Part !!!: Importance of Culture

EXPERTS ON CULTURE, NOT ADS
Agencies now need to be more than just Ad men. The days of Madison Avenue and Mad Men are done. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be ads or that a hard sell still won’t work. It’s just that, because of how quickly technology is moving our culture forward, we need to see the big picture. As agencies, we can’t just think of the linear path to purchase. We need to understand the world around our group/person of interest.

Today’s advertising should be like echolocation. People need help navigating information in our physical and online environments. Instead of yelling at them with one-way advertising (once again, I know, not a novel idea), we need to help them when they need us. Like echolocation, we need to find avenues for the consumer to reach us (to call out to us) and once they do, we need to genuinely help them navigate their want/need state to find the best solution. Even if the final solution isn’t a sale, there is still value in how we have helped them.

Not only do we need to understand the culture of consumers and our daily life, but also understand how to engage, build, and gauge organizational culture, both internally and with our clients.

The biggest differentiators for business nowadays and in the future will be through corporate culture and customer service experience. The two go hand-in-hand. The better your culture, the better the employees are treated, the more passion and belief they have in the inanimate capitalistic entity called a corporation, the better the customer service will be, the higher the sales will rise. It’s not just for one kind of industry, it’s any company.

Look at Southwest Airlines, Toms Shoes, Google, QuikTrip (QT), Wal-Mart, P&G, IBM, Whole Foods. All of these places are successful because they have a corporate culture they can get behind.

Furthermore, agencies need to proactive in culture, internally and externally. Why can’t agencies make products and produce work that creates value for people? Why can’t agencies build proprietary analytic systems and sell them? When are agencies going to stop charging by the hour and start charging for unique services as a whole. They need a research project, that’s $15K. You need a rebranding and a new position. That’ll be $200K thank you very much. The next post will go into a lot of examples, but I want to keep it top level right now.

Agencies need to show that they understand culture by creating cultural content. Why not create a direct mail piece for clients at Christmas? Why not do something fun and funny (like a video) and put it on YouTube or sell it for charity. Two great examples I will give is Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland office documents local music venues and artists and posts it on their site. BBH (Bartle, Bogle, and Hegarty) has created BBH Labs in order to hypothesize, theorize, build, and dream up social and technological experiments and research. Both of these agencies are better because of the actions they’ve taken. It proves that they live in the world and care about more than just advertising; that they don’t just stay in their advertising bubble without really getting out and experiencing the world or understanding society.