“What’s the Best Place You Ever Worked?”
My earliest memories involve shops. My grandparent’s beauty salon. My paternal grandfather’s clothes factory. My father’s laboratory. Thomas Edison’s workshop, just a short walk from that beauty salon in Menlo Park, then and now part of Edison, New Jersey.
I remember the statuettes lined up – all the awards my Grandfather had won for his hairdressing – so that they could be noted or admired by patrons on the way down into the salon proper. My grandfather was the old master by then. The awards seemed dusty and old to me. Something about the salon seemed forlorn. Old ladies flying down from Canada to have their hair done by the one man in the world who they trusted to do it right … Read more
The Last Slide-Rule Manufacturer.
If you want to look at the downsides and limits of “market category thinking,” the slide rule category provides some excellent examples. Keuffel & Esser Corporation, a company founded in 1867 in Manhattan is a good place to start. In 1962, the company introduced it’s DECILON slide rule into the booming market for slide rules, and on the strength of this line was able to go public on NASDAQ in 1965. But by 1982, the firm was forced to declare chapter 11 bankruptcy. This same year, AZON corp buys ownership of K&E Trademarks and K&E is no more. [1]
ARISTO had over a century of slide rule production, but was forced to close in 1978. [2] … Read more
DIGO Brands The Pitch Process.
AMC’s new documentary series “The Pitch” features some terrific agencies this first season, including DIGO in Episode 7 scheduled to premier on Monday, June 4th at 9pm. “The Pitch” has spawned a lot of comments within the agency community about the agency pitch process itself. Negative comments. Nasty comments. Prideful, rebellious comments. So, we threw our comment into the mix, and republished it here. … Read more
Talk about it. Do it. Don’t look back.
When I started my agency, I reached out to someone I had been working with to gage his interest in being my partner. At the time, he said he was intrigued, but was just not ready to make the leap.
I would have liked to start my business with a partner, to share the weight and to make the growing easier. But, I knew that partnership was like marriage, challenging even with the best match, so I decided to make a start as a sole proprietor … Read more
Market Categories are B.S.
We can’t see the world as static. Conceptual boxes can be helpful as long as we realize we have invented them ourselves to help us understand things. The moment we forget that we can uninvent them, we’re stuck.
There is a tendency to view market categories as a given. We think we’re in the “server hardware” category. Or the fitness club category. Or the E-commerce category. Like Blackberry (Research In Motion) was in the smartphone category and Apple was in the personal computer category. Oops.
Or Starbucks was in the coffee shop category and McDonald’s was in the Fast Food category. If categories tell us which competitors to ignore and which competitors to track, than category thinking is dangerous. You won’t see them coming!
If category thinking limits your imagination about how to expand and grow your brand and business, then category thinking can be deadly … Read more
Productive Paranoia.
Intel founder, tech genius and billionaire Andy Grove titled his book, Only the Paranoid Survive.
Since we can’t see everything, the truth is that we make decisions based on our biases. Most of us don’t question our biases, they are just “the way we are.”
Grove developed a set of biases that propelled him to the top of the digital world. Where did he get them? Nazi Germany … Read more
The Fountainhead: Why to do thought leadership and content marketing.
If you understand the value of the content you create to your audience, then you’ll have a much better idea of what’s worth doing and how to do it.
Let’s start with the current norm. Those of us who are doing this because we think thought leadership or content management is a good thing to be doing. We think we’re helping people make a product decision. Or we think we’re simply building the reputation of our company. And perhaps we also think we’re creating inexpensive ways to expand the potential for prospective customers to engage with us, and then perhaps be converted to customers down the line. Maybe we also think we’re arming our brand advocates with information and data they can use to advocate for us with others … Read more
DIGO Brands Google and Goldman Sachs
How the relatively new phenomenon I’ve called “Cultural Whistle Blowing” is rocking giants and creating opportunities for virtuous midsized companies – Cheetahs – to take share!
Today we read two telling and purposely public resignation letters. The first is from a high level executive at Google, the second from a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs … Read more
Bias Toward Action.
