While the first quarter was furiously busy, the end of March brought scary times. Hopefully, this will be short-lived but the news seems to get worse every day.  Stay safe everyone.

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year.  Filament has wrapped up 2019 with a very strong fourth quarter which put a bow on a very strong year, significantly ahead of 2018.  Webinar participation continues to grow with participants joining us from Europe, Asia and South America.  Thanks for joining use everyone!

Our webinar leaders have also expanded to include experts from both the client and search consultant side of the business which has given our participants a unique perspective of the industry.

We look forward to a great 2020. Happy New Year everyone!

In October 1998, I took the leap and left my corporate job. At the time, it seemed like a big risk and a scary proposition. While starting a business is not for everyone, I can honestly say that outside of marrying my wife, starting Filament was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Through the years we have worked with so many incredible, inspiring individuals and learned from them at every step. Many are still clients and friends. Some have gone on to other careers, some have retired and unfortunately, some have passed. There are too many to call out everyone but Mike Hughes, former creative leader and President at the Martin Agency, left a tremendous impression. His love of making the work better while insuring that the focus is always on the creative work and not the creative person was incredible. Sadly, Mike passed away from lung cancer 2013. He was an industry icon that will be missed.

Others have gone on to start their own agencies or rise to the very top of the industry as executives at holding companies. It is always rewarding when you see the genius in a person, then watch others see the same genius and watch the promotions that quickly follow.

It has been a wonderful 21 years and we all look forward to many more years.

Thank you all for showing your support over the many years.

Sincerely,

Mark

After three years of offering agency specific webinars to our agency clients, Filament is now in the process of creating a library of on demand webinars for our clients. We currently have over 50 webinars on various topics in a sortable database of content. We still have some quality control to go through with the developers but Webinars on Demand in on the horizon. We will keep you posted when it goes live. In the meantime, here is sneak peek…

It is always great to have an opportunity to connect with some longtime friends and celebrate the the great work in our industry. While pharma advertising only represents about half of Filament’s client base, it was still wonderful to catch up friends. Congratulations to all of the winners!

2019 has proven to be a very exciting and busy year. Training, pitch consulting and webinars are doing very well and a number of new clients have joined the Filament family of clients. Beyond client/revenue growth, website traffic is through the roof with over 1,000,000 hits to our site already this year. Admittedly, a great deal of this is search engine traffic but a great deal of it is client and prospect traffic. Very exciting!

One of the biggest challenges that faces marketers is getting the best and most effective work from their agencies. To meet this challenge, Filament has created a workshop that helps marketers better understand the creative process, which develops skills to more effectively evaluate creative and provide better feedback to the agency resulting in stronger work that moves the needle.

Part of the process is creating a better brief which is the launching point for the creative team. The next step in the workshop is learning how creatives concept off of brief. Understanding the ideation process helps marketers understand the why behind creative. Understanding the why opens the door for both better feedback and better alignment between the marketing team and the agency. Without alignment, the agency will continue to bring work that meets the agency’s goals without necessarily meeting the marketer’s goals. This lack of alignment never results in great work or a healthy agency/client relationship.

The final goal of the workshop is to give marketers tools to give feedback to the agency creative team in the language that they understand and can act upon. Often times, feedback is given about the work and the revisions are made without addressing the underlying issues with the creative. The work looks different but still has the same issues. Understanding how to give specific, actionable feedback to the agency in a style that they understand is a key to creating better work.

Marketers and agency staff, particularly the creative team, simply speak a different language. The communication gap impacts every part of the creative process from the strategy to the brief and ultimately the creative. Bridging that communication gap is the key to unlocking the real power of a strong client/agency relationship and producing outstanding work.

For more information about the workshop, contact Mark Schnurman, Filament Co-Founder, at mark@filamentinc.com or 800.509.6599 x201.

Trust me…the learnings apply to advertising.  Read here

As we start the new year, it is time to look at the progress we have made in two and a half years of hosting webinars.  Bob Linden has led the charge assembling a variety of topics and speakers that address many of the challenges facing advertising professionals.  While there have been scores of topics, some of the most popular have been Managing Creative Staff, Presenting and Sell Creative, Negotiation Skill for Account Staff, New Business Tips and many more.  For a comprehensive list of webinars available for purchase click here.  

What started as a relatively small offering has grown and grown.  This past year, Filament exceeded 10,000 viewers of its webinars.  It is great to see the market responding to some great content.  Kudos to Bob for putting together a terrific collection of speakers and topics.

2018 has been an exciting year so far for Filament webinars.  The roster of speakers is getting better and better.  Luke Sullivan (former CD from GSDM, The Martin Agency and Fallon) has been a highlight of our webinar seasons has been joined this year by Hart Weichselbaum (former head of planning at The Richards Group), Laurie Coots (former CEO of TBWA) and famed author Stephen M.R. Covey.  It has been a pleasure to be working with industry icons to develop rich content for our clients.

As our webinar offerings continue to grow, we are reaching deeper into the advertising industry to find useful insights for our audience.  In addition, we have started to reach out to thought leaders beyond advertising that can bring a fresh perspective to the challenges facing agencies and thoughts on how to deal with clients that are demanding smarter and quicker thinking from their agencies.

2019 should be an exciting year as we look to add more speakers and new topics.  We are already in discussions with some very exciting, household names in the industry and look forward to making new speaker announcements at the beginning of the year.

Have a Happy New Year everyone.