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Over the past decade or so, we have witnessed more and more of our clients bemoaning the commoditization of their business - their complex goods and professional services reduced from highly nuanced, value-added client relationships  to little more than upfront cost and concessions presented to purchasing professionals who were buying toilet paper yesterday and will be buying office chairs tomorrow. Between, of course, “purchasing” accounting software and building controls. We offered wise words and a shoulder to cry on, but little else other than observing as this trend expanded from major global entities to solid proliferation at even medium sized national companies. Well, newsflash. It has not stopped there. In a recent article, it has been observed that purchasing of even mainstream professions, such as IT, advertising, legal services, accounting and PR, are now going under the purchasing professionals bailiwick.

“But we really can’t be categorized so easily,” you say. “We are all about industry knowledge and experience. We provide a complex service, purchasing would never understand what we do. No one has our industry contacts. We’re specialists. We just don’t fit an RFP mold….”

Well, think again. In fact, entire procurement professional meetings, retreats, seminars and even trade shows are being devoted to the purchase of professional services. Spend any time at all with procurement professionals, and you will soon realize that professional services are seen as a gold mine - full of opportunity to control cost and quality while at the same time full of risk of the unknown and the unfamiliar. Fellow professionals, welcome to the supply chain….

So what’s the best tactic for those of us being “requested to propose” provision of our services to a large corporation via their purchasing group? It’s actually quite simple.

Start with a rate card, and keep it current. Ensure that your list of services is comprehensive and up-to-date. If you are a private company, make sure you have current financial statements, or other acceptable evidence of financial stability. Don’t worry about the nuance, because it doesn’t matter. Sure, you’ll need to foster a relationship with the ultimate user of your services, but the important thing during procurement is to meet all the purchasing criteria. Stop presenting as an attorney and present as a roll of toilet paper, the most functional, cost-effective toilet paper the purchasing department has ever seen. The fact that corporate counsel has gone apoplectic waiting for purchasing to approve your appointment will make the eventual assignment all the sweeter. Because the funny thing is, they don’t like it any more than you do.

We were talking at dinner the other night about the two floating islands of plastic in the Pacific and the Atlantic Gyres and how the plastic has slowly entered our food chain, bringing with it possible severe health consequences. Another big thanks to the chemical companies busy “bringing good things to life.”

With that in mind, the recommendation of the medical community is to eat lower on the food chain. You don’t have to give up meat and fish entirely, but it’s best to limit your intake and learn how to enjoy other sources of protein. Because the higher up the food chain you go, the greater the concentration of these toxins…little fish being eaten by bigger fish, and so on. However much we like to eat things high up on the food chain, they are actually not very good for us. So over a lifetime eating more beans than sizzling steaks or tuna will prove to be the better and healthier choice.

What’s this got to do with marketing?

Well, anyone who’s been in this business (or any business with corporations for clients) for any length of time will tell you that big corporate clients, high up on the food chain, are great to have. They bring lots of revenue, the ratio of production and creative to media is huge and the clients are generally sophisticated and used to working with an agency. It is tasty, juicy work compared to smaller clients, like start-ups and industrials, who are generally further down the food chain. These smaller clients are more like a big pot of beans than a great big tuna steak. Not to say you don’t get some tasty work out of these relationships, but the process takes longer and is generally less profitable, with lots of continuous stirring so they don’t burn. On the plus side, we’ve ended up making more lifetime friends with some of our smaller clients than we ever have with the big boys.

Another plus is that you can lose a small client with very little impact to your firm. Lose a big client and you are going to have to let go of staff and make all kinds of adjustments until you recover the business. Big clients can keep you up at night, and yet I can’t remember losing sleep over a small client. I care about them as much as a big client, but the risks are just that much lower.

As our industry continues to evolve, as larger clients continue to take media and other plumb and profitable assignments off the table, perhaps learning to eat lower on the business food chain can actually have long term health benefits - both financially and physically. Sure, there’s less salt, less fat and less sugar, but there are also a lot fewer hangovers and headaches, and a greatly reduced risk of business stroke and heart attack. Sounds like a plan to me….

Today, Intel and Vice Magazine launched a collaborative effort titled “The Creators Project.” Pegged as an initiative “dedicated to the celebration of creativity and culture across media, and around the world,” the new project is centered around a website (www.thecreatorsproject.com) and a series of events and exhibitions spanning the globe from New York to Beijing.

The project kicked off today with a streaming press conference led by Vice co-founder Shane Smith and creator Mark Ronson (and notably DJed by Alexandra Richards, daughter of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards).

