Why Every Series B Startup Can Benefit From an Ad Agency Relationship

*Stytch’s founders and their internal team worked closely with Division of Labor Advertising to create their hugely successful first advertising campaign.*

The people who work at ad agencies are generally not Rhodes Scholars, rocket scientists, or Mensa members. They didn’t graduate from Stanford, Penn, or MIT. And if you’re the CEO of a Series B startup, you may be smarter than many of them. But intelligence doesn’t make great advertising. Insight does. And ad people know how to connect emotionally with people and make them want things.

Yes, it’s sometimes hard for really smart people to relinquish control, but if we could give you one piece of advice when running a Series B start-up it’s this: Stop solely collaborating internally on how best to market your product and bring in an ad agency to help you and your team get the job done.

If you have the money to build an internal agency, that works too. Keep them independent and hire experienced talent and internal agencies are amazing. But before you spend the millions, spend a few thousand. Why?

We don’t know everything

And that’s a good thing. You all know too much; about the product about the market about the technology about the details. Your target audience doesn’t think about your product 1/100th as much as you do. Neither do we. But an agency can help find that little piece of truth, that one thing that will make people sit up and go, “Ooah, what’s that?”

Strategic Planning: Sure, you can draft a business plan, but can you craft a campaign strategy that weaves seamlessly beyond just digital and social clicks? An ad agency does more than just draw pretty pictures; they map out the entire journey, sorta like a GPS with a PhD in marketing.

Copywriting: Anyone can string a few adjectives together, but crafting copy that’s actually memorable is an art form. Your product or service may be as exciting as watching paint dry, but in the hands of the right creative team, even insurance can be entertaining.

Design: Product design is not graphic design or art direction. You probably have great product designers and UX designer on staff. But that’s not the same as a conceptual art director or a designer who can bring a campaign to life and create a brand that’s unignorable.

Media Planning: Buying Ad Space is Not a DIY Project. Ad agencies are like real estate agents for your content, securing prime advertising spaces and negotiating deals that make your budget stretch further than your yoga instructor doing downward dog. We’ve seen countless campaigns get messed up because the wrong media is bought or the timelines aren’t clear or the specs are wrong or the assets are shipped incorrectly. Yes, you’ll pay a small commission. But do it right or don’t do it.

Data Analysis: Ad agencies don't just throw darts in the dark and hope for the best. They dive deep into the data, analyzing the performance of your campaigns. They can adjust the messaging and adjust the target media to get the absolute most from your media spend. At the same time, we do not blindly follow data. We use it to craft holistic campaigns. If advertising was pure science, we would have written the algorithm and retired a long time ago.

That’s it. What an ad agency does for you isn’t exceptionally complicated But it’s a skill like any other best left to the experts. You trust them to know their craft and you’ll benefit from their perspective.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top San Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offer brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.

How to Launch a Brand in Three Short Months

Division of Labor’s new ad campaign for 15Five.

We won some new business this past April and launched our new client’s first-ever brand campaign this past August. The process from award to launch was incredibly efficient, which is rarely the case. Why? Well, to launch a campaign quickly, there is one major thing that must be done over and over again throughout the process. What is that thing?

Job One: Make Decisions

The client we’re talking about is 15Five. They're a major player in the employee engagement space. They’ve got a great product, but they’ve also got something many companies do not have; a decisive management team. Decisiveness is what separates the good from the great. The brunt of efficiency problems comes from delayed decision-making, or making decisions and then changing decisions. Or making decisions, changing the decision, and then showing what was intended to be the final decision to someone higher up the corporate ladder who actually has the final say. And then this new decision-maker eighty-sixes all the previous decision-maker’s decisions and now you’re back to square one. Sound familiar?

A well-run brand launch is best approached as one big decision tree. As you move through the process, you have to be decisive and never look back. This latest process was three-plus months start to finish:

Strategy workshop in May.

Develop creative in June.

Production in July.

Launch in August.

Make a shit-ton of hard decisions along the way.

Out of home advertising from Division of Labor and 15Five

The strategy workshop brought all the company players into one virtual room where we explored everything they could possibly say or stand for. (We run good strategy workshops; fast, fun, insightful plus there’s coffee cake.) From there, they had to decide on targeting, brand persona, archetype, main purpose, and a ton of other things that are all important but must be prioritized.

