What it means to work here.

Every company has a culture, but B.R.A.V.E. marketers actively build culture. They honor, guide and transmit the culture through thoughtful, inventive and dramatic gestures combined with a ritualistic consistency. At DiMassimoGoldstein, we have a lot of ways of doing this. Rituals like our Monday all agency lunches and Thursday night "group therapy." The ringing of the bell to celebrate new business. Our own way of speaking. And various "sacred" documents, that outline our common values and passions. Here's one of them:

WHAT IT MEANS TO WORK HERE: When you work here, you are creating a business that’s planning to grow. We are system creators more than we are system followers. We are system killers and simplifiers even more than we are system creators. • If you’re happy here, you probably relish ambiguity more than a little bit for the opportunity it affords you to invent and create yourself and your environment anew. Here, you may not have a roadmap, and even if you do, it will likely be torn up and redrawn several times. And if you’re really successful here, chances are you will be the one doing the tearing and redrawing. • You’re a big picture thinker and simplifier. You kill clutter and identify the important thing. • If you’re here, you’re building not just a book, reel or website, you’re building a brand and a business reputation that you can be proud to be associated with. You think from the audience’s point of view and you expect to make them FEEL something. You hate to confuse; you love to clarify. You’re not satisfied with clever, you want to connect and persuade. You want to involve. • You want to achieve “it” -- and “it” is such a high standard that it defies permanent definition. • If you’re all about “I” you won’t last here. This is a “we” place. We’re competitive, but we all love great ideas, work and teamwork so much that we easily put aside the competition for collaboration when the comes to make great ideas even better, • If you’re not resilient, you’re not going to make it here. Nothing is easy in business. The best parties won’t be the ones you’re invited to; they’ll be the ones you crash. Your great ideas will die and you’ll need to come right back with better ideas. Ideas nobody asked for. Solutions nobody thought they needed. We’ll take a step back for every two steps forward and sometimes it will seem like the math is working the other way. But you never give up. • Because the bottom line is you love this. You love it like it’s your play and your hobby as well as your work and your salvation. This is not to say that you don’t have a life, but this is probably the most compelling part of it. • You will need to be committed to personal growth because the secret of your current success will not be enough at the next level. You will love challenge, you will be ambitious, and you will believe in your heart as well as your head that great brand building and great advertising makes the client’s brand emerge. • If you’re here, you were chosen with an obsessive-compulsive level of care and then more than likely put through a testing phase matched only by Marine basic training and certain reality TV shows. While no hiring track record is perfect, or can be, our ability to find, hire and develop our kind of people has been our greatest strength. So, if you’re here, there’s a good chance you will thrive.

When Apple Was Over.

Ten years ago...

No one said, "I've got to have 10,000 songs in my pocket." Or, "I need to Google that." There was no Viagra. The three dollar cup of coffee was an obscure phenomenon.

People found their groceries in stores and their mates in bars and no one said, "I think I could do better on the Internet." People got their videos at the corner Blockbuster and they liked it! No one let their fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages searching for a "Strip Tease Aerobics" class.

• Phone numbers were in a big book that came two ways, yellow or white.
• Directions came from gas station attendants.
• Books could only be bought in book stores or borrowed from libraries.
• Auctions were for the rich.
• Travel agents booked trips.
• Stocks were traded by professionals.
• Doctors knew more than their patients.
• Presidents consulted the CIA, not CNN.

Ten years ago, Apple was over and Google wasn't even a glimmer!

• MTV was a place to watch videos.
• HBO was a place to watch movies.
• No one thought they needed a thirty dollar tube of toothpaste.
• Buzz was for bees.
• Advocacy was for causes.
• Viral was for viruses.
• Branded entertainment was about entertainment, not branding.
• Advertising was advertising, and everything else wasn't.

And ten years ago, the world didn't need a new agency. But we didn't wait to be asked. Our passion for working with the visionaries who were creating the future demanded action, not talk. Through a decade of ad trends, long before the industry started talking about it, we had done it. Because advantage comes from preempting trends, not from following them. And our clients visions deserved the effort.

In decade two, we're speeding up.

No one asked for this.

More Proof Design Is Here To Stay.

"Designing is such a prestigious profession these days that there seems to be more of it than there are things to design."

The interesting thing about the above quote is that it comes from a 1963 edition of Time Magazine. Yes, back in 1963 some people were already worried that design was getting too popular! Nearly 45 years ago!! The rest of the article follows. The design details may have changed, but the point is still relevant. It's the rare great designer and the rare visionary brand that uses "un-design" to delete the extraneous and give us products that work and are beautiful. You know who they are. Here's what Time had to say in 1963, with a timeless quote from Charles Eames...

