There are roughly 40 advertising agencies in the great state of Mississippi, give or take a handful of boutique shops. As of 2017, there were almost 14,000 advertising agencies in the country—and the industry was growing. How many are there today? Oodles.
Everyone’s a Butterfly
One of the earliest steps in the branding process is developing one’s unique selling proposition (USP). It’s your je ne sais quoi; that thing that makes your company more appealing than your competition.
To nail one’s USP, to really get it right, it’s important to know what makes you the same as your competitors before you try to embrace what makes you different. With that in mind, here are a couple ad agency truths:
- We are not so great at practicing what we preach (read: advertising ourselves).
- We are all chasing the same thing, more or less.
As We Say, Not as We Do
Agencies explain their lack of advertising in a number of ways.
“There’s No Time”
Some may say that their team doesn’t have the time to market their own agency. The advertising world moves at a break-neck pace. We are often juggling multiple clients and jobs each day. So, that can put agency agendas at the bottom of a very long to-do list.
“There’s No Need”
Others may think that there’s no need to advertise. Growth isn’t a priority, and their dance card is full. They may have a large account or two, and that’s enough. Better to keep them happy than to add new business and potentially clutter a streamlined system, right? (Wrong, but that’s another blog.)
Our Excuse
Mad Genius? We’re no exception. We fall into the first group. We’ve got a whole lot of Mad Genius marketing efforts cooking, and we’re working hard to get to them. We absolutely believe in the need to advertise our agency, just as soon as we can get to it.
The Grind
It wouldn’t be fair to say that if you’ve been to one advertising agency you’ve been to them all. It might, however, be fair to say that if you’ve been to one advertising agency you’ve been to a lot of them.
Agency Clichés
We won’t write down all the things you likely saw at your agency visit like some Where’s Waldo checklist, but you probably heard the words “strategy” and “results,” glanced at a few trophies or awards (often at the entrance), and had a room full of people in dress-casual attire smiling at you just a bit too intensely (except for the tattooed Creative Director who only wears t-shirts, they never smile).
Are we painting with a broad brush here? Yes. Are we wrong? Not really.
Ad people are a very specific breed of human. Though each employee comes wrapped in a specific discipline, we are all attracted to the pursuit of the perfect moment. That’s what we’re chasing: the nirvana of unification when a story is elevated by all involved to move an audience into action.
Embracing Our Tropes
Cliché? Yes. But Mad Genius embraces our tropes. Most of our web team likes to work in the dark by themselves, our creatives are too loud, the production folks tend to think they’re the rock stars, and the media team sees everything as numbers like Neo in The Matrix. And that’s all great because it works.
What’s the Difference?
All right then, what’s Mad Genius’s USP? How do we elevate ourselves above our industry peers? What’s our je ne sais quoi amongst the oodles of agencies increasing in number year over year?
Evaluating the Uniqueness of a “U”
We should say something like “Creative Fusion,” which is the strategy behind everything we do (it’s all over our website). Does it set us apart from most agencies? Probably. Our infrastructure allows multiple disciplines to touch one another and that cultivates fresh perspectives.
Or this is where we could give a line, like “Smart works hard here” (also on our website). And it does. “We are a full-service advertising agency steered by strategy, driven by data, and powered by people.” All true.
But here’s a truth many ad agencies may not want to admit: the strength of those almost-14,000 ad agencies is the more than 191,000 people (as of 2017) people who work within them. It’s the talent, entrepreneurship, initiative, passion, and prowess of those who do the deed. Smart doesn’t work hard, and the creative doesn’t achieve fusion if the people don’t put their everything into the work.
An Agency Celebrating Creativity
Specifically, Mad Genius is built by and for people who value creativity—the process of being creative, the work itself, and the failures inherent in the effort. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on something for a client or something for ourselves, it’s going to embrace creativity. And you can trust that the moment we think we’ve found a solution that looks like a solution another agency could’ve come up with, we’re going to find five more fresh ideas.
Mad Genius isn’t about being different for the sake of being different. This isn’t vanity. We embrace the act of creativity and leverage our collective experiences to generate the most fulfilling work for our clients and ourselves—that’s our unique selling proposition. We’re special because we celebrate the creative in the destination and the journey.
We wholeheartedly love what we do. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Get Creative With Mad Genius
Interested in what you and Mad Genius might do together? Let’s talk.