Advertising Age - April 13, 2009

Marc Brownstein Peter Madden says points out that if his laid-off creatives can mom’s on Facebook, you hone skills, make contacts definitely need to be. with pro bono work. SMALL AGENCY DIARY SMALL AGENCY DIARY

Edited by Ken Wheaton, kwheaton@adage.com

What are our Small Agency Diarists worrying about this week? What’s going on under

The Big Tent? Do our Songs for Soap bloggers think your commercial works?

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Big idea from a small business:
a market-based pricing model
JONAH BLOOM

AT 19, Jeremy Parker took $7,000 he’d saved from his bar mitzvah and turned it into a production budget for a film called “One Per Cent,” about America’s wealthiest citizens. “One Per Cent” won the audience award at the Vail Film Festival in 2006. When he came out of Boston University’s College of Communication, Parker took the money he made on the film together with cash he’d earned over the previous few summers, and started his own business, Teesand Tats, last July.

“I figured the best way to learn business was to run one rather than keep studying,” he said. He saw an article in GQ about renowned Portuguese tattoo artist Marco Serio and spent three months badgering him until he got in touch and agreed to come up with designs for high-end T-shirts. Each T-shirt would be a limited-edition piece signed by the artist and would retail at $110. Like so many youngsters going into business, Parker also built in a cause

from the beginning, in this case promising a share of every sale to Artworks, a charity that provides access to art programs for children and young adults suffering from chronic or life-threatening illnesses.

He was soon moving five or six shirts a day through teesand-tats.com and boutique clothing stores. In the first three months, he pulled in $35,000 and established good personal relationships with a number of retailers. Then last September the recession suddenly started to bite, and sales dried up. Could it be that people just went off the T-shirts? Parker didn’t think so. “The buyers said they loved the designs and that they’d sold well, but people had just stopped spending in their stores, so they stopped ordering.”

“I needed to come up with something to get people over their nervousness about spending,” said Parker. “I needed to come up with something that’d allow me to survive.” But he also knew he couldn’t just hack prices, at least not if he

wanted to ever get them back up. So, just over a month ago, he hatched what he called his Customer Recession-Proof Plan: When people bought a T-shirt, they’d be given the closing price of the Dow for that day. For every 100 points the Dow dropped within two months after the time of purchase, they’d receive a $5 refund.

Whether this was the insurance some of the buyers needed or whether they just admired his ingenuity, they started buying again. Sales are back to pre-reces-sion levels. Meanwhile, Parker has been negotiating with a large retailer to create a line of similar but cheaper T-shirts that can be sold under the retailer’s brand. For now, at least, it looks as if Parker’s fledgling business will make it. Whether the world needs another T-shirt brand is up for debate, but America definitely needs hard-working, ingenious young entrepreneurs like Jeremy Parker.

And other marketers might like to think about his idea of a

market-related pricing model, because it shows sensitivity to the customer’s situation without doing the damage to brand and profit that a price cut can.

One other marketer has already cottoned to this. Michael Colombo is marketing director for ProActive, a physical-therapy and personal-training business in Tucson. He came across mention of Parker’s scheme on Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick and loved it. “In today’s economy people are more worried about putting food on the table than spending money on personal training, so I’ve been looking for ideas to get them to sign up,” he said. Maybe I’ll tie it to the market, like Jeremy, or maybe we’ll offer them discounts based on how much weight they lose. Lose weight, gain money— an incentive that works for them.”

“Either way,” added Colombo, “what we know is that we need to think about different ways of doing business, and Jeremy’s idea could be a big one for us.”

AS SEEN ON ADAGE.COM/ SMALLAGENCY

JOHNSON: I WANT
TO GIVE OUT RAISES

I’m here to tell you that it’s still possible to make the big bucks in advertising and get a raise during a recession. You’d think the owner of an agency would want to control costs and hold down salaries. Not true. There are times I want to stuff money in people’s wallets. It’s more fun and more rewarding than buying real estate with no money down. My best advice when you’re looking for a raise is to ignore those newspaper columns that tell you to make a list of your accomplishments. If you need a list, you probably didn’t make much of an impression.

