HDM took home top awards at the 2013 DxMA Creative Communication Awards. Each year, the Diagnostic Marketing Association honors the best of the best in diagnostics advertising, marketing and promotional programming. Click here for the full list of winners.

Click here to view the entire agenda and to register.

We’ve been promised free beer.

We’re pleased to announce that B-to-B Magazine recently recognized Harris D. McKinney as one of the Top Three Agencies for 2013. This marks the fifth consecutive year that HDM has been featured in B-to-B Magazine’s Top Agency List.

Other glowing reviews HDM secured in 2012 were published in TechCrunch, MacWorld, GEN’s Best of the Web, GenomeWeb, and again in The Scientist for a separate in-depth Careers section profile of customers at Harvard and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

We’re pleased to announce that B-to-B Magazine recently recognized Harris D. McKinney as a Top Agency for 2012. This marks the fourth consecutive year that HDM has received this honor.

Whether it’s print, online, social, digital, product design, or point-of-purchase, the ways in which companies can connect with their customers continue to evolve. Surveying the landscape of potential agency partners to help make those connections can be dizzying. Today’s CMO, VP of marketing or marcom manager must choose between outsourcing to a series of specialty agencies based on their marketing need or partnering with a fully integrated agency (a subject that’s quite popular in the blogosphere).  The answer however may come from understanding the origin of the word “agency” and how it’s still relevant today.

Modern-day advertising agencies really began as media brokers, or agents, taking a 15% commission for the coordination and placement of advertisements on behalf of its clients. It wasn’t until James Walter Thompson discovered there was value in creating content for advertisers, in addition to placing the media, that the advertising agency as we know it today was born.

While that form of compensation is long gone *sad face*, full-service agencies can still play a valuable role as an agent, coordinating the many moving parts required to effectively connect companies with customers. This is particularly relevant during uncertain economic times when resource-constrained marketers are facing flat budgets, but rising performance expectations from the board room. It can be difficult for client-side decision-makers to manage multiple agency relationships efficiently because in addition to day-to-day contact, each partner usually requires extensive time to “ramp-up” its knowledge of the client’s business goals, customers, corporate culture, brand platform, etc. The modern integrated agency can provide the best of both worlds—the benefit of a trusted partner invested in your business and the ability to coordinate the best of breed talent for projects that require it.

Imagine your CEO will be sitting in New York next week with an Associated Press science editor. Energy and expectations are high for a profile of the company’s promising technology. But, a similar sit-down interview last year didn’t yield an article focused on the company, frustrating the CEO. What went awry? Did anything go awry?

In this three-part blog series, we will share insights from Harris D. McKinney’s experience helping executives make the most of one-on-one interviews with important journalists.

First, let’s discuss five issues that can cause frustration.

“They don’t get it.”
Some executives become frustrated mid-interview if any of the reporters present fail to grasp their gospel. They shouldn’t. An “uninitiated” reporter is perfect. Journalists may be unfamiliar with or even uninformed about your vision and technology, but they are curious and interested enough to take time from a hectic schedule to meet. If the company executive is patient and uses this opportunity to educate, the interview could stimulate an article that can alter the perception of thousands of readers.

Flying solo.
An interview is much like a major business meeting. In those meetings, the CEO is not the company’s sole representative and he or she should not be alone when conducting interviews, either. The public relations advisor should be at the CEO’s side to reduce misunderstandings and keep the exec on message. The counselor can increase the CEO’s comfort level and, just by being there, enhance the CEO’s stature and demonstrate that the company believes the meeting is important.

Racing without warming up.
“What does your company do?” “Why should I report on you?” A reporter needs a concise, straightforward explanation that explains the company’s position in the market. Executives may believe they know their industry and the position of their company inside out, but being able to discuss it simply and precisely can be a challenge. Without thorough preparation, without rehearsal of the “elevator speech” (the 30-second description that is so interesting it invariably stimulates follow-up questions) the executive risks doing an interview that goes nowhere.

Making assumptions about the audience.
An executive who assumes a reporter has the technical expertise of a good customer, the joking style of a golf buddy, or shared beliefs about politics or other controversial matters, risks alienating and unsettling the reporter and sabotaging the interview. To avoid an unintentional style mismatch, executives should adopt a neutral tone and answer questions by sticking to facts and staying on message. Another risky assumption is that the reporter will follow the acronyms and professional lingo that is freely used within your company. It’s far safer to assume the reporter is totally unfamiliar with such language. If the reporter is better informed, it will become quickly apparent and the executive can then slip into more colloquial language.

