AdAge.com – Are We Too Connected?
April 10, 2008
All This Connectivity Is Killing Us
We’re Draining the Human Batteries
 Marc Brownstein |
I was out with a client the other night, and asked him how’s he’s doing. He said he’d just come back from Spring Break and was exhausted. Not from being on vacation. Instead, from never really leaving the office, regardless of where in the world he was vacationing. I’ve been hearing this a lot lately, from a wide range of executives.
In business today, the reality is that we are almost always “on.” Our cell phones are on. Our wireless devices are on. Our laptops are on. That means we are always on. There seems to be an expectation that business is never off anymore. Not after dinner. Not on Saturday or Sunday. Or holidays. Where was it written that if you have a thought, it should be communicated right then and there to the recipient? What that means in our industry is that when our clients have an idea, or a request, they reach out to us. When an account supervisor has a question for the creative team, the e-mail (or call) goes out at any hour. And we all feel compelled to respond right away.
It’s part electronic addiction, part passion to succeed. Hey, I can relate. I love being able to communicate a thought when I think of it. It certainly drives business at a faster pace. And I’m a fan of getting things done vs. having meetings to talk about getting things done. But the 24/7 connectivity takes its toll after a while. And I believe that’s what theses colleagues of mine were reacting to.
The advertising business, in particular, drives us harder than most industries. If being on — from the time we wake until the time we go to sleep — hasn’t already taken its toll on us, it will. So what can we do about it? I propose a few reality checks:
- When you take a vacation, take a real vacation. Let people know that you won’t have e-mail or cell phone access (even if you know you will — this way, there are zero expectations of a quick response from you). Our bodies need time to refuel and recharge. When you’re in the idea business, being fresh, wiping the mental slate clean, is of obvious importance.
- Turn the vibrate option off on your devices after hours, so you don’t know when a call or e-mail comes in, and feel compelled to answer.
- Hit the gym in the morning or after work. It’s hard to return calls and write e-mails when you’re doing lat pull-downs.
- Just say “no.” Your body and mind won’t take a daily pummeling if you don’t allow it. Train those you do business with to expect a reply in 24 hours, not 24 seconds.
Now go and get some rest!
AdAge.com Article – Gen Y-ers Career Drive
April 10, 2008
Give Gen Y-ers a Reason to Stay at Your Agency
We All Must Dramatically Re-engineer How We Approach Entry-Level Positions
Published: April 07, 2008
Ever scanned tomorrow’s calendar only to find that a junior member of your team has scheduled 15 minutes with you but offered no specific reason? Any astute manager knows that this dreaded appointment will likely contain either complaining, crying or quitting — all of which are rather unpleasant but entirely manageable. However, Gen Y employees have begun using these 15-minute sessions for a much more captivating reason: to take their senior-most management through the Four Ps: the Personal-Progress PowerPoint Presentation.
From a design standpoint, the Four Ps I have observed generally were quite stunning and demonstrated tremendous mastery of PowerPoint’s next-generation offerings — hyperlinks, unusual custom animations, video and the new 2007 Word Art function. But while the form of each varied dramatically, the function did not. All of the presentations were built around three distinct sections:
1. ACCOMPLISHMENTS
A comprehensive list of the projects the employees had worked on since joining and a recap of what they had learned about themselves, the agency and our business.
2. GOALS
Specific short-term and long-term objectives the employees had set for themselves, often the most significant portion of the presentations. Some key shared desires, such as to marry personal and business passions, to quickly move between jobs, to make lots of money.
3. EXPECTATIONS
Each presentation ended with three asks: a promotion, a specific salary increase and a desired effective date for both.
At the conclusion of each presentation, I was all too happy to give the presenters the positive recognition they wanted and deserved. But beyond that, my hands were tied. If I could have given them the raises and promotions they desired, I would have. But our business model just doesn’t support those actions. These frustrated Gen Y-ers might have begun job searches or, even worse, developed a crushing resentment toward me and the agency and written about it in their blogs. Who can blame them?
