DIGO Brands

“What’s the Best Place You Ever Worked?”

Team DIGO — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:51:14 +0000

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

It was a proud show, but past it’s prime. Grampa hadn’t raised prices in twenty years. He ran a shop, not a business. But where he shone, where he was a true master was in the area of client service. He was famous for his soft touch, and while this technically referred to the gentle way his fingers controlled the hair and the scissors, never pulling or pinching, this appellation applied equally to his mastery of the entire relationship with his customers. It was beautiful to behold, and I had a front row seat. Sitting on a couple of phone books, my head under a hairdryer, I watched, and when I tired of the hot, dry, tornado, I listened too.

The beauty shop was perhaps the original social network. A wonderful place to learn about people. A place where things made sense, where you could care for people, touch people, and make them feel… better.

From the beginning, I loved the shop, the laboratory, the workplace. I envied people like my grandparents, couples or families who worked together for long hours and basically lived the better part of their lives together in the shop. To have a role to play, to feel useful, to feel part of something, to make one’s way in the world as part of something good or great or important… what could be better than this?

In truth, I always felt a bit awkward without work to do, without a useful role to play. At parties, I was in the band. I visited restaurants and bars much more often to work than as a patron. Work was an escape from the awkwardness of small talk. Work was tourism for me as well. I planted trees for billionaires. I worked the phones in a boiler room telemarketing set-up. I learned an immense amount as the sole Caucasian working in a Chinese restaurant.
A workplace provides all of this and more. A social purpose and a social life. Money and meaning. Colleagues and allies. Learning and tests. Challenges and overcoming. Accomplishments and recognition. Great games to play and perhaps master.

For as long as I can remember, I have been asking people a single question, “What was the best place you ever worked?” Typically, I follow this up with, “What made it the best?” “What did you learn from being there?” “Why do you think more places aren’t great?” “What could be done about that?”

The Last Slide-Rule Manufacturer.

Team DIGO — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:47:38 +0000

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]

Sphere Research Corporation of British Columbia, Canada, runs a web page devoted to fans and collectors of slide rulers.

“In these company archives, you can find very detailed info about the rules and models they made, the company and its history. Some rule makers were in business almost 100 years, and their histories and products are fascinating. Some major makers still survive today, but without any help from slide rules, as their businesses are now quite different. In the 1960′s, the industry was at its most sophisticated, and there were large slide rule manufacturers all over the world, each with their unique styles and features. This industry and technology survives today mainly in the form of slide charts, and the hearts of collectors.”

DIGO Brands Broker Advertising.

Team DIGO — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:25:39 +0000

(NEW YORK – May 8, 2012) – Award-winning broker-dealer and futures commission merchant TradeStation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Monex Group, Inc. (TSE: 8698), today launched a new integrated marketing campaign, highlighting its award-winning platform. New York-based brand-building agency DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO) created “The Proof is in the Platform” initiative, which will feature print, TV and digital advertising along with a strong social media component.

The ads lightly spoof TradeStation’s competitors, encouraging traders to focus on the actual capabilities of trading platforms. Print ads will begin running in Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities, Futures Magazine and Active Trader, and TV spots will begin airing on CNBC today.

“We don’t need bells, whistles or special effects to impress or attract traders,” said Erik Jepson, VP of Marketing for TradeStation, which received the highest overall ranking (4 ½ stars) from Barron’s magazine in its 2012 review of online brokers, as well as Best for Frequent Traders, Best Trading Experience and Technology, and Best for International Traders.

“Our platform speaks for itself, and speaks louder than flashy, over-the-top advertising does,” Jepson added.

That’s the reasoning behind TradeStation’s decision to create a tour of its platform features on TradeStation.com. Hosted by the TradeStation Guys, the tour, which debuts today, will allow traders to see firsthand how advanced TradeStation’s platform’s tools are through several one- to two-minute videos.

DIGO Brands The Pitch Process.

Team DIGO — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:06:27 +0000

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.

I understand, truly, the feelings behind much of this criticism of the pitch process as many agencies experience it. The sort of rules “the industry” might create would only serve to protect and enrich a guild of established agencies, while it would raise the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs. DIGO is sixteen years old. I remember what it was like to start and it was hard enough. It doesn’t seem fair to upstarts or clients, especially entrepreneurial clients, to take the nearest thing to pure evolution and ossify it, even a little. We chose to participate in The Pitch for our own reasons, and have so far really enjoyed and benefited from the experience. We’ll see how we feel after our show airs on June 4th. We participate in relatively few formal pitches – maybe one or two per year – and yet have grown every year since 2003. When we do pitch, we first carefully vet the client and the process, and we set our own rules of engagement, before committing. Frankly $15K doesn’t make a difference in our world. Time is much more valuable than a few bucks. Our strategic thinking may be our most valuable product, but we give it freely and without concern every day. There isn’t some storeroom with a limited inventory of smart ideas. We are smart and strategic every day and if you’re having lunch with us, you get us. Your ability to implement our strategic ideas and your ability to execute on them successfully — well, that is typically the outcome of an uncommon partnership. It’s much more rare. If you’re the sort of person or organization that wants to try it without us, that’s ok. There are plenty that will pay a fair amount for that partnership. Beyond that, anyone who thinks the implementation of strategic ideas — the media, reporting, optimizations, creative, design, production, development — is a commodity, just hasn’t seen it done right.

