Welcome to the Furnace

Finely roasted musings. Burnt offerings.

Archive for Insights

April 6th, 2017

Mind the Millennial Gap

How many times has the ‘M-word’ come up lately in meetings? “We need to reach a new audience – the millennials.” “Why aren’t we getting traction with millennials?” “The millennials are the future. Find them.” These are phrases every marketer has probably heard from their leadership and/or uttered themselves. We get it. Millennials are important. And in some cases, they are the answer to solidifying the success of your brand. After all, they represent about $600B of spending power each year and are on track to surpass $1 trillion a year by 20201. There’s only one problem, all millennials aren’t created equal. There exists a wide gap between the ends of the millennial age spectrum (18 to 36). It doesn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics to realize that a father of two who has been married for 10 years and owns his own house might have different spending habits and media behavior than a teenager who is navigating things like Read More

January 10th, 2017

Three keys to getting the greatest value from your client/agency relationship

So your two companies have gotten married, enjoyed a lovely honeymoon of back patting and optimism but now there’s this nagging feeling that maybe you’re not on the same page. That you’re not syncing well. Or maybe your efforts just aren’t delivering the results you’d hoped for. Maximizing the combined efforts of two separate organizations is the holy grail of collaboration and success. And much like said grail, it’s often just as frustratingly elusive. Aligning them so that they effectively operate as one marketing powerhouse doesn’t need to be overly complicated, but can be incredibly difficult to achieve without a few important and agreed upon points. 1. Don’t pay your agency to be busy. Pay them to achieve. For decades now clients have been inadvertently encouraging agencies to take longer and use cheaper talent on their business. Think about it. Anyone getting paid by the hour and wants to make more money inherently looks to find ways to add more Read More

October 8th, 2013

Blurred Lines

Members of the Planning Team recently attended DFWIMA’s latest event, a breakfast presentation from eMarketer’s Noah Elkin. His keynote was full of great insight on what’s trending when it comes to digital marketing and consumers. What did we learn from this event? Here are our key takeaways from Noah’s presentation: Digital spending is growing, but still only comprises a quarter of total US ad spend. For the first time, the amount of time spent online exceeds TV viewing. This is interesting as the latest reports show that US consumers are influenced equally by television and online ads. Not so sure that is really true… But this research is important because there has been a long standing belief that certain media types meet either a branding goal or direct response. If digital can break out of the direct response box, it is believed that they can take a greater share of the total US ad spend. – Nichole Mobile no longer distinguishes “on-the-go” from sedentary. People Read More

June 3rd, 2013

Engaging Teens

Recently, my second article for Mediapost’s Engage: Teens series went live. This year, I decided to help tackle understanding how to connect with the teen market. As the parent of a teen (and a pre-teen), I’m often intrigued by the teen world view and how quickly ideas and information spread in their very connected world. I plan to draw heavily on the insights that come across the kitchen table. It should be a fun ride. And I hope you will come along. The Power of Volunteers Kids These Days – Taking It Easy

May 20th, 2013

Mad Men + Math Men: 2013 iMedia Agency Summit Recap

I recently had the opportunity to attend my favorite conference, the iMedia Agency Summit. In my opinion, iMedia has really dialed in on the perfect conference setup…great content, a focused track for agency folks (we get distracted easily), and quality time with vendor partners that I don’t see often enough. This year the focus of the summit was a topic I’ve been thinking and talking about (much to the chagrin of my coworkers) a lot lately…”Mad Men + Math Men.” It was about leveraging all of the data we are now collecting to make us smarter marketers, and I have to say, it is an exciting time to be in digital media. There are three major points that caught my attention: 1. Technology is finally evolving to the point that it is useful for digital media management. As an industry, we’ve relied heavily on cookie-based information for targeting. One speaker said “cookie-based targeting is like visiting a car dealership, and Read More

