Don’t call it a comeback: How agencies are navigating economic recovery with their clients.

Originally published in Digiday

Recovering from economic downturns varies significantly depending on the type of media agency and its clients’ business. But agencies and their clients have learned some important practices in the last few years.

The global pandemic and recent slumps in advertising and media sectors have forced agencies to focus on efficiencies and step up as partners for their clients.

Jay Langan, CEO of Ocean Media, said his agency has been impacted by downturns like “most of the industry,” largely the result of the pandemic accelerating many digital and retail changes and concurrent corrections.

Langan said during these times it’s normal for clients to pull back on spending while evaluating the impact to their business. Ocean Media has focused on more scenario planning at different budget levels and closely monitoring performance.

“You want to be ready to ramp quickly when the economy picks up, and this can vary across different categories,” Langan said. “The brands that tend to excel and come out stronger are not sitting back waiting for things to improve. They are optimizing media mix based on performance, adjusting messaging, and leveraging data to capitalize on the inevitable turnaround.”

For example, during Covid the travel category was hit hard and Ocean Media client Priceline cut back on spending, Langan explained. However, Etsy and Rakuten saw an uptick in their business by taking advantage of the lower media rates.

For the upcoming year, agencies seem encouraged about ad spending delivering a lift to their businesses. Based on Digiday research, 12% of agency execs said ad spending on behalf of clients will significantly increase in 2023 compared to last year, while 47% said the spending will somewhat increase compared to 2022. The survey also found 32% of agencies strongly agreed about being optimistic about their company’s prospects for 2023.

Leveraging AI to increase efficiencies

Other agencies have focused on improving efficiency internally and externally. Peter Prodromou, president of Boathouse Palo Alto, said his company has invested in “performance AI” over the last several years. In January, Boathouse launched an AI narrative capability that supports clients’ campaign strategy and channel engagement. The dashboard uses natural language and machine learning AI to analyze data from tens of thousands of sources, ranging from sentiment and hashtags to themes and passion.

“Going forward, particularly with performance AI… [there is] the need to be more efficient than the changing expectations of us as consumers,” Prodromou told Digiday. “They’re going to have to deploy more of that technology into their marketing… and into their business in order to make it work better.”

Client expectations have also changed amid Covid, Prodromou noted, pointing to the ability to source international talent as modern-day work life has made location requirements more flexible.

“We changed our business model in that sense, away from being physically constrained by the cities that we’re in to being able to access talent,” Prodromou said. “Like 25% or 30% of our workforce is from different cities than where our core offices are, and that to me is an enormous growth opportunity… clients, because of the pandemic, aren’t caring about you being at their front door in the way that they used to be.”

For instance, he said companies still seem to be sending out RFPs the same way as before — but there is not as much an emphasis on having to be physically present to pitch and close business. This flexibility is “a good thing,” Prodromou added.

Changing KPIs and brand basics

Over the last year, agencies and brands have found they need to reprioritize some metrics that took a backseat as the pandemic impacted businesses. Amy Lanzi, COO of Publicis Commerce, previously mentioned that the agency is seeing a shift recently from return on ad spend to new-to-brand and lifetime value of a customer as KPIs. As commerce grows, Publicis is continuing to gather data on multi-touch attributes and exploring a new product with Amazon’s ad tech team to test attribution.

It is about going beyond ROIs to understand “total sales and however your client wants to talk about that,” Lanzi said. “But I would say that in the last month, there has been a definite tempo change from our clients, particularly around the metric of new-to-brand.”

Evan Levy, president of indie agency Fitzco, agreed that businesses are going back to fundamentals, like brand building and differentiation after some of them slipped during Covid as the industry pushed toward high-performance media. Levy added that slumps are also an opportunity for agencies to examine what they put off when things were busier, which can be fine-tuning their tech or reviewing projects that were postponed.

“Then you have to make your own magic,” Levy told Digiday. “That sort of goes back to doubling down on client partnership. What’s the business challenge that you know exists but hasn’t been briefed into the agency before? What is some spec work that you could do?”

Levy has focused on managing the business in a fluid way, though the agency has benefitted from its client base — 30% of which are in health care, and other sectors not as impacted by the economy. A year ago, the agency also guided clients on how to invest during a recession, which has helped in cementing close partnerships with them.

“The best agencies have steeled themselves against the headwinds that we’ve been facing and will continue to face,” Levy said. “So if [clients are] going through a slump, we have to be prepared to go through that slump with them — and that requires just nimbleness that the agency is built for.”