"The result is overdesign, bringing more that is really less, heralding improvements that do not improve. Recent examples:
∙BUMPERS. Once there were bumpers to guard the fenders; now the bumpers seem far too delicate to be bumped. Some, in fact, have so many knife-edges and knobs that they act more like can openers than bumpers. As for the friendly push in time of stress, drivers have to be careful that pusher and pushee match up bumper-wise. One solution (by Dodge): bumper guards to guard the bumpers—and the bumpee.
∙DISPOSALS. Though they were meant to provide an easy system for getting rid of garbage, most disposals are such picky eaters that an accompanying list spells out what must be otherwise disposed of. "There you are," says ARCHITECTURAL FORUM Managing Editor Peter Blake, "with a paper bag full of disgusting garbage and find you must go through it piece by piece to get out metals, bottles, plastics, et al."
∙FAUCETS. With rare exceptions, bathroom faucets all used to turn one way—counterclockwise for on, clockwise off—something a man with soap in his eyes could rely on as he groped for the hot water faucet in the shower. Then the designers got the modern impulse to get symmetrical, and devised matching handles that turned in opposite directions, toward or away from each other. No one knows which way is which until he tries it.

Sometimes in the same bathroom the hot turns on in one direction on one fixture, in the opposite direction on another.
∙FOAM-RUBBER CUSHIONS. Neither soft nor comfortable, the new cushions spring disconcertingly back into their original inhospitable form, seem visually as uninviting as a concrete slab with the un-touched-by-human-bottom appearance of an ad in a homemakers' magazine.
∙VENETIAN BLINDS. A centuries-old and efficient design, the Venetian blind has been tampered with by improvers, who have divided it so that top and bottom can be tilted separately (who needs it?), and the adjusting cord run through a snap spring. Result: they jam.
Many of the better designers view the trend with distaste. Concludes Designer Charles Eames: "There is a danger when the better mousetrap is better at catching people than at catching mice. And that's the trap we are finding ourselves in right now."

Time Magazine
April 3, 1963

The Tortoise and the Hare, Circa 2007.

There once was a speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch.
Hare ran down the road for a while and then paused to rest. He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, "How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?"
Hare stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking, "There is plenty of time to relax." Then his cell phone rang.
It was his sponsor. “Get off your ass, Hare.” Said he, “Surely you are aware that they are making hares faster then we can sponsor them. And, by the way, I think I saw a cheetah in my boss’s office just last week.”
Hare ran back out to the track, nearly running tortoise down as he passed him in a blur.
Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until…he got an instant message from his sponsor…
“DPLY CONCERNED HERE.” It said. “YR LK OF PRGRSS VIOLATES YR CNTRCT. RUN R WE SUE.”
Tortoise continued in his steady pace, secure in the knowledge that his strategy would work in the end. He hadn’t traveled twenty feet before he was served with his papers by a clever chameleon, who just a moment ago had been a very credible rock.
“Slow and steady wins the race.” Tortoise protested, speaking slowly and steadily.
“I’m sorry,” Pronounced the race organizer, a woodpecker with a determined beak. “Only sponsored animals are permitted on the course.”
Tortoise, though he descended from a long line of successful racers, was forced to find work in the restaurant business. After a painful adjustment, he did finally achieve a modicum of success, as a soup.
Hare crossed the finish line with his cell phone ringing.
“I’m sorry to say this,” said his sponsor, as if he was not sorry to say it at all. “Cheetah is in, you are out.”
“But I won!” Protested Hare.
“Yes,” said his sponsor. “But you are not married to my boss’s sister.
After that, Hare always reminded himself, "Don't brag about your lightning pace, for Well Connected won the race!"

Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

Sad. Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I remember how much I identified with him and with his characters, who were little more than quizzical dust particles on a cosmic breeze. In fact, their lives felt like my life – and by that I mean the life of a member of the TV audience – buffeted about through time, moods, and all manner of inanity.

I was born in 1962. The first long-running TV series I remember was the Vietnam War. It was presented as a farce, with mortal consequences. I lived in a working class neighborhood, with an assortment of immigrant and second and third generation Catholics, fighting people, among them a former Hitler Youth, many still working out pathologies from WWII. I knew I would one day have to decide whether to go to war or evade the draft. A monumental, life and death, kill-or-be-killed-or-don’t-kill-and-be-imprisoned-or-exiled-existential decision that I needed to be prepared for by the age of eighteen. I knew I would face this decision alone.

