Is Mad Men the new CSI?

989 Design is not only a graphic design studio, but we are a boutique ad agency. And by boutique, I mean small, it just sounds fancier. We do the same things most agencies do: prospecting and landing clients, design and copywriting, branding and ad placement, and so on. We'll probably talk more about this elsewhere on the site, but between Laurie and myself, we have nearly 40 years of experience in design and advertising.

I've been watching the new season of Mad Men on AMC and loving it. If you haven't watched the show, you are missing out. As someone with a keen interest in advertising (coming out of college, I was going to go into ad copywriting, but we'll talk more about that another time) and a few years of experience at a large agency working on a few HUGE accounts, I have an appreciation for the history of advertising.

For those who haven't seen it, Mad Men is centered on a small-to-medium-size agency in New York in the early 1960s, they heyday of Madison Avenue. Even though Sterling Cooper is fictional, they reference a lot of actual ads and agencies in the show. One of the first things you notice when watching the show is the dynamic of the agency offices. Everybody smokes...all of the time. At their desks, in meetings, etc. Women are treated like they are children (on a good day) or property of the agency (most of the time). The other thing that jumps out is that everybody drinks. A lot.

My agency experience is that a few people still smoke, but they have to go outside to do it. Women are not only equal, but in the agency I worked at there were more women than men. The one thing that still holds, though, is that the three-martini lunch still exists. Except instead of martinis, they were three-beer lunches. Our biggest client was Coors Brewing Company and when we'd do company meetings and studio lunches and so forth, the beers flowed freely. On many Friday afternoons, the agency would loosen up a bit and start the weekend early—and the Coors Light would be flowing (in my case, substitute Wednesday evening for Friday afternoon because a handful of studio artists worked a three-day week, ending on Wednesday).

Working in an atmosphere like that was a lot of fun, not because they let us drink while we were working, but because they let the creatives pretty much run free as long as we didn't miss deadlines. There's something to be said for that—treating people like grown-ups instead of policing their every move. The things that are acceptable behavior in a design studio/ad agency wouldn't fly most places, but different rules apply when you're working with creative people.


And when I watch Mad Men, I get the same feeling I used to get when I worked at the agency. If you have the talent, just let them do what they have to and trust that the work will get done. It's a little different in a two-person studio (although, in the interest of complete candor, I've polished off a Shiner Bock while writing this entry), but it's really not all that different.

My little trip down memory lane has pulled me away from the point, though. Remember when CSI first came on television? People loved the show from the beginning (I don't really watch the show, but I know that I'm in the minority on that) and suddenly you had this spike in interest in forensic science. There were documentaries and stories on forensic science on every channel. Schools couldn't add forensic classes quickly enough to keep up with the demand. Crime lab work was suddenly sexy.

Is advertising the new crime lab? Is Don Draper the new Grissom? Are advertising programs going to see a jump in enrollment?

And if schools see an influx of future advertising professionals, what will be the net effect on advertising?

Over the past fifty years countless industries have seen advances that nobody could have imagined, yet aside from the development of the Macintosh computer, the advertising industry still operates the same as it did in 1960. Will the next generation of Ad Men and Women bring the revolution with them?

Or will it just be more bikinis and double entendres?

15 More Minutes

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said that I was interviewed for a profile being run in the Tri-Cities Business Review? I just received a blast e-mail from the TCBR and my photo is the first thing I see when I open it up. Here is a link to the article. I don't have any problem with it other than they have a quote wrong--unfortunately, it is the quote that appears beneath my photo in the e-mail. There is a word or two missing and somehow nobody noticed that the sentence there doesn't make sense. Great...now I look like a buffoon who can't string a few words together into a coherent sentence. The best part? The quote is about communication.

Reading through the article, I think the writer did a decent job, but it's a little uncomfortable for me to be on that end of the interview/camera. I'm used to being the one asking the questions and taking the photos, so when I'm the subject I get a little self-conscious. Reading through the article there is a quote when I said, "I don't go out to sell," he said. "Work finds me." That sounds a whole lot differently now than it did when I said it. The writer was asking me about how I find work and I explained that I am not a salesperson (I've never been comfortable in that role) and I don't really go out to sell. I have no doubt that I said the words, but as an out-of-context quote they make me sound arrogant. Blech.

I've never been comfortable being interviewed. In the winter of 2007, the Saginaw News ran a feature story about me on the front page (below the fold) of the paper. The angle of the article was about an American designer designing the logo for the 2007 Ontario Hockey League All-Star Classic. The article came out great and included a photo of me. At that time I was sporting a VERY full beard--we're talking Grizzly Adams full. A lot of people recognized me and complimented me on the article and on the OHL work, but one person went a step further (I think I wrote about it in my old blog, actually). She sent an anonymous letter to my home, the letter read:

Hi Shawn,
I saw this picture of you in the Saginaw News on 1-30-07.
I have one question to ask: Don’t you think you are getting to old to have that long dirty looking hair? And that silly hair on your face, you sure could use a razor.
a Reader of the News

Nice, huh? One of these days I need to dig up that letter, scan it and post it here. Until then, I leave you with the full photo that was taken for the article. I was hoping they'd use the whole shot and show off the window graphics, but no such luck.

