Before you read a business book you should have some idea of the qualifications of the writer. Along with my partner Diane Jenkins I started the advertising agency Babcock & Jenkins (www.bnj.com) 17 years ago, and helped guide the company through the challenges of radical transformations of marketing.
The next few paragraphs outline the nature of that qualification and read like an abbreviated history of B&J. If you’re satisfied that I might have might have something to teach you, you can certainly skip it and dive in to chapter one.
B&J is an odd agency–very introverted. The most descriptive term I’ve come up with is “heads down”. Many dynamic and engaging individuals work at B&J, but even they are as comfortable speaking with our clients’ engineers as with their marketers. The company’s overarching personality is decidedly geek. Some of our clients consider us to be more of a software development company than marketers.
But we are marketers to the core. We simply look for a technical solution to nearly every marketing problem. That’s our DNA–for better or worse. Our devotion to technical innovation, (along with some disastrous mistakes I’ve made) has sometimes limited our growth, but it has also enabled a small agency in Oregon to have the largest companies in the world as clients. Nearly every major technology company is or has been a B&J client.
It’s common for companies to claim to innovate ahead of the curve. I don’t brag about that as much as I used to, because I no longer consider innovation to be an unadulterated benefit. I know firsthand how painful and pointless innovation can be: Ahead of the curve means ahead of fashion and general knowledge. As any good marketer knows, being too far ahead of the curve means the benefits of your approach are not known–you have to teach instead of sell, and teaching is expensive.
I’m not even sure that innovation is a measure of clear foresight or a pioneering spirit. I think it’s just a byproduct of a particular disposition intersecting with a set of circumstances. And I’m not so foolish as to claim we pioneered anything uniquely–when a set of technologies evolve they create opportunities that many people and companies see and build solutions around. What I do claim is that B&J is one of those companies, and built leading edge solutions again and again. We have the patents and the history to prove that. The innovations continue today. How many agencies do you know that deliver lectures on iPhone development at software conferences? How many provide access to marketing campaign results via smartphone? The better question may be why would we do that? And the answer is that we must. You may get smarter about managing your natural proclivities, but you can’t change your DNA.
I mention all this because the insight I gained during those years of continuous innovation fuel this book, and there is some characteristic of my personality that makes me continuously curious. But several years ago I decided to step down as CEO. Despite my Peter Pan leadership the company had grown up and become very professional. We had all seen how difficult it was to get clients to adopt innovative solutions to sales and marketing problems, especially if the company didn’t know they had the problems or couldn’t understand the value of the solution.
The final straw was a year-long development effort of a tool we called iMarq to deal with sales lead nurturing though a rich media publishing platform. We offered our clients an integrated system that combined concepts now known as Wiki, blogging, personalized automated email newsletters, web profiling, permission-based publishing and profile-based site personalization. Selling it proved nearly impossible when when a sum total of NONE of those concepts existed anywhere else. Even the concept of nurturing or maturing prospects and customers was largely unknown. To the question “So who else is using any of this stuff successfully?” we had to answer “Well, you would be the first”. The only customer we had was a division of Siemens, and then the dotcom bubble popped and our corporate sponsor was laid off (yes, it was that long ago).
Of course one problem with iMarq is that we wanted to charge several hundred thousand dollars to let companies use it, and then charge for all the work required to support it. Today you can get every bit of the iMarq functionality and a lot more in Wordpress–for free. This book is built on Wordpress, a remarkable platform.
Following the iMarq fiasco we searched for a CEO, found a person we thought could lead the company, discovered he couldn’t. I went back briefly to help stabilize the company and handed the reins over to Denise Barnes, who had been running operations for many years. Denise has grown into the role of President and is doing a spectacular job running the company, succeeding even in the current recession to add new business and keep our customers happy.
They’ve become a very professional organization that does spectacular work for their clients. I’m very proud to be associated with them.
I went off to play in the internet, looking at how new technologies and concepts can benefit marketing. I view what I do as pure research, done mostly to keep my mind agile. I share what I learn with B&J, but I no longer try to convince them to adopt the things I learn as practices for our clients. I use my undisciplined programming abilities and steady flow of competing ideas to build experimental websites and tools–mostly around particular interests I have so that they can do double duty. I analyze everything I do and roll what I learn into new ideas.
So that’s my qualification. I’ve been early enough in internet marketing that we didn’t pay any premium to register www.bnj.com, innovated excessively, and now I’m playing with all the tools and concepts of social marketing, web publishing, mobile, and the loose agglomeration of notions called Web 2.0. I’ve earned my stripes, made and lost money, paid attention, thought carefully and wildly, and experimented within the limitations of time, money, and the need to be right most of the time.
Now I wrote it all down. I hope you find it useful.