Hee-Haw Marketing

On Management Philosophy

A few days ago, a former member of my department asked for a little help developing a management style. I suck at blogging these days, so I'll use this opportunity to steal those email thoughts and make them a bloggy thing. I'll pick up after the niceties. 

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The shortish bit though, I think it's really important to think in principles first. That's more of an all encompassing philosophy for me, but it's particularly important here because you’re dealing with lots of different individual personalities. And many of those won’t work or think like you do. If you're pretty clear on the big picture, it's easier to figure out how to adjust on the fly day to day.

So a couple different things to think about - one is how they work, and the other is about the work itself.

The first thing on how they work - do they give a shit? Some people are willing to let things be just okay as long as they can get out of the office. Those people usually get written off pretty quick. But you'll notice how many times I talk about that though. Mostly just to make clear what the expectations are. As in, this isn't about me - but you taking ownership of making yourself better. That means learning and expanding your thinking on your own, and not expecting others to do it for you. Some people will talk a lot about how to motivate, but I sort of think my time is better spent finding motivated people than getting unmotivated people to work harder. That being said, clearing out all the typical agency crap that can be demotivating is still really important.

Second is empathy. Not only putting yourself in the shoes of the client or whoever you're trying to reach, but to think about what other people you work with need from you. If you spend 5 minutes thinking over what everybody wants, you can take care of those parts and gain a huge amount of latitude to get done what you need to get done. For a young strategist, that usually means worrying about the details. Pay attention to spelling, don't be late, do stuff on time, be considerate, that sort of thing.

Third is acting and looking like a pro. The way we frame our thinking or ideas is half the battle if you want anything good to get a listen. No reason to get stuff kicked back because you wrapped an interesting core thought or idea in an uninspired argument or a document that looks like hell. If it looks sloppy, most people will assume the thinking is sloppy too. The more your work is joy to follow, the more credit you'll get for the thinking. Sort of related to the last point.  

Fourth is staying opportunistic - which is essentially to say, don't be passive. The highest goal is the quality of the end product, so don’t wait for people to tell you what to do. Look for opportunities to improve what that thing is and don't make excuses or blame other departments when something sucks.

For younger planners, if you can get those things right, it makes talking about the work itself that much easier.

Then for projects -  I'm generally watching the story or the argument. When you boil down all the big stuff, what is the larger thing we're building to. That's difficult usually for younger planners. It’s way easier to collect lots of stuff than it is to make it say something. So it’ll often be your job to show them how that collection of things can turn into an argument or a direction when re-assembled in the right order and positioned in the right way. That's what the 30 second pitch framework was all about - making sure everyone was thinking about how pieces become a whole.

After that, it’s staying connected to what makes a brand interesting above anything else. Which basically means thinking about what people give a shit about and matching that with how a brand can relate to that thing. So most new planners start with a selling statement - our cars are the fastest, our pencils have lead that doesn't break. Bla bla bla. But 90% of the time, that's not what makes that brand interesting to people. It does happen, but we’re usually something close to functional parity and we’re influencing along other dimensions. So as you’re discussing an approach or an argument, that’s consistently asking questions about what people care about, or why they care, or what people do with the brand, or where the brand comes from, or how a brand got big in the first place. That's all stuff that can be windows in to a overall more interesting story. 

Then last thing is giving people space to gets things done in a way that suits their personality. Some people think more visually, some people more in stories, some people in numbers, some people like writing stuff out.  Then some people want to spend lots of time in groups, some like to do most their thinking on their own. I think the crappier managers will impose their way as the only approach that works, but if you try to get someone who is a little quieter to constantly do all their thinking out loud, you won’t get the best work and that person will likely flame out. Now that being said, strategists in particular need to do some shapeshifitng, so it’s good to get people uncomfortable from time to time - whether that’s how they work or the type of work, but you’d still want the bulk of their time on projects where they’ll naturally be more proficient. 

