As a communications company, our purpose is to attract attention to our clients and tell their stories through advertising, public relations and so on. For the most part we stay behind the scenes, but occasionally the work we do for others attracts attention to us as well. That happened recently when the Business Journal of the Triad profiled the agency in this story: In bloom: W-S ad agency stays true to itself to keep clients happy.

(And by the way, if you aren’t getting Bloomination and you would like to receive it, sign up here.)

And that’s okay.

Most Art Directors, myself included, used to know how to draw. Really — we knew how to draw people and animals and vases and fields of corn. Then we started directing art and such. That meant “drawing” headlines instead of heads, and layouts instead of landscapes. And that’s okay, too. Because these were just ideas, and clients knew their finished product would look nothing like my crazy sketches they waited three days to see. They knew it was only a concept and actually used their imaginations to fill in the details, knowing the finished piece would be much better. The idea was king, and the execution of it an exciting collaboration of creative and client vision.

As time went on, we began to acquire cheater tools — Letraset type, stat machines, the Lazy Lucy — all invented to make development of the creative product faster and more complete. (If you’re a young art director who doesn’t know what any of those things are, call up the person you probably replaced and ask them.) We even had a set of 256 Design markers (in case there was any confusion about what color red that Coke can should be, I guess). These tools allowed us to cut time off the concept development and show layouts that were basically camera ready. Life was beautiful and everything was right with the world because the client could get a better idea of the concept, but still know it was going to get better once it was complete. And a lame concept was still lame, but shiny.

Then computers came along. Suddenly clip art and stock photography were a click away, along with an infinite selection of fonts available at the touch of a button. The very idea of sketching out an idea became laughable. Why sketch it out when, in an hour, you can have it all but done? Nowadays we show clients raw ideas that look ready to go to publication, and they love them. But that’s the problem — they love them too much. If you happen to think of a way to improve your idea or, even worse, have a new idea, the client balks — they want the idea they saw the day before. And telling them the new idea is better does no good, because they fell in love with first idea. So now you have to come up with your best idea right off, because you leave yourself no wiggle room.

I say let’s go back to the drawing board. Let’s get out those old pencils, dust off those old erasers and go back to pulling ideas out of our brains instead of our hard drives. And no, I’m not saying don’t use all those resources we have — I’m just saying don’t use them until you have an idea you like, the client likes and the public will like. An idea that’s been allowed to percolate and fester and develop instead of being requested on Monday, executed on Tuesday, presented on Wednesday and sent to the publication on Thursday. The Mona Lisa and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel each took four years to complete.* Given that, spending an extra day or two on a cat food ad doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

*And no, Da Vinci wasn’t that much slower than Michelangelo, he just had a lot more going on in his life. You try inventing the helicopter with one hand and painting the Mona Lisa with the other and see how long it takes you.

“Mass marketing is doomed.” – Bob Garfield, author of The Chaos Scenario: Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, the Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish, on NPR.

Bob Garfield talks and writes about marketing on NPR and in Advertising Age as well as a number of other media outlets, and he’s not alone in thinking that mass marketing is on the way out. In general, he and many others say that the internet, DVR, satellite radio and other new technologies will so fragment the audience that marketing to the masses will no longer make sense. After all, with targeted marketing you can spend a little to reach the 100,000 people who really want your product instead of spending a lot to reach 10,000,000 people and hoping the right 100,000 hear the message.

But do people really want advertising that’s geared toward them? Well, as it turns out, they don’t. Especially when the companies doing the targeting are tracking their customers’ online (and offline) activity in order to find and advertise specifically to them.

A new study, “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising,” conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkley, reveals that people care more about their privacy than getting targeted ads. I won’t go through all their findings (if want to read the whole study, you can download a PDF here), but here are two key conclusions:

• “Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages – between 73% and 86% – say they would not want such advertising.”

• “Contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults. 86% of young adults say they don’t want tailored advertising if it is the result of following their behavior on websites other than one they are visiting, and 90% of them reject it if it is the result of following what they do offline.”

At the heart of all this is the practice of behavioral tracking. You might already know about behavioral tracking, but for those of you who don’t, here’s a brief overview: Behavioral tracking is, quite simply, gathering information about what individual consumers do online and offline to better understand their buying habits so that they can be targeted with specific ads that will (based on past behaviors) appeal to them. Websites do this by placing cookies on your computer every time you open a new page or something on a page – an article, an ad, whatever. They keep track of what you’re interested in and then suggest similar things or show you ads for things you might want. Advertising networks do much the same thing, but they track you across multiple sites. Retail stores track you through frequent shopper cards. (So when you get coupons on the back of your receipt, they’re for products the store knows you’ll probably buy because you’ve bought them before.) And now, with giant computer data bases, all this information can be brought together so the companies who want to sell you things can know exactly what you’re likely to buy and can market those things directly to you.

