About four years ago, we started having the conversations that ultimately became this company. We talked about the massive changes in our industry. We talked about the changing role of advertising, the changing nature of brands and the impact of technology upon culture. Most of all, we talked about the idea that all of these changes had set the stage for a transformation of marketing that is reshaping much of what we do and how we do it.

Our conversations were probably like many of yours. But we happened to share a mutual belief that marketing could and should be broader than the output of a creative department; and that agencies – locked in the frameworks of a communications industry – were by and large incapable of re-building themselves around the new world while simultaneously profiting from the old.

And so we started Zeus Jones. A company built from the ground up to serve the new world of marketing and modern brands that are emerging. Armed with equal measures of naive idealism and the desire to create a real separation between us and what saw as the “old, failing world of marketing,” we created sharp divisions around what we would and what we wouldn’t do. Around how we would work, and around how we would not. Around what we believe in and what we don’t.

We defined our company around these beliefs and they drove everything from our workspace, our staffing, our “pitch,” our contracts and our processes (or lack thereof).

Our beliefs are not a product of the business, they are the business.

Because above all else, we are in business to put our money where our mouth is. To prove that our beliefs are strong enough to build strong brands; to prove that they’re strong enough to support a company.

In the early days we used to (half jokingly) refer to our philosophy as “sales prevention.” We confused or scared off many more clients than we kept. But slowly we managed to convince a few of the crazier ones to sign up, and now, three years in, we find ourselves in the enviable position of working on a bunch of amazing projects with amazing people. So many of them, in fact, that we are growing.

And so we are now looking for a very senior strategist to become part of our team. An extremely important hire to fill an extremely important role.

The right person will be a keen thinker and practitioner of modern marketing and will share our desire to help to shape the tools and the direction of modern marketing. They will be a smart, strategic business thinker who is also fluent with technology. Someone who can lead client projects while also being a mentor within our company. Because we don’t write briefs, nor hand off strategy to a creative department, the right person will be comfortable with an extremely fluid process where strategy and creative are often the same thing. They will be equally skilled at creating a strategic framework for ideas, as well as helping to create the ideas themselves.

The right person is a great presenter and is likely respected within the industry. They will share our love of strategy and our ambition to do strategy better than anyone. And they will be an extremely important part of helping us realise that goal.

But most importantly, the right person will share our beliefs about marketing and about brands.

Because those beliefs continue to drive our company and shape the decisions we make about what we want to do and what we don’t want to do. And because of that, because we have literally built this company around those beliefs, the right person will also understand, as I do, that this is the best strategy job in the world.

So if you are that person, or think you might be that person, I would love to speak with you.

Adrian

Technorati Tags: jobs, strategist, strategy, Zeus Jones

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Like Faris, I’m a big fan of recombinant culture. It’s the framework that underlies  many the things that most capture my imagination.

The example of this that I’ve been thinking about recently has to do with the remixing of the “Philosopher” with the “Man of Action.” Of course, the most visible symbol of this comes from looking at our past presidents. Clinton, was replaced by Bush, who has been replaced by a blending of both in Obama.

It seems to me that this is a framework that’s also useful in describing some of what’s happening in our industry. We can see this in the blurring of production-oriented companies and strategy-oriented companies. I’m obviously heavily biased but I think there’s a new-found respect for strategy, but only when paired with technical ability and not when delivered by traditional consultancies. On an individual level our icons aren’t the thinkers or the doers but instead they’re more interesting blends like Noah who makes the stuff he thinks about, and thinks about the stuff he makes.

I don’t think this is a coincidence, I think this is happening because this is precisely the combination that we need to deal with the times we live in.

As the problems facing brands become more and more complex, so do the solutions. Even the most meager social media presence can’t be comprehensively thought through or planned, nor can it simply be managed through doing alone. It seems to me that the right approach is to think as you act, to learn while you practice, to develop systems and frameworks through doing.

As the complexity of our work increases, the need for this approach becomes even greater. While it’s tempting to try to spend longer thinking about more complex problems, it’s often more productive to actually start doing them sooner. However, complex solutions require more stakeholders, so there’s an even greater need for developing frameworks and ways of thinking about what we do that can be taught and transferred.

There are, of course, fairly significant business-model barriers in bringing together these two different kinds of skills in a company. Production skills are often billed on an hourly basis, while strategy is typically priced based upon value. However, I think that the more difficult barriers are cultural. These two archetypes have historically been polar opposites and simply putting together people who embody one aspect with people who embody the other is a recipe for disaster.

In order to move a production company into a more strategic area, you’re probably going to have to alter your production staff too. Similarly if you’ve been a strategic company and you want to start doing, you might want to look at replacing your strategic resources first.

Technorati Tags: agencies, production, skills, strategy

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It seems to me that one of the better results of the fragmentation and specialization that has taken place in culture is that many jobs or tasks that once might have seemed banal or trivial have been reinvented into highly skilled professions. Take, for example, the transformation of bartender into mixologist. Fields that once were quite rote, linear and prescriptive have either been taken over by machines or they’ve been re-mixed (pardon the pun) into something far more human and interesting. I’d guess that many more areas of human endeavour are areas of passion these days. The trick is finding where the passion really lies.

