I was driving my son somewhere yesterday, and he was watching TikTok videos. All I could hear was the sounds, and Kelis's 2023 earworm "Milkshake" starts pumping out of his tinny iPhone speaker.

That this song has been stuck in my head for days, and I think the only way to get it out is to use it in this newsletter. Obviously, the character Kelis is talking about something different than I am, but stick with me for just a minute, will ya?

Kelis → A “milkshake” is something boys want. Kelis wants the attention of milkshake seeking boys. So she makes a "highly-desirable” milkshake. The boys are drawn to it. Everybody’s happy.

Agency → A “better, healthier business” is something that brands want. Agency wants the attention of “better, healthier business”-seeking brands. So Agency creates a “highly-desireable” way to get a “better, healthier business”. The brands are drawn to it. Everybody’s happy. (And hopefully, the chorus to this masterpiece will stop galloping through my head over and over and over again.)

I'm glad you asked…because I have to extend this metaphor a little bit (I can hear the groans from here…). You'll notice that the milkshake was for boys. It wasn't for girls or anyone else. There was a target. There was an intentional match.

In order to create that match between a highly desirable milkshake and a milkshake that the boys would find highly desirable, Kelis’ narrator needed to understand what would make a highly desirable milkshake for those boys. She had to have real and true insight into the flavor, consistency, etc. of the milkshake that the boys favored. On on top of that, she had to have the culinary skill to create this magnificent confection.

Okay, I'll stop here. No more milkshake talk, but so far this plan to get the chorus out of my head is backfiring, so I can't promise I will stick to this.

In order for you to make something that the brands you want to bring to your yard get excited about, you need to know what that is. Then you've got to create that exciting thing so that it is most attractive to the brands that you really want to come to your yard.

What happens a lot is that we think we make a milkshake that will bring all the boys to the yard, but in addition to those milkshake-seeking boys, we end up attracting milkshake-seeing girls, turtles, Labrador retrievers, and, invariably, hedgehogs.

When all those milkshake seekers show up in your yard, you are probably going to want to try to sell to all of them.

News Flash: It is nearly impossible to sell the same thing to turtles and Labrador retrievers and hedgehogs and girls and boys. So you tell yourself that you really just want to sell to the milkshake-seeking boys, but just this once you'll sell to a milkshake-seeking turtle and a milkshake-seeking hedgehog. Six weeks later, your yard is full of a motley congregation of boys, girls, turtles, dogs, hedgehogs, and probably even a couple of toads. So you can't really attract the boys that you want.

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For long-time readers of this newsletter, it's going to be shocking to you:

Yeah - the way to make sure that you've got only a buy-attracting milkshake is to understand them, to know who you are and what you bring to the table, and to have a point of view.

What I want you to do is think about each of these elements as a forcing function that mandates your output in terms of marketing and content, and thinking is truly focused on the “better, healthier business”-seeking brands.

Is the content you are creating, or the words you are about to say, or the presentation you are assembling, reflect everything that you know and understand about the brands that you want to help create a “better, healthier business”. The truly difficult part here is that you were only looking to attract the brands that want a “better, healthier business”, So you are going to want to make the unique needs, desires, and concerns of the brands that want specifically a “better, healthier business” are at the core of the meaning of the content you are creating. We often mix definitions like “better, healthier business” with a similar but different definition like “we want to grow 3x in the next 12 months”. In one respect, those definitions might seem the same because growing 3x in the next 12 months could deliver a better, healthier business, but the needs of those milkshake-seeking brands are different. Rapid scale demands a different perspective than sustainable growth.

Are the stories that you are telling, the insights that you are sharing, and the perspective of what's going to happen next totally focused on the “better, healthier business”-seeking brands? If the case studies that you share are all focused on chasing a new audience and growth at all costs, kind of thinking and approaches, those “better, healthier business”-seeking brands aren't likely to find that milkshake all that delicious.

It might seem wrong to not share stories that show off your expertise or point at your incredible technical execution, but if they aren't speaking in a language that resonates with your target “better, healthier business”-seeking brands, they are more off-putting than attractive. You've got to match your storytelling and your vision so that it is in alignment with what you perceive the vibes, vision, and values of “better, healthier business”-seeking brands. This it might mean that you need to reinterpret your history somewhat and adjust your case studies from "we drove an 11,742% increase in return on ad spend" to "we managed a consistent cost per acquisition throughout a stage of sustainable growth", even if it is drawing a different conclusion from the same set of circumstances and facts.

Positioning, as we know, is arguably the hardest thing to define in this context. For many agencies, positioning is an exercise that happens every five years at a management off-site & the output is stored away in some Google Doc, collecting digital dust until the next off-site.

Positioning is where you find yourself on the map of the market. It’s the intersection of target market need, your capabilities, your future vision, and your point of view. There is no positioning without considering and overlapping all of those vectors. If your capabilities don't match up with the target market need, that's a position you can't defend. Imagine part of an agency's positioning included "brands that spend six figures a month on Meta" but they've never managed more than $5,000 a month in media spend, that is not a defensible position.

Positioning, in its most abstract form, is a collection of things that you say about your agency, the market you serve, and the clients you want to work with that wouldn't be as true if some other agency said them.

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You might think that all of these filters would essentially diminish your opportunity because it generates messaging and activities only attract the milkshake-seeking boys, and some part of your brain thinks that the backyard, full of girls, turtles, Labrador retrievers, and hedgehogs, and even those aforementioned toads, is a more target-rich environment. It feel like there’s more opportunity because your yard is crowded.

At the beginning of your agency, before you have refined your service offering, your market insight and your depth of understanding, a crowded yard actually might have more opportunity. Truth be told, however, it's easier to acquire the “better, healthier business”-seeking brands because you only have to learn how to tell one set of stories, embrace one set of values, and share a singular, cohesive vision of what happens next.

These three elements - Return on Understanding | Vibes, Vision & Values | Positioning - work together to eliminate non-accretive thinking, stray ideas, and things that might be confusing to your market.

The content, case study, examples, and insights that you create after they've been pushed through the forcing function of our elements are sharper, more effective, and are going to increase the velocity with which your milkshake-seeking buyers show up to the yard. They dramatically increase the chances that the milkshake you serve is going to be the best one that they've ever had.

Whew - I think I did it. Thanks for your help - this quartet has left my brain - hopefully it didn't infect yours:

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