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Narrative Economics with Boathouse Founder and CEO John Connors

Originally published in Marketing Today with Alan B. Hart

Alan B. Hart and John discuss what Narrative Economics is, how it works, and why marketers may need to reevaluate their use of Brand Management theory.

Alan and John discuss what Narrative Economics is, how it works, and why marketers may need to reevaluate their use of Brand Management theory. John tells us how Boathouse uses data and AI to empower brands to understand their true narrative and evaluate how it aligns with their desired narrative. Boathouse employs strategies like “newsjacking” and “socialjacking” to manage and leverage their client’s stories in a way that drives engagement and aligns with their goals and values.

John Connors has spent his entire career in the advertising industry and founded Boathouse in 2001 after serving as CEO of Zentropy Partners and being part of the McCann World Group Management team. At Boathouse, John and his team use Narrative Economics to help brands manage and leverage stories by overseeing both the strategy and execution.

 In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• How Narrative Economics works in practice 

• What Tesla and the Catholic Church narratives have in common

• How Narrative Economics can help CMOs reestablish power 

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How Executives Need to Rethink Brand Strategy

By John Connors

Co-Founder/CEO of Boathouse

Originally published in ANA

Image source: Unsplash.com

We need to rethink how we do brand strategy and brand management.

The traditional brand strategy model can rarely keep pace in today's always-volatile business environment that is being driven simultaneously by financial markets, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, celebrities, and consumers.

By dogmatically relying on classic brand strategy and management, too many executives look like aging athletes who are not able to keep up. We too often lean on the classic brand management model that was created in 1931 for the purpose of differentiating Ivory Soap from Camay.

The hard truth is that we are too blindly loyal to a 91-year-old model. Our adherence to this dated framework results in CMOs having the highest turnover in the C-Suite, not being invited to board meetings, having roles re-titled and to marketing and communications departments being reorganized.

It is time to revisit our beliefs and to find new brand strategy and management models that will change the trajectory of marketing. We need to uncover new ideas that embrace the complexity our companies face to help marketers regain their credibility in the marketplace.

Practical Advice on How to Rethink and Apply In Your Organization

Analyze your marketing belief system. Which brand strategy model do you use? Which marketing guru do you follow? Is it Kotler, Trout & Ries, Aaker, or maybe you use the brand management model? There is too little discussion on branding schools of thought. It is critical to make sure you have examined your philosophy and evaluated if your model is still relevant today. For example, if you use a model created for soap in the 1930s and you work in a global asset management, healthcare, or technology firm, you may want to reconsider, or at least ask yourself why you believe what you do.

Know your company's marketing situation. Be clear minded about finding the right model for your company and your industry. Different industries, competitive situations and budget levels demand different models. If you are a Top 30 advertiser and you have more than a billion to spend then you can likely win through brute force (e.g., P&G spent $8.1 billion in 2021, according to Statista). Unfortunately, too many marketers follow the big budget philosophy without having the dollars to match. If you do not have enough money to reach much of the market through paid advertising, then you should evaluate new models.

Study your CEO and your company's strategy. To effectively rethink marketing strategy, CMOs must first commit to studying their company and their CEO. We need to embrace their complexity and not think marketing first. Today, only 49 percent of CMOs have the personal trust of their CEO, according to Boathouse Quant Study). Trust is a requirement for operating success. We have found two shortcuts to building this trust.

The first is to study the CEO's calendar. It is the single biggest indicator of what they care about. Study how they spend their time, build pie charts of the audiences and issues that take up their time. If they meet with investors, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, and consumers then you need a broader model. If they spend most of their time studying the market data, store traffic and the consumer then a consumer-centric approach may be right.

Second, visualize your company's strategy. Get your company's strategy on a single page. We use Michael Porter's Activity Map framework as a tool to bring strategy to life. Armed with the CEO's priorities and the company's strategy, marketers can then consider the appropriate model. The challenge for many marketers is that they bring the same model to each company and spend too little time studying the new battlefield. This quickly erodes trust.

Identify a model to succeed with the CEO/board and the market. The challenge with finding new marketing models is that there simply are not many out there. As marketers, we like to experiment with new channels and new technology more than we like to evaluate new strategic models. There are very few academics creating new models. Consider for a moment who you consider to be the greatest marketing thinkers of our time, or better yet do a search on the topic.

