Why agencies?

Met the intelligent folks from e4m – Nawal, Amit and Noor – this morning. Told them what I have always felt about agency rankings. Why are agencies evregreen targets for perception surveys and size rankings? Sure, size is important, but then how is 2009 different from 1990?

Why are we clinging on to the measures of the exposure era, as if our lives depended on it? Will our narcisism and introvertedness ever end?

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Amongst the most important buttons every website has to have soon..

important icons of the future

Where did civility go?

The guy sitting next to me on the flight this Wednesday picked up my newspapers without even a simple ‘may I?’, tried solving the crossword, tore the papers with his clumsiness n put it non-chalantly in his own seat pocket…am I just mean or was he wrong?

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At the e4m event in Delhi on June 5th

Srini talked about SIP- Systematic Innovation Plan…Jacob said we must all get disciplined and Shruti argued in favour of going back to the basics..

I like it..

I told Anurag that the next time they have a debate on media accountability and ROI, they should have finance and procurement guys on the stage and marketing guys listening..

I also felt that it will be great to have young planners and buyers talking about serious topics on stage and oldies listening in the audience…why must we listen to experience all the time? Why not the audacity of ideas?

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Smarter Planet..I like it

Inbound marketing..awesome!

Will all marketing be this some day?

Value Addition

For years, in the media business, ‘value addition’ has been a catch phrase in most negotiations. Clients have loved it, agencies have flaunted it and media owners have used it. I wonder if the term really represents the marketer’s need to ‘get something for which I am not paying’, like a free lunch. Imagine how self serving this logic is. Every one knows there is nothing called a free lunch, but still most people hope that somehow they can negotiate one , even if they were the only ones to get it. What the search for ‘value addition’ does is to distract negotiators from the real thing they are negotiating for. It’s like your fruit vendor saying, ’so what if my apples are a bit rotten, look at the free orange I am throwing in.’ So the focus shifts to the orange rather than staying on the apple. That’s cheating right?

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Tags: marketing, media, negotiation, advertising

About LinkedIn

Some people tell me that because LinkedIn encourages you to create your entire professional resume, and keep updating it as often as you want to, people essentially use it to look for a new job. I don’t agree. While getting a new job or finding someone you want to connect with to further your busines interests is a huge advantage, I believe maintaining a comprehensive profile actually filters out a a lot of general chit chat type contacts and therefore makes LinkedIn an effective professional networking tool.