The site features interviews and documentaries spotlighting artists like Diplo, Muti Randolph, Richie Hawtin, Karl Sadler, Phoenix and numerous other individuals who have helped bridge the ever-narrowing gap between creativity and technology. The already robust site promises a multitude of future updates and content additions, so keep checking back for more information. The first event, scheduled for June 26 in New York, advertises “a groundbreaking combination of interactive art and installations, panels, workshops, screenings, and live performances.” Sounds like a party we wouldn’t want to miss.

To check out more about The Creators Project, visit the site, Facebook or join the conversation on Twitter using the #creators hashtag.

Koroberi says goodbye to its beloved mascot.

Angus, the black pug that has graced the halls of Koroberi for nine years, died suddenly this weekend. Raised by the ad agency staff, he was part of the team with an almost perfect attendance record.

We are heartbroken but grateful for his faithfulness, dedication, fun and antics.

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan. But this is no alien creation - the designs have been cleverly planted. Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields.

A Sengoku warrior on horseback (pictured here) has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colours created by using different varieties, in Inakadate in Japan As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.

The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993. The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall.

More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals.

Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.

Dear old dad takes son for his first aerobatic flight. Son’s face tells the story….

I bring two (well, three, if you count the dog) personal practices with me to work every day. One is my meditation practice, which continues to be a wonderful tool for dealing with stress and aggravation, kind of like having your own private beach right there in the office. I should probably talk about that a bit more, but I’ll save that for another time.

The practice I want to talk about today is flying, or more specifically, aerobatic flying. In so many ways, aerobatic flying is truly what flying is all about. Exploring every dimension, every corner of the airplane’s capability; loops, rolls and spins; right side up, upside down, straight up, straight down. Part of the journey in aerobatic flying is learning to comfortably fly upside down (see image above, which is actually taken from a video of me flying upside down), because flying upside down, or inverted, is totally different from flying right side up. The control inputs are opposite and your perception of right and left and east and west are completely skewed. In fact, pretty much everything our brain thinks it knows is wrong, and it has to relearn some pretty basic concepts on the fly. Keeping that in mind, here are just a few things that I’ve learned from my inverted aerobatic experience and some disciplines they can bring to business decision making.

Flying your business point of view upside down means introducing totally new and fresh behavior patterns and make them your own. It’s not easy. It’s a challenge to overcome the brain when you logically predetermine a sequence of steps but your experience tells you they are the opposite of what you should be doing. Second, in a time when all of the rules have changed, you should stop assuming anything based on your past experience. Just stop making assumptions. Stop thinking you know the answer because chances are you don’t. In a world turned upside down, we actually don’t know jack.

A week or so ago, I was practicing flying inverted on my own. I was nice and stable on an easterly heading and I told myself to turn north. Well, don’t you know it, but I found myself heading south. Duh! And then I burst into laughter. Upside down, hanging by the straps, almost in tears with laughter, because suddenly I realized how cool this all was and how aerobatics is just like business and just like life. If you find yourself in an upside down world, you better make your decisions based on being upside down - if you don’t you’ll be turning left when you need to go right and going down when you want to go up. How well we fly and how well we run our businesses, marriages and lives when everything is topsy-turvy depends on how well we practice. Unusual attitudes and inverted flight teach us a whole lot more than we give credit. I’m still not great at it, but I am getting better. And I think my clients also appreciate the fresh perspective on their challenges.

And about the dog? Well, right now he is gently snoring on a soft bed in the corner of my office. A perspective on business that perhaps we all could use…..

Last week, some of my Koroberi coworkers and I participated in a “virtual event” sponsored by the American Marketing Association titled “Social Media: Cracking the Code for Business Marketers.”

I was armed and ready. I had circled the speakers that interested me and marked the conflicting time slots to remind myself to watch them on-demand later.

One problem: I couldn’t log in. I never even received my login information. Emails to the AMA were answered by an automated message assuring me that my “question would be answered within 24 hours.”

This is the equivalent of a locked entry hall door at a tradeshow. There were others in the same boat on Twitter, calling out to @marketing_power for help. The problem could have been solved faster had any of us known the hashtag for the event (it was #AMAVESM), but even that wasn’t released until after the webinar had already begun. We could “hear” bits and pieces of the presentations from some of the other Tweets, but it was akin to pressing a glass to a wall.

Once I was able to log in (piggybacking on a coworker’s information), I joined my conference and immediately found myself adjusting my speakers. The presenter’s audio was terrible! I had to “turn it up to 11,” my tinny computer speakers threatening mutiny.

There were some strong lessons to be had, though most of it not about social media. It was about how to do (or not do) a virtual event” Now that I’ve had a week to think about this, I’ve compiled a list of guidelines for coordinating and running a virtual event.

1)    Ensure that attendance links are sent out in advance - not when the “doors open.”
Even after I logged in, I had to update my Mozilla and restart my computer. I would have appreciated the chance to update earlier in the morning (even if I didn’t take the opportunity to do so!)

