an opportunity to take the giving and sharing to a new level–and flex the creative chops at the same time.

That was the strategy about Marcus Thomas’ most recent holiday card, if you want to call it that. Actually, the card was a three-day, multimedia, live-streaming, direct-marketing, word-of-mouth, game show extravaganza.

The Marcus Thomas "Wheel of Holiday Destiny" combined gameshow excitement with the spirit of gift-giving to fill the stockings of friends and client Akron Children's Hospital.

Basically, it went like this:

We invited 1,500 of our closest friends to take a live spin on our very own wheel-of-fortune, manned by Jr. Art Director, Roger McMullen. Once logged in, each recipient waited in the queue for their chance to score some of our clients’ amazing swag, a variety of once-loved MT staff possessions, or a donation, in their name, to the Akron Children’s Hospital Fund. And as if having an opportunity to win a 1988 Christina Applegate poster wasn’t enough of an incentive to participate, the “Wheel of Holiday Destiny” was full of impromptu holiday freestyles, words of wisdom and impressive dance moves from elfin Roger.

But did these creative machinations produce an ROI sufficient to satisfy the elves in accounting?  Perhaps, but let’s not tarnish the shine on the holiday spirit by looking too closely at whether the program resulted in new business. That wasn’t really the point. The point was, did all the spinning, grinning, joking and engagement spread some joy?

Ask the folks at Akron Children’s Hospital who received 88 donations as a result of the program. Ask the 119 clients who received gifts from the prize wheel. Ask the 140 Marcus Thomas employees who lifted their heads up briefly from their oil-lamp-lit ledgers to smile. Ask the 11 team members who put in hundreds of  hours to make the extravaganza possible.

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“Wheel of Holiday Destiny” by the numbers

Total impressions – social plus media outlets – 1,642,158
Donation to the Akron Children’s Hospital Fund – $5,000
Unique visits – 2,322
Page views – 4,071
Average time spent on page/person – 2:11
Return visits – 24.92%
Total spins – 302

By King Hill, senior vice president

As I near the end of my first week with Marcus Thomas, I find myself reflecting about what makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful merger. I hope you’ll indulge my trip down memory lane, as it may be helpful to our current situation.

Bringing two companies together is easy: a little paperwork, some desks, phones, name tags. But bringing people together, that’s the challenge. Do it well and you can kick any ass. Do it poorly and you damage current relations and a hard-earned reputation.

On September 11, 2001, as the Towers were coming down in New York, I, as the president of DigiKnow, sat in the lobby of the Caxton Building in downtown Cleveland as about a dozen employees of FutureNext got their walking papers – on the loudspeaker by telephone. I was in the lobby to offer those folks new jobs at DigiKnow, as we had acquired the “assets” of FutureNext’s Cleveland and Dallas offices.

Our world at large, or so we thought, was coming to an end. Their world, in particular, was too.

I quickly ushered them into a conference room, introduced myself, offered them my business card, told them to be at DigiKnow’s Beachwood offices the next day to start their new lives. I thought we had solved at least one of their problems – they had jobs. (The military and political elite would have to solve the other.)

Just that quickly, two companies were together. But were the people together? Not hardly.

Immediately, people from the two companies split into camps: them and us. It was often unspoken, and we held all-company lunches and happy hours to get the folks together, but the split persisted. It was obvious, the people didn’t want to be with us. And we continued to resent it until all of them were gone. “We” grew despite this breakdown, but we could have grown even more had we succeeded to leverage the collective.

Perhaps it was different then. After all, we were two companies cut from the same cloth, without any obvious new opportunities for synergy. We were just more of the same. Two “interactive” companies from different lineage. One built with drunken-sailor VC money. The other bootstrapped. A classic blue-collar/white collar conflict?

The Marcus Thomas/DigiKnow mashup is a little different. Marcus Thomas is a full-service, integrated agency that sells ideas as the main course, with execution as the side dish. DigiKnow, begun at the birth of the Web, was a digital business that sold digital “stuff” as the main course and ideas as the side dish. This offering, by the way, wasn’t deliberate; we were swept away by the demand for stuff that has grown since the early days of the Web. We rode a wave (a good wave, I might add) instead of charting our own course. We attempted to reverse this course over the years, expanding our strategic offering with some success. But it’s nearly impossible to go from a drive-up window to haute cuisine – which brings us here, together.

It also brings us to the reasons for excitement and optimism about the blending of our businesses, talents and cultures. With Marcus Thomas and DigiKnow there is no “Us” and “Them.” We have opportunities at the client level and talent level. We have obvious synergies. We have an insatiable appetite to identify and solve client problems with strategically sound ideas. And now we have even more cooks to prepare them.