Sooooo - I think that's my big principles. Obviously, you make calls as you go, and you change around the edges depending on what that particular person needs, but I think you'll be better equipped to direct them if you start with what you want them to be and how you think the work works best. Then it’s asking the right questions, giving them good inputs, funneling the right work to the right people, that sort of thing.

What to Expect from Your Agency When All Hell is Breaking Loose

My article from our new magazine, Connote. Enjoy, folks!

It’s a mess out there. Proven channels are delivering diminishing returns year after year. Everyone says engagement is important, but that usually means another coupon or promotion that inevitably forces you to lose profit for likes. The line between marketing and operations is getting murkier.

There are more opportunities than ever, but it’s only gotten harder to determine if or how they make a difference to your business.

Media channels have disintegrated into an increasingly complex network of possibilities. Broadcast television is noticeably suffering as Netflix, DVRs, and a hundred cable channels divide audiences.

Mobile is already upending the way the Internet works and altering how all of us shop, eat, read, drive, and communicate. The cost of attention has skyrocketed. It takes more time and more money to break through. Decades of paying for eyeballs has made the challenge of earned engagement that much more difficult. The good old days are gone.

WHERE’S THE SPARK?

The challenge of advertising was never a matter of making things. There was no app that helped you manage your shopping experience. We didn’t consider what happened after a click.

There was no expectation for the viewer to do much of anything. Agencies were left to do one thing really well—create a spark between a brand and a customer. Products were made more profitable through this inherently intangible notion.

After the screams of the death of advertising, the need to stop telling great stories and get on with making great utilities, our conversations changed. We spent less time on the spark and more time on where this or that button should go. We worried more about functionality and less about emotion.

It is the difficulty of doing. We are easily wooed by the rationality of the tangible, often at the expense of the spark.

Whether we are creating apps or status updates, you should expect advertising and marketing to do what it was always meant to do—add intrigue, emotion, thoughtfulness, story, surprise, magic—in ways that make you more noticeable. The biggest wins will always be when we use these new tools not just to make peoples’ lives easier, but to add the stuff of advertising at its best.

THE MODERN INTEGRATED AGENCY

“Integrated” can’t just mean campaigns that happen to cross channels. That’s table stakes. We’re meant to create conversations. To use data we didn’t have 10 years ago. To understand organizations, incorporate customer service, and invent new products. We’re meant to operate like publishing houses, pushing content on a daily basis and receiving judgment immediately through the tweets and likes of fans.

It also can’t mean that every potential need you might have will be executed within our walls. Sometimes you’ll need specialists, and it’s not realistic to trade expertise for practicality.

Advertising and marketing are not statements of a product we make, but of our purpose. We make products easy to like. We make them more famous, more attractive, and more familiar. Truly integrated agencies are those that keep this purpose central while remaining effective with new partners, in new places, and different methods. We will still create magic, but that magic will only sustain itself if we are repeatedly and ruthlessly committed to it.

In Defense of Big Strategy

I'll start by saying - I have much respect for Teehan + Lax. Most of what they do makes me insanely jealous. Same goes for Eric. Super smart human. But I was a bit perturbed by their depiction of big strategy as being necessarily wrong-headed, wasteful and exclusive. Strategy at its core is simply defining where you are, where you want to be, how you'll get there and how you'll measure your progress. If you spend 3 months crafting a strategy for a single tactical output, that's probably wasteful assuming you have good inputs and clear objectives. But combining all instances of strategy into that one bucket undervalues what strategy can be when done and applied properly.

Eric characterizers "big strategy" through this idea.

"They dutifully comb through consumer research and reports, hoping to uncover some magical insight that will unlock some door. For instance, they might discover that there is a statistically significant percentage of 16-24 year olds in Missouri who like kitten GIFs. So they recommend that their tortilla client sponsors a Facebook kitten GIF contest. Maybe they’ll even create a microsite for it. They will spend months planning and conceiving a campaign, cross their fingers and pray that it will ultimately deliver results."