The next step is the creative brief which compiles the results of the workshop into a simple, pointed document used to brief creative teams. Give the brief to any team and they will know everything needed to communicate the brand. (It’s easy to un-decide things in this phase, so be careful.)

Four creative campaigns were presented and the team quickly eliminated two ideas and kept the two that they loved. They did not ask us to bring in other elements from other campaigns. Nor did they consult with their book clubs, spouses, therapists, investors, advisors, children or spiritualists. They decided which they liked best, and stuck with it.

Media plans were developed based on the creative and creative was revised to accommodate media. The client had to get serious about media spend and decide on a budget level for launch. This is a crucial point where delays can happen as the reality of spending money kicks in.

We then presented a production plan and prepared to brief our digital artists, designers, and producers. We presented everything via Google Sheets and in a Slack Channel and all along the way our clients could make comments, choices, and decisions.

They built out landing pages, prepared PPC, SEO, and organic planning. Then we all built out tracking and analytics plans and launched the campaign.

When does this decision need to be made?

Making decisions is easier when you know the effect of your decision. Is it permanent? Is it reversible? Is it crucial to the timeline? In every meeting they asked questions like:

What decisions do we need to make now?

Can you post our options and deadlines in the Slack channel?

What will you be doing next and what decisions will we need to make next?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked if you want to launch a campaign quickly. And if you want to make good decisions along the way. In the end, we have a shiny new campaign and, wait… what does 15Five do, actually? Ah, thanks for asking.

Basically, 15Five helps companies treat their employees better. And helps HR people revolutionize what we all think of HR. Their software helps learn what your employees actually think and does away with the yearly review process. 15Five will increase employee retention and engagement while helping companies behave better.

The entire employee engagement space has been blowing up the past five years as evidenced by all the articles out there including this recent one in Forbes, which is far more relevant and trustworthy than the blog of a small, independent ad agency.

So there you go. How to launch a brand campaign efficiently and some news about the employee engagement space and 15Five.

Thank you Julia Stead and Greg Hewitt and everyone at 15Five. Plus Dustin Smith, Rob Lee, Faruk Sagcan, Rebecca Reid, 29 Black, Rigved Sathe, Resize Guys etc.

The Chief Human Resources Officer is evolving. And 15Five is leading the way.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top San Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offer brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.

Ad Agency Hires Explainer Video Company to Explain the Idiocy of Explainer Videos.

A scene from our explainer video explaining the drawbacks of explainer videos. See full video below.

Last week we wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post about how every tech startup seems to use the same style explainer video to launch their company. But there was some confusion as we noted a number of people were debating whether the article was parody or real.

This speaks volumes about where we are in the industry. We were blatantly making fun of a fake company called Woo Woo and how they had a pitch for their 100 million dollar business but instead hired a kid named Dwayne to make a cartoon for $500 bucks.

And as ridiculous as it sounds, so many of us in the industry have watched dumbfounded time and time again as startups have made this same marketing mistake.

So we at Division of Labor decided to hire an explainer video company to explain why marketing executives should not use an explainer videos in place of proper branding and advertising.

We were nervous at first that explainer video companies wouldn’t take kindly to our little experiment. After all, hiring someone to create a video that makes fun of what they do for a living might not go over too well.

But the company we hired saw nothing strange about what we were doing and charged us the standard $400, which incidentally is one hundred bucks cheaper than our fictitious explainer video mastermind, Dwayne Clutterbuck.

So what did we learn? The service was seamless. Our contact was professional and willing to make whatever tweaks we suggested. And, in the end, we got what paid for: A crude, formulaic, 2-D animation video that looks exactly like every other explainer video that’s now ubiquitous on the internet.

And while disruptor culture certainly makes it easier to do things, faster and cheaper. It’s ironic that the end product is in no way disruptive. (Save for the tree shrews eating people’s brains and our main character pole-dancing to a cash shower.)

There’s certainly a place for explainer videos in the world. As a way to detail a complex product in simple, disarming language, it’s a technique. But not if you want to set your product or brand apart from everyone else. These sorts of videos do nothing to differentiate, nothing to establish a voice, and nothing to set your product apart or make anyone remember you.

If one marketing executive or startup founder watches our “explainer video on why not to use explainers videos” and finds merit, it was worth the investment. Though, admittedly, we’d be even more delighted if said marketing executive or founder offers Division of Labor the opportunity to properly position their brand for optimal success.

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