Spyro Kourtis

on December 23, 2008

category: miscellaneous

President and CEO

We're (still) hiring smart marketers.

I have enough self-confidence to know my company has done well -- and has always done well, even through some sticky economic downturns. But I’m of Greek heritage, so a small shiver of panic hits me if I think I might be bordering on hubris.

That’s why it takes some guts for me to come out publicly now and say Hacker Group is hiring.

I just read an article in ClickZ about staff cuts in the digital marketing space. We’ve been hearing about layoffs in general advertising agencies for a while. But everyone seemed to think digital would continue to grow in the new year.

There might have been a little hubris in that thinking. The truth is that digital is still a small portion of most advertisers’ budgets. And, worse, the income from digital marketing is -- for most marketers -- tiny.

Our company has been around since 1986. You might remember a stock market crash in 1987. We survived that -- and continued to grow. While the dot-com bubble expanded, we did, too. When it burst, we kept growing, because we had a diversified client list and weren’t that dependent on technology. We still have a diverse client list. When terrorists attacked in 2001 and someone was planting anthrax in letters, our company was much more direct mail focused than we are now. We managed through that crisis and grew in 2001.

We’re still planning to grow in 2009. I mean we’re planning to grow. We’re not assuming it will happen. We focused on making smart plans and working those plans. It won’t be an accident.

Part of the plan is not to lay anyone off. We won’t need to lay anyone off, because we’re doing everything possible to keep the business we have -- and to get more business. Since 1986, Hacker Group has never laid off an employee due to lost business. When we’ve lost clients, we’ve been able to replace them before resorting to layoffs. That philosophy has served us well, because the result is a smart, well-trained staff than understands our culture and our work methods.

I’ve had enough experience to know that everything doesn’t always go according to plan. Twenty-two years of continued growth doesn’t guarantee a twenty-third year. But this is important to me and the 153 other people here at Hacker Group. If we have anything to say about it, we’re going to keep hiring smart people and keep our business growing through the new year.

 

Comments:

8/24/2010 at 11:00 a.m.

Spyro, You should repost this, updated for 2010. It's a powerful statement and helps to differentiate Hacker from others in the market. Maybe it's worth folding this kind of message into your general website. Look forward to meeting you today.
>>David Camp, Seattle WA1/2/2009 at 3:25 p.m.
Great to hear
That's great to hear that your company is still hiring. I've recently applying for the Project Manager position and am glad a company of your caliber is still willing to hire. I love your company!
>>Arnold Arnan, Kirkland WA

Brian Gilbert

on December 18, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Integrated Marketing

An apples-to-apples approach.

Traditional direct marketers look at costs with an exacting eye.  All costs are included.  This is the only honest way to approach measurement, budgeting and goal-setting.  And most importantly, it’s the only way you can effectively optimize your spend across channels to maximize your return.

 

However, even in direct marketing, standards can slip.  We’ve run into many DRTV marketers that only count media against the cost-per-sale goal, because the creative costs may be amortized over a long campaign.  It’s appropriate to optimize your buys and placements based upon media-only analysis, but too many marketers forget to allocate the production costs when comparing DRTV results to other channels, such as online or mail.  Let’s face it - creative production can be cheap or it can be very expensive.  Creative ideas can succeed or fail miserably.  The only fair thing is to include creative fees and production costs in the analysis to create an objective ROI analysis.

 

Are the metrics for your multi-channel campaigns comparing apples to apples? Here are a few questions to ask the next time you get campaign results:

• For TV and radio advertising:  Are you including production costs, or is this just media?  If this is a direct response campaign, have you included call center costs?
• For print campaigns:  Is creative included in the costs?  If you’re making a special offer, are fulfillment costs included?
• For SEM campaigns:  Is this what Google (or Microsoft or Yahoo!) says your cost-per-click is, or have you also added in agency costs?
• For banner campaigns:  Did you include Web development costs associated with this campaign?
• For email campaigns:  Have we considered creative production costs?  What about fulfillment costs for responders?
• For social media campaigns:  Are there any sales we can directly attribute to this effort?

Cost accounting is not a mystery.  Measuring the inputs to your campaign should be relatively straightforward. Demand accountability and a fair measuring stick. Your company will benefit from the fact-based decision-making it allows.

 

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Jon Bell

on December 16, 2008

category: creative

Senior Copywriter

Automated advertising.

It used to be a joke among creative types that when you show a client three different concepts, they’ll pick the headline from the first ad, the photo from the second and the copy from the third.

Then we’d shake our heads and laugh, go into a deep funk or rage, depending on our personality.

The last laugh is on us.

The New York Times has reported on a new technology that will create web ads on the fly "changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience."

In theory, because I’m a direct marketer, this makes a certain amount of sense to me. I love testing. I love knowing what works. I even love being surprised by what works.

In practice, I can’t imagine this working very well at all.

Type fonts and colors are important, but they’re important only in context -- and they’re not important at all relative to many other things you could care about.

