By Rob Whittle
President and CEO of Williams Whittle and Williams Whittle Digital
Recipient of the 2009 Silver Medal Award
The Capitol Communicator has asked me to write about what I’ve seen in my years in the ad biz since I am either a) an elder statesman; b) have seen 4 decades of this fun; or c) I’m just elderly (hey! I started very young).
I checked the Washington Business Journal’s Book of Lists in preparing for this article and - no surprise - three of the last-reported top-ten ad agencies are no longer in business. Rosenthal and Partners has morphed into RP3; The Bomstein Agency has joined up with Williams Whittle; and Hammer, well, Hammer…that’s another story altogether. The Recession of 09 is, I think, my fifth or sixth and, seriously folks, it’s the worst in my career. So we knew there’d be casualties.
But we also know that Gens X and Y did not invent hard times. Even Boomers didn’t think up recessions, even though we secretly believe that the world didn’t truly start until post-WWII (and will come to an end when we all die). Here is a partial list of gone-but-not-forgotten DC-area agencies—Earle Palmer Brown, Rosenthal Greene and Campbell, Henry J. Kauffman, Ehrlich Manes, Kal Merrick Salan, Sohigian, Abramson Associates, Needham, Demaine Vickers, and Goldberg Marchesano Partners, Rainmaker. You can play the game and remember many that I’ve forgotten, I’m sure. Of course, there’ve been many new marketing companies as well, but more on that later.
One question I have. Do other DC-area business categories have as much attrition as we do? Is ours so fast-changing that if you don’t adapt ahead of (most recently) the technology curve you’re a dinosaur? Is social marketing here to stay? Will Bob Ryan always be our weatherman? I’ve got the questions. Got answers?
First of all, I see no slowing down from Bob. As for the other questions, I don’t think that keeping ahead of the “next next” is anything new for our industry. Over the years, there’ve been new practices that became fads, but some became trends and some have become staples. Twenty-five years ago The Martin Agency, our neighbors in Richmond, took the commonplace tactic of focus groups and repackaged them as Benefit Testing. Williams Whittle “borrowed” that practice in the 80s and 90s, refined it and won a lot of business with the technique. The point is that if you were slow to adopt a good research model during that era, you were apt to be left behind. Remember when account planning emigrated from England? If you had it and the guys down the street didn’t, then you had the edge. Now, for a pitch to an airline, for example, agencies will employ “cultural anthropologists” to ride around on the prospect’s flights and observe behavior in order to better market to them.
So, in the middle of all of this comes the Worldwide Web. And all of us scramble to figure out what it means, how to harness it, and how to make a buck from it. And just when we think we’ve got it all figured out, here comes Web 2.0, and there’s a whole new vocabulary and set of parameters to master. Ain’t it fun? Am I comparing, say, account planning to the changes wrought by the Internet? Only in a very small way. The Web is not only the most significant marketing development in my career, but arguably the greatest since the invention of the television.
Hundreds of new marketing businesses in our area that are centered around the Internet have sprung up in recent years. You are reading this article courtesy of one of them. These ventures have more than replaced the aforementioned firms that are no longer with us. In fact, the Internet, like any great new concept, has expanded the business of marketing exponentially. The challenge for generalist ad agencies (just like for general media properties in print and broadcast and for blacksmiths 100 years ago) is to create a business model that is client-centered and that recognizes that media — whether it be on or off-line — is just that: Media. Be fluent in it; be proficient; be able to track results with it. But, above all, be creative with it. Not only in the judgment of which media vehicles to employ, but more especially what to say. And here is where ad agencies have an advantage. What to say. That’s our training, our love, why we got into this business in the first place. What to say, how to say it and whom to say it to. In Web-speak: content.
Part of what Web 2.0 is all about is creating communities so that we aren’t “preaching” to or selling to our customers. We are creating places for them to comment about our products and talk to each other. Fine. But there still needs to be someone who knows how to imbue brands with attributes and benefits that make them irresistible.
Let’s look to our most recent ad guy hero, Don Draper from Mad Men (Are you like me? Are you afraid of getting lung cancer just by watching that show?). Don gets paid the big bucks from Sterling Cooper not because he’s a hunk who charms the gals and drinks the guys under the table. It’s not even because he understands the still relatively new medium of TV. No. It’s because he has the ideas; he can tell the story of the brand; he knows how to put it into words and pictures.
When I was first looking for a job in this business at the tender age of 22, the creative director at Kal Merrick Salan (who chose not to hire me) told me that advertising was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. It was the first time I’d heard that expression. He said I needed a “Book”. So I got to work making up clients and products and wrote ads about them. It was fun, but I was probably too inexperienced to meaningfully compare it to unclothed sport. I created Juniper Bourbon (horrible name) and wrote ads about it. The gist was that Juniper Bourbon was already 26 years old when so-and-so-horse won the Kentucky Derby in 1904. I wrote a series with that theme. A couple of years later Early Times Bourbon came out with a campaign that had the same concept. The only difference was they used The Roaring Twenties instead of the Derby. After I realized it was a ridiculous notion that they somehow plagiarized my idea, my reaction was to be flattered and vindicated. “Hey, maybe I can do this!”
As a participant and observer of the ad scene over these four decades, I learned I “could do that”. What keeps me energized, jazzed and anxious all at once is the question, “Can I do that?” That next-next thing? Because in our business, 3.0 is coming like a freight train!