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Do this or die. Again.

Never, in my wildest self-elevating fantasies, would I compare my neuro-matter to that of the late, great ad man Bill Bernbach. But in the late sixties, Doyle Dane and Bernbach published an ad in Time Magazine with the headline: Do This Or Die. The ad challenged the advertising industry of that day to change. Bernbach wasn’t suggesting changing agency operations, he said “There is a twelve-year-old mentality in the country; every six-year-old has one.” So it’s time to change the practices of tricky and misleading advertising. Well, I am making an appeal to today’s small to mid-sized shops: Change. And I do mean agency operations.

I’ve uttered these words many, many times in the past couple of years: “This is my fifth recession and the common denominator with each is a single word – change.” With every downturn, comes an upturn but it never returns to the same place. Clients change. Consumers change. The world changes, and so must we change, or die.

Small to mid-sized advertising agencies often respond to economic gyrations with either an invigorated business development effort, so they can land enough new clients to continue doing what they’ve always done with the same people and the same approaches. Some simply bury their heads in the sand and wait for a recovery so they too, can pick up where they left off in the good old days. For both, their days are numbered. They are doomed. They will quickly be identified as relics of the past. The good old days are gone forever.

However, the good new days are here.

I wrote an article a couple of years ago entitled The 21st Century Agency Model: Small + Smart. The essence of that piece was:

Today, small to mid-sized marketers are demanding more of the capabilities of the larger, full service agencies, like sound, strategic business and brand planning, traditional as well as digital media expertise, killer creative ideas, insights and intelligence. But what they don’t want is an agency focused on keeping a lot of people employed rather than providing the appropriate solution to their business’ immediate and ever-changing needs. The agency of the future is a Small + Smart shop.
 

  • Jim Hughes is the Founding Partner of the Brand Establishment and has developed hundreds of brands in almost every business category during his career. He personally created and developed the BE’s proven Turning the Telescope™ Discovery process as well as the 21st century small agency business model: Small+Smart™.