Capture, delegate and execute action steps. I’m told that Harvey Weinstein has two assistants that follow him around and catpure every single action step from every meeting and conversation.
Then they go down those lists and check off actions until they are all competed. Every day.
Harvey has acheived some miraculous things. A lot of miraculous things. In fact the list of things he’s produced on the Internet Movies Database includes 239 titles! And there’s a lot of good stuff here. In fact, you’ve got to see it…so here it goes…Read more.
Don’t be better. Be different.
We try to be good children. We have a report card of As and Bs and one C, and we focus on how to turn the C into a higher grade.
What’s wrong with us? Well, perhaps it starts with a question, What’s wrong with us. A better question is what’s different about us? And who can that matter and how?
The stone cold marketing fact is that it works much better to be different than better.
Would you rather be The Ground Round or Hooters, assuming business success were criteria. Let’s face it, there are a lot of restaurants offering greasy fries, dark decor and lots of undercooked beef.
But how many mammary-themed restaurant chains are there? … Read more
Celebrate the Messenger
I don’t shoot the messenger. Ever.
When someone brings up bad news, raises a controversial subject, or just tells the ugly truth in a meeting, I go out of my way to praise the messenger right there and then.
I want to make an example of them for everyone else. THIS is what I’m looking to for. Honesty. Openness. Realness. Challenge.
If you don’t do this, you will hear less and less of the truth. And then where will you be?
Can You Be Too Smart For Advertising?
Early in my career, I came in to find I had a new boss. It wasn’t long before he shared with me the following priceless and absolutely useless advice, “Mark, being too smart can be a disadvantage in this business.”
Inside my big brain, I thank him every day for the motivation that remark still gives me. Every successful day of my career is at least in part a victory over the stupid, thoughtless, and hackish impulses that are inside of every one of us. … Read more
If you want to know the future, invent it.
There are so many excuses. So many shades of red and yellow light. You need to see these for what they are, or you’re going to take “Wait” for an answer.
We never get all the facts. Speed chess masters. Champion poker players. Genius stock traders. Anyone who runs a business, a marketing campaign or a brand – they all have one thing in common. They make better decisions with nothing like all the facts.
In other words, they gaze into the same cloudy ambiguity that everyone else sees, and they choose a better path. … Read more
We need GO lessons.
All of us. We are taught what it should be, but we’re not taught what to do about it.
Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, the little firm behind revolutionary products like Ruby on Rails open source programming language and BaseCamp, writes in his wonderful book REWORK, “Start making something.”
He quotes director Stanley Kubrick’s advice to aspiring filmmakers:
“Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
Kubrick knew that when you’re new at something you need to start creating. The most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting.
Typos r Good
People in a hurry have to choose.
Choose a veneer of blamelessness. Or choose optimal progress.
It’s really that simple, and that difficult. Because people like to be blameless. They like to manage risk by trying to eliminate it. They want to appear all buttoned up, all the time. They don’t want be seen to fail, even in small ways on less important things.
But what if your choice is to risk failing on the small things versus a certainty of falling behind on the essential things? … Read more
Learn from PostSecret
PostSecret is the Haiku of the web. And it’s long been a very highly trafficked site. It’s so simple. People submit postcards, which conform to simple guidelines, sharing their secrets. PostSecret posts them online, and perhaps ads a bit of the comments they inspire.
What can you learn from PostSecret? To give people a simple art form, with rules that make success more likely. Discover something that needs to be expressed and give them the chance to express it.
DIGO did this when we created, “Talk Back To Cancer” for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. We knew people had an intense relationship with their cancer, so we built a simple social outlet for them.
It worked.
DIGO Brands The Marlboro Cowboy
If you ever doubt the power of what we brand builders do, pause briefly to consider the Marlboro Cowboy.
This image helped to addict millions. This after it transformed a minor women’s cigarette brand into a legendary masculine number one brand smoked by men and women alike.