The brightest of my junior account folks attended notable universities and graduated with impressive GPAs. They ran fraternities, philanthropic organizations, student governments. And what can I offer them in return? A frequently mind-numbing job filling out insertion orders for newspaper ads, managing Excel budgets, updating status reports and writing up competitive alerts, all for a salary that’s considerably lower than what their client equivalents make.
Agencies need to find a new employment model that better caters to Gen Y’s 21st-century skill set, enviable ambition and vibrant desire for recognition. If we don’t, rest assured we will continue to lose smart and driven people to other, more-Gen-Y-friendly industries.
In a recent survey of our New York office, the majority of our employees under 25 wanted quarterly performance check-ins with their direct supervisors and separate quarterly meetings with their department heads. Right.
We all must dramatically re-engineer how we approach entry-level positions. Here we’re testing rotational department/discipline employment, reverse mentoring, master’s-level strategic education, personalized performance metrics and accelerated compensation models.
Gen Y employees are playing a more active role than ever in managing their careers. Our job is to find new ways to motivate, inspire and reward them. If we don’t, I fear these “Ad”-olescents won’t be taking us through their PowerPoint decks any longer, because there simply will be none of them left.
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Mark Strong is group managing director on McCann Erickson’s global MasterCard business.
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Large Dark Roast, please
March 1, 2008
I was recently asked (via email survey!) what I wanted to be “when I grow up” when I was little and then what I actually am now. I liked my answer to the latter so much that I’m posting it for you.
#29 – What are you now? Media Buyer Professionalle (say it like it sounds people)/research and national television ratings whore/should-be stockholder in Caribou Coffee
Hype vs. Anti-Hype
February 11, 2008
Giving credit where it’s due, this is where I swiped this article from:
Ad Age Media Works
Written by: Simon Dumenco
I especially liked the part about Hype vs. Anti-Hype and anti-hype becoming hype. Read on. You’ll get it.
Don’t Hate Me, but Sometimes I Like to Like the Things I Llike
A (Gentle) Rant About Hype and Anti-Hype in Current Pop Culture, Starting With the ‘It’ Band of the Moment
Published: February 11, 2008
Last week, once again, I found myself wondering why I like what I like — why any of us likes what we like.
Part of it had to do with Super Tuesday — a referendum, of course, not so much on politics but on likability or lack thereof (political substance will have to wait).
But it was also because I came across a slam of a band that I, well, really like. (Forgive me for mixing politics and pop, but in a primary season dominated by various and sundry cults of personality, can you blame me for conflating them?)
The band happens to be the “it” band of the moment: Vampire Weekend, a New York quartet of Columbia University alumni whose eponymous debut has a Metacritic.com score of 82, which roughly translates to “universal acclaim.” (One of my all-time favorite web resources, Metacritic collates and summarizes published opinion about music, film, books, etc., and assigns numerical scores to each external review it links to so as to tabulate critical consensus.) Music writers at publications far and wide — from Britain’s The Guardian to Teen Vogue to Paste to Spin to Pitchfork — have smiled on this 35-minute collection of preppy indie rock with an Afro-pop sensibility. As non-music-critic venture capitalist Fred Wilson (whose all-over-the-map “Musings of a VC” blog is generally brilliant) wrote, “What would happen if the 1977 vintage Talking Heads covered Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’? You’d get the sound of a new band called Vampire Weekend.”
Though the record was officially released on Jan. 29, I’d actually heard (and instantly loved) many of its tracks last year, thanks to internet leakage (so much so that the VW song “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” made it onto Rolling Stone’s “Top 100 Songs of 2007″ list).
And then, last week, I opened up the Feb. 2 issue of “The Lefsetz Letter” (tagline: “First in Music Analysis”), a free e-mail newsletter written by Bob Lefsetz, a Santa Monica music-industry pundit. Lefsetz started his letter, “Last night I caught Vampire Weekend on the Letterman show. They were awful.”
He went on about the disintermediated media universe: “The top-down world is coming to an end. … People have tools to make art and a smorgasbord of entertainment options. … You must not bang them over the head and make them feel inferior. … We’ve been living with a class of professional, holier-than-thou trendsetters who believe they determine what is cool. Cool is not so important anymore. Attention is king. And the longer you can keep someone’s attention, the more you’re going to win in the 21st century.”
