Death of an Advertising Agency:Part 4 of 12 - The Preteen Years

Posted on June 28, 2007
Filed Under Death of An Advertising Agency |

Please note: This is part four of a twelve part series. A new entry will be made each Thursday. To view the entire series, please visit the Death of an Ad Agency category.

We all remember the pre-teen years - before puberty, but not quite old enough to venture out on our own. And next to adolescence, they were probably some of the toughest years. If you don’t remember, here is how one resource describes it:

experiences in building, creating, and accomplishing to gain a feeling of adequacy; Needs encouragement and deserved praise to achieve competence; Needs academic, physical, social, and work skills for healthy self esteem; Needs teachers, parents, and counselors who are nurturing to help children discover and develop special talents and abilities.

Well, this was a challenging time period for Classified USA of Nevada, and one that Ted Stepien and our clients would help us through. We spent a lot of time asking questions and learning. We learned very important lessons and philosophies. The one that rings true in our day to day operations today is “Customer complaints are the school books from which we learn.”

We learned to solicit constructive criticism from our clients. We asked what we were doing right and what we could do better. We learned to evaluate and “solve” the problems rather than just manage them. This quote is embedded in the signature block of my e-mails today.

Douglas T. Geinzer
President/Publisher - www.RecruitingNevada.com
delivering recruitment solutions for Nevada since 1993
check out our blog: http://blog.recruitingnevada.com/
Las Vegas (702) 240-4100 Cellular (702) 604-5627
Reno (775) 329-5588 Toll Free (888) 754-6030
Learn more about: Socially Responsible Recruiting
“I was put on Earth not to manage problems, but solve them” - DTG

We strived to be perfect. Did we make mistakes? Absolutely. But most importantly, we learned from those mistakes. Many of our clients were our guinea pigs, or what we continue to call our ‘beta-clients’ today. Many of those same clients are still with us today - 10 years later.

Where we learned most, was from the mistakes of the daily newspaper. As we asked our clients where we could improve, many times it was in areas that we could not control; areas that only the daily newspaper could make a difference. Most of the customer complaints were simple – “can’t you just get my ad right.” Seemed simple. But was really quite a challenge.

We took this challenge on by demanding perfection. Demanding that ads be done right. Ted would spend countless hours arguing with the RJ reps. As a silent partner we would just sit back, listen and learn. Silently, we plotted what would need to be done to ‘solve the problem,’ rather than manage it. The solution was simple. It was technology.

Our clients would many times dictate their ads to us over the phone or if we were fortunate, they would fax a copy. We would in turn, typeset the ad and then fax it to one of our seven Review Journal reps. That rep would in turn typeset it again. There were three very evident areas of duplication. And three areas where mistakes could (and would) be made.

Our first offering of a solution was to provide each of our clients an e-mail address and empower them the ability to e-mail us their ads. First off, it made communication easy. Secondly, we would receive ‘first generation’ ad copy that would not require any further typesetting. So we thought.

Keep in mind, back in 1996, e-mail capabilities were rare. Human Resource Departments commonly shared a computer amongst the entire department, and many times that computer was a hand-me-down from accounting. Complicating it further, less than 10% of our clients had an e-mail address. Hence, why we gave them all their own.

Regardless, we drove forward and established multiple AOL accounts, each with five screen names. Each client was assigned a screen name, provided some simple instructions for use and a communications protocol was established. We were well on our way. So we thought (again).

Clients began e-mailing us their ads. We would spice them up with the recruitment advertising lingo that would get candidates to respond, and remove the irrelevant copy that was many times copied and pasted from an actual job description. Now it was time to forward the copy to the Review Journal.

Then we discovered the next problem.

The RJ did not have e-mails established for their reps and the reps had no way of getting emails from the general email mailbox. We would have to fax the ads to the newspaper.

As optimists we looked at this as one step forward. At least we eliminated 1-2 of the areas where mistakes could be made, leaving only one: the Review Journal.

Need more be said?