Consider what that word “Cowboy” means to the American psyche, and indeed to the world. This is branding and image-making par excellence. … Read more
Are You An Incrementalist? Or an Optimizer?
At DIGO, we’re often asked how we approach our e-mail and other direct response testing. Do we have a list of variables and guidelines?
The answer is, at DIGO we don’t so much have a list as a testing philosophy. Of course we read Direct Marketing News, belong to the associations, read their websites, attend webinars, get newsletters, judge and attend award shows, and generally do all we can to get into the stream of information that professionals in the industry ought to digest. … Read more
DIGO Brands the War of the Inbox
The first “killer app” of the Internet is fast becoming the most important. Lowly E-mail!
Back in 1999, when Seth Godin wrote the groundbreaking book Permission Marketing, he predicted that an increasing percentage of marketing messages would be, “anticipated, personal and relevant.”
It was a radical idea at the time. E-commerce marketers with their frictionless webs were doing just fine, thank you. But today, the battle is on for the inbox. … Read more
Steve Jobs, and the one that got away
Marty Staff, our client at Joseph Abboud, told us about a call he’d received from Steven Jobs, the CEO of Apple. Marty’s company had their flagship store in a prime location in New York City, and Steve was looking for the perfect spot for the first New York City Apple Store. And here’s the first interesting thing: … Read more
DIGO Going Offline
Agencies should spend a lot of time coming up with ideas for clients.
It’s a simple thing, but the wall of information we all deal with can get in the way. That’s why, at DIGO, our most productive days tend to be Offlining Days.
What is Offlining? It’s a campaign we created in response to our growing attachment to devices, to encourage people to spend a little less time looking at screens and a little more time paying attention to the people in front of them.
This Friday, we’ll practice what we preach and take the entire agency offline from 10:30. Everyone in the office will put down … Read more
DIGO Brands The End of the World
The May 21 Rapture was rescheduled for October 21, and as communication practitioners and good citizens, we at DIGO wanted to do our part to ensure a safe, smooth rapture event for all, even those of us who get left behind. That’s why we agreed to take on this assignment from the NYC Rapture Readiness Committee, which reminds New Yorkers who plan to be raptured about what steps to take to make sure they don’t leave behind more of a mess than necessary. After all, Jesus was pretty big on neighborliness. Learn more at www.rapturereadynyc.org.
Game Changing Isn’t Game Winning
We love game changers. They drive the world forward. They are the natural force in national selection. They are the good guys of business. And I want them to win. I want them to end up on top.
But, often they don’t. Because game changing and game winning don’t automatically go together. … Read more
Match Words and Pictures
Talking things out can be a time waster. Especially when we imagine that once we agree on the words that all is solved, never suspecting that the pictures in our heads are not the pictures in other people’s heads. One of the most useful things we do with clients is simply to match words and pictures.
This simple process is so rare and such an effective shortcut to better communication that I would seriously recommend it to relationship counselors for serious consideration! … Read more
DIGO Brands Your Green Actions
Fresh in-market work from DIGO for brilliant client Recyclebank, the leading rewards program for your recycling and all your green actions. We’re so proud of this work and the impact it can have on families, communities and the environment we all share. We also think it’s a beautiful, elegant solution and we like looking at it! But… before you do, will you do something that will make you feel good? Go to Recyclebank.com and sign up to be rewarded for your green actions. It’s Free. There is absolutely no cost or obligation. No cost to you, ever. And, you get stuff… just for being good to your environment. You recycled. You carpooled. You rode your bike. Just report it on the site and Recyclebank rewards it. It’s “the first rewards program approved by planet earth!”
Digo Brands Multi-Tracking
You’ll find this works in most situations. Typically, there is an ideal. It may even be attainable. People may not be clear about how long it will take to get there, but they are enamored of it. Most teams, left to their own devices, will ruminate on this project of getting to the ideal for weeks, months, even years.