Part of me was thinking, Yessss! But then another part of me was thinking, Aw, Bob, stop being such a hater! (Particularly given that he closed his rant by coming full circle to VW on Letterman: “I laughed to myself, wondering why everybody was wasting so much time on this evanescent act. I switched the channel.”)
The irony is that, by off-handedly dismissing Vampire Weekend, Lefsetz is aligning himself with the hipsters and would-be arbiters of cool that he’s trying to distance himself from. A hallmark of contemporary cool-kid posturing — particularly bloggy posturing (or in the case of Lefsetz, email-y posturing) — is, of course, acting like you’re so totally immune to the hype machine. Anti-hype — advertising your aversion to everything hyped — becomes its own form of hype. As a result, as much as there are tons of cool kids praising Vampire Weekend, there’s a parallel set of cool kids trashing the band with almost equal vigor (which is why a Village Voice piece titled “Vampire Weekend: Hated On, Mostly” can coexist with a “universally acclaimed” Metacritic score).
I did a little digging and found that some of the very first praise of the band appeared in The L Magazine, a 5-year-old, digest-size biweekly listings magazine that’s distributed free in New York. It’s actually one of my favorite reads, because it’s packed with exceptionally sharp arts and culture criticism, including that of its (excellent) music editor, Mike Conklin, who championed VW when it was just an ambitious local band. It also has a blog (at thelmagazine.com), and last week the magazine’s (also excellent) film editor Mark Asch had this to say about Vampire Weekend on that blog:
“Paradoxically (or not?), I think one of the reasons the band has blown up so quickly is that it was really easy, while they were on the way up, to see what the backlash would zero in on. They … are young and privileged and synthesize hip influences (and burgeoning scenes) into three-minute jingles that it’s literally impossible not to like; they’re going to be beloved by people with very bad taste, and this is something that people with good taste hold against good bands more than perhaps they should.”
That pretty much nails it: In certain circles these days, liking or hating is less and less about liking or hating a specific phenomenon (e.g., a band or a movie or a politician) but about whether or not you like or hate the people who like or hate that phenomenon.
Meanwhile, given how weary I am of backlashery — and this here backlash to the backlashery — I’m going to de-stress a bit by listening to some breezy, brainy pseudo-Afro-pop.
Forgive me.
Chicks rule.
November 10, 2007
“I believe women drive television viewing as a whole.” ~ ABC Entertainment president, Steve McPherson in the 10/29/07 issue of Mediaweek Magazine. To further summarize, this [I think] interesting article by Mediaweek writer John Consoli goes on to discuss how successful ABC’s programming – new and old – this season has been at hitting women, who many advertisers know are often the primary decision-makers for most purchases.
I think the most interesting thing he pointed out was the success of ABC’s Wednesday nights, when the entire line-up consists of freshman shows – Pushing Daisies, Private Practice (I LOVE Dell), and Dirty Sexy Money.
Monday nights have been a decently successful chick-target as well – with new sitcom starring the always-adorable Christina Applegate, Samantha Who? leading into one of my favorite primetime guilty pleasures – The Bachelor.
Interestingly, ABC’s Tuesday night newbies, Cavemen (what were they thinking?!) and Carpoolers, skew much more male and are tanking. Granted, they fall against Fox’s Bones which leads in to Tuesday night’s gem, House, so they’re up against some tighter competition.
Anyway, back to the stuff I watch. I’ve honestly only seen Pushing Daisies twice or so, but I just LOVE it. I think it’s beautifully shot and the exaggerated supporting characters are so charming and lively. And how cute is our lead couple and their bee-keeper nets and saran-wrap kisses? What cheesily adorable romance!
Private Practice has become one of my hopeful new shows, despite being really skeptical to start. I say hopeful because while I really enjoy it and find it entertaining, I’m hopeful that the potential I see really explodes as the show develops. Dr. Addison Montgomery was such a volatile, strong-willed, “oh-no-you-didn’t” kind of character, and she’s really softened a lot of those edges and I can’t help be just a little disappointed. Either way, I was a little skeptical at first about the spin-off, wondering if we’d be given too much of a good thing, taking the Grey’s thing too far, but they’re doing an alright job of giving new life to these new characters, separating it enough from the Grey’s storyline and stark hospital walls and translating it into the cozy little oceanside clinic with the cute front-desk “midwiff.” (You know… because Dell keeps saying “midwiffery”… Yeah.. ok).
