Agency land ....again.....

Agencies economics do my little paranoic, presbyterian-pessimists head in.

Once again I am off on a below wonderful wage to a company who's business is probably so lumpy that it makes your blind grandmothers porride look of even consistency.

The issue with agencies is that they grow in non linear ways, completely sporadic and at the whim of the commisioning marketing director or senior brand manager at the client.

They either grow by reputation, hard pitching or selling more to the same customers. Every one of these hits a wall. Life's a pitch and then you die.

The company I am merily hopping off, bushy tailed to tommorrow COULD follow a route to producing a software revenue model by combining a browser - my Bot type set up and selling seats at clients. The value add could be in writing meta reports, doing set ups and then updating the system as the arms race on the internet starts to make obselite the once wonderful ( web promoter gold; remember that one?) A product is scalable in terms of sales, marketing and version management. Also today we could include cloud computing for bots, using down time to do crawls and indexing on a network of users machines. Problematic?

How much does it cost to get to a product ? Well it can be pretty well documented and worried about, while surprisingly getting a couple of big service clients and then bumbling through justifying your fees there and building up business on shoe leather, a wind, a single repeating prayer and all by the seat of your pants. Flights for directors probably amount to pretty much the same as a months programming here, or maybe a whole project in India.

Some how this is just accepted by investors, maybe because it is getting them near to the business and early raft investors are happy to see explosive growth on a handful of big-brand-name deals.

For my money and in this case time is money, I would go for the scalable product tied to a service, seat numbers and developments out from the core offering. Then we can get to be puppetteers and play at product management in stead of burning out shoes.

New Paradigm Marketing and Selling

i- Marketing

Traditional marketing Communication	New Media Marketing Comm's
Display Advertising/ TV ad's Transport / outdoor Media Ad's Direct Mail Sales Promotion Sports Sponsorship Press Releases & Articles Flyer (leaflets) Point of Sale (POS) Underground/gorilla marketing Stunt Marketing Product spot sampling Classified Advertising Fax mailings Closed group Seminars Exhibition stands	Search Engine (SE) Optimisation Paid for SE top-Positioning Social Media / Viral marketing webcasts- and youtube Banner Advertising - Pay Per Click Advertising On line sales promotion / cross selling Transport Media Ads Sportsponsorship Off line ad's referencing dot.com links Industry Directories, yell etc SMS - MMS GPS iPhone geo-marketing Strategic Linking – web ringing XML - Online Press Release Ezine Sponsorship On line press Article development e-mail blasts pod casting virtual conferences 'Permissions' marketing Gorilla Marketing & Chat PR marketing Snowball marketing WOMBAT Webex demonstrations Personalised web links- www.jimwyper.camera.com
Traditional Sales	New Media Selling
Sales Visits following up on DM Conferences Exhibitions Telesales Field Representatives Meeting booking agencies Business network meetings Consultants Networking Customer Referals	'Call-me-now' web-response teleselling e-mail selling Linked-In type contact selling on line networking that is to say Wombat - snowballing sales leads and messages Chat room selling/ referrals Skype sales / webcam selling Webcast / streaming sales pitches with chat/e-mail closing Specialist conferences (off line for online!) Virtual conferences purely on line with pod/web casts and webexes etc. Webex Telemarketing with Webex Passive / reward based customer referals
Traditional Sales Channels	New Media Sales Channels
Shops Distributors Resellers Re-marketers (local) Country/regional Subsidiary Joint Ventures OEM / Own Label	Your Own Web site Response Mechanisms!! e-Commerce online shop SMS booking and payment Online auctions and tender submission sites, price comparison web sites Reseller / rebrander channels Interactive sales booths Web markets / e-bay Online Joint Ventures OEM / Own label ( developer)

The King of Marketing is dead, long live the King!

Traditional Channels / Marketing that is Likely to Become Less Prominent or Even Die: well as you can see above even in a non exhaustive listing the means to inform and interact with your customer has widened. The emphasis is that more channels and methods create immediate interaction and opportunities for the customer to buy.

The content of those individual interactions is perhaps actually less rich and diverse than the traditional "press the flesh" or "TV Brand" advertising but cheaper to do per point of touch and it allows the consumer to get exact information and compare prices on line.