So here's the thing. If that's your job, you are not doing big strategy. You are doing bad strategy. It's not all that hard to use 'big strategy' as a punching bag if you characterize it as chasing after inconsequential stats such as who likes gifs the most. When you actually need strategy, you should not be looking for one magical consumer insight to drive a single communication or platform, but a deeper understanding of the organizational inner workings, the competitive landscape and the marketplace that will uncover opportunities for new growth.

In big organizations with complex problems and complex marketplaces, creating a strategy helps to build commitment from the broader spectrum of the company. It helps us to consider the implications of what we do, both internally and externally. It helps us to get outside of our own assumptions and create a more nuanced understanding of those we need to reach. It helps us think more broadly about the business result of the outputs. When you leap too quickly into the product without working out some of those bits first, you are relying entirely on the generally limited knowledge that exists in the room. Again, sometimes that's okay. But not always.

Even the military photo introducing the post is wrongheadedly dismissive to the impact of strategy. Military organizations use strategy and planning more extensively than any other organization on the planet, precisely because they are dealing with incredibly complex challenges that require a nuanced understanding of the people they may affect. What you will see from the military is a model more like the one I endorse; understand the problem, get agreement on the end state, define the decision making frameworks and measures that'll help you know whether or not you're progressing, then finally - make sure everyone knows and understands that direction so you can decentralize decision making to the highest degree without losing effectiveness. But frankly, you can't do that last part without understanding those before it.

Eric goes on to say.

"This is the main source of digital marketing landfill – countless microsites that were never visited, mobile apps that nobody used, contests that only had 20 entries, and tweets that were never read. They are the unfortunate result of an approach that attempts to predict a positive outcome in a world that resists these types of predictions."

Frankly, that's just wrong. The idea that the digital marketing landfill is a product of big strategy is ridiculous. It's usually matter of total marketing myopia where everyone in the room doesn't question whether anyone would actual use the thing. A good strategist will help bring a customer or segment to life in a way that externalizes the team's thinking. That's a really really good cure to bullshit microsites.

"Big Strategy" helps us define the right problems to solve precisely so we can break old dogma and forge into unexplored territories while remaining rooted in the realities of the outside world. I would ask:

• Does it make sense to understand how customers buy a product before we jump in and start designing how we'll make it easier?
• Does it make sense that a company looks outward to understand what has worked and what has not when approaching a new market?
• Does it make sense for a company to analyze what competitors have done if they want to stand out themselves?
• Is it ever important for a company to consider the resources they have that may help them grow in new areas they may not have considered?
• Is it ever important to develop a new capability rather than creating a new tactic in order to accomplish an objective?
• Are the problems our clients face ever about doing too many things rather than not enough?
• Are there times when investment is required, even if profits haven't caught up with the potential?

If you are not equipped to tackle these kinds of questions, it doesn't mean that they won't be asked and answered. It just means that it will happen without you. We are screaming towards a time when digital shops will either need to diversify and move up the chain or focus and act more like technology companies than marketing agencies. Both will exist. Both will probably thrive. But it is a choice.

So I guess all I'm really saying is that you can't throw all strategy into one big bucket and call it a waste of time. You can rail against misapplied strategy, bad strategy or non-inclusive strategy that assumes it is only the purview of intellectuals, but it remains an effective tool in sustaining growth across a series of tactics when done at the right time and in the right way.

"The great virtue of thought and analysis is that they free us from the necessity of following recipes, and helps us deal with the unexpected, including the imagination to try something new."

Harold McGee on Food and Cooking

Photo credit: Carmen Marchena

 

The Big Ol' Idea

Only some ideas are big - big enough to cross boundaries of media, partnerships, screens, and audiences. Big enough to spin off 1,000 smaller ideas that can all work together in a cohesive way.

