Month: December 2007

A friend asked me this question in this vein and I thought the answer was worth sharing, so I took out the specifics to outline some general principles:

First, remember that most CMO’s are insane. In general you’re best bet would be to do a custom presentation based on what you know about them. A generic approach would be the type of pitch an agency would make to a senior marketing person. Something like this:

1. Define the Market
2. Strategy and tactics
2. Concepts

A CMO has a lofty plan they set up by demographics – “We are looking for married women, 35-50, household income over 100k”. By defining the Market you are selling them on how your specific skills can hit the target – “The fastest growing segment of X market is the one that I have the keys to”.

In strategy and tactics outline what will be done and how it will be measured – “There will be these programs, we are looking for X impressions, and Y conversions…”

Concepts are the best place to shine, and also the most work. The easy way out is to show stuff that you have already done for other people, the hard way would be to mock-up what you would be doing for them. It’s a good idea to present concepts in sets of 3, two good ideas and (what you consider to be) a crummy one, that way if your client always picks the crummy one you’ll know that you have some style or communication problems and perhaps you shouldn’t be working together.

It also depends on the purpose of the meeting, better firms know that interviewing agencies is a low cost method of brainstorming so they do no original work until there’s really a deal…

Just a random marketing stat for Saturday. When buying shirts for software executives I found this distribution:

M 15% L 37% XL 35% 2XL 13%

If you have to buy shirts I’d suggest a similar purchasing pattern (unless you have other data?).

Another point – I’ve always made it a point to get women’s shirts for them if they are working on behalf of the company. Nothing looks lamer to me than a woman who’s been given a company shirt that fits like a feed bag.

For the past month I have been reviewing my schedule and I’ve noticed that a very large part of 2007 was devoted to networking in the new media space. Unfortunately it’s starting to look like I’m hitting a point of diminishing returns. As much as I enjoy going to events I’m starting to think that my time would be better spent working on projects rather than talking about them.

I’m going to finish out the events I have for this year and then I’ll be setting up the work plan for 2008 without adding a lot of events. Right now I’m looking at 4 events – Podcamp NYC, Gnomedex, NME in Vegas and Podcamp Boston, and may only pick two of those.

Is there a progression of events? You attend for a few years, hit the point of diminishing returns and then go every other, or even 3rd year just to keep up to date.

Another thing I have been thinking a lot about is an idea Eric Rice infected me with – some kind of event where work is done, as opposed to education. I’d much rather get together with 5 rockstars and try to do something rather than talk about how to do things.

Of course none of this is carved in stone, it’s year end and time to evaluate all the strategies and adjust for 2008, but it’s starting to look like more time in the Fortress.