friday open vault: deutsch telekom + Oasis

call it cheezy, call it easy, but I admit this clip moves me



Can't wait for the album to drop...



have good one..

what if...we changed the budget

So here is one from real life actually that got shot down.

One of my targets, in my official capacity, for next year is to help Sales increase revenue (somehow it seems that's always a target). So to achieve that here is what I proposed.

Cut the target and budget meetings down from once a month to once every three months.

See most of our sales managers know at the beginning of a month whether they will achieve their targets. So when they know it's gonna be negative, they go on defense. cutting costs to reach margin targets, squeeze old clients for more and go on sales driven binges by offering everything at lower prices. This then only wrecks havoc on the revenue side, because if you have a bad month you go to the same clients a s always and dump the price even more. It's a cycle.

But what if you knew you had two months to make up you current negative? This would allow you to use a month, that is "lost" anyways to go on offence and take chances with new business. It would free up sales manager to be more proactive and the trickle down would be positive instead of fearfull.

Yes this is all just a theory, but never put to practice it remains that.

Back to the drawingboard.

what if: whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me

A comment I made about breaking the competition sparked the above quote from Matthew 25:40 in my head, given by Senator Obama at mr Warren's debate last week. That in turn lead me to think back to a comment made on the blog I commented on.

"Droga5 had the chance to lift the norm of Aussie adland" was in essence the comment.

What if, the responsability was put in the hands of the client, instead of the agency? Speaking as a client, I know that customers don't care.

They don't care that I have a 10.000 papers bigger circulation or that the competition has more display points. They base their decisions on emotional associations we trigger in them and the amount of interestingness we can offer in a fresh and original way. The only thing that they do care and share is their loathing of those who sell advertising space. So it's a question of getting them to a point of " I hate all of you as a category, but I like you personally..let's do business".

Because customers are tainted by experiences with others, you pay a price.

So why not as a client do the following:

Write a brief to your agency to do work for your competitors (off course presuming you got a good agency). It's like opposition research in politics, but in reverse. You do not want to be better than your competitors, you want them to be better for the sake of all.

You want to lift them to new hights and the category as well. Knowing off course that the better the competition get's the better you've got to be.

I am aware of category strategies that have been applied in the past, think Juan Valdes, but that was out of co-operation between competitors.

But has there been a client who actively demanded that he be surpassed by his competition, and even helped the process along? I hope so..