On the other hand, there is the attainable. The immediate opportunity. The low-hanging fruit. This is not a bitter fruit at all, but typically a quite tasty variety at the peak of ripeness, and within easy reach. Yet people will sit under that tree and plan for next years harvest and let those cherries rot on the vine. … Read more
DIGO Brands Our Mission
We do lot of things that ultimately add up to one thing: we help companies grow. We do that by building brands. And we do that with a myriad of different tools. Research. Strategic planning. Media planning. PR. Social media. Design. Direct response. All of that in addition to what people have now come to call “Traditional advertising,” i.e. television, print, and digital. All of it just comes down to communicating in a way that makes it easy for people to like your company. … Read more
Finding The Right Ideas
We are in the idea business. Actually, we’re in the business of executing ideas in service of very specific goals. But, to do so, we need to generate a large number of ideas. And, to do that really well, we spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to get to the greatest number of ideas and then how to separate the good — and even the great ideas — from the right ideas. … Read more
The Tale That Tells Itself
A closet down the hall from my office is about half full of brooms. Whisk brooms, push brooms, straw brooms… even a few bronze and pewter miniatures.
I don’t ask for them, I don’t encourage them, but people keep on bringing. or sending them to me and they have been for years.
It started more than fifteen years ago when I wrote about leaving a senior position at a big, bureaucratic agency. “I bought a broom,” I wrote, “and showed up at a great agency I had read about in the press. I took my broom to the top guy there and I said, “I’ve realized I’d rather sweep the floors in a great place than rule a mediocre place.” … Read more
Reorganize for the Engagement Revolution
By Jeff Pundyk
We’ve heard a lot of discussion about how marketers are losing control of their medium and their message as digital channels and user-generated content compete for consumers’ attention.
And, indeed, more consumers fast-forward through commercials and are finding their video on the Internet; traditional media properties are losing ground to blogs and social networking sites as the primary source of information, and, of course, consumers are completely absorbed by their smart phones. … Read more
Rebooted and Unplugged
Joe Burby, an amateur songwriter and former actor and playwright who works in sales, is the winner of the Cats in the Cradle Reboot contest. The contest, sponsored by our sister site Offlining, challenged songwriters to update the Harry Chapin classic to reflect today’s always-online culture. Burby, who accompanied himself on acoustic guitar (unplugged, of course), is featured in an article covering the contest in the New York Post. … Read more
DIGO Brands Offlining Day
We’re back. Hit us with your calls, your emails, your tweets. Text us. IM us. Go ahead and Poke us.
Friday was a DIGO Brands Offlining Day. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., we took ourselves offline and brought everyone in our organization together to focus their full attention on discovering, inventing and developing ideas for our clients. … Read more
Today, scores of former agencies are dropping the “agency” moniker. Where does DIGO stand? As usual, we’re going to give it to you straight.
If by “agency” you mean one of those traditional, hidebound, pretentious, print, radio and tv factories, with initials on the door, drawn from the names of dead white men, massive overhead, executive committees, public stock, analyst meetings, acquisition funds, full-time novelists with ten-year separation agreements, “integration” by acquisition, A-Team for pitches, B-team for clients, C-team for clients spending less than $100 million, trainees for you, bill by the hour and commissions too, “creative” timesheets, “well it’s your fault because you changed the brief,” If that’s what you mean by agency, then DIGO is definitely not an agency. … Read more
LOVE YOUR BRAND
People want to commit to things that give their lives meaning, but of course people fear committing to things that will fail to return the love. Many institutions have done just that, leaving people with a lack of faith in any organization. So today, the dream seems to be of “passive income,” “the 4-hour Work Week”, the billion-dollar exit, … Read more
DIGO Brands Turns 15, ‘Nuff Said
DIGO Brands Surfing
By Jeff Pundyk
Back before search, there was browse.
