See anything unusual in this photo?

Burke House, where our offices are located, has a restless spirit. He roams our offices at night, searching for something he can never find. He wanders up and down the stairs, never staying long in one location. He leaves little evidence of his presence – a stack of papers moved here, a picture adjusted there. But the careful observer, upon returning to the office in the morning, will see that an unseen hand has paid a call.

I’m talking, of course, about Art Bloom.

But Art is not alone in his midnight rambles. In recounting his late night visits to The Bloom Agency’s offices, Art has often spoken of mysterious noises, closing doors, and the occasional cold chill, as if a bony finger had tapped him on the shoulder.

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, our offices are haunted.

It is not a malicious spirit. It does not spill copy toner on the floor or re-arrange the conference room chairs into a pyramid. The worst it will do, at least in my case, is to occasionally fire up my computer, go into a document I’m working on and make a raft of spelling and grammatical errors that I fail to notice until they’re in the printed piece. (Hey, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Why is he here? This has been the cause of much speculation. Perhaps he was a mason who helped to build the original structure and has come back to admire his handiwork. Perhaps he was employed here many years ago, and has come back looking for a job in the afterlife. (Who knows, maybe unemployment is problem there, too.) My theory is that he is a customer from the days when the building housed a dry cleaner, and he’s here looking for that favorite sport coat or pair of dress slacks – perhaps something he wanted to be buried in but wasn’t. I can almost hear his sad wailing as he wanders our halls at night: [click to hear sad wailing]

And maybe he’s not alone. Maybe there are many spirits, all wandering the building eternally, here about items they never picked up or wrongs never righted. [click to hear sad wailing of other wandering spirits]

As Halloween approaches, we wondered if any of you have ghost stories about where you live or work. If so, we’d love to hear them. Just enter them in the Comments section below or put them on our Facebook page.

And if you happen to be driving by our offices in the middle of the night, and you see the lights on and hear a loud and mournful cry that bespeaks horrible despair and pain and heartache, don’t worry. It’s probably just Art trying to format our next big client presentation.

Probably.

We want to extend congratulations to Southern Community Bank for taking home its 9th consecutive award for the bank’s annual report! Southern Community Financial Corporation’s 2010 annual report was honored with a Bronze Vision Award in an international competition sponsored by the League of American Communications Professionals (LACP). The Bloom Agency is proud to have worked with Southern Community Bank to develop all nine of the recognized annual reports.

The Vision Awards acknowledges outstanding annual reports from around the world produced for the most recent fiscal year. Competition was particularly steep this year with more than 5,000 entries from 24 countries and only one out of five receiving recognition. Judges rated the bank’s annual report “superb” with high marks for narrative content, message clarity and information accessibility.

This year’s report was titled “Together,” to reinforce the strong personal relationships Southern Community builds with each of its customers and stakeholders and to demonstrate how, especially during challenging economic times, the bank’s core values of service to customers and local communities provide the foundation for shared success.

The 2010 annual report can be viewed online by clicking here.

You see, the article puts forth the idea (well, the reality) that the classic agency model* is disintegrating, brought down by the new phenomenon of digital marketing. “The explosion of platforms like search, geotargeting, the iPad, and mobile apps means fragmented media budgets and fragmented consumer attention,” the article explains, as well as the end of “the fat 15% commissions [agencies] used to score off of a client’s media spend, a spend ballooned mostly by television commercials.”

At Bloom, that’s not a problem because we have never taken that “fat 15% commission.” And having never taken it, we don’t miss it, and are well prepared to see it go the way of the horse and buggy (or the rotary phone, for those of you who prefer a more timely reference).

But causing the disintegration of the media world isn’t the only way the rise of digital marketing has hurt the classic agency model. It has also caused a disintegration in the way the work itself is done. The old agency model was made up of individual pieces and parts that rarely intersected, but today integration is the key. The article describes how one large agency is successfully adapting to the new paradigm: “For years…people were isolated in offices and by long hallways; different disciplines never crossed paths…Now, social-media people, creatives, media planners, technologists, and user-experience folks are sprinkled next to one another at modular desks.”