December 27th, 2012

Engaging Men

I was very happy when asked to be a monthly contributor for the inaugural year of MediaPost’s Enage: Men. I’ve always been a fan of the Engage series, squirreling away various posts on targets like Hispanics or the affluent market. Men are a particularly interesting target for me. Not only have we spent years working with clients like Interstate Batteries and Stripes Convenience Stores, but, personally, I think men are often misunderstood and over-generalized by marketers. One of my goals as a contributor was to highlight the diverse attitudes and behaviors that comprise the men’s market. Let me know what you think about the series. What Men Really Want Owned and Earned Media Grows a Pair Brands Go Back to School You Are Looking Mansome Today To Attract Men, Be Attractive to Men Is Yours A ‘Mad Men’ Brand In A ‘Modern Family’ World? Reflections on 2012, Looking Ahead to 2013

December 20th, 2012

It isn’t a principle until it costs you money

As a small but ambitious agency, this is a cliche we face all too regularly. On the one hand, we’ve created a culture that everyone here can be proud of. Along the way we’ve tried very hard to challenge the how our industry goes about its business. Not because we’re trying to be contrarian, but because we honestly feel that so much of it is broken. Charging based on hours, not outcomes, giving away ideas and thinking to win the right to execute, telling clients what they want to hear instead of frank and meaningful dialogue; the list goes on and on. On the other hand, change often takes two: those who initiate the change and those who accept it. We find ourselves having to do a lot of educating when we meet with new or prospective clients. In essence, peeling back the layers of what has gone on before us and trying to reveal a new, better way of Read More

April 26th, 2012

New Paths to New Insights

As the head of planning at an agency who truly believes in insights, nothing jazzes me like having clients who share a hunger for knowing more – about their consumers, about how those consumers make decisions, and about how brands can intersect them and impact their thinking in new ways. We are lucky to have partners who fit this description. While we conduct ongoing tracking for a number of clients, do a fair amount of traditional qualitative, and address a la carte research needs on a regular basis, there are certain projects that reinvigorate you about what it is we do. And we’ve recently undertaken, or are about to initiate, some projects that are exciting because of the new ways they’re allowing us to tap into insights. We just transitioned a subset of respondents from an ongoing tracking study into an online community where we spent a few days engaged in story-sharing and conversation about the emotions that arise when Read More

March 28th, 2012

SXSW – Media Perspective

Despite being in digital media for 13+ years, I recently attended SXSW for the first time. And the words “digital” and “interactive” have now broadened in meaning for me. The extensive variety of topics was amazing. There were more than 2,600 speakers and hundreds of sessions focused around technology (programming, “cloud” storage, e-wallets, big data, SoMoLo apps, government/privacy), gaming, social media (owned not paid), convergence and emerging technologies. Sunday’s keynote speaker discussed our digital bad habits: how our phones are the new cigarettes (so true) and how we’ve become digital hoarders (but are just better able to hide it). He also said, in the future, the best technology is going to be invisible and that we should “get out of the way.” I attended a couple of sessions around “big data” where it was stressed that data vomit is actually data knowledge. The trick is managing data so it is collected, digestible and actionable. Another session was around the semantic Read More

March 20th, 2012

We’re Batting .500

Okay, so I came across two articles worth sharing. Both are from Jeff Haden and Inc. Magazine. One that highlights characteristics of great employees. And the other that highlighted the 5 traits of a great boss. Turns out I saw a lot of things after reading them that I recognize easily from walking the halls here every day. Bad news for me is that those were almost exclusively from the Remarkable Employees article. The Boss traits, well….. Good news is that I’m convinced we just may have the most eccentric, job description-ignoring, occasionally dialed back, privately complaining yet publically praising people that are always fiddling, when of course they’re not proving others wrong or speaking up when others won’t. It is no wonder after reading this that our year is off to a great start. Also, I really liked the reminder for me to to develop every employee – although it seems like a no brainer – it reminds me Read More

Firehouse Agency