No doubt, this is what made Kurt Vonnegut’s characters and his world so attractive. And the rest of TV too, in the age before the remote. One was transported through time, the object of events, never the subject. No life and death, kill or don’t kill, live or die, right or wrong, character-defining decisions need really be made. In the end we are just the pawns of space-time anyway. We are merely the abused audience for a cosmic joke told for no particular reason by no one in particular.

I fell in love with Kurt Vonnegut in the early 70s. I wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut. My first short stories weren’t much like his, but the protagonist who is little more than a hapless witness to insanity certainly was there.

By 1984, Vonnegut had made a serious attempt at suicide, and my own crippling anxiety had sidetracked my nascent music and writing careers.

Part of the cure involved ceasing to see myself as a Vonnegutean anti-hero. Though I never was forced to make that life and death decision about going to war, due to the elimination of the draft in the early ‘70s, I still needed to face up to what I believed and what I would give my life for. And little by little, I discovered that it did matter, and that people could and did make a difference.

Vonnegut himself was no Billy Pilgrim after all. It takes fierce will and an almost insane commitment to become the kind of writer and figure that Vonnegut was. He was actively, aggressively, assertively himself despite every kind of discouragement the world has to offer and in spite of all enticements too.

C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we are not alone.” At a time when I felt very much alone, I discovered Vonnegut. Though his world became an anchor that I ultimately cut loose, or at least learned to put in perspective, at one time it was a lifeline.
And through Vonnegut, I fell in love with writing. Short sentences. Little words. Wit in the juxtapositions. He lit a fire in me – a fire to connect. I now use it to pursue a career he would have hated, but that I absolutely love.

So it goes.

Health, Wealth & The Pursuit of Happiness.

Check this out: http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2006/07/nparticle.2006-07-28.2448323827

What we have here is something new. Something potentially important. It's the first ever "global projection of subjective well-being." In other words, it's a worldwide happiness map.

Check out who's happy and who's not.

Now let's get into why. It turns out the factor that correlates most strongly to happiness is HEALTH (.7). Close behind are WEALTH (.6) and access to EDUCATION (.6).

As you'll see, here in North America, we sit in one of the world's great oceans of subjective well-being. In addition, our population is aging as baby boomers begin to reach retirement age. What is emerging is an increased focus on HEALTH and WEALTH.

At DiMassimoGoldstein, we've increased our focus on health (MaxMD and GoSMILE , among others) and wealth (various financial services brands).

We believe that by putting the customer first, by focusing on the customer's satisfaction, we can help our clients give customers what they want so the customer will give the client what the client wants. That's how brands emerge today. Sounds simple, and it can be. But that doesn't make it easy. It takes courage, skill and clarity of mind along with that rare ability -- listening -- to get the corporate and career agendas out of the way, and put the customer in the center.

Then it takes the best of social science and human insight to answer the question, "What does the customer really want?"
And great ingenuity to deliver it across all channels and fundamentally in the product or service itself.

When we do that, we're delivering more happiness to more people. Jeremy Bentham would approve. Mom would also be proud.

Cheers,

Mark

Howard Luck Gossage said...

Howard Luck Gossage said “I think a successful ad man has to have something missing in his character, just like a successful actor does.”
I have a very strong need to please. I have a rather strong tendency to please through the strategy of appreciation. My compulsive curiosity is an aid here. To appreciate, one must first understand. I am driven to do the work of understanding. It isn’t work to me at all.
This need to please is, perhaps, my hole. This, in itself, isn’t a problem. In fact, it’s been the hot poker spurring me on to ad success.
The problem is, I’m spending too much time with partners and employees, followed by clients – I’m understanding, appreciating, and pleasing the wrong people.
What is needed is to repeatedly get me in the room with the target audience. I need to spend most of my time with the people I must please to succeed for the client. I need to orchestrate the same for my people.
I am driven to connect with an audience. The target audience is the missing ingredient. That’s really all there is.
I reject award show judges as my audience. Much as I respect my enlightened competitors, clients and colleagues, I also reject them as my audience.
I require a process of discovering my audience in order to do what I do. It can’t be second hand. I can’t just read someone else’s research. I need to see, hear, touch, feel, converse with them. I need to get to know them. I need to try out my material on them, play a lot of rooms, die out there, and evolve a routine, like a stand-up. Except that my routine is a campaign. That is and always has been the answer for me.
I have no other genius than that. It is the only path for me.
Last night, accepting his Oscar, Forrest Whittaker said that he does what he does to connect with...everybody. I identify with that motivation, with that need. And I know that the way to make it work is to connect with somebody. And so, I think, does he.