San Francisco chronicle
February 13th, 2007 by Mike O'Toole
Chris Frame and I spent a couple of days working out of our Union Square office last week. Very productive, and perspective-changing in the ways that the best business travel can be. Small pleasures, like a 60-degree-and-sunny sidewalk lunch at B44 on Belden Street, and a drink at the Top of the Mark, didn’t hurt.
I talked to three candidates for our GM position, and met with some very good creative and account resources that I could imagine contributing immediately to PJA’s left coast presence.
Perhaps the most valuable outcome is that it forced me to think very specifically about the role and value of our San Francisco office. It also helped enormously that I met with a Carlsbad-based client before coming out who has a very distinctive point of view about what kind of PJA west presence he values. While my thinking continues to unfold, here is where I am:
San Francisco is humming again. We had a hard time finding a hotel room, and struck out on dinner reservations Tuesday and Wednesday night. The lobby of the W Hotel felt like the bar at the Clift, circa 2000. Freelancers are fat and happy, and agencies are struggling to hire.
It is critical that we have a presence here. But we need to be deliberate. A print-centric, ad-centric tech agency offering would be greeted with a collective yawn by local companies. The contrast between old and new agency models couldn’t have been more clear on Wednesday. We visited a friend at a rapidly imploding big agency, then had dinner with a former colleague who is a senior creative at a ModemMedia that can’t hire fast enough.
As we grow our presence out here, the right strategy is to complement and extend PJA’s capabilities. It should add something important to our conversation about elite, innovative, BtoB marketing. Here are a couple of ideas for where to root that offering:
1) E-demand generation. The bread-and-butter of a small office will be the $50-250k marketing program that is essentially about generating leads. We will have an interesting story for clients to the extent we approach this work in a distinctive way: programs with a social media component, lead gen programs that involve upgrading the prospect capture-and-cultivate capabilities of the corporate Web site, or demand gen programs that are built to create a brand experience.
2) Planning-centered programs. Whether they are positioning, advertising, or demand gen programs, we should front them all with primary research that uncovers a fresh set of insights that drive a more distinctive creative execution or program design. Could be rooted in the PJA panel idea (our own network of science and technology decision-makers that we can research on behalf of clients), or figuring out the right application of intercepts or ethnographies. It is hard to imagine fresh insights coming from focus groups or another purchase process study.
3) Experiential marketing for the BtoB brand. Use video, events, and online to uncover and deliver the distinctive IP/thought leadership of mid-sized companies in a compelling way (this is a riff on videoing the CEO delivering the company story). Over drinks at Postrio (there is business value in T&E), Chris Frame and I discussed some other variations on the experiential theme. What if PJA became known as the agency that brings tech/science brands to life in multi-dimensional, cross-sensory ways? We define the sound for a brand. We talked about fielding a research project that builds the definitive ITunes playlist for IT (it would be fun to contrast the playlists of developers and CIOs). Or scientists, for that matter. There is something deadly earnest (and honestly, a little dull and predictable) about much of the audience research that happens today. I think everyone would get a huge kick out of research that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Or, possibly we define the aroma for brands. Don’t laugh. Chris brought up the associative power of scent, and we imagined all those Invitrogen consumable packages carrying the subtle scent of…reliable research? Or imagine the Novell booth at LinuxWorld having a scent (what does the global open source community smell like?). Bottom line, our goal is to help our clients stand out in a sea of sameness, and merchandising intangible brands in new ways would certainly help.
4) Green marketing. This came up in a number of conversations. This is another curve we should be ahead of.
This should keep us busy for a few months.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Tired and pretenious. And you’re a partner? I’m passing on pja as a potential agency partner.
February 13th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Too bad, o salt-of-the-earth luka. No scratch & sniff marketing for you.
Brings to mind the campaign in San Francisco: a “Got Milk” outdoor display was yanked after groups took issue with the smell (it smelled like cookies).
People find offense in the most innocuous things.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Flame mail from an agnecy that hosts a blog. Thin-skinned on our part by the way.
PS Luka does work in the valley at a comapny you’d probably like to have as a client. Joke’s on you friend.
March 1st, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Scott, you just don”t get it. There’s a world of difference between bs and substance. I’m turned off.
And by the way, it IS your loss.