2017, Chapter 3:
Leaving Marketing
It’s funny how perspectives change.
When I was in college doing DIY speakers, I’d have laughed if you’d told me I’d ever do anything other than design speakers at my own company, and build a giant company on our idiosyncratic designs. Of course, reality intervened, and the speaker dream went nowhere.
When I was working at Sumo, I would have guffawed if you’d said I’d turn my back on engineering and have my own marketing company—to the exclusion of technical design. But opportunities changed, and that’s exactly what I ended up doing when I founded Centric.
And when I started Schiit, I told everyone that it would be a fun “hobby company,” something that would be comfortable in a garage, or maybe a small structure in the backyard. But again, it took on a life of its own. It grew much faster, and became much larger, than I expected. And my perspective has to change yet again.
And that’s why, this year, I’m leaving Centric, the marketing company I founded and ran for 23 years.
Because now it’s time to focus on Schiit.
Wait A Sec…
“Uh, I thought you were focused on Schiit,” someone’s probably saying right now. “I mean, you design all the analog stuff, you have this book, you do the ads, you go to (some of) the shows, you must be focused on Schiit, right?”
Well, yeah. For the three days a week I’ve been spending at Schiit, anyway.
You see, I’ve been sharing time between Centric and Schiit. At first, I spent all my time at Centric and did Schiit on the side, in the evenings and weekends. Then I started taking two days out of the week for Schiit, then three days. It worked very well, at least until recently.
“Wait a sec!” someone howls. “You’ve been doing this part-time?”
Exactly right. And now it’s time to do it full-time. Because, let’s face it, we’re getting bigger, our line is expanding, the products need to be better than ever, we need to deploy new ways of making things, and we’re going to need to pay more attention to customer-focused stuff (like “alert me when something is in stock” automation, reorganizing the site to help people find what they’re looking for, being more strategic about outreach, actually taking the time to look at metrics, and, in general, growing up.
(A bit. Don’t panic. We’re not going to go all big-corporate evil and Monsanto-y on you.)
“Oh hell, if you’ve done this much part-time, how crazy is it going to be full-time?” someone asks. “You’re going to take over the world!”
Actually, no. Maybe not even our little corner of it. Because you never know what the future holds. We could fall on our face, no matter how much time I put in. But the reality is, I’m having the time of my life at Schiit, which is something I couldn’t always say at Centric.
And if I’m having the time of my life, why not do more of that?
So What Happens to Centric?
That’s a fair question. Centric has had a long, long run as a marketing company—over 2 decades. In dog years, that’s about 140. Centuries, that is. Most marketing companies either implode (founders’ egos can be big problems), fail, or get acquired long before that.
Aside: for disambiguation of what “a marketing company” is, refer to previous chapters about marketing. Centric was, to be precise, a full-service marketing agency with a focus on creative and technology. Which meant we had in-house designers, artists, etc and in-house programming and technology staff. Which translated to a whole lot of online work from about 1998 onwards. But which also encompassed items like complete rebranding, trade show strategy and implementation, and even print, outdoor, and broadcast ads.
And Centric had a lot of firsts: We were one of the earliest agencies online, one of the first to do websites, one of the first to do online marketing, one of the first to do SEO, one of the first to do Flash sites, one of the first to do social media marketing, one of the first to do virtual reality and augmented reality stuff. In fact, I think we still did the largest ever VR event—the 12Avatars contest—and a whole lot of first-ever stuff online, including a kids’ virtual world for Bandai.
Looking back on it, I could summarize Centric as growing and thriving by constantly pushing the limits of change, in a constantly changing environment. When we started, hell, people were still doing color separations (look it up) and scoffing at computer typesetting. We did one of the first huge catalogs using digital photography (done with a monochrome sensor and 3 rotating filters) in an era when people were still using drum-scanning. We embraced the web very early, which led us to working with some huge companies like HP and Compaq. We were first in line when we learned about SEO, creating a department to manage it. We experimented avidly with social media from the MySpace and Friendster days onward. We played with Second Life and augmented reality. We deployed novel insurance-backed contests that got a lot of attention. We built our own consoles, took our own metrics, made our own reports and recommendations to clients…
…but today, the pace of change has slowed. There are, or seem to be, less new opportunities. Marketing has hunkered down into a highly metrics-driven, test-and-iterate based system, or “big creative” that can only be afforded by incomprehensibly giant companies.
Or, again, so it seems. Perhaps the pace finally got to me. Perhaps marketing is only the province of the very young, who can devote 14-hour days in 7-day weeks without blinking. Perhaps we’re missing the new frontier.