Fax marketing will probably die out, unless the spread of desk-top faxing comes back into fashion for some reason.

Traditional TV - this is underthreat beacuse Rupert Murdoch and other TV companies don't like and don't understand the internet. What they don't like is it's largely free and you can avoid a lot of the advertising. Also there are many more advertising sources and very granular business areas in on line marketing which is a sales model they don't relate to.

What they don't understand is that internett will soon become the primary entertainment and information source in the developed social sectors of the world. Their opportunity is to take their media into the internett wholeheartedly, but so far in most countries they seem to be tacit in allowing their "qaulity content" go webcasted- if at all - without big buck advertising they don't want to go on line. ADSL tv and the tv which surfs the net are here. They could have channelised with their own search engines built on a TV controller basis, and mixed media content on a time tabled basis but now they have been run down on the e-highway by on-demand TV and video.

Various models persist, such as the stream-view only packages most known now in spotify, where video on demand can be to some extent controlled to one viewing and advertising imbedded.

The fragmentation of the TV industry and prevallence of pay-to-view for quality broadcasting ( while public broadcasting remains largely devoid of advertising) means that the advertising buck is spread thinly and magical 'target audiences' dematerialse into the standard-distribution curve of decreased audience size. TV advertising is no longer sexy, so budding ridley scotts had better take to youtube productions in order to get a modern profile.

Ironically I believe that transport media will become the highest value per cm2/ hour as it will be used increasingly to drive the metropolitan masses to dotcoms. This is the one area where you get more than a scrolling blink amongst long listings- you can brand your web sites and hgave a call-to-action and sales mechanism all in a couple of lines with the magical www.com in there. This also goes for sports sponsorship, espeically with soccer becoming the biggest world spectator sport. It's format is adamently on the 40 minute half, unlike the NFL's advertising perverted rules.

Sales Promotion on the internet, and especially third part cross value discounting and reward schemes have been about at least since the days of web beanz. This area is under exploited in my opinion and ripe for closing deals from traffic. For example with really good web-only product bundles, discount vouchers, airmiles and likes of spotify earned points. I think this will show big growth because the internet marketer will find it hard to convert traffic to a full-price, branded experience site when cross comparision and used-goods shoppiong is so prominent. People will not only get more used to buying, but more used to shopping about or using 'bid-me' type web sites to invite in the cheapest party on a secluded unbeatable discount.

Thjis is a major problem with product sales on the web. Product sales channels have big vested interests in selling from the shelf and they don't want their margin eroded. However I don't think it will be long before some major brands offer really good discounting on line- they may need to work these up as bundles or do the opposite- sell bundles through the snail world channels.

Small comapnies marketing on the web still conform of course to the need to at some poiint buy from the channel, and also have the same old costs for premises , the CEOs ego based income, the web master and nerds and so on. So with a low barrier to entry, many small third and fourth party sellers struggle to offer any discount worth the salt.

I think the tender and I'll buy web sites will see major traffic expansion because the price can be hidden from the masses. Even if a bvuyer tells all their face book pals to go buy at 50% off, and posts your link on chat rooms, you will still get little traffic demanding the discpoutn or in fatc you could base your whole sales channel on outward spot price selling with no published prices to be frowned upon by the manufacturer!

Job offer

Well what does happen when you get a job offer which you can be cynical about?

How many times have I heard " we are a small company, and we must think of what our current coworkers earn" in the same breath with " good potential to progress quickly" ??

I feel very much like back in Stockport in november - december 1996. Then I managed to squeeze out 3 k more, but even that was selling myself cheap without a company car in the deal.

Even at h-lab I was cheaper than I needed to be and got no offer or leverage for a raise after 6 months.

They are even getting an employment grant.

So I sell myself down the road to long travelling on public transport. I have a feel-bad factor. I feel the same as when I moved to dynabeeeds! Hope is not a strategy, so hoping to get sales of this together and hoping to get opportunities...I think he is an honest guy but that is why vagueness is disinginous if the wind changes.

I get to do analyses, and that is it so far.

POSITIVES??