2)    Post the event hashtags to your Twitter account – not within the event!
For those that couldn’t join the conference, it’s nice to be able to catch a glimpse through a Twitter search feed.

3)    Powerpoints are never glamorous – but please give us good audio.
The high-pitched ringing of my speakers made an introductory topic painful to listen to and likely caused several audience-members to tune out.

4)    Consider how the user will interact with the speakers and others.
The presentation was located in a “pop up” window but the chat was housed in my main browser. I lost the presentation “underneath” my browser windows and couldn’t efficiently watch the presentation and chat at the same time.

5)    Always provide the information for on-demand viewing.
Bravo, AMA. The Virtual Event is still on demand here. Yes, that’s a typo in the link. No, that’s not my typo…

That being said, we applaud the AMA for putting the event together. We can’t all dedicate a day in our local city to attend a conference that only has one or two applicable presentations, let alone fly out to Beverly Hills or San Francisco, so virtual events are a helpful and cost-effective alternative.

On a side note, we’re breaking out the popcorn and watching one of these this afternoon!

The agency RFP process, widely criticized by agencies to the point that it’s even driven some to strike, has been covered extensively by authors voicing opinions for fixing or refining the age-old procedure (see examples below). While it’s easy to recommend ways to amend the clearly challenging and expensive RFP process, the question remains – once you’ve chosen to participate in a pitch, how can you tell if and when you should politely decline to participate?

For example, we recently pitched an account from a large global corporation headquartered in Wisconsin. The new VP of marketing visited twice, provided guidance during the process and informed us that we were finally shortlisted for the actual pitch, going against two mega agencies. We felt the love, the interest and the validity.

Fast forward to post-pitch and D-day. We did not win the account. Oh well, it happens all the time. A big deal and yet not a big deal - simply part of “our” business model as a marketing agency. Despite the fact that RFP’s are time-consuming and cost a bunch of money (research, creative, media planning, presentation, travel, etc), we understand the risks and rewards going in eyes wide open.

But here’s the thing. When we reviewed our January website analytics, we noticed a startling fact - over the entire three-month duration of the pitch, we did not receive one single site visit from Wisconsin headquarters. Not one. We also found that zero corporate stakeholders had taken the time to review our personal or corporate profiles on LinkedIn. The oversight of not noticing this earlier suddenly dawned on us. We were so deep into the pitch and so busy with the work that we never took the time to review the facts. And the facts spoke to a lack of interest in spite of the personal visits, emails and telephone calls from the delegated corporate coordinator.

We would have noticed this apparent lack of interest much earlier by keeping a closer eye on our collection of analytics, and could have responded by withdrawing and allocating our time, effort and dollars more appropriately. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

So you can bet that the next time we pitch, we’ll be monitoring our web traffic and other analytics, gauging interest throughout the process and staying absolutely on top of our newly designated “interest-o-meter.” For our clients, we embed and apply metrics to practically everything that we do, and we’re held accountable by them. It’s now time to put the same process to work in our pitching. Embed the metrics, analyze them daily and make decisions based on facts, not feelings. Because despite what we want to believe, love has nothing to do with it.

Related links:

http://fuelingnewbusiness.com/2010/02/20/belgium-ad-agencies-strike-to-protest-unfair-new-business-pitch-process

http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2009/02/why-agency-rfirfp-process-is-contrary.html

http://digitalseachange.blogspot.com/2009/01/fixing-clientagency-rfp-process.html

As the New Year rolls around, everyone inevitably compiles the usual list of resolutions: lose weight, eat better, Tweet more often, watch TV less, etc. Here at Koroberi, we’ve compiled a short list of resolutions that we feel will bring more value to our clients in 2010. Below are my media and marketing resolutions for the New Year.

1. Don’t let clients engage in social media without them knowing why.

Too often, B2B companies see social media as simply creating a Facebook page, adding a Twitter account or uploading videos to YouTube. It’s our job to help them see the big picture. Identifying key objectives, understanding customer behavior and devising a detailed strategy are paramount to any successful marketing initiative, so why shouldn’t that apply to a social media campaign?

2. Create measurable metrics for all social media activities.

Once upon a time, social media was seen as the “immeasurable medium” that offered no identifiable metrics, therefore making it impossible to calculate ROI. Those days are history. With tightened budgets and uneasy executives making marketing decisions, creating quantifiable metrics and demonstrating ROI can make the difference between a successful social media campaign and one that never gets off the ground.

3. Move beyond email marketing.

I won’t go as far as saying that email is dead, but there is an oversaturation of email marketing in the B2B space. What was once an affordable, fairly simple form of advertising has deteriorated into a spam-ridden vehicle utilized by many and read by few. So what’s next? SMS advertising? Social search marketing? Online video sponsorship? How about a return to direct mail now that the receipt of a letter has become a rarity?