And that’s a good lead-in to what’s going to happen to Centric.
Because Centric won’t die. It’ll just move on. Our current staff is taking the company and running with it. It looks like Centric will end up being more metrics-driven, more testing-based…but there will still be a creative core. I’ve signed up to spend time helping them through the transition this year (for free), but from what I’ve seen, they aren’t going to have any problem without me.
And I want them to be successful. I sincerely hope they can navigate the problems with today’s marketing, and the problems with today’s agencies, and create something truly stunning. Because the potential is there. Right now, there are many problems to address. Which means, for the companies that get it right, there will be huge opportunities.
Problems? Yeah, let’s talk about problems. And how Schiit helped me see some of them a whole lot more clearly.
What’s Wrong With Marketing
What’s wrong with marketing? One word:
Influence.
That’s a book title. By Robert Cialdini. Look it up. Read it. And suddenly understand why all marketing has a familiar (and sickeningly sweet) flavor, why you’re treated a certain way, spoken to in a certain way, and offered to in a certain way. Sometime between the publishing of that book and today, marketers inhaled it, absorbed it, and it became part of their very being, and that’s why marketing is the way it is today.
Because, for all the stats and numbers Cialdini cites, they are all from an era pre-Influence. Today, after several decades of Influence’s tricks, people are beginning to see through it. They’re beginning to look askance at too-tricky, too-obvious techniques, because they’ve seen them too many times before. They’re beginning to tune out the soothing patter of the corporate script.
And, in this type of environment, where everything has been calculated to influence, where everything is so plainly fake,
anything authentic is an amazing departure—and people flock to it.
I didn’t realize how terribly fake, so sickeningly upbeat, so easy it was to drop into that mindset and write copy that sounds exactly like everything else these days, that is designed to soothe and cajole and persuade…until I started Schiit.
And Schiit is authentic. Schiit stands out.
And people notice. I think this is a big part of our success—because we broke out of the sickeningly fake mold of “we’re so happy to have you as a customer, you are immensely valuable to us, current wait time on hold is 96 minutes, I’m sorry we can’t cancel your account without an early termination charge of $185, did you know you may elect to choose our wonderful new offering of Product Insurance which guards against most likelihood of loss for only another $58 while you wait.” The right words, the perfect soothing voice…and you’re screwed in the end, or sold something. Schiit is not as nice, smooth, right, soothing, or perfect…but we get you taken care of. Which shows
real caring.
I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again, the logical end-game of this is the McNugget phrase:
made with white meat.
Use this phrase on a non-marketer, and they usually either:
- Smile and say, “Yeah, it’s made with all white meat chicken, it’s good for you.”
- Look at you blankly and ask why you’re so terrified.
Use this phrase on a marketer, and you’ll get one of two very different responses:
- They’ll look increasingly more disturbed as the implications sink in, finally saying “Wow, I’d never eat that,” or something to that effect.
- They’ll shake their head and laugh at how great a marketing phrase it is.
Why this difference? Because the phrase is engineered to seem maximally positive to the widest audience, without actually saying anything. To a non-sensitized, non-marketer, this sounds like a positive phrase, something to be proud of.
But let’s break it down.
- It does not say how much white meat is used.
- It does not say what kind of white meat is used.
- It does not say that there is any kind of white meat, at all, in the product.
So, this phrase could equally apply to a 100% soy-based chicken substitute nugget being made entirely in a factory, with the human pushing the button while eating a pork chop as the only “with white meat” statement. Or maybe it’s a 100% automated factory that has a pork chop sitting on the machine. Still with white meat.
Made with white meat.
Sound a little different to you now? There you go. The pinnacle of “reduces the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles,” (appearance?) “save up to 90%,” (on one sock, everything else not so much), “maximizes the potential for a positive outcome,” (lolwhut), “virtually everything,” (virtually, ouch) and so on.
But the Cialdini book isn’t the only signpost of bad marketing.
Let’s add in benchmarking against the competition, paralysis by analysis, focus-grouping to death, and the nail-biting, gut-clenching possibility of actually being noticed. All of these are subsets of fear, and fear is the other big problem in, well, pretty much everything to do with big corporate environments. Nobody wants to take a chance, because if you fail, you’re done. And that’s why we see things like:
- Obsessing over what the competition is doing, leading to me-too products, differentiation by feature proliferation, same-old-same-old ineffective advertising, races to the bottom (because, hey, if customer service sucks at the competition, why bother doing anything other than incrementally better?), and, basically, all the stuck-in-a-rut **** that ruins companies. Ask yourself: do you really think your competition is so much smarter than you? If so, then maybe best to not get into business in the first place.