So let's take an example. What if you had the idea to chop up every Schwarzeneggar movie scream and put it into one video. That would be super. So someone did it.

But then you took that idea to a community manager, an offline agency, a media company, the client, the fans - what do they do with that idea? It's limited. You can take the video and place it in pre-roll. You can share it. You can talk about it in a status update maybe. But there's not all that much to add. 

But what if you had expressed that idea one level up? The Supercuts meme takes movies and television shows down to their essential ridiculousness to expose the cliches or shared techniques that exist within them. When you frame it that way, everyone gets to play. You could get this.

Or this.

Or this.

That's often the difference between big, integrated ideas and stuff that just does a single job. One gives everyone the freedom to create, the other does not.

So - let's talk examples.

 American Express - Create a Black Friday for Small Business

 Levi's - Reinvigorate a city by putting its residents back to work

You can think of these ideas as gardens. They define both boundaries and fertile territory where other ideas can grow. American Express could have just made the small business tools and Levi's could have just made the tv spot about a fictional steel town getting back to work. And that may have done a job, but it probably wouldn't have spurred as much participation or conversation either.

Even when we do stay solely within the digital space - more often than not, things tend to work better when it's big enough to become a banner ad, a series of social updates, an influencer program, a website, a video and on and on. If all you can do in each of those spaces is tell people that this other thing exists somewhere else, your idea will limit the content teams, social media teams, bloggers and whoever else wants to help it spread.

This isn't always about good ideas or bad ideas. Sometimes our ideas need to be big, programatic, expansive, and sometimes they need to be very specific. But it's important that you understand the difference because even the smaller ones should be additive at the core.

So putting it together - go for ideas that give room for others to play. Infuse them with borrowed elements from music, art, tv, film, fashion, books, memes and magazines to gain attention and make them feel familiar for the audience. Marvel at how awesome you are.

Working Out the Big Idea

Pull out a sheet of paper. On the top - write "The idea." In a few words, write down the basics of the idea.

Below that - you could write this:

Banner ad:

YouTube video:

Facebook status update:

Blogger outreach:

Tumblr:

Then beside each one (and feel free to add other channels) - write down a related idea that would fit with the big idea at the top. If the only thing you can think to do is to tell people about the big idea or you have a slew of hackneyed, unworkable nonsense - might be time to think bigger.

Why Celebrity Matters, Part 2

Here's part 1 in case you missed it.

Simple, not simplistic.

Simple messages are more likely to be remembered and shared. Which is why most briefs have "one key thing." It's also why trying to game the brief by adding a double entendre or a two-pronged one key thing makes it exponentially more difficult to use. 

Pay with a tweet is easy to talk about. A mobile application that is a social network within a game that measures the speed of your car and gives you points to move up and down levels and and and - not so much. And things that are hard to talk about don't get shared.

As we build increasingly complex digital things - a website, an application, a community, a campaign - the imperative for the easily explainable idea becomes only greater. If you want to sell big ideas, you have to give clients the tools to sell them to their teams and the audience the tools to sell them to their friends. 

But there's a tension - simplicity without nuance is boring. And boring things get ignored, too. So while our ideas need to be simple and shareable - each of them need to be packed full of interest generating elements. Or reasons for me to pay attention. And that's where cultural connections matter most. They help our audience identify who it's for and how it can be used. 

Mr. Porter

Given the nature of the site, the big idea is the brand itself. Let's call it 'Classic style for refined men.'

But the site isn't only a rack of clothes. It's full of little content ideas that help me decide if what they sell is for me. So if I'm a lumberjack or something, the whole site would feel foreign. The interviews, the style advice, the profiles of old-school dapper celebrities, they all work together to help me know whether this is something I should stop down for or not. The content never distracts from your purchase, but helps to subtly explain it.