1. over riding is that I could do this on my own. I can either work from home eventually or I can start up on my own, or get a better job
- 2. there in I get to learn a new area and review my skills in use of internett

3. I get to know a lot of jargon and ideas

4. I get to have sales leads

5. If I get a sale or a lead quickly converts then I get to ask for 450 000

6. I get to move onto more money 450 000 plus car if I can

7. i get to develop the directions I want to go in.

8. Maybe most of all, I make myself far more salesworthy a prospect when applying for jobs, and I can negotiate upover with wages as the key lever.

summary of actions in CV and applicatons

tips of the day:

1) produce a mini cv resume for open applications. Do many around places outside aust agder, esp though in K'sand

2) FOLLOW UP in telephone with everything you are serious about. Follow up in e-post to those who are hard to get to.

3) Do CVs like dynal application- a focused pull out of key relevatn positions, the others in a list or not on

4) do a middle sheet - a table which compares your skills to their needs

5) consider your man managemetn and people skills

Interview debreifing

Now, my interview yesterday went very well. But I feel maybe everyone was building up expectations and maybe they are not "aligned"

Ok, so how was it overall?

I did a bit of an overlong career history, but being honest about Dynateeed won me some favour. I did not sell in my own personality or how it succeeds in a work place. I did not really get onto my actual achievements and was a bit worried about my actual level of responsibility, despite being pyshced up as a prospective, experienced and mature 'project manager'

The first mis-alignment is maybe that the job in hand is analyst , most likely to free up someone else to move into a more senior position. My expectation is to get in a little higher than this level, and since they are refocising on London, I feel this is a risk to take a low level, specialist role. However with a poorly formulated contract, I could probably actually get started here and maybe their new investment is not popular with the earlier soft-seed capital?ie moving jobs out of the area having had the idea of being a growth company for local employment!

So I feel that I have to not get all worked up about it being the next big thing, nor get pissed off like I did at Dynateeds, arriving under a cloud.

back to the interview - I got buying signs from everyone and had the EMIR roudn the table. So I did manage to steer things my way and keep it all relevant. This ticked the boses for most of them, but I hope i am not boxed in by my lack of 'wham-bang'

I need a wham bang - I mean like come into a company and shifted it round. I have had many false starts and lost opportunities but I made all the right noises. I just need to be more head strong and opportunistic and use levers with the board of directors.

My aim is to get into an incubator- share pay set up like forinnova. So I need to get on in this company if i take it.


Ah, relax.

Job Interview - a middle aged man !

How can the experiences of a middle aged man related to a new graduate from MSc Marketing?

Well I am in the same boat; for me in a foriegn land with too many marketing graduates, it is hard to get a stable job with some future! SO I am not really on the ladder here. As on old fart too.

Now I happened to have an interview yesterday and it was pretty much front-loading to an actual offer, despite being purely speculative. Here is how I did it:

1. I had contacted their investment-management firm before.
   
2. Being curious in the area helped in 1 and lead to the contact
3. I held off until after paternity
4. I went back to the investors and got shoe horned a little, and good mouthed seemingly from their business developer
5. I then sent a very, very short form post enquiry from the actual company's web site just with a couple of key words and followed this up with a phone call.
6. I still had to send a CV and not present it myself, but this made it a little more formal.
7. I was curious and motivated for the position
   
8. I am open minded on what form the job takes
   
9. I used a state- assisted training grant as an extra closing bait
10. I was curious....

So what shoudl you do? 60- 80% of first time jobs for you are going to be through unadvertised sources. Curiousity will be the key, and using your nose to come up with several ways into the company. This spurs your motivation and overcomes your distance and shyness to the firm.

Firstly, lose any idea of geographical restriction. Maybe there is a firm in Scotland who you are interested in your chosen sector - add them to the list and be prepared to get a K-B but keep the door open while you are working elsewhere- in the english speaking world if it is so specialist!

Secondly find different ways into the company- contacts. Try to shoe horn in through some route or just go in for an investigation on what they do, or a work place shadowing type day. Also investor companies are a good source or route, because anything coming from them is taken seriously! If you get a recommendation " chat to this guy" from the VC or incubator boss then it is a huge amount self- brand equity you have earned without doing very much.

Maybe you go in from the bottom up otherwise- find a really tarty brand manager or what ever and get in on her back - the marketing director will be more open to her charms ( or "one of the flirty girls" from time to time them being a Sit-Pee)