A panel debated what evolution is needed at December's iMedia Summit.

On December 6th in Scottsdale, Arizona, a panel of new-aged agency folks discussed what makes agencies more efficient for integrated marketing. Doug Weaver, president of the Upstream Group, moderated. Panelists were:

Gay Gaddis, CEO, The Think Tank (T3)
Richard Notarianni, Executive Creative Director, Media, Euro RSCG New York
Fred Rubin, Partner & Director, iDeutsch and directDeutsch

Yesterday, the panelists discussed structure and compensation. In this second third of the transcript, they talk about creativity, client relationships and taking risks:

Doug Weaver: Now Fred, Deutsch is -- maybe it’s just Donny [Deutsch] and what a wacky guy he is -- but Deutsch is really known as a very creative, out-of-the-box kind of an agency. So talk about how ideas are generated or adopted or driven within the agency? Frankly, a lot of agency environments can stifle ideas. You can, as Rich said, you know, find reasons why it can’t be done and things to get road blocked or bottle necked. How does an idea thrive and incubate in your agency environment?

Fred Rubin: Well obviously, you know, we are a big agency that goes beyond Donny, but I do feel like some of the DNA comes from him. And he’s a kind of combative street fighter kind of guy and, we know that we never succeed if we don’t, you know, kind of come out of the box, and take our best shot at something. We had a situation -- I am going to give you an example -- when we pitched the Tylenol business, and this was pretty much an adventure for us. You know, an agency like Deutsch picking up J&J, which is, you know, one of the most family-oriented businesses; a Blue Chip client. And what really won the business for us was we were the only agency out of the four or five who pitched them that told them to take the gloves off. You know that they were getting their butts kicked in the marketplace by all of these new drugs that were out there, and we weren’t afraid to come to the table and say this is not, you know; you have to go to battle to win. And the way we arrived there, I think, again, goes back to that process that we had talked about. And it was kind of letting the marketplace and the consumer dictate the solution rather than kind of, you know, what do they want to hear.  

Weaver: Frankly, don’t we live in an agency culture though where, you know, the first rule is always "do no harm?" Don’t do anything that’s going to piss off the client or risk the business? I mean we run a risk I think of, you know, trying to play not to lose sometimes, rather than playing to win. How do you counter that? How do you get people to take risks in your environment? 

Gay Gaddis: There are only two things really important to me in our business, and that’s integrity and relationships. And I think that can transcend into anyone’s business. But if you really, really believe that you are doing the right thing for the client, and you have the trust back and forth between client and agency… You would be surprised, if you walk the halls at T3 -- and I think this is a bit different than some agency environments -- you won’t hear our staff bad mouthing or talking about the client, or talking about how stupid they were, or they wouldn’t let us do it. And I have been in environments where that was promoted or where it happened. That’s not what you hear at T3. We are about working together in partnership with our media partners, with our clients, with each other. And it’s all about what’s the right thing to do. So when you have that mentality, you know, in part of your structure and culture, then I think that it is okay to be able to walk into a client meeting and say, you know, this is not what we believe is right. And if you trust each other and have integrity, I think that you can do those things. But at the end of the day you will say, well, if you tell us to paint it blue, I guess we will. But that’s the last resort. It really has to be that give and take between client and agency. 

Weaver: Just for the record, all of these guys love their clients and don’t ever say an ill word about them. I just wanted to clear that up.

Gaddis: Well, if you don’t like your clients, you shouldn’t be working with them. And I think that’s something extremely important for us. Sometimes you just have to go shoot a couple of assholes and just move on, you know. 

Weaver: I knew that Texas would come out eventually.

Gaddis: Yeah, I know. 

Weaver: Rich, Euro is, you know, directly descended from the longest advertising agency name in history.

Rich Notariani: Yes.

Weaver: So they have always been known for taking risks. They have also been known for shaking things up. In fact, they were one of the first buyers of advertising on the Web ten years ago. How’s the culture? Is it still an organization of risk takers? This is softball, isn’t it? An organization of risk takers, how do you maintain that? Because people coming in may not get that? 

Notarianni: As risk takers there is a sort of contrarian culture. Ron Berger, Tom Ester, they created that. And that’s in the DNA. And the same sort of street fighter mentality. We [should] have got Donny and Ron Berger together. It would be a frightening thought. 