Converse // Wall to Wall Toronto

Converse adds the nudges at the bottom - Music, Basketball, Skateboarding, Style - each a reminder, I am for you. The shoes protect your feet - the music, the art, they infuse it with style. The communications aren't just a way to sell more shoes, they are as much a part of the product as the rubber or the canvas.

Pop Secret Labs // Movie Cards

Earlier this year, Pop Secret launched Pop Secret Labs to use technology to make in-home movie watching more social. Each idea is designed to reach a specific audience or community - a Chrome application for the tech folks, then they've made partnerships with Someecards and OKCupid, reaching out to those that have already shown an ability to connect large audiences.

In each case, the core idea of the brand or the campaign uses smaller ideas to create the world it should live in. They are the connective tissue from the function of the thing to its meaning. When done properly, they make our ideas no less simple, but provide much richer, contextual experiences that give the audience a reason to pay attention.

This is often where campaign microsites and utility for utlity's sake applications consistently fail. While creating an airbrushed stereotype of our audience, we strip the reality, the nuance, the humanity from them. We create a fake world for our audiences instead of a rich world that reflects the one they actually live in. It's in this area that digital shops have the most catching up to do. Even the most technologically interesting solution will fall flat if it remains barren and disconnected.

In short - 

If you want to make and sell big ideas, make them easy to talk about and share.

If you want people to watch or participate, use references to create familiarity, context and invite attention.

All for now. More to come. 

Why Celebrity Matters

We talk a bunch about making stuff, but we spend much less energy connecting that stuff to what our audiences are already doing, reading, watching or making themselves. So let's start getting after that.

Stick with me here. It looks long, but at least there are lots of fun videos and stuff. 

Why does celebrity matter?

Sometimes they lend credibility. So if I need to sell a tennis racket, maybe I'd want Monica Seles as a spokesperson. Or if it was 1995 maybe I would. Because she is great at tennis, so she must know something about rackets. Just like 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest, and they know more than you about teeth, so better to take their advice.

Or second, they have existing communities. When I attach myself to Jay Z, I'm not just buying him, I'm buying what he represents to the people who listen to him. So he may sell Pepsi or American Express, two products he has little special credibility in. Except maybe that he's rich and has awesome taste buds. Either way, the line is way less clear than she plays tennis so let's give her a tennis a racket. 

You could think of Jay Z as a publisher himself, not all that different from Rolling Stone or GQ. So when you bring him in, you're effectively buying space in the mind of his audience. Or at least occupying the same space.

But there is a bigger thing happening here than just credibility or attention. Mostly we're buying familiarity. 

Now - think about your own social circle. How did you get to know them? Probably some sort of commonality. Maybe you went to the same school, or you work with them, or you were at the same show, whatever. That commonality provides the basis for a conversation. And that basis gives you leeway to explore other interests you may have in common. Might be music, books, political leanings or even a worldview. You make connections with others because of all the ways you're the same.

The same goes for how you connect with brands. We tend to favor those that seem familiar. People usually choose things that they know over change, even if the new thing is better. I could spew some psychological mumbo jumbo here, but suffice it to say - creating a sense of familiarity matters a lot whether you're meeting someone new, chatting up a potential client or trying to get someone to buy something. So all those associations you pack into the things we make also amp the likelihood someone will use it, trust it, share it or frankly - just give it a chance, which is half the battle.

So a few examples.

Adidas - Star Wars Cantina

A weird one to be certain, but think of all the little snippets of connections they're using here, creating a world where Star Wars geeks, fans of Snoop Dog and club DJs can all play. All in a style natural to the thousands of remixes that appear on YouTube. And all brought into the Adidas universe. We can argue of how effective it is, but it certainly provides lots of reasons for people to stop down and give it a watch.

Toyota - The Force

Keeping on the Star Wars theme, here's Toyota's Super Bowl spot from 2 years ago. Pretty brilliant connection between a feature and, well, the enterprise.

But let's focus on the year after, where they continued to expand their cultural tapestry, starting with the teaser for last year's super bowl spot. 

