For a few years, I have been on a marketing professionals panel to help high school students learn about marketing and advertising as a possible profession. The organizers gave me this year’s questions and they struck me as the kind of basics anyone might want to know about advertising and Tronvig’s role as an advertising agency.
1. Tell us about the agency and your specific role.
Tronvig is a boutique advertising and brand strategy agency. This means we have fewer than ten full-time employees but also a roster of talented freelance creative partners in New York City and sprinkled around the globe that we rely on to produce and manage our workload. I am president and a 30-year veteran in the business. I function as the agency’s lead strategist, workshop facilitator, and sometimes creative director.
2. What type of clients do you serve? Can you give us an example?
We serve nonprofit healthcare, cultural clients that are often museums, and a selection of commercial clients (including small business). Our clients are mostly located in North America.
3. With which media platforms does your creative team work: print, radio, digital/online, TV, etc.?
Partnering with DCW Media, we offer a full roster of capabilities in print, radio, TV, and digital advertising. This partnership and our creative network allows Tronvig to tailor the media tactics to the strategy and the specific needs of the client.
No two clients are alike so we keep a solid roster of specialized talent on call so that we can match them to the specific situation. The requirements can range from creating a Super Bowl commercial, which we did last year, to developing and managing short-term and modestly budgeted digital-only campaigns for a time-limited event or exhibition.
Our media buys range from about $500k to $10 million for any given client in a year.
4. In your experience, what are the top three things that make an advertising campaign successful?
Have a very specifically defined marketing target with a clear demographic and psychographic profile of that marketing target.
Have a deep understanding of that target’s needs with a strong hypothesis for their emotional motivations that connect to the client’s service or product.
Be willing to experiment within the frame established by the above parameters, and adjust the details of creative or strategy in light of the market’s feedback.
Advertising campaigns can fail due to strategic errors (targeting and/or concept flaws) or errors made at the tactical, human-level interface (design and production). Paying close attention to both throughout the process is critical.
5. What is the most rewarding / challenging part of working in this industry?
The most rewarding part is seeing clients make the difference they want to see in the world.
The most challenging is bringing the client past the fear of abandoning things that are good but not effective. Giving anything up is hard, but such abandonment is often the key to effective strategy. Good but ineffective tactics, programs, and campaigns must be cleared away to make room for concentrated efforts focused on what is most important.
6. In addition to a business plan, why is it important to have a marketing plan?
The marketing plan is a key pillar of a good business plan. Product, finance, and marketing should be in balance and expertly managed. A business plan that ignores its marketing pillar assumes substantial risk. It is also crucial to remember that both branding and marketing must be brought into the service of the larger business strategy. They are not stand-alone endeavors.
7. What information do you need from a client in order to help them create a successful advertising strategy/campaign?
We need to understand the client’s business strategy, their Core Values, and their capacity to think of us as part of their team instead of as a vendor.
The specific information that is most useful to us is what they know about their customer or access to those in the organization who are the holders of that knowledge. Customer understanding is the most foundational ingredient of successful advertising.
Customer understanding is the most foundational ingredient of successful advertising.
8. Do you ever work with clients who are in competition with one another? How do you manage that?
The nature of competition differs by sector. In the nonprofit sector, for example—which is not a zero sum game with winners and losers—it’s easier to do this. When we have had two “competing” nonprofit clients, the work turned out to be mutually beneficial and the clients acknowledged this.
Because we also operate in the commercial sector—with financial services clients, for example—it’s a more complicated issue and clients may be in direct win-lose competition for a given marketing target. In such cases, painstakingly obtained customer insights can be proprietary and as such, not shared. We are not big enough to create firewalls between teams, so in such cases we have to demur, turning away the work.
9. In your experience, what is one thing small business owners may overlook during the creative process?
The greatest challenge with small business owners is them confusing themselves for the customer. It is so easy for people in positions of authority to make decisions or recommendations on creative work based on what appeals to them personally, even if they are nothing like the customer. The challenge of bringing the customer into an active role (via research, personas, and other means) in the decision room is something we spend a lot of energy on.
10. What is the price range and commitment for your agency’s services?
We work with budgets under $100,000 for brand strategy, marketing strategy, and branding, and advertising campaign budgets including creative, media, and production that range from $500,000 to $10 Million annually.
11. Does your creative team design the logo and advertising campaign and media presence from scratch? How involved are your clients in the creative process?
Creative work is actually never “from scratch.” It responds and solves the challenges set for it within the constraints of business strategy, organizational capability, and the market.
That said, logos and advertising/media campaigns are apples and oranges. Let’s take them separately.
In either case we operate on a team model where we are brought in as part of the same team as the client.
If we are developing a brand (including a logo if required), then our model requires that we form a kind of ad hoc team with the client to address all the challenges related to the brand. This means they will be intensely involved during discovery and less so once the strategic parameters of the new brand are set and creative work is underway. From that point on, the client is needed to give input and approvals based on the framework of the agreed strategy.
Advertising is very different because it is ongoing and generally requires constant monitoring and adjustment. In an advertising campaign, we are plugged in as part of the client’s standing marketing team and we work closely with the client all along the way.
12. Do you have to partner with other companies in the industry to service your clientele? Why or why not?
Yes, we partner with specialists on nearly every project. This is a necessity for all advertising agencies regardless of size. Our team model makes it easier for us to be 100% transparent about this instead of trying to “white label” or pretend that we have some kind of in-house expertise that we actually do not. Partners often bring a higher level of specialized expertise that can be specifically selected to fit the needs of the particular project. In this business, the quality of your network is much more important than your in-house capacity.
One key partner type that we use frequently is brand design specialists. Because we are often brought in relatively early during a project’s strategy phase, we are not always subjected to what one might call “beauty contest” vetting. This means we are selected for our strategic capabilities without focused consideration of how our visual style matches the tastes of the client. As a result, when we move on to creative—as we are often asked to do—it is very helpful to stage a “beauty contest” with a select set of vetted creative partners to understand who among them is the best fit in terms of stylistic taste. This gives our client a good deal of agency in selecting the stylistic direction for the creative talent engaged with their brand work.
13. What is one thing you learned during your career in this industry?
Haha. That I do not know very much. Advertising is a tricky, ever-changing business that never fails to educate those who are humble enough to take note of their own failures. Show me an “advertising genius” who has gotten it right every time, and I will show you a selective storyteller, if not a bald-faced liar.
Photo courtesy of RDNE Stock project
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