Talk about it. Do it. Don’t look back.

Team DIGO — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:37:32 +0000

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

The first year felt like a decade – an exhilarating decade, and exciting decade, but also a stressful, challenging, dread-inducing decade during which I was either earning or losing roughly $70,000 per month with zero cushion for error. After all of this, my friend declared himself ready and admitted, “I didn’t think you would really do it. I had always thought that people who talk about things don’t do them and people who do things don’t talk about them. Obviously, I was wrong.” He proposed he’d join the business now with something like half of the equity.

The idea that people who talk about things don’t do them struck me as absurd. If I had to choose a cliché’, I would have chosen the one about snoozing and losing. I told my friend that the year I had invested and the risk I had taken to establish the agency had great value and that there was no way I could pretend otherwise and treat the situation as I might have a year earlier.

We decided to remain friends and I continued on my own.

Market Categories are B.S.

Team DIGO — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:23:24 +0000

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

David Gardner of the The Motley Fool talks about “top dogs” and “first movers.” A first mover is a company with a new technology or system that completely changes an industry, disrupts the existing categories and creates a new one. Ebay in digital auctions. Amazon in online retailing. NetFlix in digital streaming of movies and TV shows. Better to be one of these, or follow one of these, then be the disturbee. For more inspiration, read about an industry that ruled the world:

When I was growing up, my Dad was an electrical engineer, working on his PhD and developing silicon chip technology. I fondly remember his slide rules and his easy comfort with calculating based on these pre-digital computers. The slide rule category was once a thriving global category and the 1960’s represented this two hundred year old industry’s peek. Curiously, even as digital computing was coming up, slide rule makers were enjoying a robust market. But all of that ended abruptly in 1974 when HP introduced the first inexpensive scientific calculator. Today only one Japanese company continues to manufacture slide rules.

Productive Paranoia.

Team DIGO — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:02:39 +0000

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

To my mind, the reason Grove’s paranoia worked so well is that most people have the opposite bias. Blessed with good enough childhoods and with normally limited imaginations that protect them from the anxiety of seeing all the possibilities, most people deal with what they think they know.

Pearl Harbor. Nine-eleven. Sputnik. AIDS. Black Friday. Our tendency is to deal with things when we have to, rather than at the optimal time. Our tendency is to be surprised.

It’s good to know what you can about what competitors are doing. Like Starbucks looked at high-end coffee shops… and then McDonald’s came along…

The competition is always coming, but you just don’t know where it’s coming from. That’s the kind of paranoia that drives you to innovate, to stay ahead.

The Fountainhead: Why to do thought leadership and content marketing.

Team DIGO — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:17:45 +0000

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

Of course, these are all good reasons to build a content or thought leadership strategy. But they miss the essential element that makes all of this content so valuable: self-esteem.

Yes, many people seek out product information and knowledge about categories in order to build their own self-esteem. These segment into a few psychographic types. Some love the process in and of itself, many others are interested in the social status they derive for category knowledge, and even more are interested in the dopamine-mediated pain reduction that comes from encountering social-validation of a good decision they have already made.

If you know that the purpose of your ‘thought leadership’ is to make the decision process and lifecycle more gratifying and better, then you know a lot!

DIGO Brands Google and Goldman Sachs

Team DIGO — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:40:40 +0000

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

Sorry Google:

Why I left Google. Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers. This is simply a more personal telling.

It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my time there I became fairly passionate about the company. I keynoted four Google Developer Day events, two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific contributor to the Google testing blog. Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus. Read more here.

Sorry Goldman Sachs:

“TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. Read the rest here.

How to Double Cross Vodka Advertising

Team DIGO — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:58:37 +0000

Marketing Daily’s Karlene Lukovitz writes,

When you have a name like Double Cross Vodka, April Fool’s Day is just too good an opportunity to pass up.

The ultra-premium vodka brand — distilled in Slovakia and launched (at least originally) specifically for the U.S. market in September 2008 — will kick off its first official consumer campaign on April 1, premised on helping people “double-cross the mundane and frustrating moments of life.”

The campaign’s hub is a microsite, Projectdoublecross.com, where fans can pick up tips for turning the tables on annoying types like arm rest-hoggers, at-table texters, telemarketers and chatty urinal neighbors. In addition, visitors can post and share (through the brand’s Facebook or Twitter accounts) their own “double cross” ideas.

Examples: To double-cross a loud cell phone talker, stand directly in front of him/her, position your Double Cross martini to the side of your head as if it were a phone, and adopt the same tone/volume as the offending phone-talker as you actually respond to what he/she is saying. To double-cross a subway pole-hugger, put your face close to the pole and begin whispering seductively to it; then enjoy your newly created personal space…Read more.