If all that sounds a little scary, it’s because it is, and when people find out it’s going on, most of them don’t like it. Here are a few more facts from the study:

• “69% of American adul                                                                                                                                                                                                        ts feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them.”

• “92% agree there should be a law that requires ‘websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, if requested to do so.’”

• “63% believe advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete information about their internet activity.”

• “Americans mistakenly believe that current government laws restrict companies from selling wide-ranging data about them.”

That last fact is especially important. People think there are laws in place to protect their privacy – but there aren’t. Everything we do on the internet and everything we purchase using frequent shopper cards is, for the most part, available to anyone who wants to buy it. As they put it in the study: “Generally, companies have virtually free rein to use data in the U.S. for business purposes without their customers’ knowledge or consent. Websites and stores can therefore easily buy and sell information on valued visitors with the intention of merging behavioral with demographic and geographic data in ways that will create social categories that advertisers covet and target with ads tailored to them or people like them.” In other words, BigBrother.com is watching, and wants to sell you the perfect pair of shoes to match the purse you just bought.

So how is this going to save mass marketing? Well, maybe it isn’t, but consider this—What if people start asking for these laws—the ones they think already exist—to be enacted? Laws that require websites to notify users that they are being tracked and give them the option not to be. Laws that prevent the information gathered from being bought and sold to anyone. Laws that keep what we buy and where we buy it and what articles we read and what websites we visit private, as people think they should be. Those laws would make behavioral tracking and targeted marketing much more difficult and much less efficient. And all it will take is a little more awareness on the part of the public and a few complaints to our lawmakers, and those laws could easily end up on the books.

Soon we may find ourselves right back where we used to be—marketing to everyone instead of just a select few because, it turns out, people like to hear a lot of messages and decide for themselves which ones they want to pay attention to. Which is, I think, beneficial in the long run to the companies doing the advertising. After all, if these companies keep marketing to the customers they already have over and over, how are they ever going to get new customers? Yes, the downside of mass marketing is that you end up talking to a lot of people who aren’t interested in your product. But the upside is that you end up getting a lot of people interested who otherwise might not be, and that’s how companies grow. So let’s not write off mass marketing just yet. Bob Garfield is a smart guy, but smart guys have been wrong before.

I’m a firm believer that though we can’t always control the events that affect us, we can always take charge of our responses. I would say that the ability to see a range of possibilities in every turn of events and to make the best of things is probably a quality shared by effective marketers.

A popular definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” This deep and lasting recession shows that companies which persist in doing the same old things are often getting different—and disappointing—results.

This is not a time for business as usual. At The Bloom Agency we’ve thought deeply about how to get through this downturn. For the most part our clients have reduced their marketing budgets. And I have made it clear that staff reductions and furloughs would be an absolute last resort.

For us, the answer has been to become more of what we are. I’ve always encouraged our staff members to develop new skills, cross-train, and learn as much as they can about our clients and our business, whatever their customary role. This downturn has been a time of tremendous learning, with all employees venturing out of their comfort zones to take on new responsibilities. We’re proud of our team-based structure. Over the past six months I would say that we have become a high-performance team, operating with a level of excellence that is gratifying to everyone.

But most of all we have decided to provide our clients with more value. We’ve added a sales training and coaching capability, which has already provided substantial benefits to several client companies. We’ve shown our clients that we can function smoothly and seamlessly as their marketing department—including taking on the role of marketing director. We’ve beefed up our role in planning presentations, proposals and events for clients, and facilitating workshops and strategy sessions.

As I look around, I see that the majority of agencies seem to have taken the opposite approach. Seeing that clients have less to spend, they are cutting their fees and taking on many small projects in lieu of the long-term retainer arrangements that used to be the norm. And of course many, if not most, are cutting their own resources significantly.

Our approach, to take on more responsibility with our clients, and to make certain that everything we recommend will contribute to their health and growth makes me think it’s time to change The Bloom Agency descriptor. Yes, we do provide Creative Marketing Solutions, but today it would be more complete and accurate to define us as Business Development Specialists.

This expanded role is a natural evolution of the “anti-agency” I set out to create in 2000. Right from the start, I was determined to keep the focus on our clients’ business goals. Other agency owners are astounded when I tell them we have never taken commissions on media placements or marked up suppliers’ charges. They don’t see how an agency could be profitable without these standard charges. And I can’t see how relationships of trust could ever exist if we were constantly in the position of putting our clients’ best interests in competition with our own.

Like everybody else, I’ll be glad when the economy rebounds. And I feel pretty confident that we will come through with our team intact and more resilient for the experience, our clients stronger for the role we played in tough times, and some new accounts who value the many ways we can contribute to their business growth and success.

We’ll be in a different place, and I think a better place. All because of the “marketing minds” we have here who can’t help asking: Where’s the opportunity in this mess? How do we get to the silver lining? What can we make of this turn of events?