Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Great Win, Exposure to New Stuff

Winning feels good. Real good. Looks like we won that big account that I teamed on. Talk about a dream come true. I can’t say what it is, but it involves sports marketing for a very worthy organization.

Another affirmation that starting my own company was the right thing to do. I mean come on, in my old agency the CEO would only let us get into B2G or maybe telecom. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Don’t get me wrong, I love my five B2G clients, but part of being an agency person is the ability to work on very diverse projects. It keeps the creative juices flowing.

Additionally, becoming a simple subject matter expert (only A&D, only B2G, only telecom) puts you in a box. Once you’re in, it’s hard to get out. You are limited, not exposed to best practices, and overall, start to wallow in mediocrity.

That’s not the way of great marketers. Great marketing minds can market anything, not because of subject matter expertise, but through the mastery of communications disciplines. They simply know how to work media in diverse forms. I want to win, to be a great practitioner and that means I need to expose myself to new communications media at all times. Next project for me is mastering del.icio.us.

Great article on the traditional advertising agency model falling apart in today’s Washington Post. Steve Pearlstein writes about how the intergalactic mega-agency model has collapsed. He leads us into part 2, coming Friday on how the Internet is reshaping the creative world. I’m looking forward to this next article as number one was right on the mark.

Part of being a business owner is selecting the business you want to work on. Of course, in some ways the business selects you. For example, a current, hot lead for me is Internet publicity for the front man of a certain nationally known rock band. He’s got a new book coming out, and the blogger community needs to know about it. This came to me, not the other way around. But if I was only doing B2G, I’d turn it away. Uhhh, no.

In general, it’s kind of wild to see where my business is taking me. I have opened a new vertical in general B2B that I had never expected, and it’s an absolute blast. Add in this consumer stuff, hmmm. More shall be revealed, I am sure, just on someone else’s schedule.

Got some good chi going on. Major coverage coming out for a media tour client this week. A little nervous excitement leading up to it as I think that additional business may be pending the results of this project.

This Wednesday morning is catch my breath time, hand written notes, accounting, post office. You know, mundane business owner stuff. Then it’s time to network, and tonight crank into a major writing project.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

CONGRATULATIONS! everything's coming up livingston!

9:16 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Congratulations first.

And you are right on about that Siloed thinking. That's often the problem in Washington, where some of the best marketing and creative is going to firms that have a diverse portfolio -- away from the old bread and butter single issue companies.

Washington has some catching up to do in this regard.

Fortunately, companies like yours and other more recent entries into the market (save for your ex-company) are not thinking like that.

There is hope yet.

12:32 PM  

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