When I first started goofing around with the Internet in the early ‘90s, there was no directed search, no search engine optimization, no organic search, no paid search. We browsed. We looked for directories of links and followed them wherever they took us. We wandered. Often aimlessly. It was the thing that hooked me on the Internet – the idea that I could skip across the globe from computer to computer, driven by my curiosity and by serendipity, until I discovered something. Serendipity was the key. Serendipity meant unexpected outcomes. … Read more
DIGO Offlines Father’s Day
This Father’s Day, we’re looking for an artist who can give the song that made a million dads cry a refresh for the Facebook generation. Are you talented enough to do the job? Visit Offlining.com to enter the contest and find out.
The winning songwriter will get an aggressive P.R. push from one of NYC’s premier public relations agencies. We’ll get your music heard by all the right people (labels, press, blogs, etc). It’s a great way to make connections and get your career going. And maybe even make a difference while you’re at it.
DIGO Brands A Boom
We never owned one of these. While CEO Joseph Park was kind enough to offer us shares of Kozmo, now worthless, back then we said, “we’re still figuring out how to make our clients successful, and we don’t have time to figure out … Read more
DIGO Brands The Rapture
Nothing good ever seems to happen without a deadline. So we at DIGO, who build brands and businesses, are grateful to the crackpots out there who periodically predict the end of the world. This way, we get all the benefits of the deadline of deadlines, without having to take the inevitable hit to our brand credibility when it once again turns out that Annie was the better prognosticator, and the sun comes out tomorrow. … Read more
DIGO Brands Housekeepers
Everybody’s talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s now more than ten-year-old secret child with a longtime household staffer. The questions that typically come up are how he kept it a secret for so long and what this will do to the Arnold brand and business prospects. No one seems to bring up the housekeepers. Privy to secrets, to valued possessions and to private moments, they are often poorly paid, work long, unregulated hours and have no professional redress. … Read more
DIGO’S 15TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY!!
DIGO is celebrating its 15th Anniversary on June 23rd at 6pm! Join us. Check out the Facebook invite here.
DIGO Brands Brands’ Brands
Mark DiMassimo, seen on the left, discusses company brands and company performance on CNBC’s Power Lunch. To watch the clip click the picture above or click here.
DIGO Brands Never Says “Never”
National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado, named by U.S. News & World Report as the #1 respiratory hospital in the U.S., is launching a new campaign created by DIGO Brands in New York City.
‘We never say never’ captures the spirit behind the extraordinary commitment and expertise that National Jewish Health brings to the treatment of people with respiratory, cardiovascular, immune and related disorders” says Mark DiMassimo, DIGO CEO and Chief Creative Officer.
“‘We never say never’ is the reason so many things that were once impossible are now routine, and it’s the reason that the intractable, the untreatable, the incurable and the unmanageable are routinely turned around at this leading academic medical center.” … Read more
DIGO Brands Fifteen Years
Royal Honeymoon Rumors Swirl. President Obama At Ground Zero. DIGO Marks 15 Years of helping visionary leaders grow brands and businesses. It’s a big week! We’ve gotten to see a lot of history up close in the past decade and a half. We had a front row seat for the pc goldrush, the first dot com boom and bust, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the devastating fiscal aftermath, the electronification of the markets, the meltdown of 2008, the socialization and gamification of everything…
Through it all we joyfully hastened the extinction of dinosaur business models while championing the sometimes spectacular rise of new ones.In our first 15 years, we’ve relished the hard work of growing brands, campaigns and businesses. Even more so, we’ve loved building the relationships and credibility that continue to drive us relentlessly forward.People you will admire, will tell you how we committed to their success, then drove ourselves and everyone involved to do what it took to deliver what we promised, and more. People with whom we have been privileged to change the world, either a little or a lot. People who believe as we do, that there is no success without commitment.
So here’s to the next 15 years of Brand. Driven. Growth. Let the adventure continue!