- Paralysis by analysis, leading to late or compromised product introductions. I’ve seen this a thousand times—when companies are not 100% sure of a product, they’ll stall, they’ll wait for more research reports, they’ll tweak the description, they’ll tweak the advertising, they’ll go back to engineering to ask for more features, they’ll iterate and iterate and iterate until the product is a complete non-starter. Bring something out. Don’t do more if it doesn’t do well. Fix it if it has a problem. And if it does well, make it better and do it again.
- Focus-grouping to death, leading to the end of some very good and deserving ideas. Guys, I can’t say this any more forcefully: most focus groups are 100% complete BS, done to massage the egos and wallets of the marketing group. One loudmouth invalidates them. Lack of vision within the group kills great product. I have never seen a focus group provide information that wasn’t completely obvious to someone with a modicum of functioning brain cells. I have seen them kill great concepts in products, service, and advertising.
So, in short, what’s wrong with marketing is simple: it all sounds the same, and nobody wants to take a chance. Which is why it all sounds the same. And the merry-go-round of benchmarking, research, and focus-groups means it trends towards a mean. A mean that I think, on my more cynical days, looks kind of like Comic Sans—yes, it’s a font, and yes, you can read it, but no, it’s not something I’d ever want to see on my documents.
What’s Wrong With Agencies
“Well, I gotcha, corporate life sux, I ain’t gonna be a drone, I’m gonna work at an agency so I can do great things,” somebody is probably saying right now.
And, you know what? Maybe that’ll work for you. Because working at an agency, coming up with amazing creative ideas that really do stand out, that are really different, that really move the needle is a wonderful rush. You’re expected to be “out there.” You’re expected to challenge the client. You’re expected to shake things up.
So, yeah, if you want to do great marketing work, I won’t talk you out of working for an agency. Or starting your own, like I did. It can be a ton of fun. It can also be quite lucrative.
But…
(You knew this was coming, right?)
But let’s start with the lucrative. Centric did very well for many years. Unfortunately, those “many years” were not consecutive, nor did I get to pick the ups and downs, nor the magnitude of the ups and downs. ’97 was great, ‘98 we almost died, ‘99 thru ‘01 were great, ‘02-03 not so much, ‘04-05 our biggest time, ‘06-08 a slow slump, ‘09 almost fatal, ‘10-14 steady, ‘15-16 a slow decline.
Why such variations? Chalk it up to both us and to our clients. When times are good, it’s tempting to put all of your effort into maintaining good relationships with your current accounts, and forgetting about adding new ones. The problem with this is that your current clients:
- May be heading into an industry downturn, and therefore turning off the advertising spigot (and there’s NOTHING you can do about this)
- May be about to have their lunch money stolen by a newer, bigger, better, badder bully competitor than they ever expected
- May be on the verge of getting acquired, and the new management has its own pet agencies
- May be on the verge of a marketing shakeup that shakes you out.
Here’s the brutal reality—you can be doing great work, selling the crap out of your client’s products, everyone there can love you…and it can end with essentially no warning.
And, when that happens, and your revenue shrinks by $1.5MM instantly, and you’re staffed for that level, well, you know where this is going.
Or maybe you don’t. So let’s spell it out. It’s going to be layoffs. Because you’re not going to suddenly go out, sell your heart out, and spin up new clients immediately. Getting new clients is a 6-18 month cycle. So if you’ve been ignoring new client generation for a year or two, there’s nothing in that cycle. And then you’re majorly hozed.
And, when you have layoffs in a small or mid-sized organization, they’re deadly. Because, up to the layoff, everyone knows everyone else. They’re more like a family than a big corporation. They go out to lunch with each other. So when you have to say, “Sorry, but you have to go,” and “Congratulations, you get to stay,” you’re creating a bitter group of ex-employees who may stay in touch with your current employees for years…feeding them poison. Plus, anyone left knows there may be additional cuts, so you should plan on losing them…the most talented first. The fallout from layoffs can take many years to work itself out. It’s never clean, it’s never easy…and it may never be over.
“So easy, we just keep selling all the time, right?” you ask. “Getting new clients all the time.”
Yeah, and maybe some organizations can do that. At Centric, we always lost sight of the ball. Whether it was simply trying to do the best for our current clients and not selling new ones, or being so insanely busy there was no time to do the work, we always ended up on a rollercoaster.
And, now that I mentioned “busy,” let’s talk about that. Agencies are high-pressure environments. There’s a reason most of the people working in them are young. They have a higher tolerance for the 12-14 hour days and 6-7 days per week. They’re more capable of staying overnight to re-do a presentation for a critical new client. They’re more willing to go all-out, over and over, even when great stuff is shot down.