There are no longer any marketing academics of any stature. Your search results will likely be filled with entrepreneurs rather than academics. You are going to have to look outside the marketing departments of major universities and business schools. In our work, we have focused on a model that emanates from the thinking of Nobel prize economist Robert Shiller who introduced the concept of "Narrative Economics" in 2018. We believe narratives are the new vectors for change in our economy, our politics, our social movements, and our companies.

Test narrative versus brand. Try a simple experiment. Walk or Zoom into your next meeting with the CEO or board and replace the word "brand" with the word "narrative". Narrative will give you the power to think and execute across investors, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, and consumers. The narrative model will give you far greater flexibility across your paid, owned, and earned media. You will find that narrative is a much more dynamic model that enables you to leverage today's media and consumer social behaviors versus brand management which is more static in nature and built for the slower moving media and the blunt force of traditional media.

The best entrepreneurs manage narratives intuitively. Jeff Bezos can talk about rockets, the cloud, e-commerce, distribution centers, climate pledges, digital advertising, streaming and himself...all as a part of their umbrella narrative: Be the earth's most customer centric company.

That narrative is not some trendy new framework. This is how countries and religions have been built. Countries and religions, the original brands, are in fact a collection of narratives that add up to a whole story and belief system. Consider the narratives of the United States. We have narratives around the constitution, the branches of government, the states, the founding fathers, the people, the democratic political model, elections, the economic model, and the military model. Narratives guided us long before we needed to differentiate Ivory from Camay.

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How to overcome your overreliance on marketing technology

By Peter Prodromou

Founder/President Boathouse Palo Alto

Originally published in ClickZ 

Image source: Unslpashed.com

Around 20 years ago, marketers started to become increasingly enamored with the promise of marketing automation and technology solutions to drive sales and growth. From its earliest stages, these solutions promised to revolutionize the way organizations could formulate and manage campaigns, track relationships, and drive new business acquisitions. In a profession constantly seeking to illustrate tangible and measurable value creation, this promise was greeted as a panacea.

Twenty years later, the bloom is off the rose. And if it is not, it ought to be. While virtually every organization has invested in some form of marketing technology, most do not come close to optimizing the promise. The same excuses prevail. First, is the human element. Most organizations do not properly onboard users about how to leverage the technology. Second, many of these users, often incentivized through customer acquisition, do not see what advantage they get by moving off spreadsheets and emails. Why add another complicated layer to an already challenging task?

Meanwhile, CMOs, who are looking for an easy dashboard to illustrate progress, must deal with the under-utilization of the technology by dissatisfied staffers. Moreover, they are stuck in a turf war with CTOs who are tasked with acquisition and implementation. So, rather than being a solution, technology has become another complicating factor in an increasingly competitive environment. And yet, rather than facing the issue and challenging the status quo, executives elect to double down.

Four ways to transform your approach to marketing technology

The question is, what should they be doing instead? Here are four thoughts we believe can have a transformative effect:

1. Change behavior

We recommend immediately polling mission-critical users to find out where the holes are in usage and what is creating the disconnect. Using a third party and ensuring anonymity will lead to honest disclosure. Some are sufficiently alienated that they will forsake anonymity and give you a piece of their mind.

Believe me, we have seen it first-hand. Based on this you can formulate tangible retraining and incentive programs to drive behavioral change.

2. Change the channels

Technology solutions tend to be “set and forget.” Rather than evaluating channel performance ongoing, as you might in a traditional implementation, you are trained to rely on the technology to perform. The problem? This is not smart technology.

It is a programmed sledgehammer of frequency, designed to systematically bombard key targets with content and respond to inquiries. It is a good bet your team is not implementing it that way and, as such, you will need to use a channel audit to implement changes.

3. Change the content

Who among us has not periodically received a piece of marketing content that looks laughably old and dated? This is technology being trusted to outweigh intelligence in anticipating a client’s need. Eventually, the content stuffs the channel, and the “set and forget” mentality slips in again.

That is because the technologists have trained users to believe that the solution IS the technology and frequency, rather than the content. It is critical to refresh campaigns in a world where trends and best practices evolve weekly.

4. Back to the future

Lastly, contemplate a blast from the past – like letting the marketing, creative, and communications professionals help formulate a strategy and approach that might resonate with prospects. Set aside technology as the over-weighted means of solution.

Instead, apply a dollop of what drove marketing for most of the 20th century: Common sense, human understanding of behaviors, and compelling content. Couple it with the technology and set the dials to the right levels.

