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.
I don’t often post about webinar content. With a half dozen or more webinars per month, plus existing client work, it simply becomes too much. That being said….Damn! Luke Sullivan is amazing!
If you haven’t heard Luke in a webinar or in person, you are missing one of the industries most insightful and entertaining speaker. His years at Fallon, The Martin Agency and GSDM give him incredible perspective on what makes for great work, how to make and how to manage the staff that make it.
Part of the genius of Luke’s webinars is that he is no longer directly tied to the industry. He is now the dean of the ad school at Savannah College of Art and Design. Because he is no longer in the industry, he is not concerned about his next job. As a result, he gives you his honest, unfiltered point of view about advertising. Suffice it to say, that Luke unfiltered is both educations and very entertaining.
Filament is happy to announce our 20th Anniversary. What started with a commitment to bring personalized training to a few clients has grown into only communcations consulting firm exclusively for the advertising and communications industry.
A few trusting, faithful clients in the early years like the Martin Agency, Grey, Siddall and GSW got in at the ground floor. Fast forward 20 years and Filament has clients in the North and South American, Europe, Australia and Asia. We are a client in Africa away from covering the world (no offence to Antarctica, but without an agency, you are not a continent to us).
Thank you to all our clients over the years that have helped us to embrace that ad industry.
MM and M magazine, the industry leading trade publication for the pharma advertising community engaged Filament President Mark Schnurman to be the keynote speaker at their conference on The Evolution of the Advertising industry. The conference took place in Manhattan on October 4, 2018. Mark shared the stage with Ed Mitzen, founder of Fingerpaint as well as other industry leaders participating in various panel discussions.
Mark was asked to speak about the changes in the advertising pitch landscape and offer insight as to how to better compete in a crowded pitch market. Agency execs, new business staff as well as clients peppered Mark with questions and stories about pitches gone bad. Nearly 100 advertising and marketing folks were in attendance discussing how the industry is changing and what agencies need to do in order to not just survive but thrive in this new advertising universe.