Images are attention-getters in the advertising world -- and a bigger deal than type and color -- but they’re not the whole story either.

Now, messaging . . . that gets closer to the point. That’s well worth testing and I don’t have any objection to testing as many ways to get the message across as you can think of. 

But the really BIG things to test are audience and offer. Audience and offer will make all the difference. The other stuff is so secondary, I wonder if these guys will even get a significant lift in their purple vs. orange tests.

Let’s see if these ad assembly systems are in wide use in a year or two. If they are, I’ll go into a deep funk or rage, depending on my mood.  If not, I’ll go about my business of crafting messages for specific audiences about specific offers.  And I’ll be doing it with a smile on my face. 

 

 

 

Comments:

12/17/2008 at 01:08 a.m.
The 40/40/20 Rule
Good points Jon. The generally accepted direct marketing rule is that 40% of a direct mail piece's effectiveness is supported by OFFER, another 40% is supported by AUDIENCE and the last 20% is supported by CREATIVE. Applying this rule to web-based messaging, the font or background color is only a fraction of that last 20%. While this new technology might lift reponse by some small fraction, logic says that at least as much thought should be going into technology that rotates/tests OFFERS and delivers messages to rotating AUDIENCES. Maybe instead of playing with fonts and colors they can use the same technology to rotate messaging, offers, and audience delivery?
>>Mark C., Seattle, WA12/16/2008 at 11:28 a.m.
A hammer does not a carpenter make...
...putting a pen to paper does not make one a good writer, and the ability to change an ad does make one an effective advertiser. This new tool may be nice for reducing the production cycle, but without the correct reasoning behind the decisions, people will not results they expect.
>>Dave, Seatttle WA

Carolyn Hansen

on December 11, 2008

category: integrated marketing

Vice President/Marketing

What green means.

I started talking about the Good and Green Conference in yesterday’s post. You might wonder why I went.

Hacker Group launched an internal green initiative a year and a half ago and we started the Green Marketing Coalition this past spring. The Coalition looks at marketing practices to see how we can make them more environmentally friendly. This is not as glamorous as being the marketer for a flashy green product, but we felt that, since our industry uses a lot of natural resources, it was important to do our part to reduce our environmental impact.

One of the most interesting conclusions I heard at the conference last week was that the idea of "green-ness" is often a negative to consumers. They assume a green product is worse than the regular version. If it’s a cleaning product, it doesn’t clean as well. If it’s a light bulb, it costs a lot of money, turns on slowly and casts an eerie shade of . . . well, green on the room.

The challenge given to the group was to make better products. Make the green product the "cool" one. As the happy owner of a four-year-old Prius, I confess that idea works for me. I made no sacrifices when I got that car.

The good news for my company is that’s what we did with our own green initiative. We offered our clients something we called internally "green in a box." We did the research and the legwork. We found the vendors and sought out the recycled paper. We already had the tightest list processing and most sophisticated marketing database systems in the business -- so that kind of waste has never been an issue for us.

And to get our clients on board, we absorbed some of the costs. So the result for the client was a more environmentally friendly way to market their products and services, without making a sacrifice.

Eventually, it’s not "green marketing" anymore. It’s marketing.

 

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Carolyn Hansen

on December 10, 2008

category: direct marketing

Vice President/Marketing

Better and Greener

I attended the Good and Green Conference last week. I’d love to sum up what I got out of it . . . but I haven’t quite reached a pithy conclusion yet.

One thing was confirmed to me about marketers that I hesitate to discuss in this post -- because it’s negative and I met such lovely people in Chicago. But I’ve made this knock so many times already in this very space that I hope that (if any of them ever stumble across this) they’ll take it in the spirit I intend it.

Marketers care way too much about generic surveys of consumer attitudes.

Everyone is trying to divide all of us into three or five or nine or 167 convenient shades of green. I’m too pragmatic for that approach. If attitudes predicted behavior, I’d be a much better person than I am. Hypocrisy is the human condition.

My contention is that behaviors are more measurable and more meaningful than attitudes.

I got a terrific book, Strategies for the Green Economy, by one of the conference’s keynote speakers, Joel Makower. He sums up the frustration with all the segmentation that doesn’t really work this way.

For the record, here’s my own unscientific market segmentation, based on nothing but intuition, common sense, and 20 years of observing the green marketplace. Like the other segmenters, I divide the world into five kinds of green consumers:

• Committed -- knows what to do and does it often
• Conflicted -- knows what to do but often doesn’t bother
• Concerned -- wants to know what to do but doesn’t yet
• Confused -- doesn’t know what to do or how to make a difference
• Cynical -- doesn’t know and doesn’t care

Of course, any one of us, depending on the day, our mood, and what we’re buying, can be any one of these five consumers or even a little bit of each.

I love this conclusion, because it rings true and it’s actionable. You can use this list as a filter for your creative work to be sure it speaks to all, except perhaps the cynical.

 

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