My Metroland September 2012
I spent quite a bit of time coming up with a topic for this article.
I changed my mind several times but kept coming back to a conversation with Joe Anderson that took place at our advertising training day for his Muskoka region in July. .. Creativity
When I was a young “Advertising Sales Person” I would spend countless hours developing layouts for clients with innovative marketing concepts… Ideas that would get them excited. Quite frankly it worked… they bought into the creative or idea and then it would just be a matter of how big, how much and how often. Once those details were ironed out I would run their campaigns and work with them to see what worked and what didn’t. Over time customers developed into clients and my revenue base consistently increased year over year. Joe concurred, adding that as a young rep he wouldn’t bring just one idea to a customer he would bring three or four as a solid means of providing creative options and build campaigns and business.
The missing piece in our process today can often be the lack of creative ideas for clients who are looking for marketing solutions and ideas… not just ad space.
Think about what it says on your business card. Most likely it will say Advertising or Marketing Consultant and that is exactly what our prospective clients are looking for… Consultants that will help them across the confusing river of marketing options… a river that is ever flowing & changing and incredibly more & more difficult for them to come to grips with.
So how can we become more creative? Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher and the world's first creativity teacher felt that consulting our own knowledge and intuition is a wonderful way to gain insight. Unfortunately, some of us never learned this lesson. Much of our educational system is an elaborate game of "guess what the teacher is thinking," and we come to believe that the best ideas are in someone else's head rather than our own. In our world very often we try and guess what our customers are thinking and offer them what we think they want before we make even the feeblest attempt at needs analysis and truly understanding their business.
I make as many sales calls in our markets as time allows. I learn from great sales people and our many clients who respond well to the right questions about their businesses and individual needs. One client summed it up quite succinctly when he told me… “I am tired of advertising salespeople who try and sell me their flavor of the day and ask me what I want to run in it… I want someone who understands my business and offers me Ideas for marketing and options for getting my message to my customers”… Question first to gain understanding… ideas and creative second and the proper vehicle or solution last… Interesting… Sounds a lot like what Gordon Borrell calls The Agency Approach.
If we see the process of problem solving for our clients and creative thinking as a journey across a the river of marketing options then the opposite bank of the river is the obvious answer... so to get there we must find the path. We have many methods (solutions) to cross. We could chop down a tree carve out a boat and paddle, riskily tightrope across or we could strategically gather stones and make a path placing & building on them as we go. This is creativity.
Using the stepping stone analogy we first have to determine the best path by which to cross. Initially, we may think the best path is the shortest from shore to shore. This may not be so. We may find that there is deeper water at the shortest point, or the current is strongest there. We must first understand their business & focus on talking to their ideal customer with a timely marketing message in the form of effective ad creative. We have to use the knowledge we have as media consultants to sort from our many choices (vehicles or solutions) that will be the most useful and effective for them to cross the river.
What we will end up with, hopefully, is a pile of well formed and appropriate stones (well planned creative ideas& solutions) that we can now use to cross. Thinking strategically or with a longer term approach we’ve picked our route, analyzed our many options and so we can now start to place our stones or build our multi media campaigns. With every step and stone we take across the river we will evaluate to see if the stone proves to be right for the position effectively working with our clients to evaluate and modify their advertising campaigns as markets and their situations change.
Eventually, all the stones will be placed across the river and the path formed will yield the desired outcome for our clients. Creative ideas combined with a longer term agency or campaign approach.
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not. But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is a skill we can learn and develop. It grows from a true desire to assist our clients in achieving their sales and marketing goals in creative and innovative ways. One Metroland Ad Manager (as a young rep) offered to sit on the roof of a local car dealership until they sold 100 cars as part of an innovative advertising campaign… the dealer bought into the idea… it worked (he got lucky with the dealership sales manager doing the roof sitting) and the dealership increased their advertising spend and started running consistent campaigns. We could recount thousands of Metroland examples just like this and the solutions have a common theme… think like an agency, understand their business and specific challenges trust your intuition and bring them novel ideas that will generate desired solutions and not just broker ad space.
As Heraclitus also so eloquently stated … "No man ever steps in the same river twice”. We must diligently make the effort to come up with new and creative ideas & ways to cross the ever changing marketing river for our clients to help them reach their goals.
Remember… the return they receive on their advertising investment will dictate how they choose to invest with you in the future… besides… trusting your intuition and coming up with great ideas that really deliver results for our clients is really fun and rewarding.
Time Management skills are especially important for sales professionals, who often find they are performing many different tasks during the course of the day. You can be in control and accomplish what you want to accomplish – first you’ve come to grips with the time management myth and take control of your time investing it where you receive the greatest return… time spent with clients.
