Loebage

“What does it take to open an ad agency?”

The girl promised it would be a quick Q&A. One question, five minutes. Then she wouldn’t bother me again. 

I pressed the iPhone to my ear, and spun to face the window. What the hell. A college marketing student got me on the line; least I could do is pay it forward and answer the question.

I start laying out the sensible path. Learn how advertising, branding and marketing work. Master a specialty. Get an agency job. Work your ass off and get noticed. Make friends with the most talented people you meet, and stay close to the smartest clients you meet. One day, you’re going to join forces with those talented people and smart clients. That’s what it takes.

Now, if she’d been like me, she would have taken notes and started making a plan. But, it turned out, she wasn’t like me. A different animal entirely.

She wanted to know: how could she open an agency, like, NOW?

It became clear she had a real passion for advertising. She talked about her favorite ads (she had good taste; loved Nike’s work during the World Cup). She talked about how she’d make up ads for her sponsors, in her mind, while she was trying to set the record for the youngest person to bike around the world solo…

Hold the phone.

Yeah, turns out she had just settled back into normal American life after two years on a bicycle. Left home at 18. Got back at 20. Circled the freaking planet. Started getting the communication bug.

It made me think about my answer. I still think needs to learn a craft, study the business, and master one or two of the storytelling and branding arts. 

But she reminded me it takes something else. You need to be able to say, “what the f**k.” You need to be able to launch yourself on a journey the likes of which you’ve never done before, and you need to be able to stick with it day in and day out, even when common sense is telling you to quit.

The kid’s got that one locked down cold, I reckon. I’m a little jealous.

This isn’t profound or anything. But it bears repeating:

Live every day like it’s your last.

Or the corollary:

Do the things you’d do if money or success didn’t matter.

I admit, I’ve had a hard time taking my own advice.

But the fact is, when I quit worrying and start applying myself like the job in front of me was my last chance to create something delightful or meaningful, I feel liberated. My inner censor shuts up. The work instantly feels fresh. It has a spark.

Recently, I’ve been talking with a client who didn’t just create his own business, he created his own category. He has no competition for what he does. 

I asked how he found himself in that line of work. His answer: “I had an existential crisis, and I asked myself what I’d do if success or money weren’t an object. I started doing this.”

It’s hard to step back and have faith that if we become the best, purest person we can be, the Universe will take care of the rest. It doesn’t always happen.

But it can’t hurt, can it?

For more inspiration on this subject, read “Secret Ingredient for Success,”
By Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield, in this Sunday’s NY Times Sunday Review.

One of the more humbling things about starting your own ad agency:

Clients don’t really care about all the work that made you famous in the biz. If you did it as an employee at another agency, forget it. Once you hang your shingle, you’re back to ground zero.

People can do all kinds of great work when they’re surrounded by a big agency infrastructure. But when prospective clients come to you, you don’t have that infrastructure. You’ve got a few smart guys in a room, and a ton of ambition.

That’s why we pursue every opportunity, and treat it like the most important thing in the world. Nothing’s too small. Every job gives us a chance to further define ourselves, and show the next client interested in working with us:

“This is who we are. This is the kind of work we do. Do you like what you see? We can do this kind of work for you, too.”

In my first year out of college, thinking about getting into advertising, I found myself talking sales with a family friend who gave seminars on the subject.

He told me you could boil the secret down to one thing: you don’t sell to the customer. You sell to the customer’s customer.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

Now, 25 years later, I’m figuring it out.

Copywriters aren’t salesmen. We like the “hidden” part of being hidden persuaders. Back then, I didn’t want to grapple with the secrets to making ads that got shared.

Now, it’s all about sharing. Everything we do isn’t just aimed at the audience. We need to build in mechanisms that help the audience spread the word.

I get a first-hand taste of this as an agency owner. Agencies suffer from a bizarre handicap: they can’t generate a single client through advertising. You learn pretty quick, business only comes through word of mouth.

To sell our services, a customer has to like us. That customer needs to have been impressed. Then, in a month, or year, or two years, that customer will be in a conversation with some other CMO who’s looking for an ad agency.

Every meeting, every interaction, reaches far beyond the work on the table. You’re planting seeds. If you impress your customer, they’ll talk about you. If you made this person look like a genius, they’ll sing your praises from the rooftops. That’s where all our business comes from.

The customer’s customer.

Usually, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. It’s always struck me as an artificial incentive for vow-making. I’m also mindful of the Jewish tradition of nullifying prior oaths at the beginning of the New Year; so I’m like, “If I’m gonna beg off all my vows, why make them in the first place?”