Bon appétit.

By Joanne Kim

We recently had Edward Boches, Mullen’s current CIO, former Chief Creative Officer in for a daylong workshop for the entire agency. The focus was on evolving an agency in the digital age. Even though Edward is digitally and socially advanced, I was curious what lessons our twenty-somethings would walk away with, so I asked five of them to put into their own words the lessons they learned. Here they are, unedited.

Jessica Folger, connection strategist

Marketing plans solve marketing problems. Isn’t that the way we have operated in this business for nearly a century?  According to Mullen’s Edward Boches, that’s not necessarily the way to go if you want to come up with the next BIG IDEA. No, those were not his exact words, but it’s what I took away from three hours of time with him last week.

What if marketing plans could do more than just solve marketing problems?

Take a step back from the marketing problems you’re used to seeing on every brief. “Low brand awareness.” “Decreasing sales.” Yada, yada, yada. Now, don’t stop at “consumer problems” – that’s still brand-centric. I’m talking “people problems.” What if marketing plans could solve people problems? Believe it or not, they can, and embracing that mentality can allow brands to connect with their consumers on a deeper level.

Take for instance, our beloved Jimmy Sollisch. He doesn’t just love guacamole, he needs guacamole. A few times a week in fact. Too bad he has to drive to two or three stores each time to find ripe avocados. Now THAT’S a people problem. So what can an ad agency like us do to help him out? Partner with local grocers and avocado farmers. Develop a GPS-enabled app that maps out harvest dates and on-shelf dates by retail location. Include consumer reviews by store. Allow folks who are already at the store to scan a barcode on the product that includes the same information. Maybe even throw in some recipes and a “ripeness scale” for newbies. Too niche for the general market? Take the idea a step further and broaden the application to include all fruits and veggies.

No, coming up with these ideas wasn’t rocket science, but boy was it liberating to focus on what people really need, instead of having our thought process restricted by a list of  goals and objectives. If only for a few hours.

Jason Perkowski, information architect

When Edward Boches came to town, I had some unfair assumptions in mind. My internal monologue went something like this, “Oh great, this is going to be some over-the-top guy with a made up title, who’s going to energize the creative department while leaving the rest of us wondering why we were even there.” To my surprise, I was utterly and incredibly wrong. Instead, I found an earnest man who was all about inspiring innovation and discussing minimum viability, while expounding that user experience and engagement are the new art and copy.

Being a user experience architect and hearing someone explain so clearly that agencies are out there solving the wrong problems for their clients, I could not have felt more validated and motivated. Oftentimes in agency cultures the people that want to push the “pause button” and ask the question, “should we be doing this?” get looked at like we have three eyes and something growing out of the side of our head. Everyone has gotten so ratcheted up to a fever pitch about an idea that, while flashy and cool, doesn’t answer the right question. It’s time to stop asking COULD we do this with regard to something innovative and instead we should be asking, SHOULD we be doing this – is the SOLUTION the right answer to the right CHALLENGE?

We SHOULD be innovative around the challenges, fail fast and make changes (based on user feedback) even faster. It’s good to be wrong, it allows us to grow.

Phong Nguyen, art director

Live and work in Beta.
We spend so much time crafting our message by repeating a process that has worked for us in the past. Putting a copywriter and an art director in a room or sending them out to brainstorm has worked for traditional clients and traditional advertising. However, with social media, engagement will change the messaging and the approach.

Beta = R & D
Let’s put people in a room and create something that is worthwhile. It’s time we create products that will add to the community and then sell those products to our clients. How was Groupon not created by credit card companies? How was Instagram not created by Polaroid? Timberland didn’t create an app to sell more boots, they created an app to help people find work and in return buy more work boots.

Allison Peltz, account supervisor/social strategist

Evolving is key – you won’t survive if you don’t continue to change and embrace it.
Mullen defined their philosophy with one word – unbound.

Boches received push back internally, but it has since changed the way the agency thinks and produces work.

We all have ideas and it’s not just something we can leave up to the creative group. From our brainstorming, we all have some quirky ideas – but those often lead to developing better, more refined ideas.

TJ Prochaska, copywriter

I learned a couple things within 24 hours. First, just because your department may not be called “creative” doesn’t mean your ideas aren’t, either. We should actively search for ideas and skills in every department and use them often.

Second, We can’t wait for a client to ask for us to solve the right problem. That may never happen. We need to find the problems that need to be solved, then find the best way to solve them. Once we have those solutions, we sell them to clients.

