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By Lois K. Geller
Do you remember the Avis No. 2 campaign? "We're #2, We Try Harder." It was brilliant. Hertz's reaction also was brilliant. In an article I read a few years ago, Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer of advertising agency TBWAWorldwide, recalled that the president of No. 1 Hertz told his ad agency something like this: "I don't want us to talk about efficiency, clean cars, price, anything like that. The competition can duplicate all those things tomorrow. What I want our advertising to do is to make people like us."
Make people like you. What a concept. By the way, Hertz stayed No. 1.
I figure Mason & Geller is probably the 18th biggest direct marketing agency—so we have to try harder.
I thought about this when I came across an article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Marketers Shop For Fresh Creativity: Ad clients tap smaller, cheaper agencies for ideas in a competitive market." The story focused on Sun Microsystems. It's not happy with its big agency, and executives started asking smaller agencies for new, fresh ideas.
I love the idea of big companies going to smaller agencies. It underscores a challenge I've noticed for years: Many agencies take clients for granted, put junior people on the accounts and don't give clients their best thinking.
This happens in other big companies, too. For instance, I'm writing this column on a Delta ComAir flight. The flight attendant is unfriendly, and she was just flat-out rude to the woman sitting behind me. It's a shame. Most of the time, Delta is pretty good. It got me to Russia and back, and the people were great. A few weeks ago, it helped me get home three hours earlier than my scheduled flight. But customers forget all the good stuff when they run into the bad stuff.
On the flip side is Jet Blue. The Jet Blue staff always is pleasant and accommodating. They seem to have fun doing their jobs, and they have a nice informal attitude that puts people at ease.
Jet Blue is a small airline, so it tries harder. It can be innovative, because it doesn't have layers of bureaucracy to hammer every nail until creative, personality, attitude and pleasantness are all merged into a boring mush.
I suspect big clients often are partly to blame for the lack of creativity they get from big agencies. My favorite example is an ad agency that asked my firm to handle a project for a major client. We came up with a solid package and recommended testing letters ranging from conservative to slightly edgy. When we got the letters back from the client's committees, they were all the same letter, almost word for word.
Do you remember the Avis No. 2 campaign? "We're #2, We Try Harder." It was brilliant. Hertz's reaction also was brilliant. In an article I read a few years ago, Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer of advertising agency TBWAWorldwide, recalled that the president of No. 1 Hertz told his ad agency something like this: "I don't want us to talk about efficiency, clean cars, price, anything like that. The competition can duplicate all those things tomorrow. What I want our advertising to do is to make people like us."
Make people like you. What a concept. By the way, Hertz stayed No. 1.
I figure Mason & Geller is probably the 18th biggest direct marketing agency—so we have to try harder.
I thought about this when I came across an article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Marketers Shop For Fresh Creativity: Ad clients tap smaller, cheaper agencies for ideas in a competitive market." The story focused on Sun Microsystems. It's not happy with its big agency, and executives started asking smaller agencies for new, fresh ideas.
I love the idea of big companies going to smaller agencies. It underscores a challenge I've noticed for years: Many agencies take clients for granted, put junior people on the accounts and don't give clients their best thinking.
This happens in other big companies, too. For instance, I'm writing this column on a Delta ComAir flight. The flight attendant is unfriendly, and she was just flat-out rude to the woman sitting behind me. It's a shame. Most of the time, Delta is pretty good. It got me to Russia and back, and the people were great. A few weeks ago, it helped me get home three hours earlier than my scheduled flight. But customers forget all the good stuff when they run into the bad stuff.
On the flip side is Jet Blue. The Jet Blue staff always is pleasant and accommodating. They seem to have fun doing their jobs, and they have a nice informal attitude that puts people at ease.
Jet Blue is a small airline, so it tries harder. It can be innovative, because it doesn't have layers of bureaucracy to hammer every nail until creative, personality, attitude and pleasantness are all merged into a boring mush.
I suspect big clients often are partly to blame for the lack of creativity they get from big agencies. My favorite example is an ad agency that asked my firm to handle a project for a major client. We came up with a solid package and recommended testing letters ranging from conservative to slightly edgy. When we got the letters back from the client's committees, they were all the same letter, almost word for word.
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