Driving marketing technology change that sticks

Now comes the largest challenge. An honest assessment of who and how to make the change. With millions of dollars sunk into these systems and internecine struggles between marketing and technology, most organizations are likely to look the other way. This allows the preservation of the status quo. Braver organizations will either face up to the need for change themselves or bring in a third party to assess, strategize, formulate, and implement change. This level of change management requires organizations that understand the manner of technology usage, content, channels, and behavior.

The right approach is a two to three-month audit and assessment of behavior, channel, content, and outcome. The output should be an actionable plan that can bridge differences, considering every stakeholder’s consideration, and ease of implementation.

Marketing technology: A look ahead

It is time for marketers to reassess and reinvest in the art of marketing and apply a more intellectual approach to using technology (which may sound ironic but give it a minute). Those that do, will have achieved the requisite balance between science, art, and human behavior. Which, in turn, will deliver the actual promise these technology solutions have been making for decades.

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Podcast: The Narrative of Trust in Advisory Services with John Connors

Originally published in Life Yield

Trust is the cornerstone of a successful advisor-client relationship. And earning that trust starts with empathy – the ability to have a complete understanding of clients’ situations and concerns. Having a clear understanding of what drives clients’ decisions allows advisors to develop and recommend solutions that align with their goals and preferences, laying the foundation for successful advisory platforms.

In today’s episode, Jack talks with John Connors, Founder and CEO of Boathouse. Prior to founding his own marketing agency in 2001, John held positions at companies such as Hill Holliday and Merrill Lynch, served as CEO of Zentropy Partners, and became part of the McCann World Group Management team. With the aim of bringing a new level of performance-mindedness to the agency business, John created Boathouse.

John talks with Jack about why narratives matter, why advisors deserve more attention and value, and how empathy can be key to building trust with clients.

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How the Great Resignation is turning into a great opportunity for leaders

By John Connors

Boathouse Founder/CEO

Originally published in Fast Company 

Image Source: Unspalsh.com

A CEO notes that there is no training ground for the breadth of workforce, recruitment, and employee-engagement issues hitting the leaders of today. But what if the Great Resignation is an opportunity in disguise?

This year, leaders will be challenged by war, pandemics, racism, climate change, politics, media bias, shareholder value, innovation, growth, supply chain problems, inflation, data security, customer experience, remote work models, employee satisfaction, and the Great Resignation.

As the list highlights and research confirms, the role of a leader is more complicated than ever before. The number of issues and audiences competing for their time and resources are unprecedented. There is no training ground for the breadth of workforce, recruitment, and employee-engagement issues hitting the leaders of today. But what if the Great Resignation is an opportunity in disguise?

Here are three opportunities to consider.

Creating a new narrative

The facts are straightforward: 68% of employees are rethinking what they want from their career.

Too many leaders are playing small. They have become disconnected from the people who work for them, or they see the world through a transactional lens with a focus very rationally on growth, innovation, and valuation.

Employees care more about meaning in their work, a strong sense of community, and company impact. The CEO-as-dictator era is over. Leaders need to build trust and real relationships with their employees. Too many leaders wear metaphorical body armor to the office and try to motivate people with impersonal emails on employee retention, and they are alarmed when employees aren’t moved.

The best leaders are the ones who can balance real humanity, authenticity, and emotion with real results. I think a good example for all of us is Marne Levine. She was the COO of Instagram and is now the chief business officer for Meta. She combines her Meta narrative, family narrative, and purpose narrative of equity into one seamless, very human mosaic that motivates Wall Street as well as the entry level employee. Most leaders are reluctant to be human, and it costs them with their employees.

Retooling the workforce

In the last year, over 20% of the U.S. workforce left their positions. This is an opportunity for CEOs and leadership teams to rethink their talent strategies.

That means doing more than updating the employee handbook, tweaking the vacation policy, or sending propaganda-style emails from the corner office. This is a time to worry less about retention and think more about the qualities of your most successful employees and teams. We all know our people can be better. We all know our leadership teams can be better. We all know we can be better. We very rarely get the opportunity to replace 20% of the workforce without a crisis.

Retooling starts by calling HR and asking to see your company’s performance review criteria, maybe even look at the forms and a few actual employee reviews. Does it reflect your views on what the best employees look like? I bet it does not. Likely, they were created more by the lawyers and people disconnected from the business than by your high performers. You don’t need to hire an expensive consultant to define a strategy. Sit with your best people and outline the qualities you want, the qualities that matter. Hire with this new focus in mind and leverage the new 20% as change agents to refocus and attract more high performers.