The next thing I learned is that we need to stop selling to audiences and start communicating with communities. No one wants to be sold something. We need to create something that serves a purpose in their life. Something that they want. Then we use that to build a relationship that makes them consider buying from our clients.

Finally, we need to stop sitting on our ideas. I shared three ideas that I’ve had for a while and Edward asked why I haven’t created them yet. We all have cool ideas, but for some reason or another, we don’t do anything with them. And that needs to change.

By Jim Sollisch, senior vice president/creative director

Bob Gill

In the category, “Surprising what you can get if you only ask,” we recently spent a day with Bob Gill, founder of Pentagram and one of the best designers in history, and another day with Edward Boches, Chief Innovation Officer at Mullen, Big Thinker and brilliant cartographer of the digital age. They actually came to our office. Why?  Because – as I’ve always said – Joanne Kim is hard to say no to.

In many ways, we couldn’t have landed two more polar opposite stars in the universe of advertising. If Bob Gill is a sun, Edward Boches is a black hole. Or vice-versa. Or maybe this analogy is better:  if Gill is a star, Boches is a constellation. Gill is a solo performer. He left Pentagram when they got too big: 20 employees. He believes in taking single ideas to clients. “I never bring more than one and I never show them all the thinking along the way.”  Edward is all about connection and convergence, and the power of an idea to spread through communities. He recently pitched and won a client with no creative, just a pile of ideas.

Edward Boches

Edward says “Tomay-toe” and Bob says, “Tomah-toe.” Edward starts with what’s relevant to the audience. Bob starts with what’s relevant to the message. But they both agree on one thing:  great ideas are always a solution to a problem. An interesting problem.

Sounds simple. But the problem is our clients don’t often come to us to help solve problems (except for how to increase sales or trial). We have to get better at helping them recognize and define problems customers actually want solved. The solution won’t always be an ad or a social idea – it might be a new nutrition label or a new product or a new platform to buy the product.

So here’s to problems. One for Joanne is, “Who the hell are you going to get in here to follow these two guys?”

By Nikki DiFranco, vice president and production director

Last week I shared details of my forth coming trip on the John Muir Trail. Part of that communication included all of the technology I would be living without.

I’ve long contended I’m looking forward to being “off the grid” so-to-speak. I’ve spent my entire career trying to keep up with the latest technologies between different production media and the digital space. I think it’s time for a break.

Imagine all the silence, not having to worry about checking Facebook and Twitter and every trade pub on the latest gadget, software, social media space app, or the depressing and/or frivolous news of the world.

I get to drop into nature as it was intended and tune out. Now you’re jealous, aren’t you?

As I received many well-wishes from everyone, a friend of mine asked, “How will you be able to see the Giants games?” A twinge of panic set in. There was another twinge when I had to write in pen the word “recommend” and I needed to look it up in the dictionary (iPhone app of course) because I didn’t have spell check. The panic grew a little more after camping this weekend – in the heat – and all I could think of was how desperately I wanted a shower. I had one that night, but once I’m on the trail – it will be six days before I get that luxury. The panic finally grew to a crescendo yesterday, when I finally received my highly coveted Google+ and Spotify invites.

As I signed on and started perusing these new treasured elements, I realized I would need some time to really understand the nuances and what they can do. I already feel so behind because others I know have been able to dig in weeks ago. The space is changing so fast – drop out for a month – how far behind am I going to be then?

I quickly reconsidered every solar charger out there, the device that makes my iPhone a satellite phone, and wondered if I could get carrier pigeons to bring my Dad and me the Giants score for each game. (Let’s face it – they could be really heating up for another pennant while we’re out there – this is important stuff.)

So I’ve been asking myself several questions …

Is dropping in and tuning out a gift or a curse?

Is all of this technology and access to information making us junkies?

If I’m a junkie, will I go through severe withdrawal?

What would the symptoms look like, because my Dad may need to know? (He has a job that allows very little social media activity of a personal nature.)

Have I just put myself into a 28-day rehab program?

If I have, what happens when I get back? How do I just say no? Can I just say no? Should I say no?

What should this new ailment be called?

Then another really brilliant question occurred to me …

Did I just create a great social experiment and/or reality TV show?

Imagine those of us diagnosed with this condition and stripped of our phones, computers, game consoles and TVs against our will – locked in a library and not allowed out until we answer a series of questions via the Dewey Decimal System!  For those of you under the age of 30 – this was a card file system we used to use to find books in the library with information we needed in order to write our papers in school. (By the way – if any of you think of stealing this for your own – this is now a ©2011 Nikki Di Franco idea.)

I leave you pondering these questions for yourself. Could you do it?

If you think you could and have any advice – I would love to hear it, because I think I’m going to need it.