At Bloom, it’s always been that way. We have never been an agency that puts someone in a box and says, “you do this and only this.” Instead, we truly work as an integrated team, with everyone contributing ideas in every area. And that integration of effort is possible because we’re small and nimble, unlike the many agencies that, the article says, suffer from “too much excess: too many people, too many of the wrong kinds of people, too much bloat, too much inefficiency.” I think it’s safe to say that bloat and inefficiency have never been a problem at Bloom.

As a result, we’re able to give our clients good strategic direction, good media planning, good creative and, most important of all, good results – all at a good value. So the future of advertising may be up in the air, but personally I feel that the future of Bloom is pretty well grounded. And for someone in this business, that’s a good feeling to have.

*For those of you who don’t watch Mad Men, here is the article’s (very accurate) description of how the typical big agency has done business since the 1960s: “The client (whose goal was to get the word out about a product) paid an agency’s account executive (whose job was to lure the client and then keep him happy), who briefed the brand planner (whose research uncovered the big consumer insight), who briefed the media planner (who decided which channel — radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, or TV — to advertise in). Then the copywriter/art director team would pass on its work (a big idea typically represented by storyboards for a 30-second TV commercial) to the producer (who worked with a director and editors to film and edit the commercial). Thanks to the media buyer (whose job was to wine-and-dine media companies to lower the price of TV spots, print pages, or radio slots), the ad would get funneled, like relatively fresh sausage, into some combination of those five mass media, which were anything but equal. TV ruled the world. After all, it not only reached a mass audience but was also the most expensive medium — and the more the client spent, the more money the ad agency made.”

]]> http://www.thebloomagency.com/newsandviews/index.php/2011/08/15/bloom-agency-honored-with-two-international-awards/feed/ http://www.thebloomagency.com/newsandviews/index.php/2011/04/25/our-customers-are-idiots-please-be-one/ http://www.thebloomagency.com/newsandviews/index.php/2011/04/25/our-customers-are-idiots-please-be-one/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:52:14 +0000 admin http://www.thebloomagency.com/newsandviews/?p=302 At some point in the last decade or so, an odd thing happened in the world of advertising and marketing: companies decided it was okay to portray their customers as stupid, deceitful, mean, spiteful and a lot of other negative things. And even odder, the customers don’t seem to mind.

As an example (and there are many), a beef jerky company is currently running a campaign in which a group of friends (the beef jerky customers) do something to Bigfoot that causes him to hurt himself. They are, in essence, being cruel by tricking and humiliating a kind of “dumb animal.” Bigfoot then retaliates against the customers, harming them in return. This would indicate that the customers are also pretty stupid, as this behavior occurs again and again. In other words, there’s no way the customers – the people who are buying and eating this beef jerky – come out of these commercials looking good. Yet this campaign has been running for a few years now, indicating it has been successful in selling more beef jerky.

I could cite similar examples from beer commercials, candy commercials, fast food commercials – it’s a long list. This has clearly become an accepted and widely used creative strategy.

But why? The customer used to be the hero of a company’s advertising and marketing campaign as the person smart enough, stylish enough or forward-thinking enough to choose that company’s products over other lesser products. And that’s still the case in advertising by companies like Apple and many others. So to see these campaigns where the customer is portrayed negatively is jarring. Yet it’s also apparently effective.

And again I ask, “But why?” What makes a customer accept a portrayal like that and not protest? I can only assume it’s a type of disassociation, as in, “Well, the guy in that commercial is an idiot, but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot just because I like that same kind of beef jerky.” But as a consumer who doesn’t eat that beef jerky, my first thought after seeing that commercial isn’t, “Wow, I want to eat the same thing those morons eat.”

Let me be clear – I’m not condemning this type of advertising. If it works to increase product sales and the companies putting it on the air are happy with the results, that’s fine. It just not a creative strategy I, or The Bloom Agency, would be comfortable presenting to a client. I guess we’re kind of old-fashioned that way.