Category: quotes
On The Changing Advertising Ecosystem
This article does a fair job at covering some of the changes the industry is going through in recent years.
Burned by the recession, clients are loath to greenlight risky work and bottom-line pressures are driving them to wring costs from their shops. To grow, independents are selling to public holding companies and succumbing to the balance-sheet demands that can dull a free-spirited culture. Often, the result is chasing business they might once have scorned while private.
[…] Fees have gotten smaller and once-huge accounts have become projects doled out to multiple agencies. “Now accounts are half the size they used to be. [Agencies have to] pitch more, because there’s more project work, fewer AOR opportunities and even those are half as much as they used to be.”
~A Tale of Two Crispins: Why There Won’t Be Another Agency of the Decade
On Constrains and Creativity
When you don’t have any money, it is easy to feel limited in what you can achieve. However, we have often found the most creative ideas come when you don’t have the luxury of big budgets.
Creativity needs constrains to flourish.
On Coding & Managing
No software engineering manager at a tech company should spend less than 30% of his or her time coding. Whether managing a team, a division, or all of engineering, when managers spend less than 30% of their time coding, they encounter a significant degradation in their ability to execute their responsibilities.
I can’t say if coding should take 10%, 30% or 50% of a manager’s time, but in order to stay relevant team leads should keep their skills sharp. It is a really tough thing, though, since there are so many things a manger is involved with. It is very easy to deprioritize coding, even more so when your team is talented.
On Getting Free Publicity on Black Friday
Amazon announced their crazy Drone delivery service on Sunday. Rumor has it that they’ve planned that announcement to coincide with the busy weekend of shopping and benefit from the generated chatter right in time for Cyber Monday.
Why did Amazon do that? The answer is free advertising. Even better: free advertising the night before the biggest e-commerce shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday.
How much was that free advertising worth? “60 Minutes” gave more than 15 minutes to its Amazon story. A 30-second spot during the 7 p.m. show usually costs just over $100,000. If you figure Amazon got 30 30-second commercials’ worth of time, you can estimate that it got about $3 million worth of “earned” media.
Is Jeff Bezos the most skilled content marketing expert?
