If you think it’s getting harder to get new business, you have plenty of company. New business director and Advertising Age columnist Noelle Weaver laments in the August 18th Advertising Age, Agency Reviews During a Recession, that ‘it sure is a little wacky out there’, with clients fishing for free ideas, inviting spec pitches...
One casualty of our era’s obsession with innovation and youth is the fading away of great and evergreen lore from yesteryear’s advisors. Dorothy Sarnoff, still alive today at age 94, was for much of her life a font of frankly-stated good sense about how to speak in public. I’ve never met her, but I...
The scarcest resource a pitch team has is time. And one of the main reasons teams run out of time is that many lack someone who’s both empowered to, and willing to, make hard, often-unpopular decisions. Not rushed decisions, not unilateral decisions, but decisions that stand nonetheless. Years ago, while talking to another pitch...
My 14-year-old loves to watch the TLC channel’s “What Not To Wear”, a reality-TV show in which hosts Stacy London and Clinton Kelly gently mock the wardrobes of fashion naïfs, guiding them through makeovers. I get a chuckle out of it, too. Who can resist watching ‘ugly ducklings’ become swans, right before our eyes?...