A couple of years ago, I did a [few] advertising messages, and CMR, at the time, reported 100 Million commercial units. If you look at the food category, it hit 12 Billion dollars in 2003. And I got my old media guy calculator out and figured out that was about a million GRPs. So, convention doesn’t do it. Incremental advances don’t do it. You can’t be incrementally better. If I improve my efficiency by 10 percent, I still have nothing. Unless I do something that’s exponentially better, back to the previous question, you won’t be successful. Yes-ing clients is a very short-lived strategy. It’s the ability to explain to the clients and their culture and build a culture around that that says these are the conventions of your category. These are the 10 things that we would do. They’re actually conventions for reason. They are good things. Let’s look at those conventions and say can I do them better? Can I avoid them? And part of that, forcing that culture, has actually been, in our tool kit as an agency, in our strategic process, we have a part of it that’s about sort of discounting the stuff you do without thinking. And we present that to clients. We actually take them through that logic. They either say you are the right agency for me or you know what the world really needs right now is a 15-second commercial with an expensive director and Britney Spears. 

Weaver: I can’t argue with that.

Notariani: I wouldn’t either.

Weaver: It has to do a lot with the people and how they are trained and, you know, the caliber of people you have got in, and how they are structured, and managed day to day. You talk a little bit about the people side of the business. How do you -- first of all, I think most of the agency folks here, raise your hand if one of your issues is that you are trying to find good people right now. Anybody? Yeah. Say, your competition for talent is right up there. Do we have to break the model of what kind of people we hire in this business and how we train them?

Rubin: Well I think there’s, to some extent, a selection process. You know people who gravitate to more integrated environments, you know, kind of set themselves up. I mean they show up at our door. I think that we, you know, it’s so hard to describe an agency culture to people. And, you know, walking into a place like Deutsch is very different than walking into a place like Ogilvy. Ogilvy can give you a book on what it’s like to work at Ogilvy. It’s much more difficult in places that have kind of grown from small agency to big agency, like Deutsch. One thing we do is, when we interview people, they see lots and lots of people. And that is kind of both ways. That’s for them to figure out if this is a place they would like to work and you know, vice versa. I think that most candidates who go through Deutsch hear the same things from lots of people regardless of the department. So, again, I can’t tell you what that thing is, but it clearly exists and everybody does sing off of the same page of the hymnal. I think that in terms of the integration piece, there is some generational piece to it. I think that younger people just are more flexible in their thinking. They have grown up with the Internet. They have grown up with all kinds of -- they just don’t think in the same way that old folks like us think, you know. In terms of TV and more traditional media. 

One of the things that amazes me today is that we do quite a bit of creative collaboration. There is a ground swell going on in our agency, without saying put this team with this team. That’s just happening now. Between interactive people, direct people and advertising people. We didn’t tell them to do it; they just do it. 

Weaver: Well, let’s take a slightly different cut at it. What are the skill sets? In other words, you are looking at young people just coming into the industry or maybe they have a couple of years of experience doing something. What do you want them to be able to do? What are the qualities you need to be part of that person and then what do you teach them later on?

Gaddis: Well I think, first of all, you just have to be a good human being. And that’s very important because you don’t want people around you that you don’t want to see everyday in the hall. So you have got to have that test, you know. But seriously, what we are doing is going so far out beyond the advertising community to find people. And one of our top art directors, interactive art directors, is a math major. And he has a fascination and a drive for what’s new in technology, and what we can do to better, you know, analyze and bring together creative products. So what we are looking for is really just smart thinkers. People who can go out and love to solve problems who love to work in teams with other people to do those things and it doesn’t matter what your degree was in or your background. And we bring people in. I have actually hired some people from Dell who were purely in analytics, but they have become awesome on our team. They have never been in an advertising agency in their life. It’s just a different kind of environment now. We are looking for lots of different types of people. When you say you are an integrated agency, and you are doing things across many mediums, then you have got to really kind of integrate the type of people that you pull in together. 

So it’s been pretty exciting to watch people come in. For a small agency, we have 146 people now; we had 6,300 applicants this last year to come to work at T3. They are not always the right ones and so it takes a lot of time to go through and really find the key people who are going to make that next plateau easier to jump over. 

Tomorrow: Managing processes and more.