Media and Marketing
Are Battle Tested Sales Leaders Worth What They Earn?
Great coaches know how to make room for more experienced players to diversify a team and provide game changing leadership to less experienced players. Great Commanders have historically relied on battle tested warriors to lead platoons into combat. Great business leaders understand the added value that experienced sales performers deliver.
Some companies have paid a very high price to arrive at this realization.
Does anyone remember Circuit City’s now infamous cost cutting move to slash payroll expenses by firing the majority of their better compensated more experienced salespeople and managers?
At the time the Washington Post reported:
Circuit City fired 3,400 employees in stores across the country yesterday, saying they were making too much money and would be replaced by new hires willing to work for less.
The company said the dismissals had nothing to do with performance but were part of a larger effort to improve the bottom line. The firings represent about 9 percent of the company’s in-store workforce of 40,000.
Here is the entire story from March 29, 2007:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/AR2007032802185.html
By January of 2009 the impact of this folly on Circuit City’s downward slide was irreversible – the company announced they were going out of business. By March of 2009 they closed their doors forever; 40,000 people lost their jobs, among them were a few short sighted executives who thought having less experienced, cheaper salespeople was the answer to their problems.
Orchestrator’s Note: I first heard about the Circuit City story through the wonderful NPR program “This American Life”. If you’ve never heard Ira Glass breakdown a story, it’s worth checking your local listings to hear his show. You can find podcasts of the show here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org
This Just In – TV Is Not Dead
With apologies to Mark Twain, the pronouncement regarding the demise of television has been greatly exaggerated. Yes, TV audiences have become increasingly fragmented, and the four major networks no longer dominate as they once did. Ad revenues, historically dependent on auto advertising, have been adversely affected by the recent economic downturn. But the truth remains that television is still reaches huge numbers of viewers and remains a powerful medium for influencing public opinion as well as consumer behavior. TV, both cable and broadcast, has also been undergoing a creative renaissance that is drawing world class writing and production talent. Yes, we still have a “vast wasteland” of ridiculously innocuous programming and inane reality shows. But we also have brilliantly crafted shows like Mad Men, Treme, The Wire, 24, Lost, CSI, True Blood – to name a few of the great shows that have helped set the standard for great drama. Shows like Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park provide us with intelligent and insightful social satire. And let’s not forget the powerful insight and analysis that PBS programming such as Frontline and The American Experience continue to provide.
No one denies the earth is shifting under the major broadcast and cable networks. DVR’s, You Tube and hundreds of other digital platforms provide often compelling alternatives to appointment television. However, great content will always find a way into our entertainment diet and at the moment cable and broadcast television are providing high quality content options that are keeping the medium interesting and viewers tuned in. TV continues to be the medium of choice for live sporting events and breaking news. TV content is expensive to produce and revenues will have to keep pace with the cost of production in order to sustain the quality of programming cable and broadcast networks deliver for free. The media landscape is changing, but at the moment TV networks are finding new ways to effectivelycompete for viewers and advertising dollars – mainly by delivering great entertainment value and using digital platforms to offer viewers more ways to engage the medium.
All advertisers need to have a great digital strategy to drive conversion and acquire new customers. However a great digital strategy should not preclude the effective use of traditional TV advertising when it makes sense. Need proof? Have you seen Google’s latest TV spots? Google TV Spot
Conan Leaves NBC and The Tonight Show
This past Friday Conan O’Brien aired his last show as the host of the Tonight Show on NBC. His departure was the result of a failed attempt to move Jay Leno to a 10 O’clock slot five nights a week. I’ll let others comment on the wisdom of that programming move. My only observation is that it would have be difficult to pull off a one hour variety show once a week that might have garnered enough of an audience to compete in that time slot- against some very formidable dramas. Trying to do it five nights a week seemed like a doomed undertaking from the start.
Conan reportedly settled for 35 million dollars to walk away from his Tonight Show contract. He could have made more money by agreeing to take back his old slot later, but refused. Some say it was a bad play. I disagree. Jay Leno can easily continue doing his brand of the Tonight Show for another ten years, or more. In agreeing to taking back his old time slot, Conan would have remained locked into the slot following Jay Leno for as long as Jay Leno wanted to do the Tonight Show, which was likely to be a long time. He would have also become the de-facto fall guy for a failed programming move that he was not responsible for orchestrating.
Last week it was Leno, Letterman and Coco that dominated the serious buzz among Bloggers, Twitters, Facebook users and media cognoscenti; not the unveiling of the Apple tablet computer, arguably the most transformative new appliance since the iPhone.
For me the one useful take away that emerges out of the whole silly debacle is that, despite the medium’s tendency towards self-inflicted punishment, TV is not dead – it’s still very much a part of our social media conversation. TV is not dead, but I’m pretty sure, unless you are an independent musician, D.J., artist, or exotic dancer – MySpace may very well be.