(Now, is every agency like this? No. But many are. We eliminated this from Centric in the 2010 re-org—and, at the same time, eliminated the need for anyone to come into the office other than one day a week. Not coincidentally, these were our most stable years.)
And—here’s the real reason that many people leave agencies, forever, in a decade or less: no matter how amazing your work is, it might not matter. Your client might not like the color orange, so it’s done, no discussion of changes. Your client may not understand they’re selling to a 16-24 demographic, even if they are 56. Your client may be an alcoholic, certifiable, or simply abusive. And your options for dealing with these clients are limited. Because, after all, they’re clients, you need to serve them well so the agency will be stable
(until it isn’t)
and that’s the way it has to be. Yes, you can defend, you can cajole, you can bring numbers and charts…and maybe that will work. And maybe it won’t.
Be ready for the latter.
Had enough? Wait, there’s more. As an agency, you also have a limited ability to choose who you work for. There are lots of good creatives out there, and not so many companies that are willing to spend good money on outside creative work.
Aside: And this should be the first warning sign, shouldn’t it? If a company needs an outside agency to tell them how best to market their own product, shouldn’t you run screaming? Yes, I know this is always rationalized with phrases like “needing a fresh perspective,” and “getting an outside look at things,” but the reality is—if you don’t know how to best portray your own products, you got problems.
So, even if you are a vegan, you may be working on the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, or if you’re a low-carber, you may be working on Pepsi, or if you’re an organic aficionado, you may be working with Monsanto. And so on. You’ll be expected to muster great enthusiasm for products you might never consider using, or even find abhorrent. And you’ll be expected to do great work for them.
With all of the above, do you wonder why many agencies do “pro bono” (free) work for clients they like and believe in? First, they get to pick good causes. Second, since it’s free, the causes will frequently accept the work, without even picking it apart first. Pro bono is sometimes an agency’s best work, and it can feel wonderful.
But it doesn’t keep the agency fed. And that—literally—is the bottom line.
How to Fix Marketing, and Keep Your Sanity
So how do you magically fix all of this stuff I’ve just spent 3300 words blathering about? Hell, I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. If I did, I might have stuck with the agency side, ha!
Seriously, though, I may be able to put up some signposts. These aren’t 100% of the answer. They’re probably not even half. But it might help…
For companies wanting to do better marketing:
- Trust your gut. Your first reaction to an ad is most important. Don’t overthink it. Don’t overanalyze it. Don’t show it to your spouse/cousin/co-worker/dog/fish. If it stops you and has the right message, it’s the right marketing.
- Do something fast. Don’t spend a billion years agonizing over the “perfect” ad, website, copy, etc. Get it out there. Iterate. Keep it fresh and different…so by the time you’ve been benchmarked, you’ve moved on.
- Measure and optimize. Find out if what you’re doing is moving the needle. Do more of what works. Drop stuff that doesn’t. Test variations to see what does better. Don’t let metrics take over the creative, but know what it’s doing for you.
For people working in agencies, or starting their own:
- Be bold. We never hired timid or mainstream people at Centric—and our clients never picked us because we were safe. Better to be remembered than lost in the crowd. We’ve had clients come back two or three years later, after making a mistable with another agency (usually someone larger).
- Mind the tenure. Agencies are high-pressure environments. How long can you keep running at full speed? Do you have a plan for the future? Or are you comfortable doing this ad infinitum? Be honest with yourself.
- Forge new paths. The pace of change may seem to have slowed, but I believe there are multiple ways to blow up the old agency model and come out ahead. Some of the ones we discussed (but I didn’t take forward, because they would be an entirely new company, and I need another company like I need a hole in the head) include going to a 100% price-list model (clients hate hate hate hate hate the uncertainty around invoicing) and focusing on specific measurable platforms, such as specializing in helping companies sell, and market, on Amazon.
To all that choose to go down the marketing path, good luck! It can be a whole lot of fun. Just remember to keep your sanity.
Am I Sad?
A little, yes.
I started Centric over 23 years ago. Anything that takes up 2 decades of your life is more than just a passing whim.
I’m very happy to have created an agency that employed great people and did some wonderful work. I’m even more thrilled that our current staff is taking it and running with it…and hopefully turning it into something even better. But it is sad to part ways.
But it’s a happy time for Schiit. Because now it’s my sole focus. If I keep learning, designing, and making things better, that should be a good thing.
Should. If I don’t mess it up.
Here’s to the future!
