The Bottom Rung » Opinion

Kia’s Drive Change Campaign

Angus Gastle — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:17:05 +0000

My old CD Israel Diaz left Leo Burnett Toronto a few short months ago to start up the Canadian arm of David & Goliath. His founding client was a little brand called Kia Motors Canada and this is the first work we’ve seen out of his new shop.

These spots focus on community revitalization acts in low income communities around Ontario (of which there are a lot). Considering that many of these communities are also the target market for Kia, it is a perfect choice. And in typical Diaz style, it was beautifully shot.

This new initiative comes at a time when the future of Kia was called into question in a recent report by the Business Insider. Kia was one of the 10 brands they claim will disappear before the end of the year. The reason? Hyundai is having the same problems GM and Ford were having with multiple brands eating away at their bottom line.

So while the work is solid, I hope Israel has a couple tricks up his fashionable sleeve as he may have to start planning for the future, before he’s even had a chance to really get started. The second spot is posted after the jump.
Read the rest of Kia’s Drive Change Campaign (5 words)

I want to deconstruct my clients

Angus Gastle — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:01:31 +0000

Continued from Part I…

Now that we’ve discussed innovating on the agency side, the next logical step is to take a look at innovating the client side of the business. The main question being, how badly do your clients want to win?

Delivering positive business results for the upper level client-side managers is what matters most. If they didn’t deliver good results, frankly, they wouldn’t be around very long. To get their business units in the black, they set goals for their staff to achieve in order to stay on track. Increase ROI or reduce churn (telecom) or increase volume share (cpg) among others. In the past, clients have turned those business goals into “communication goals” via a communication brief.

The purpose of this brief is to translate the business talk into a communication goal that the agency can act on. Which makes sense as creative teams don’t talk 5% growth, they talk consumer insights.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if our clients passed their business objectives on to us to see what happened. If Bell Canada briefed Leo and said, we need you to reduce churn by 2% this year. No mandatories, no silly benefit statements. As long as Leo delivered on that 2% reduction, it wouldn’t really matter what they produced, nor would it matter much what it cost as long as it was less than what was invested.

I propose that clients start to brief their agencies with real business results as opposed to hokey communication objectives. Challenge their bright minds to wrap their head around real objectives. And challenge their wallets by linking results to their fees. Through this method, you might get some off the wall work, but you may also get some off the wall results.

The Secret to Great Ideas?

Angus Gastle — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:15:03 +0000

As the old axiom goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. Therefore, if you’re in need of some truly awe inspiring ideas to save your client’s business, briefing the same creative team will get you to the same place you always end up. Such is the problem many CPG account teams face when they re-brief the same teams on the same old problems with the same old insights.

But what if you briefed a collaborative team of writers, art directors, planners, producers and account people? Would their broader experience base produce better ideas? Who knows, but Uncle Leo has decided to give it a whirl and I’m very excited.

I want to deconstruct my agency

Angus Gastle — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:41:38 +0000

Surf any agency website and you find a similar story. They may articulate it in a funny, rebellious, inspirational or game-changing way but strip away the bravado and you’re left with the same pitch. Sometimes that pitch is customer centric, other times it’s behaviour centric, but it always involves a love of the Big Idea. This industry trades in Big Idea Currency and just like needing an MBA to become a consultant, you need to have Big Ideas in order to even get invited to the big house.

However, the Big Idea is only as good as the agency’s ability to fight for it. Many are sold down the river for a steady paycheck. But if you were in upper management and had to choose between fighting for a great idea and putting food on your table, you’d sell the idea down the river too. But what if the Idea and the paycheck didn’t have to be mutually exclusive?

What if the quality of the idea was what guaranteed the paycheck?

If you look at your typical agency, you’ll find print producers, tv producers, project mangers, web developers, flash designers and print studio artists among many others. The agencies that employ them need to develop work that keeps them busy and keeps them employed. If you have a studio, you better recommend a print campaign so they have something to do. If you have TV producers, you better recommend commercials. And if you have a big web team, you better also recommend a website, a viral video and a social networking angle to keep them all employed too.