The Thinking Person’s Rock Star
On January 2 the New York Times published an interesting op-ed piece by the pride of Dublin and the lead singer of U2- Bono, offering new ideas for the new decade http://bit.ly/4DgSii . Following a rich tradition that dates back to Woody Guthrie, Bono is making use of the soap box afforded to him by his musical celebrity to inject thought provoking ideas into the vox populi. His editorial covers a variety of subjects ranging from suggestions on how to make American cars sexy again to promoting a Mid-East music festival celebrating the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As always, Bono offers an enlightened rock star perspective that reflects his optimism and intellect. The common thread in his view of the coming decade is that music, sports, art and technology will continue to be powerful uplifting forces. Forces that will increasingly be accessed and harnessed by ordinary people to create extraordinary results. Read more…
Five Important Concepts To Help Grow Your Business in 2010
1) Small shifts in perspective can yield large changes in R.O.I. Shifting your perspective from a traditional impression based paradigm to a “user experience” model will help you do a better job connecting with the right customers for your business. Reaching a large pool of potential customers is good, reaching the right pool of potential customers is better.
2) Authenticity is powerful currency. Create synergy and symmetry between your customer’s online and offline experience. In other words be who you say you are.
3) A great “inbound” strategy is not a substitute for a great “outbound” strategy and vice a versa. It’s tempting to believe that all you have to do in order to have a successful marketing campaign is use social media to demonstrate your value proposition, build your reputation and watch potential customers come streaming through the door. For most companies (I say most because there are some exceptions) pursuing one without the other is a recipe for failure. Reputation is very important, so is reach and scalability.
4) Virtually every form of engagement with current and prospective customers should be based on adding value to that engagement. This also applies to branding campaigns; a great branding campaign will add value to the engagement by reinforcing identity and affiliation i.e. “the Pepsi Generation”. If you want my attention, if you ask me to “click here”…. you better have something that brings value to me on that landing page – if not, it’s unlikely you’ll get a second chance.
5) Any creative or marketing endeavor is the result of a collaborative effort – choose your collaborative partners wisely. It is highly unlikely that any one company is going to have all the solutions you need to be successful in today’s marketplace. Make sure the team of solution providers you have put together has strong adaptive skills, understands how to leverage synergy and that their values are aligned with yours. Do they pretend to have all the answers (media orthodoxy) or are they adaptive and able to learn and optimize as they execute (media agnostic)? Winning is much easier with the right team behind you.
Riding the Tsunami of Change
We are in the midst of a tsunami of change: social, political, economic. Adapting to that change and competing in a global economy requires us to be more flexible, more nimble….. smarter than ever before. Those of us looking to guide clients through this environment of disruptive change must find new tools, new approaches, new paradigms for understanding, adapting to and influencing our shifting cultural zeitgeist.
There are no simple answers to how to best move forward, and this is not only true for marketers, start-ups and even established businesses, it is true for every industry that wants to remain relevant. Depending on your perspective, it is either a fascinating time to be alive, or it is scary as hell.
I recall listening to a speech at the JFK Library in Boston some years ago that spoke to this issue from the perspective of another time, it resonated with me so much I kept a copy of it framed in my office for many years. It is as relevant today as when the President first spoke the words.
Here is a little excerpt from it:
“The world of Calhoun, the world of Taft had its own problems and notable challenges. But its problems are not our problems. Their age is not our age. As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest– but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” – J.F.K. Yale Commencement June 11, 1962
We no longer have the luxury of opinion without thought. If we are to thrive in this disruptive world we can no longer trade on clichés and yesterday’s strategies; we can no longer ignore the changes thrust upon us by technology, the economy and a generation of consumers who are creating their own communication channels. Does that mean that everything we did in the past is irrelevant or no longer viable? No. It does mean, we have learn to adapt in real time to a rapidly changing environment.
How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate and what mediums we use to reach our audience. Commercial communication is no longer exclusively about one way messaging. The companies that have grown stronger in this disruptive environment: E-Bay, Zappos, JetBlue to name just three, have done so by listening, learning and adapting their products and value propositions based on what their customers are telling them.
Adapting to disruptive change requires fluid “customer centric” marketing solutions. It requires communication that goes beyond the “repetition of stale phrases” to offer consumers genuine value and an opportunity for meaningful engagement. It requires us to be smarter, nimbler and much better listeners.
Are you listening to your customers?
A Brand New Day
I have finally conceded that in order to be a proper thought leader I can no longer rely on communicating to potential customers and collaborators by Facebook, Twitter or even through my website. Change is happening so quickly in our world, and particularly in the field I have chosen to make a living in for the past 20 years: the world of media, marketing and advertising, that the concepts that worked perfectly fine yesterday must be reexamined tomorrow.
One of the exciting things about the media business these days is that it is being disrupted by so many different forces it is forcing everyone, neophytes and veterans alike, to re-think how they go about building an audience, building a market and sustaining a career. It’s forcing businesses to be faster, smarter and more creative. It’s forcing us to look around corners and listen to our customers like we never have before. Web 2.O technology has shifted the balance of power away from ivory tower managers to consumers, who are more influential now than ever before in the history of commerce.
While powerful disruptive forces can be unsettling, they can also force us to be better at what we do. They move us away from complacency and can often bring out the best in each of us. We either adapt or we perish, it’s really that simple. There is something about that concept that I find absolutely thrilling.
Louis A. Rivera
Multi-Platform Solution Provider
Broadcast - Online - Mobile - Social Media
Sales Accelerator ~ Sports Sponsorships
New England Sports Network
Boston Red Sox/Boston Bruins
http://www.IMcollaborative.com
e: Louis@IMCollaborative.com
t: 617.686.9546
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