Interviewing with the wrong expectations.
When a CEO is interviewed and an article about the company doesn’t immediately materialize, he or she may become frustrated and consider the process to have been a waste of time. That would be the wrong conclusion. Remember, the reporter made time to speak with the CEO. Journalists don’t interrupt their schedules for interviews that have nothing to do with immediately breaking news, unless they are very interested in meeting the executive. There are numerous good reasons a story based on the interview will not appear within a short amount of time. Perhaps the journalist is waiting to connect the information obtained from the interview to some upcoming event. Sudden newsworthy developments on a completely unrelated topic can also interrupt plans to write a story promptly. It is best that the executive realize that in conducting the interview he or she has made a time investment in a relationship that will ultimately be rewarding.

Have more questions about executive interviewing? Ask Alan Zachary or Ryan Ferrell by calling (312) 506-5200.

Be the first to read the next part of this series on executive interviewing by subscribing to the McKinney Ink RSS feed. Just click the orange icon on the right.

Global Industry Analysts released a report in 2010 that projects there will be 2.1 billion mobile web users by 2015. Advertisers are taking this trend seriously – Gartner expects spending on mobile advertising to reach US$7.5 billion in 2012.

The stats are impressive, but you don’t have to be a tech analyst to predict that mobile will overtake the desktop web in the coming years. The proliferation of mobile devices is clear when you scan a crowd of commuters and see the majority focused on the small screen in front of them. This can be attributed to smartphones becoming more affordable and the expanded availability of 3G data networks.

It’s important to note that mobile is not limited to phones, as the adoption of tablets, eReaders and other products trended upwards in 2010 and continue to rise in popularity in 2011. The mobile web browser along with the exploding app market offers us access to anything at anytime. From social networks, news and commerce to games, books, videos, and music, it’s all a tap away.

It’s time to thoughtfully review your analytics and see what types of devices are used to view your website. Solicit feedback from your customers to further understand their habits and how they live in the mobile web space. The data that is collected will help craft a user experience that is rewarding for your mobile visitors, and will also determine if you need a mobile website or a mobile app, or both.

With mobile websites there is such a wide spectrum of phones and browsers that you’ll never be able to support them all. The iPhone and Droid garner a lot of publicity, but the Blackberry is still very popular in the business realm. If you focus on the specs of one platform, you might be be excluding part of your audience. In addition, you don’t want to get into a situation where you have to manage multiple platforms. Being platform independent will reach the widest possible audience and work well across all platforms and browsers.

When developing a mobile site, your content strategy should not be a direct copy of your PC version, since the two user experiences are very different. Mobile users are on the move and typically want to experience a simple and intuitive interface. Conversion goals should be immediate and conveyed through bite sized content. Target and Ebay offer two good examples of this approach. Ebay puts the search at the top, a link to view a full list of categories, a short list of key categories and the login. Target also provides the user with a search at the top, a simplified navigation system that is focused on finding products, adding products to lists, MyTarget access, and purchasing.

Mobile users may not always complete the conversion goals you’ve outlined, but they will critique your site and share their opinion publicly through social networks. You want the initial experience to be positive in hopes of converting them at a later point in time.

If mobile based visitors are a small segment of your site visitors today, it won’t stay this way — expect rapid growth. Now is a good time to consider what your mobile strategy will be in order to properly connect with, build and maintain loyal customers.

At a recent national 4A’s conference, when asked what kind of agency he would hypothetically build, Howard Draft, chairman of DraftFCB responded, “It would be a digital shop that would never have more than 50 employees and would charge a minimum $1 million per month to clients.” He continued, “You can’t be great with 10,500 people on a regular basis.”

This statement begs the question: Does being a jumbo-sized agency negatively affect the “greatness” of creative coming out of it?

It got me thinking about the size of our 20-person shop and the success of our Creative Development Process, the Five Eyes™. The five pillars of the Five Eyes™—Input, Insight, Inspiration, Implementation and Impact—are the foundation on which we build every campaign and it’s an all-agency experience from beginning to end. Being a small agency means we rely on the active participation of every member in the development of a campaign, from input gathering to the first “Aha!” to the big pitch. It’s this open and collaborative culture that keeps refreshing creative concepts coming from every corner of our agency and keeps our clients coming back for more.

It seems Mr. Draft would agree. When asked what percentage of work that came out of DraftFCB in the last year was truly great creative work, Draft said only 20 percent. In fact, of those agency leaders asked, including Claudia Batten of Victors & Spoils, Peter McGuinness, chairman-CEO of Interpublic’s Gotham, and Duff Stewart, president-CEO of Omnicom Group’s GSD&M, all said less than 50 percent.

These responses put size into perspective and demonstrate that large agencies can’t guarantee quality creative. The best creative often comes from a small agency comprised of compassionate, driven and imaginative people who give 100 percent to every campaign they develop. A concept I know well because with the inclusive nature of HDM comes the opportunity to participate in those campaigns and see their successes first hand.

Works Cited: Parekh, Rupal. (March 8, 2011) Claws Come Out in Afternoon Session at 4A’s Conference. Advertising Age.com.