 |
|
 |
Mediasmith Anvil |
| Volume 3, Issue 6 November 12, 2003 | |
| |
|
|
Mediasmith Anvil |
| Volume 3, Issue 6 November 12, 2003 | |
| Some Principles to Work By |
|
By David L. Smith, President/Media Director; Mediasmith, Inc. smith@mediasmithinc.com Note: This piece was first published last year in MediaPost's Online Spin. We believe that the message is timeless. What would you say about a company whose goals included phrases like "benefit everyone who is touched by our business", "nothing is more important to our success than our integrity" and "building and nurturing our relationships....is an essential part of our work"? Pretty idealistic you say? Not practical in today's environment? This is a great goal but hardly achievable given today's pressures? These principles do not represent goals from today, as they are from the 19th century. None other than the founder of Coca-Cola uttered these phrases. This and more can be found on the Coca Cola Web site. The concept that everyone who touches a company should benefit financially seems to have been lost on many who start up companies today. I am not just talking about some of the "dot-coms" who failed, but about some who have survived as well as companies in many other fields. You've all seen it, especially in media. Someone who makes some money
by squeezing it out of others. What Coke and many other companies have
been able to demonstrate, is that building a company on integrity and
relationships actually works. And, while egalitarian, it turns out to
be self-serving. Not intentionally, but if everyone benefits, you will
too. And if you worry about whether the other guy is making a fair margin,
he just might be fair with you too. |
|
Mediasmith Morsel. . . |
| We all know about predatory CPA deals where,
the minute you make a deal that works for all sides, the client turns
around and lowers the goal for the next month. This is not the basis for
a long-term relationship and the viability of the company that performs
such a practice must be brought into question.
Other examples include relationships between buyer and seller. We have all seen too much of agencies and buyers who have a closed door to the rep community. Back when we bought a lot of spot TV, those buyers who had the sellers "put the avails under the door" were legendary. Today's equivalent is the buyer who hides out through communicating solely via e-mail but is not available for a face-to-face meeting. In fact, many agencies are secretive about who even works on a specific piece of business. (I'm happy to say that at Mediasmith, we practice what we preach. If you are a legitimate media representative, almost any Mediasmith employee will be willing to e-mail you a chart outlining who works on what account so that dialogue will ensue). We fail to understand the reasoning behind a policy that excludes dialogue. In our experience good ideas can come from anywhere. In many cases rates have even gotten better for buyers because the vendor wanted the business. It can be profitable dealing with an open hand and an open door policy. The same can be held true for agency/client relationships. Again, this was especially true during the crazy "dot-com" heyday. Everyone was in such a hurry to get things done that there was not a lot of stopping to smell the roses. Some clients during this period operated on a "gun to the head" mentality. No give and take at all. As in "do this or else." We frankly have found that it is just not worth it. We are becoming increasingly insistent about limiting the clients we take on to those who appreciate what we do and what we can bring to the table. We are not just vendors; we are partners in their business. This involves forthright honesty in all phases of the relationship, even when it is painful to bring something up, as it did not work out according to plan. But it is on this honesty that good relationships are built. And agency client relationships, if nurtured properly, can last a long time. |
|
Mediasmith Morsel. . . |
| Many individuals who got into the business
over the past few years and who are out of the business right now are
finding out the hard way about relationships. If you have not taken the
time to build a network, you can't get much help getting back into the
business when you are on the street.
What's the bottom line? Open door policies are profitable from a long-term standpoint. Help someone out, and you will find not only a friend, but someone who will go out of their way to help you out. Kindness is profitable. Pay it forward and the positive results will come back to you in spades. |
| Mediasmith
Morsel. . . In the ever important quest to forecast reach and frequency, especially when planning take-over campaigns, or campaigns where share-of-voice is important, it is often frustrating to run upon discrepancies between online research tools when trying to find out a site's unique audience in a given day. One report states a different number than the other, and god-forbid having to rely on a site's usually inflated , non audited numbers. We planned a launch day site-takeover recently, and to our surprise, we found a very interesting way of using a creative ad-serving technology, coupled with media planning, to find out an accurate number to attribute to a site's unique audience in one day of who enter a site's front-door. 95% of the sites we used, barring a couple of sites where sections are bookmarked and entered from, were planned against in this manner: We used the Eyeblaster rich media ad platform to serve our creative, with a frequency cap of 1 per user per day, and checked and verified the findings through Atlas as well using a 1x1 gif. The data reported from Eyeblaster not only showed us performance per site, per creative, but also showed us how many unique visitors encountered our ad on each site for the day we ran the ad! |
|
David L. Smith is President of Mediasmith, Inc., the Integrated Solutions Media Agency based in San Francisco. He can be reached at smith@mediasmithinc.com. |
| Contact Mediasmith, Inc. |
|
You are receiving this newsletter from Mediasmith as part of our efforts to keep our friends abreast of what's going on in media. |
 |
|
|||
| 555
De Haro Street, Suite 360 San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 252-9339 (415) 252-9854 fax |
||||
|
|