John Winsor

Are you Talking the Talk or Building the Tech?

One of the most amazing and wonderful things in the last couple of years here at Victors & Spoils has been dynamic tension that’s been created between being an advertising agency and a tech start-up. That tension that’s been created by mashing up the two cultures has been profound for me.

When we started we noticed that even the most tech-based agencies were analogue at their core. We asked ourselves a couple of questions. First, what would happen if we took the functions of a typical ad agency and digitized them? The way we communicate. How we work in a massively distributed way across the globe. Hence, we created Agency Machine. Taking an analogue business process and making it digital is a messy affair, full of trials and errors. All said, it’s working pretty darn well and gives us the ability to scale globally and rapidly.

Next we thought about what we could build for our clients. It’s something that has intrigued me for a while, and was an inspiration for Alex Bogusky and me to write Baked-In. Lot’s of agencies talk about building their own IP but their own structure gets in the way.  Forty percent of the Victors & Spoils team is here to build proprietary technology. We feel it’s the only way to go beyond just building campaigns for clients to building platforms that scale across media and can be massively scalable. Yesterday we launched our second tech product, Fan Machine, working with Harley-Davidson as our launch client. Mark-Hans Richer, Dino Bernnachi and their team at Harley-Davidson have been great partners in exploring ways to shift the paradigm of how advertising is created. We want to make the experience better for creatives, customers and brands by cutting out fat and facilitating faster, deeper conversations between brands, consumers and creatives.

Agency Machine and Fan Machine are just the start of what we’re building. It’s not just about creating great work, it’s also about building the digital tools to change the way campaigns are born and executed.  

Fees, Lies and Advertising

I had an epiphany a couple of days ago when leaving the Denver airport. In the last 6 months the airport parking management has replaced pay booth attendants with self-serve technology that allows drivers to speed up their exit from the parking garage by not having to deal with anyone. The result has been not only faster service for the customers but also has given the airport management the ability to cut their expenses through a reduction in staffing.

Then, reading Thomas Friedman’s latest op-ed piece in the NY Times really drove the point home. The latest economic turmoil has highlighted the fact that other businesses are doing the same thing. We are in the midst of an economic paradigm shift where technology is replacing jobs making companies more efficient but producing long-term unemployment issues. It’s happened before. First, with the agricultural revolution then with the industrial revolution and now with the collaboration revolution.

What’s this mean to the advertising business? We’ve certainly seen the effects of the collaboration revolution in other creative businesses including music and photography. Digital technology has allowed more people to participate in the creation of creative output driving down prices in a radical way.

I’ve been on the road for the last month talking to a dozen CMOs of Fortune 500 companies. There’s a lot of frustration out there. The biggest is the cost of creating advertising both in terms of time and money.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the people. There are fantastic people both on the client side and the agency side. It’s in fact a broken system.

Businesses act based on the way they are compensated. And, the majority of agencies are compensated by selling their people’s time. Compensation is based on the number of FTE’s or full-time employees working on a piece of business. In the age of collaboration the FTE model is broken. The fact is that many agencies make more money when they put more people, or say they do, onto a piece of business. Likewise, it’s more profitable to take more time to do something. If a project should take a month there's no disincentive for most agencies to drag it out longer.

One of our clients called a couple of weeks ago saying, “You’ll be excited because we can move the deadline back one month on a project.” Our reaction was, “No thanks.” You see, we believe in fixed cost pricing. Just like the Denver parking lot we’ve used technology to become a lot more efficient. Each project, from concepting to production is a fixed price. We feel that this aligns our interests with our clients. In order to make money we need to be more efficient through the use of technology. We make money when we deliver great work faster, using fewer resources. That’s what clients want.

If advertising industry is to thrive in the age of collaboration we must address the root of the problem, the way we are compensated for our work. If we don’t many companies won’t survive the current economic transformation that’s underway.

Let’s come together, all of the great people from great clients and great agencies and fix this. Sure our businesses will be transformed and probably be a lot smaller. But, if we don’t collectively grab the bull by the horns and proactively transform our businesses then they will be transformed without our input.

 

It’s About What You’re For Not What You’re Against

After starting a few companies over the past 25 years I’ve found that start-ups are defined more by what they are for than what they’re against. But discovering what you’re for usually takes a bit of time. That’s what I love about start-ups. It’s a clean slate. You start with a vision, which includes being different than something else, then you race like hell to learn as much as you can. Then you pivot. Only then can you discover what you’re for.

Victors & Spoils is 20 months old now. And we like where we are. We’ve had the very good fortune of being at the right place at the right time as the world becomes more open. Recently, we added new clients to our roster, including Nike Foundation, Mercedes-Benz and Unilever. And, we're putting the finishing touches on the production of new work for Harley-Davidson and Smartwool. We are honored that they want to be part of the future with us. Our creative department has grown to over 6000 and our technology is being tested every day. We’ve learned a lot and have continued to pivot.

We’ve also learned a bit more about what we are for. And above all we are for technology that powers creativity. Without our technology we couldn't do what we are doing. The technology we are building has allowed us to create more fluid and open communications, reputation ranking and a more abundant way of solving our client's marketing objectives. Our technology is enabling us to achieve everything else we are for: from open systems, to transparency, to more flexible career options for our crowd and great work our clients.

Above all, great work using Collaboration, Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing wouldn't exist without the right technology.

 

Thanks, Ira

I woke up this morning to the news that Victors & Spoils was named as one of the Ad Age Agency A-List: 10 to Watch. What an honor. Thanks to so many wonderful folks on the team, both here at Victors & Spoils and our extended family of 4,200 in our creative department. We’ve also had the honor of working with a lot of fantastic clients.

A special thanks goes out to Ira Bahr, CMO of Dish Network. The day we launched Victors & Spoils and an article about us appeared in the New York Times , Ira reached out to us. Over the past year, Dish has been our most supportive client. Not only has it been an honor to work them, but Ira has taught us a lot.  Ira’s willingness to innovate, coupled with his direct style and honest feedback, helped us figure out how to build and improve this new machine we call Victors & Spoils.

It wouldn't be the same without our partnership. So, thanks, Ira.