A Free Lesson in PR.

There was an article in the Bay City Times this week about the Bay City paying a consultant $30,000 to “find ways to get a positive message out to residents regarding the city’s water and wastewater systems.”

I sat at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast a few months ago where city officials were pleading poverty as to why we can’t repair the streets of Bay City. We can’t afford to fix our roads but we have money to invest in making us feel better about our sewers?

This isn’t the first time that Bay City has used outside experts who came with a high price tag. I don’t have anything against using outside experts when the situation calls for it, but $30,000 to get a positive message out about the sewer?? Really? Really? Sometimes I am not sure if the people running the day-to-day operations of our city are capable of making good decisions. I wouldn’t let them run a bake sale and they’re in charge of the city budget.

Our city is falling apart and I am not speaking figuratively–the streets are actually crumbling. Is this really the best use of $30,000 out of an already overtaxed city budget? I don’t care if the money wasn’t earmarked for street repairs, we don’t need a PR campaign to make the sewer warm and fuzzy. It’s the sewer! If you have thirty grand to throw at a consultant, that’s thirty grand that could go to street repair. Or whatever…just not a PR campaign for the sewer.

Want a free lesson in public relations? A lot of PR comes at little or no cost–newspapers, tv, town hall meetings, etc. I have nothing against using consultants/experts when it makes sense, but Bay City is too quick to turn to consultants because there is a very low level of expertise when it comes to dealing with PR/advertising. Just look at the city logo that came out a couple of years ago–that monstrosity cost the city nearly $50,000. There are at least ten designers in Bay City who could have done a better job at a fraction of the cost. Hell, there are probably ten fifth graders who could have done a better job.

Sometimes, Bay City government seems more concerned with looking good than doing good. And that’s a problem. Good public relations come from sound decisions. Spending $30,000 for a consultant's ideas is not a sound decision in the current economic environment. Quit trying to look good and just fix the city.

The Skinny End of the Pareto Principle

I want to be careful here to avoid equating the business of graphic design to, say, selling vacuum cleaners. Obviously, there is a world of difference, but when you distill it down to the essentials, graphic design is like a lot of other businesses in that it's all about the numbers.

Between the cost of operating a studio (rent, utilities, insurance), staffing the studio, marketing and so forth, there is a number we have to hit every month just to keep the doors open. So, in effect, I know that every month I need to move X units of graphic design. The units vary in shape and size (logo design, brochure design, photo shoot, etc.), but I need to move enough units to pay everybody else and then hopefully have enough left over to pay myself.

I'm a big believer in the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule among other names. Basically, the Pareto Principle says that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. (Note: the Pareto Principle does not apply to just business, but to many other things such as baseball teams--80% of your run production comes from 20% of your players, for example.)

I first learned about this notion while I was a general manager with Kinko's and it proved itself valid time and time again. The way we applied the Principle at Kinko's was that we focused the lion's share of our marketing efforts on the clients who were already loyal (and often major) customers. This is a valid approach and it worked--in about three years I grew my store from about $30K per month to over $100K per month.

The Pareto Principle applies design studios and ad agencies, too, bit that runs straight into one of my worst business fears--having all of my eggs in one basket. I know of several studios and agencies that have gone out of business because one or two big clients moved their business and the revenue loss killed the studio. And I know of many more who lived in mortal fear of it happening to them. Nobody wants to have too much business from any single client, but it just sort of happens over time. You keep doing a good job, they keep bringing you more and more business. Then one day something goes wrong or the client is purchased by someone who mandates that their agency be used and it is all over.

There is one company in the region who, if they were to go out of business or pull all of their business out of the region, would kill a BUNCH of agencies/studios. Maybe not right away, but over the course of a year it would be a bloodbath. The principles would get out okay, but for the studio rank-and-file it would be all over. The Tri-Cities would find itself flooded with designers and copywriters, many of whom would take to freelancing, which would hurt freelancers and other small studios. The trickle-down effect would be devastating on the local design and advertising industry.

To avoid the all-eggs-in-one-basket trap, I have tried to take a different approach by focusing my attention on the 20% side of the Pareto Principle. Not so much the 20% of clients who are occasional clients, but the 100% of potential clients who don't work with us. Yet.

I make a conscious effort to reach out to a wide variety of clients in a variety of industries. The effect of making phone calls and meeting with potential clients leaves me feeling a little bit like a door-to-door salesman. I'm not trying to sell anyone a logo design they don't need (although, believe me, there are plenty of people in need of a new logo design--I'm talking to you Sherwin Williams), but there is a degree of discomfort in asking people for new business.

Discomfort or not, I need to keep making the phone calls and setting the meetings. The more people who see the work 989 Design has done, the more people want to work with 989 Design. A pretty high percentage of our meetings turn into actual work, which is something I am very proud of.

The way I see it, as long as we continue doing great work and keep working the skinny end of the Pareto Principle, we should be in pretty good shape.