And yet, this year, I made a resolution. I wasn’t looking for it. It found me.

This: In the coming year, I’m going to drastically cut back on my Internet use. Less social networking. Less frequent news reading. Less aimless browsing. Less consuming quantity, and more consuming quality.

Here’s how it found me.

I took a long break over the holidays. Long enough to start enjoying the peace and relaxation that happen in week two.

As I started enjoying this peace, I noticed something: I felt sick after using the Internet.

The more I’d graze — jumping from post to post, checking social networks for activity, cruising through the top links on popurls.com — the sicker I felt. Dull and listless. Tired and unfocused. Unhappy. Unfulfilled. Unproductive.

And suddenly, the light turned on: this sickness I was feeling was pretty much par for the course when I’m not on vacation.

I started reading about Internet’s effect on our brains, and referred back at my August 30 post about multi-tasking. The Internet is one big multi-task. Every time you dip in your toe, you’re overwhelmed with information and stimulus. There’s a strong argument that we, as a species, don’t come by this behavior naturally. Our caveman-era brains can’t handle it.

So, I’m cutting back. I’m going to be more choosy about what I look at, and how much I consume. I’m going to spend less time devouring screens, and more time observing my own thoughts.

I’m a realist. I can’t give it up completely. Used wisely, it’s an incredible tool: for research, learning, communication, networking and entertainment. Not to mention an essential tool for our business

But used unwisely, the Internet can turn your brain to mush, make you sad, lower your IQ and kill your creativity.

This year, I hope to be more mindful of the difference.

Confession: sometimes I check my phone when my wife is talking to me. 

This makes her mad, for the obvious reason that it’s rude as hell, and it sends a clear signal I’m not really listening. (I’m not proud of this.) 

It’s even worse when she discovers that the “work e-mail” I’m checking is actually me checking five new likes for my latest #corgi picture on Instagram.

Fact: when I do more than one thing at one time, neither thing gets more than 50% of my intelligence. And, numerically speaking, when I divide my IQ by 50%, it puts me in the “special needs” category. 

This is a real problem, with real implications for community, productivity and creativity. Multi-tasking shreds your focus. And because digital, connected devices make it ridiculously easy to multi-task, more and more of us are experiencing extended periods of scatter-brainedness.

After all, it’s so easy to check email, Facebook, news headlines, Gawker, The Onion, you name it. Much easier than, you know, focusing on one thing and getting it done.

How dumb does multi-tasking make us? 

A new info-graphic from onlinecollege.org lays it out for us. A few highlights:

1. Multitasking lowers your IQ by 10 points. The equivalent of missing a night of sleep. Twice the dumbing-down power of marijuana. (I quit smoking dope in 1986 because I could feel it make me stupid; an outcome I achieved often enough without outside help. So, knowing what I know now, why would I multi-task?)
2. Multitasking costs you 2.1 hours of productivity a day. 10.5 hours per work week. 546 hours per year.
3. Multitasking makes it harder to learn. Students who do homework while IMing (or watching TV) are more likely to report academic impairment. 
4. Multitasking in a car is as bad as being hammered. If you’re on the phone in the car — and we aren’t even talking about texting, we’re talking about talking — you drive like someone with a BAC of .08. That’s legally drunk. 

It’s hard to voluntarily put the devices away, and focus on focus. But I’m become aware of how much time and focus I waste by doing too many things at once. 

It’s bad enough when they’re “important” things. It’s worse when they’re habitual time-wasters — like when we pathologically check email for new messages, news sites for news, social sites for shout-outs. 

It’s time to cut back. For all of us. 

Just because we can multi-task, doesn’t mean we should.

Mostly new music in August. Some is just new to me. Enjoy.

Recently, I volunteered to help our client, Smári Organics, at a food investor’s fair. Manage the sample table. Deliver the spiel. Invite people to try the yogurt. 

I don’t mind. I get to meet customers, see how the brand is being received, see which pitches get the most traction. 

A young woman approaches the table. We start talking. Turns out she’s an art director working with one of the other companies.

Small world! I introduce myself, tell her I’m an ad guy — and she gets the feeling she knows me somehow. We try to figure out the connection. No luck.

A half-hour later, she comes back.

“I figured it out! I went to ad school in from 2000 -2002. I used to pore over the award show books. I literally studied everything you did!” 

I pause. I’m wearing a promo t-shirt, holding a disposable spoonful of Smári yogurt. What else can I say? “Well, that’s…you gotta try the yogurt.”

It’s a brave new world, birthing a small agency. I love it.