They stuck with Star Wars bit by having a dog choir barking the Imperial March, but added a throwback to the most annoying Christmas song ever made. The extra touch of the dogs resembling the characters just gave another nice angle to talk about.

But then it gets more interesting with the spot itself. Starts pretty basic with the cute pup. But then we pull back into the Star Wars universe in the middle of a meta debate on which spot was better - a conversation that would happen across millions of households only seconds later. Maybe a little weird, but packed with cultural currency.

Hospital for Sick Children - Pain Squad

Video-centric examples tend to be the easiest to explain, but sometimes a bit harder to follow into the digital space. So think of the Pain Squad mobile application. Maybe it wins at Cannes without the Rookie Blue and Flashpoint integration, but I doubt it.

Nike+ Fuel Band

The invention of the Nike+ FuelBand sucks up all of the attention, but it is the world Nike, Wieden and R/GA crafted around it that elevated it from just a cool thing for runners and tech geeks to something of more interest to a much wider audience.

How did they launch it?

With this-

Counts

And this-

A Day with Nike+ FuelBand

Or this- 

A Day with Ndamukong Sug

This one was super interesting because they used football player Ndamukong Suh, but also partnered with Path, introducing a whole new community. And setting up a relationship with SXSW.

Or this-

Connecting to the Portland music community and introducing a new use case.

Oreo

The simplest example is this single post from Oreo. They could have just put up another video of you dipping your Oreo into milk or something, but instead - they chose to play in the real world.

The status of products are often derived not from their function, but from their cultural viability. The voice-over, the music, the style of the shoot, the actors, the language you use, all of it - creates a playground of opportunities and a cultural shorthand for the brand. Every choice is a chance  for the brand to say - I like this thing, so do you, so now we can have a chat. 

By now, you've probably figured out that this isn't really a post about celebrity. It's a post about common references. That can be a meme, a phrase, a book, a song, a band, a youtube video, a media property, stylistic element or even another brand. Sometimes it's overt and sometimes it's more subtle - but packing these elements into our products builds the connective tissue that gives it a punch that an unknown voice actor or a custom-made song could never supply.

So how often do we play with these elements? How often do we think of these audiences and question - what do they watch, read and play with? What stuff comes across their newsfeed? What do they talk about in line at Starbucks? And how can we take all of this cultural noise and use it to make our stuff more meaningful.

None of this is new. But it isn't structural to how we assemble our work. And it probably should be. Our baseline job might be to create another action, to provide better experiences, to get someone from point a to point b - but all of that works better and harder when you make the cultural stuff that matters to our audience work with you rather than trying to fight it, or worse, ignore it.

Anyway, more to come. Then we'll get into method.

A version of this was cross-posted on Core, the internal engine of Twist Image

Creating Marketing Things for Ourselves

"Once you start conceiving of your book as a commodity, you start thinking about readers as potential buyers, as customers to be lured. This makes you try to anticipate their tastes and cater to them. In doing so, you begin to depart from your own inclinations rather than respond to what the Irish novelist, Colm Toibin, has referred to as “the stuff that won’t go away.” “It seems that the essential impulse in working is … to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find a form and structure for it.” Facing up to what haunts you and finding a form and structure for it can never be a commercial enterprise. That stuff’s too chaotic and unpredictable, too messy and gorgeous, to fit a popular template. But it’s the source of your originality and may well prove popular in the end."

Author Jeffrey Eugenides shares somewhat of a fact of creativity. it tends to work best when it's something we want ourselves. Which I think is problematic for the business we're in. Everything we do chases the whims of something or someone else. So our question then is how we "chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul" when it's not only an expression of something that burns within, but rather something meant to move someone else.

Not to get all emo on you, I think the answer is love. We don't have the luxury of chasing every eccentric act of creativity that crosses our mind, we aren't in the business of provoking for the sake of provocation. And frankly, very few can build a career on that sort of indulgence in any industry.

