What do you think of when you hear about Disney? Fireworks, castles, and happy families all probably came to mind for a moment. But you probably didn’t think of dishware — and we’re not talking about those cups from the 90s with Lion King characters on them that were in every family’s kitchen cabinets.
Today’s guest, Alvaro Melendez, knows brands deeply in a way that most of us could never even imagine. If you think you know the core of what makes a brand who they are, think again. Alvaro has been developing and using machine learning to measure brand awareness or “Brand Love” for years to help companies, both big and small, understand what makes people connect with them.
In this episode, we discuss how Alvaro uses technology to help brands reach a bigger audience. He speaks about how to advertise effectively, how DEI is imperative for brands, and how creativity and technology go hand-in-hand in brand innovation.
And, if you’re still wondering why Disney is defined by dishware, you’ll just have to tune in to the podcast to get your answer.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- How Alvaro and his team are using machine learning to make brands trackable
- Why organic social is the best way to advertise and promote your brand
- How machine learning has taught major brands things they never knew about themselves
- What the PPAI branding framework is, and how to use it to identify major brand metrics
- How smaller agencies can learn from the experimentation of big brands
- The importance of making DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) a huge part of your brand identity
- Why creativity and storytelling must still be people-centered and collaborative in an automated world
What makes an employee want to stick around at your agency? Every year since 2014, we’ve been doing the research and compiling it into our Agency Edge Research to help agency owners get to the bottom of how to maintain employee satisfaction.
We expected certain things like financial compensation and work-from-home flexibility to be most important this year. Still, we were surprised to find many other desires shining through that have nothing to do with money. This year, Susan Baier returns to help me break down our findings.
In our analysis, we’ll highlight three categories that most agency employees fall into and how their needs, wants, and levels of loyalty differ across the board. Each group has their own unique way of viewing their role in the agency, how they want to be cared for, and what’s missing that would make them want to stay. We’ll talk in-depth about each group and how we can best address their concerns to boost employee satisfaction.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- What is the Agency Edge Research Series, and what agency-specific issues does it address?
- What questions do we ask agency employees when compiling the research?
- The three categories that most agency employees fall into when looking at employee satisfaction
- The most important things that employees feel are lacking in the agency culture
- Where millennials stood out more than other age groups in certain categories
- What are the driving reasons behind an employee choosing to leave an agency?
- How to build loyalty in your agency and take care of employees
- How to identify employees who might be at risk of leaving your agency or agency life altogether
Are you making yourself irrelevant in your agency? We’ve been talking a lot lately about how important it is to have systems and processes in place so you can work less and get back to doing the parts of agency ownership that you love. But if you or anyone in your agency becomes irreplaceable, you will be stuck in your 60-80 hour work weeks.
This week, our guest Jesse Gilmore gives us a thorough breakdown of how to identify single points of failure in an agency—Hint: it’s often the agency owner—and how we can create a better flow that helps everyone work together more successfully. When we give our employees the tools they need to work effectively and delegate with other team members, our whole workflow improves no matter who’s out of the office that week.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- How to identify single points of failure in your agency
- If you’re the single point of failure, how do you make yourself more irrelevant?
- Why removing single points of failure is vital for scaling your business
- How to create systems and processes that aren’t cookie-cutter solutions
- How to carve out time in your already busy schedule to put systems in place
- What is the difference between a bottleneck and a single point of failure?
- Timing out changes to your agency’s systems and processes
- How removing single points of failure can improve agency culture
If you’re in a creative role at your agency, you’re probably familiar with receiving creative briefs that just don’t measure up. Instead of getting inspired to do great work, you’re left wondering where to start or what the point of the project is.
If you’ve ever created or pitched a brief, on the other hand, you’ve probably worked from a template or simply checked off the boxes of the bare minimum — it happens to the best of us!
This week, I’m interviewing Tim Brunelle, a creative director with decades of experience in marketing and advertising. Over the years, he has seen hundreds of creative briefs that span the whole spectrum between gold and garbage.
When our brief falls flat, it won’t inspire our creative minds to do great work. In this episode, Tim challenges us to think bigger and better rather than checking off the boxes and reading from a sheet of paper in our briefing meetings. When we think creatively about our creative briefs, we get a wealth of inspiration in return.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Why creative briefs often fall flat for creative teams
- Why brief-makers should care about the project just as much as the creative team they’re hiring
- The two core functions of creative briefs
- What the pipeline of the creative briefing process should look like
- How to mentor and inspire creativity across teams to collaborate on the briefing process
- Why location is important when discussing your vision
- Determining when a creative brief is necessary to inspire a team to do ground-breaking work