A Teaser of the Playlist
- 1) Jenny (867-5309) –Tommy Tu Tone
- 2) Breakfast At Tiffanys –Deep Blue Something
- 3) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap –AC/DC
- 4) All That She Wants –Ace of Base
- 5) Teenage Wasteland –The Who
- 6) Time After Time –Cyndi Lauper
- 7) Bohemian Rhapsody –Queen
- 8) Forgot About Dre –Dre
- 9) Hip Hop Horray –Naughty By Nature
- 10) MMMBop –Hanson
- 11) Pump Up The Jam –Technotronic
- 12) Tom Sawyer –Rush
- 13) More Than A Feeling –Boston
- 14) Like A Rolling Stone –Bob Dylan
- 15) Somebody To Love –Jefferson Airplane
DIGO Brands Put Down This Blog and Go Outside
Offlining is becoming a growing trend — online. It was a topic of discussion at the recent tech conference SXSW, where Mark DiMassimo exhorted the crowd to step away from their smart phones. DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum are offlining pioneers, having launched Offlininginc.com, a site that encourages visitors to make an “offlining pledge.”
An article this month in U.K.-based magazine Prospect takes a closer look at the phenomenon.
“We have (at SXSW) incredibly smart people, very capable people, very motivated people – and what are we working on? What are we obsessed with? We’re obsessed with engagement, stickiness, gamification, making sure that we’re attracting people to our worlds, engaging them. We are working very very hard at making sure that when people start to interact with whatever it is that we want them to interact with, that they go as deep as they can, stay as long as they can, they come back as much as they can. So there’s this incredible creative energy focused on the “on” button. Where is the business model in the off button? Where is the business model in helping people find some balance?” – Mark DiMassimo, speaking at SXSW.
DIGO launches Proove media
- Lee Goldstein, President of DIGO; Adam Lutz, Managing Director of Proove (sm); Mark DiMassimo, CEO and Chief Creative Officer of DIGO
Something to Proove: 3 minutes with Adam Lutz
Q: Let’s start with the name. Proove.
A. Proove is our twist on prove, which is a value we live by. It is a hard word for some people to commit to…I mean it is quite a word to live up to. That’s why I like it. It says everything we are: accountable, actionable and measurable. And we’re willing to prove it, not just say it. We live … Read more
DIGO Brands SXSW
Mark DiMassimo, C.E.O. of DIGO Brands, participated in a panel discussion at the SXSW Interactive Festival this week, entitled, “Tweeting On Weekends: Are We Becoming Socially Anti-Social?” Mark was there to discuss the insights and inspirations that led him to co-found the Offlining movement in 2010. Check out these beautiful visual notes taken during the forum by illustrator Sunni Brown.
DIGO Brands the Nation’s #1 Respiratory Hospital
Nation’s top respiratory hospital launches the second “We Never Say Never” television ad.
National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado, named by U.S. News & World Report as the #1 respiratory hospital in the U.S., has released “Camping”, the second television ad in the “We Never Say Never” campaign launched earlier this year. This … Read more
Brand. Driven. Growth.
Growth. Let’s begin with the end, with the goal: Growth. Improbable, competition-threatening, critic-silencing growth is our aim and our comfort zone. It is what our clients have come to expect. It starts with a brand story so large that the only way to live it out is to grow. And then a plan. We help you define what growth means for your organization. We help you to quantify and measure it. We help you define and test a theory of growth. Then, optimize it and roll it out. Rinse and repeat. At DIGO, the entire organization shares a singular measure of success – we succeed when our clients grow.
Driven. Growth is driven. Working side-by-side with a who’s who of world-changing entrepreneurs, we’ve learned that driving change is crucial to growth. Those in the driver’s seat at ambitious organizations appreciate our dashboard of growth-driving services. They rely on us to to explore and chart new frontiers of technology, media and culture through Brand-Driven Acquisition, Direct and Digital Marketing, Innovation, Product Development, Customer Marketing and Retention, Brand-Driven Conversations…
Brand. To make sense of life, to motivate themselves, and to guide choice in an increasingly complicated world, people need stories. Becoming one of those meaningful stories, through what you do and say, is the ultimate growth fuel. That’s brand. The art and science of building and bonding people to brands is the key to leadership, innovation and marketing in a changing world. DIGO provides brand-driven strategy, insights, naming, launching, re-launching, advertising…