So love though, think of how you bought gifts for others this past Christmas. Did you hurriedly buy the first thing plausible you could find? Or did you have the most success in considering the tastes and fashions of someone you care for? Did you buy it to check a box on a list or did you buy it because you wanted to show that person that they hold some meaning for you? If your purchase is more considered, the act of both giving and receiving becomes more satisfying. Everyone wins.

The best strategists and creatives I've found are not only passionate about the work, but the joy of the work stems from something bigger than building stuff you like or building because you need a pay check. The best find something about those who will ultimately touch the things they make that they genuinely care for, admire and respect. The best work is not simply transactional, but an empathetic exchange of something of more import than selling a few widgets.

So that is the job for the New Year, to get beyond the scowls and politics, the holier than thou attitudes we sometimes take towards an audience who may seem far away and not of us. It is to stay out of the high rises and in the streets. To not imagine only soccer moms, tech geek dads and rich, extreme white teenagers when we find ideas, but to create experiences for how the rest of us, and the most of us, live, too.

Austin Kleon says of musicians, "You can ignore the audience as much as you want — just don’t expect to get on the fucking radio."

Ignore your audience all you want, just don't expect to be rewarded for it.

The Agility Myth

“If you look at the creative process outside of traditional advertising, you’ll find a gap. And where there are gaps, there can be opportunities. Why does it take agencies months to work out a single campaign, when it seems Silicon Valley can kickstart an entirely new company in the same amount of time? In the same time frame, gaming companies pull together thousands of iterations of Call Of Dutyand Farmville. Sitcoms can turn out dozens of scripts. And so forth.

What agencies must take immediate responsibility for is the change in hierarchies happening outside of the agency brain tunnel. Top-down assembly line processing is a remnant from the rusty industrial age, and no longer works in the fluid, spreadable hoodoo environments of the information era.” - Patrick Hanlon, Google Says It's Time for Agencies to Get Agile, Forbes

This drives me almost as crazy as the ridiculous "utility or bust" snake oil that sold agencies the idea that storytelling is for chumps, tools are the only things that matter. Like don’t teach math, just build better calculators. Sounds good on paper, but leaves you with a bunch of idiots. 

First, agencies are not startups. Startups aren't even startups, at least not in the romantic view in which they’re presented here. They imagine the myth of the entrepreneur while dismissing the months or years it takes even the most succesful to find their footing. Even then, they fail at a higher rate than would be sustainable for our industry. If you expect to stay in business long with 1 success to 100 epic failures, good luck.

Second, most startups are building stuff they themselves want. In Paul Graham’s post on growth in startups, he said “Steve Wozniak's problem was that he wanted his own computer. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. But technological change was about to make it a much more common one. Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people in the coming years. But by the time it was obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was already established.”

In other words, it’s a combination of perspective and circumstance. Neither easily gained, especially not at the rate suggested here.

We spend most of our time making things that need to move people other than ourselves. Pretending that you can create things that matter to someone else by wielding only an expert knowledge of a technology is just absurd.

I believe that agility matters. I believe that companies that can grow and adapt to changes happening around them usually win. I believe that relentlessly iterating and staying ruthless with our ideas matters more today than in any other time in our history.

That doesn’t mean that every part of the process of making advertising-like things should be treated the same. It's not always useful to throw a bunch of people in the room and expect anything of value to come back. Agility is not an end unto itself. 

A secret sauce for faster ideas is a story the industry wants to believe in, just like the flash of a brilliant insight or the power of creative genius. But if we rely on miracles rather than the tenacity and grit to both find and produce good ideas, I have trouble seeing how the products we make improve rather than continue to decline.

We need to understand when to run. When enough information is enough. When we have the right problem to solve or the right ideas to execute. Maybe then is when speed becomes more of an imperative. Otherwise, dollars are too scarce and too important to risk for the sake of speed alone.

photo by kurichan+