Finally, Dirty Sexy Money has become my one real “appointment-viewing” show. This is the one I do what I can to try to be home for, to put down whatever else I’m doing to see if Nick is any closer to figuring out who and who not to trust, to see if Jeremy Darling can really make it as a working man, to roll my eyes at Karen’s chronic infidelity and self-centeredness, and to fall further and further in love with Juliet Darling.
So yes, Mr. Steve McPherson, ABC Entertainment President, nice work on Wednesday nights. Chicks rule.
Party Like It’s 2004
October 15, 2007
Every so often Cynthia Turner throws out a “Special Edition” newsletter to add some more spice to her already fun and informative “Cynopsis” and my favorite, “Cynopsis: Digital.” Today was a flashback to 2004. Here are some highlights from today’s newsletter:
Greetings! It’s Monday, October 15, 2007 and this is your Cynopsis Special Edition, taking a look back at the Year 2004.
- Many of us saw more than bargained for of Janet Jackson and the Wardrobe Malfunction was born
THE NETWORKS:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg… but the rest will have to wait!
Good Question!
September 26, 2007
John Rash interviewed on WCCO’s segment, “Good Question,” when asked “Why is the TV season now so short?”
Gossip Girl, Technolust
September 25, 2007
I have to agree with Erin about The CW’s new guilty pleasure show – Gossip Girl. Josh Schwartz sure does like to tell the stories of rich, young, beautiful, have-it-alls in such a way that makes you both wish you had that life while at the same time, being completely content with the normalcy because you don’t.
Anyway, I also agree with her observation that Blair makes some very Summer Roberts-esque nose squenches and “oh no you didn’t!” head tilts. I missed the pilot on Sunday night, but was thrilled to see the full episode posted on The CW’s website, which I caught last night via the laptop I’m itching to replace.
Nice segway into the technolust that is the way I feel about the iMac and the iPod Touch. I feel like a kid in a toy store, jumping up and down, screaming, “BUT I WANT IT!” My iBook has gotten me far in the three years (almost) since I bought it, but I’m having a HARD time running CS3 on a less-than-1GB memory card. I realize that I could add more memory, but I want a new machine anyway – more space, more media options, and a new iPod on which I can tote all the shows and songs! *sigh*
Ok, this was the creative break I needed. Back to numbers.
My 15.5 Minutes :)
September 21, 2007
Check out The Rash Report this week! John (the boss man and the brains behind the content) is on vacay/pat leave this week, so I’ve been filling in for him – this has been fun and I think the fact that it’s the first of the new fall season premieres, I’ve had the stories pretty much handed to me. So to check out some Nielsen ratings analysis and chatter about the new fall shows, go here:
Rambles
August 23, 2007
The only real point to this post right now is to try to calm my brain a little. My body and brain are completely exhausted, but for some reason, my mind’s still awake. I’ve been up since 5:30, I packed in a full day of work – the kind where by the end of the day, you start forgetting what you were doing about a second after you started it – then killed about 3 hours in between before playing a late-night (9:40!) game of volleyball. I live across the Cities from the courts where we play, so it’s now quarter of midnight, and I’ve finally just sat down after getting home, taking a shower, and pouring a glass of wine that I’ve really only stared at so far. The idea of picking up the glass is making me tired.
One thing I can comment on or point out though – kudos to the road planners and peeps that added the 4th lane to I-94 between Hwy 280 and 35W. I travel that route every single weekday morning and afternoon to work, and since the bridge collapsed, with 280 being the main alternate route, traffic on that stretch has gotten really tight. Granted, the times I’ve been traveling there this week so far have been outside of normal rush hours (I’ve been working way too early/late!) but it is SO much nicer! Hats off to all who contributed to jump on that so quickly and provide us commuters with a bit of an easier AM and PM drive.
