But there's a fine line between “different”, and “I don't understand.”

Back during the dot-com boom, I worked for this company called Inktomi. They were a search engine, a comparison shopping engine, an auction platform, and an early edge content delivery network. Each of those businesses on its own might have made some kind of sense, at its core, it was kind of a Franken-business. At the peak of its fortune, Inktomi hired an agency to create a commercial for broadcast television. It was a bunch of shapes that moved rhythmically and all collapsed into the Inktomi logo with a voice over "We are the heartbeat."

I am really sure that that ad cost a bazillion dollars to create. I am also really sure that it cost a bazillion dollars to show it on network TV. I am also really sure that 2x a bazillion dollars was lit on fire because it did not tell anybody anything about Inktomi or why you should pay attention.

Inktomi was a weird company. It was a bunch of parts put together, desperately searching for a cohesive story. The end result of this ad was multiple bazillions of dollars lit on fire, and not a single person on the planet having any deeper understanding of what Inktomi did.

One of my clients is a completely terrific agency that has a marvelous mixture of direct response and brand advertising savvy. They help businesses design campaigns and experiences that are both high-converting and accretive to their brand. they are really freakin' good at what they do.

They are keenly aware that, in their space, there are many, many agencies that cover the same ground: creative, content, retention, and user experience. They know that their service selection is not unique, so they've tried very hard to create a positioning that is unique. They have done a really great job of creating an abstraction of what they do, essentially a meta-level explanation of their approach.

When you read the explanation, even though it does not tie itself back to specific campaign types, you basically get the idea of how they think. In my VVV world, that really satisfies the vision part, because their client understands the way they make decisions, the way they consider things, and the way they articulate their output. Cool.

However, because they've been trying to be different and they created this abstraction layer, they actually abstracted it so much that unless you know who they are and what they do, you have no idea who they are or what they do.

The outcome is that their pipeline is pretty dusty, not a lot happening…

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I recently spoke with another agency owner who is so afraid of being different they can't even be expansive and paint what they do in a powerful and interesting way.They run paid search. they are really good at it. They've got a deep understanding of how the algorithm works, a great way to help define what's going to feed the algorithm, and a really good nature about them.

Because they don't want to say something that might be misunderstood or seem different from what might actually happen, they have become so overly literal that their offer page is essentially a list of activities. Their contracts are a list of activities, and all of their meetings or reports are a list of activities.

These guys are actually super creative, very thoughtful, and very data-driven, and they are constantly looking for alpha. Because they don't feel like there is any magic in that and it's just what you ought to do if you are a paid search agency, they undersell the complexity and the gorgeousness of their approach. Because they don't want anyone to misunderstand and feel let down.

There is perhaps this idea that if you speak about what you do in terms that are not completely factual, process-driven, and based on data that is publicly available, you are selling and obscuring, and trying to obfuscate the facts of what you deliver from your prospects and clients.

There is an equal fear that if you come out and say what it is that you do, you will have essentially commoditized your service. The only differentiator is price, and you are not the price leader, so nobody will ever do business with you.

There's a third space here that we need to focus on…it's at the intersection of direct and indirect impact. My fully abstract agency was very open about the non-results-focused things that their approach brings. They were able to articulate that their mysterious service, whatever it might be, threw off some data, messaging, and meaning that fed other parts of their client's machine. Those are the indirect benefits.

My paid search agency, on the other hand, did not consider any of the indirect benefits that they are able to generate. Their impact, as far as they are concerned, is limited to clicks and conversions. In fact, they generate an enormous wealth of audience data, merchandising data, market demand, profitability and product page detail page effectiveness data. All of these things can be implemented, understood, and applied to other parts of their clients' acquisition and growth machine. The agency was afraid to embrace those as benefits because they did not necessarily control what they were or how they'd be used.

The Abstract Agency was rightly terrified of being commoditized. The Paid Search Agency was rightly afraid of over-promising. They each over corrected.

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if you are the Abstract agency, your potential buyers might be 100% engaged, bought in, and in love with your data model, your audience and market approach, and your ability to create insights. That's because no VP of e-commerce or director of marketing wakes up and thinks our biggest problem is a poor data model that impacts our audience growth and our ability to create insights that impact our marketing. they buy a solution that fits the symptoms of their problem - declining sales, rising cost of acquisition, lower conversion rates, changing AOV, etc.

There are all sorts of symptomatologies that they experience, and that's why they are buying solutions. The abstract agency may have, in fact, 100% identified the issues causing those symptomatologies, but they didn't connect their abstract approach to an implementation that made it make sense that their prospective clients would feel relief from these symptoms.

the paid search agency diminished the impact of its execution so that it was very bare bones. If you are a marketer who has a problem that has multiple symptoms (lower conversion rates, higher cost of acquisition, all that sort of stuff we just talked about), you have to believe that the solution you buy addresses all of those things that you experience. If you deliver your service in a completely cut-and-dried, very narrow perspective, the only people who can buy your service effectively are those who have identified the basic technical execution of a particular advertising channel as the cause of all of their problems

this sounds dumb, but you notionally have to fit somewhere within the box of potential solutions that your prospective client has before they speak with you. If they are sure that their rising cost per acquisition has to do with paid search management problems, and they are coming at it from the perspective that you are not doing enough audience testing so that we can help feed the Google algorithm, it is unlikely to work.

Conversely, if they are not sure what their problem is and you come in as a one-trick pony, they cannot necessarily connect your one trick to the myriad of problems they experience.

this is a significant part of return on understanding. You must be able to look at the world the same way your prospect and target market do. You don't have to only look at the world through that lens, but you must know that lens well enough to translate what you do into a language and a shape that is recognizable when observed through that perspective.

I want you to be weird because weird is authentic, and it's the only way to stand out. I want you to be grounded because, in order to be part of the consideration set, it has to be clear what you do and for whom, so that it's clear you fit in that consideration set.

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If you are like 100% of all the other agencies in the world, you are leaning too far to the abstract or too close to the purely functional. You throw away the people who think their problems are more complex, or who don't know how to identify what their problems are exactly. Too abstract, and you get people who are afraid to engage because they don't understand what it is that you do.

quick, tell me: where are you too functional? Where are you too abstract? It's never just one of these. We are always both too functional and too abstract.

I want you to carefully look at all of the messaging that you create and deliver, and think about how your prospective client will hear it. Forget anything that you've heard from any other agency. Forget anything that you have ever read about copywriting. ignore everything that you have ever learned about positioning and sales. for just a moment, crawl into the skin and the space of your target market. Look through their eyes and try to interpret the world based on the information they have most access to. When you are able to do that well, you will hit a much healthier mix of abstract and practical and create a truly compelling value proposition. It lets you be you and lets them latch on to a completely defensible and understandable offer and engagement paradigm

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