With Virtue, media brand Vice
helps marketers tap its genius
TERESSA IEZZI

WITH ITS RECENT fashion issue, adorned by a striking Ryan McGinley-shot swine, Vice magazine marks its biggest edition ever. Nice for them, and a rare bit of good news in magazine land. But Vice, chronicler of youth culture, purveyor of the profane, is also one of the more unlikely yet most convincing cases of a media brand (a real media brand, and that’s an important distinction) turned brand partner. Vice magazine, which was launched under the shadiest possible circumstances in Montreal in 1996, has since became a global media operation with offices in 22 countries, encompassing a website; music and retail concerns; and, since 2007, an online content channel, VBS.tv, for which the company partners with MTV. As noted here previously, the channel offers some genuinely interesting—dare one say important—content, (such as last year’s deeply depressing “Garbage Island” and feature film “Heavy Metal in Baghdad”) while still bringing the

vice (For example, “Shot by Kern” is essentially one long masturba-tion-assist highlight reel for straight males).

The company has worked with advertisers of a certain music/sneaker/lifestyle type before. But marketing efforts were coordinated in earnest two and a half years ago with the creation of brand-strategy/creative arm Virtue. The shop was born when Spencer Baim, a former strategist at Fallon, approached current Vice principals Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, and pointed out, “If these massive brands (like Nike) are coming to you to do small things, they will come to you to do big things, too.”

Virtue’s inaugural project was Virtual Lower East Side, an online music experience for client MTV. More recently, Virtue has under-taken a range of brand projects (and, yes, even advertising) for the likes of Rock Band (brand ID and packaging-design work), Edun (a VBS series on mountain gorillas), Dell (a tech series called

“Motherboard”), Red Bull (a reality show called “School of Surf”) and action-sports enterprise Alli, for which Virtue undertook a complete rebranding, and created ads and an online content hub. The shop just completed its first project with energy drink Guru and announced a partnership with Kanye West, who has signed on to create new Guru products.

The success with youth-target-ed brands and the ability to create and execute a range of projects are where the real-media-brand part comes in handy. Virtue takes Vice’s core genius—its winning way of interpreting the world of and for urban youth and those who wish they were urban youth—and applies it to for-hire work for brands. Those brands also benefit from the sensibility of Vice’s contingent of writers, photographers and artists. Not all media outlets have the kind of unmistakable voice and hard-won authenticity that works in Vice/Virtue’s favor.

Will too much Virtue be bad
for Vice? Simon says “we’re care-

ful” about keeping Vice Vice but also notes that its demographic is more concerned about quality of content and transparency than with the fact of brand involvement. “Vice has always been free,” Baim notes. “It’s existed because brands have bought media within the magazine. We’re just pushing that further and looking for smart creative ways to drive clients’ businesses forward as we drive our own forward. It all comes down to openness, transparency and great content. When it’s done right, it’s embraced and accepted.”

And for all the detached hip-sterism of Vice, there’s an earnestness, too, that has informed Vice content and will likely steer the company’s brand efforts. “We want to make young people’s lives better,” says Simon. “We want to make amazing brand communications that affect people.”

AS SEEN ON ADAGE.COM/BIGTENT

NEWMAN-CARRASCO:
DO YOU GET IT?

I have worked with many individuals for whom the U.S. Hispanic marketing arena is uncharted territory. Yet, professionally, they have been able to embrace the value and importance of this segmented marketing opportunity and act upon it. So I set out to classify the types of marketers I’ve known and see if I could find patterns that exist and qualities that distinguish the “get its” from the “never going to get its.”

AS SEEN ON ADAGE.COM/ GLOBALNEWS

CHANDRASEKAR:
WOMEN IN IN INDIA

A new trend in India is worth noting and celebrating. After years of mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law power-struggle stories, there is now a significant shift in soap operas broadcast in Hindi, the national language. A flood of new serials are celebrating the daughter. Almost every other soap is now about daughters, sisters and young brides finding romance in their marriages. And “girl-child” issues are in.