However, there is a small movement taking place in our industry. To protect and promote really big ideas, some agencies are taking off the shackles of a large workforce and cutting their agency down to the Big Three: The Strategic Arm, The Creative Arm and The Account/Management Arm. Under this model, you hire the staff you need as your big idea requires. Need a website? Hire the best web developer or boutique digital agency to produce it. Need to create an art installation for fashion week in Toronto? Hire the designers that are coming to town anyway to build it for you so they can rep it while they’re here.

If you structure your agency so that it can fight for the big ideas, you allow the idea to drive the process. You attract the top creative talent in the business which will only make you stronger. And you’ll drive real results from your clients, albeit in unexpected ways.

I want to liberate my agency

Angus Gastle — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:16:55 +0000

A mission statement, by definition, is a short formal statement description the purpose or direction of an organization. Until I read Winning by Jack Welch, I had not seen a mission statement that made sense to me.

During his time at GE, his mission was to have each of GE’s businesses be #1 or #2 in every market that they competed in. That is a mission I can get behind as it has direct implications in every day business. Have an under-performing business? Can it. Why? Because it doesn’t live up to the mission of the company. Have an under-performing business with potential? Pour your heart, soul and cash into it to make it the best in the world. Why? Because that’s how you live up to the mission statement of the company.

The goal of Leo Burnett Toronto is to be the most talked about agency in town, bar none. It said it right on our creative brief. We could live it and fight for it everyday we came to work. And it’s an easy thing to measure for my fellow foot soldiers as all you have to do is read the industry rags.

This year Leo cleaned up in Strategy mag (as well as a few others) which further proves that we’re living up to our mission. But early in 2009, word began to spread internally that Leo wanted to not only be the most talked about agency in town but also one of it’s most competitive. While the goal of being competitive is more of a value than a mission statement, some of what Welch applied to GE can be applied to Leo.

If you’ve worked in our industry for any length of time, you’ve probably heard war stories about MacCann being an incredibly tough place to work. Especially in New York where the toughest of the tough go to fight in the trenches, spending half their time shooting down their own line instead of at the enemy. While you might call them competitive, I’m not sure Uncle Leo would want to follow the same path.

Since the goal of being competitive has been all but forgotten, I’ve taken it upon myself to draft a few goals for the agency that I’d enact if I was CEO.

1. Every person from Assistant Account Exec to ECD is an ambassador for Leo. They should always be on the lookout for new business large and small. There is no reason why, if their brother-in-law is an electrician, that he should advertise with anyone else but us.

2. We need to ramp up the internal training of our employees. Having senior people give talks to the rest of the agency on their topic of choice isn’t enough. Once a month, we should learn something that can be practically applied to our accounts.

3. We need to send people from all levels out to colleges and universities spreading the gospel of advertising and of Leo. I once gave a talk at Durham College and got 20 resumes in return. Give an inspiring talk and you’ll win the hearts of the brightest young minds out there.

4. Encourage all levels of the agency to network with other agencies in town. We need a finger in every pie in order to know what’s going on. Someone pitching a new account? We should have 5 people that know the guy running that pitch.

5. We hire a lot of smart people at Leo. Having a tough time cracking a brief? Get the whole agency in a room and get fresh eyes on it. Have a new pitch we have to win? Do the same. New business doesn’t have to just fall on the shoulders of the executive club. Just think of how persuasive our pitches could be. And how tight knit the agency would become.

6. Do reviews twice a year. If you can’t get better in 6 months, we need to know so we can bring in someone new.

It’s a short list but that could be enough to get people up and moving. Being competitive means we have to shake things up. To compete in this market, as overexposed as it is in T-dot, we need to be everywhere and in front of as many people as possible. One of those people will be a CEO one day. And one of them will call us up.