“If we try to fix everything at once, we’ll die of exhaustion.”
-JWT New York’s co-presidents Ty Mongague and Rosemarie Ryan. Fast company June, 2006.
You know the alternative, yes?
P.S. Use this code to read the piece: FCJUNLEAD
About the author
“If we try to fix everything at once, we’ll die of exhaustion.”
-JWT New York’s co-presidents Ty Mongague and Rosemarie Ryan. Fast company June, 2006.
You know the alternative, yes?
P.S. Use this code to read the piece: FCJUNLEAD
K… you published a subscriber-only link.
Hell, with my copy in Dallas and me in the UK, even some of us with scrips can’t read it. 😉
Can you clip the relevant bits?
That quote came from the front of the magazine, introducing the story. So there were no more relevant bits. I’ll see if I can find a way around.
They made the point well, though, didn’t they, in one sentence!
They had to totally revamp a 600 person ad agency, where about everything was broken. So they started, a bite at a time.
Like the elephant story…How do you eat an elephant?
hehe.
One bite at a time.
🙂
Here’s a bit more…I can access the piece next month, and will report the juicy things…Meanwhile:
“J. Walter Thompson’s flagship New York office was “slowly dying.” It hadn’t won a single new account in two years. Then Rosemarie Ryan and Ty Montague arrived to set the joint afire. By Danielle Sacks”
It is THAT situation that triggered the comment I quoted in the post above.
We would all do well to respond likewise to the masses of stuff we think we’re supposed to be doing…
g:
OK I found a way. Click the link now and it should go right to the article. Did for me, at least.
K
Didn’t for me – still asking for a code. When my wife’s awake in Dallas, I’ll ask her to find the thing and thus reveal the riches within.
And, with regard to ‘How do you eat an elephant?’… I’m tempted to say something like: ‘in the case of the NM elephant, we need to shoot the ****** first’.
But to do so would be unconstructively churlish. Perhaps an initial step is to simply point out that there is an elephant in the room – as clearly many folk haven’t seen it or are just keeping schtuum. Maybe not, though. Perhaps that’s also unconstructively churlish to those who love the thing and won’t hear anything against it.
‘A New Breed of NM-er’… who, instead of lapping-up tired old nonsense like [names removed to protect the shameless], instead read stuff like Fast Company, Godin, Rushkoff, Peters et al – and thus, duly enlightened, go do things differently. Maybe.
Thanks for sorting the access.
Good piece. Lot of lessons therein – many beyond the obvious – for NM and NM-ers… at least those who want to stand out (to get noticed and be remembered).
———-
‘If we want to be great, part of that is taking some risk and trying new things. If you think you can survive by standing still, you’re crazy. Standing still is going backward.’
In a cluttered landscape of indifferent consumers, it has become essential to see advertising itself as a form of entertainment.
A culture-rich underdog that tapped creativity and irreverence for its competitive edge… merciless self-criticism… inspiration and cross-pollination. She deployed her most effective weapons – brutal honesty, realism, and laughter.
———-
A flick-through JWT’s on-site material uncovers more gems:
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The new consumer is savvy, easily distracted and in control.
The consumer has changed; our industry hasn’t.
We believe the rules and processes that have guided our industry for decades have passed their use-by date.
We passionately believe in the power of advertising, but only if we stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.
To do this requires talent, a shared set of beliefs about what constitutes great work and an individual sense of responsibility for delivering it. This is why we’ve introduced the JWT 10-Point Standard to measure, in consumers’ terms, just how good our ideas are.
Advertising is not a tidy business. It requires a blend of knowledge, experience, intuition, insight, skills… which often comes in an untidy mix. Rather than applying a straightjacket, we need to embrace that mix. Rather than put into place systems that assume advertising is a production-line process, we have instead decided to reconfigure the way we work…
Our clients are why we’re in business. Our clients are our partners.
We realize the biggest risk we can take is to produce work that is predictable, boring, or worse.
———-
What if this business adopted and adapted some of this stuff? And, like JWT, introduced a Client Manifesto – or two. One between the corporations and the distributors, and another between the distributors and the retail customers.
Can you imagine how… uh… ‘transformed’ it’d be. MLM Re-imagined. Cool. 😉
But’ let’s not get enthusiastically ahead of ourselves… also in that piece is the line: ‘…which probably accounts for JWT’s agonizingly slow U-turn’. It’s a damning reminder of the difficulties faced in changing stuff – enabling elephants to proverbially dance.