As a result of this, I think that our job as marketers has become the discovery of that passion. Rather than finding the deep, hidden secret(s) in our customers’ lives, I think we’re often better served by looking for the area(s) that truly excite and motivate them. It’s through these that we can create relationships based upon shared goals and values rather than relationships simply based upon transactions.

Technorati Tags: gladwell, passion, planning, strategy

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One of the highlights of Planningness for me was getting to see Grant McCracken present and spend time with him afterwards. I’ve admired him for a long time through his previous books and his blog. His writing is both erudite and incisive. He is no less impressive in person.

Even in speech he uses language in a very precise way. In our casual conversation he often said things that stopped me in my tracks and made me think about the layers of meaning he was conveying.

This is why one of the most memorable moments at Planningness was overhearing him respond with a surfer-like “totally (dude)” to someone. I was reminded of the time that Bob Dylan said that Smokey Robinson was “the world’s greatest living poet.” It was either deeply insightful, deeply ironic, or perhaps a little of both.

I just read (the Kindle version of) Grant’s new book – Chief culture officer – on (my iPhone) a flight to and from Seattle. It’s a compelling call to recognize and use the power of culture in business. Convincingly, Grant writes about the fact that culture and cultural references underlie huge shifts in business fortunes. I loved it. Here’s just one of the brilliant insights that I will reuse often:

“Culture was not caught in a downward cycle. There was evidence that a virtuous upward ascent had been set in motion. Smarter viewers encouraged smarter culture. Smarter culture encouraged smarter viewers. For Generations X and Y, this development had become a badge of pride. Being good at popular culture became a generational marker. For boomers, popular culture might have been a guilty pleasure. For younger generations, it was a rich, more complicated joy.”

I think this book is a must read, also check out the CCO network on Ning too. Totally dude!

Technorati Tags: chief culture officer, culture, grant mccracken, strategy, thinking

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Image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/hindolbittern/

It probably has become apparent, due to the disappointing lack of activity around here lately, that things are very busy here at the moment. I’ve not had time to keep up with the things I ought to be reading, let alone form any coherent thoughts worth writing about.

However, as I frantically scanned Twitter and RSS for stuff I that might be useful yesterday, I realised again that the only things that caught my attention were stories or Tweets containing timely, but ultimately fairly shallow information.

There’s an interesting paradox in this, because it’s exactly this kind of information that’s likely to be the least useful in solving my larger problem – lack of attention. What I actually need is information that gives me the benefit of a different and broader perspective. What I ought to be looking for is information that’s probably a lot less time-sensitive, that’s longer, deeper and harder to consume.

There are similar patterns in other areas. For example, it’s precisely when I am the most out of shape that exercise becomes the most important. The thing that’s hardest to say is often the thing that most needs to be said.

At the exact moment a task becomes the least desirable is typically when it is the most necessary.

I think this is a truth that we remember infrequently in our personal lives, and hardly ever acknowledge in our professional ones. In fact, it would probably seem quite insane to develop your marketing around the insight that you want to help your customers do exactly the thing that they least want to do. The reverse is probably far more common and a basic assumption of many marketing programs is that your job is to make it even easier for your customers to do what they already want to do.

In the same way that this addresses the immediate need, it probably fails at solving the larger problem of creating a stronger relationship. Our clients at Nordstrom like to say that the really great salespeople will put you into clothes that you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself, but love later. Your truest friends are the ones who tell you the things you find it hardest to hear. The brands we love the most may be the ones that take us places we least wanted to go.

Technorati Tags: doing what's hardest, marketing, strategy

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Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_amanda/

I’m very excited about Planningness in SF next week. As I mentioned, me and Rob are giving one of the sessions. And in the spirit or making things rather than talking about things, we’re going to try to use our session to crowd-source the new planning toolkit. We’ll get the planners who come to help us create tools for new-marketing and new-planning. Then we’ll share them with the community on a wiki for everyone else to use, modify and improve.

For a while now, it’s been increasingly clear that a lot of the tools we use; like briefs, brand architectures, planning processes, etc. are less and less useful in helping to create new-marketing. However, over the past couple of years we’ve come to believe they’re actually worse than useless, they’re anchors which tie us firmly to the past. They were designed in an era of communications, and their output can only be communications and communications managed brands.

Great digital experiences don’t have a single-minded proposition. The most interesting brands aren’t about just one thing. There are now a host of instances and reasons why the practices of the past are completely opposed to the requirements of the present.

So, a question for you: which of the planning tools, documents, frameworks, processes, etc. do you want re-invented? Which parts of the planning/branding/marketing toolkit are the worst offenders in your opinion? We’ll be able to tackle only a few of these so I’d love your thoughts on which ones would be the most useful?

Secondly, I’m hoping that you can join us in person at Planningness to work through this with us. I’ve gone on record saying that I think planners are ahead of the curve in figuring new marketing out. The problem is that we’ve applied our learning sporadically and haven’t come together to establish a baseline of practices, processes and techniques that everyone can use. That’s clearly a much larger issue, but I’m hoping we can at least make a dent in that next week and, because I know readers of this blog are smart and well-informed, I’d love to have as many of your minds there as possible.

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