Making work better (Not simply building a better workplace)

The Great Resignation is an opportunity to more aggressively advocate for new working models that enable new talent pools, improve company performance, and encourage people’s well-being.

As we all know, the office model for success has been relatively static since the inception of the knowledge economy post-WWII. Too many companies have abused the model and treated employees as resources to control rather than as people and lives to be optimized. But as we are learning now, the average American daily commute of 56 minutes per day, while perhaps balancing a family or caregiver responsibilities, was not high-motivation strategy.

Leaders like Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, raise the bar and advocate for their employees and for all employees. Wojcicki was employee number 16 at Google, its first employee to go on maternity leave, and a tech leader who maintains strict boundaries between work and personal life and even manages her kids screen time. She has used her position as a platform to change how work happens. She has advocated for women in tech, for closing the gender gap, and for breaking up the boy’s club in Silicon Valley.

The Great Resignation should be such a catalyst for us all to advocate for change. It is not about the return to the office cubicle. It’s an opportunity to do more than make self-serving incremental change. It’s an opportunity to win for our people. We must operationalize new models that are good for our people, our communities, and our companies.

The Great Resignation can be like a candy store for leaders who want to innovate and do good by their people. It may be hell for those who never cared for their employees in the first place. Unfortunately, many leaders know their financial narrative but too few have thought through the human narratives. As a result, they revert to employee retention as a pathway to protect their financial narrative. Employees can smell the fear.

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Pursuing Narrative Alignment

By John Connors and Wyatt Ferber

How to Identify, Monitor, Analyze, and Manage the Narratives Impacting an Organization’s Stakeholders

CMOs are facing doubt within their organizations that they can drive growth. Time is increasingly committed to counseling CEOs who believe they have a marketing challenge. And they're not alone—other C-suite executives are expressing the same concerns about their CMOs, indicating an industrywide dilemma about the perception of chief marketers.

The data is startling. According to research by Deloitte, only 26% of CMOs are being regularly invited to attend board meetings, and Spencer Stuart has reported that CMOs continue to have the shortest tenure on average of any member of the C-suite at 40 months. The profession is increasingly under fire. 

As the alarming realities of declining tenure and lack of trustworthiness dawn for CMOs, there is also a drought of resources to diagnose and solve these issues. Without a more substantial understanding of the obstacles facing their position, CMOs won't be able to generate effective strategies to reassert themselves as valued members of the company.

In hopes of driving more conversation, research and dialogue to restore the value of a CMO, here are five strategies that can have an immediate impact:

Fall in love fast 

Focus on the CEO and connect with the strategy. What are the CEO's top three priorities? Are they the same as your top three priorities? Can you show a direct connection to your key initiatives and budget allocation?

Build the company 

Don't be selfish. Marketing cannot change companies alone, so start thinking about how all members of leadership can own and deliver collectively in terms of company narrative. 

Question if brand management is dead

The CEO looks to the CMO to integrate new models of thinking and defy the status quo. The CMO must decide if brand management is the theory they want to live by, as it's often seen as a one-dimensional, old-fashioned concept. The disciplines of economics, finance, technology and manufacturing have reinvented themselves repeatedly.

Speak the language of business 

CMOs must be fluent in the language of business. Oftentimes, CMOs and their departments "speak marketing," but this can be too difficult to parse for department leads who are not as experienced in this space. The marketing language can often get lost in translations across the C-suite and in the boardroom.

Instead, speak in terms of growth, revenue, value creation and share price.  A profit and loss statement is the best teacher of all. Marketers who have created profit and loss statements can streamline communication for maximum efficiency and understanding.

Earn real trust 

Extend a hand and build trustworthiness, as this is the foundation of performance. Trust is a quality that cannot be bought; it must be earned by being vulnerable, and it is the single most important attribute of leadership. By forging valuable relationships with CEOs and fellow board members, CMOs will be able to build a more credible reputation with peers and showcase their value.

It's time to make changes and bring value, respect and longevity back to the CMO role. There are no easy fixes, but minor changes can leave lasting impressions and completely change the C-suite dynamic in a positive way.

It's essential to reflect and examine actions, initiatives, thinking and the foundations of the marketing profession. Let's rethink and rebuild brand management and the role of the CMO for a stronger tomorrow.

Originally published by John Connors in Adweek, September 19, 2021