TRIUNION Marketing

Our running group has a tradition of saying “one day closer” as we pass a cemetery on our regular route. The genesis of this long-standing ritual was two-fold: 1. We run early in the morning. So when it’s pitch black outside and nobody is completely awake, the conversations tend to be pretty interesting (what happens on the run, stays on the run and all). 2. We also notice when the equipment is out to prepare for a new resident at the cemetery. This is typically acknowledged by someone saying, in response to “one day closer,” with “but not today.” Though it sounds morbid (ok, maybe it is), the intention is a positive one. You know, in the spirit of carpe diem or momento mori. We try to recognize that every day matters and attempting to live it to the fullest is our version of optimism. Plus, we run to stay healthy to get as many good, productive days as possible. Which leads me to the topic of optimism. Kevin Kelly said, “Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve them.” Spend any time on the internet and you’ll inevitably run into doomers who dwell on all the problems all the time, but cannot envision someone (anyone…ever!) finding a solution for them. Using “always” and “never” to describe any challenge never made sense to me. Why? Because always and never are an *awfully* long time. If history has taught us anything, much of what is true at any time becomes embarrassingly false later. With experience and wisdom comes the ability to see that life moves in waves and those that remain open to positive outcomes are in the best position to uncover and capitalize on opportunities. Which is why we only hire optimists at Triunion. In fact, the reason Triunion exists is because we believe that there is a better way to serve clients and help their businesses grow than selling them things they don’t need while extracting the maximum amount in fees. The best news? This belief and mentality attracts clients who also practice optimism and build organizations positioned to win. Our challenge to you: Go spread maximum optimism and let us know what happens.

There has never been a better time to start a business. Barriers to entry are low, and the ability to directly reach your audience and key stakeholders has never been easier. But what I’ve noticed lately is these two factors are not always used responsibly. For example, we get 2-3 cold emails every day offering lead generation services. And I know we’re not alone. I understand there’s virtually no cost to spamming indiscriminately, but c’mon. If they’re doing this to us, imagine what they’re doing on behalf of their clients who are ok with this practice to all the marketing teams whose emails they’ve scraped. Do we need *hundreds* of these companies? Wait, I’ll answer: No. Which brings me to the importance of core values. Having a set of guiding principles as an organization provides a lens and a filter for clearer decision-making and better business practices. But what’s more important than having core values is abiding by them, every time and in every situation. We often say it’s not a core value until it costs money. This means you have to be willing to pass on revenue tied to work that conflicts with them. At Triunion, we believe in: Purpose – Defining the why behind what we’re doing is vital; it leads to a stronger culture and a more meaningful mission. Ours is simple: A trusted extension of your marketing team focused on growth that deploys and optimizes strategic paid media campaigns to allow you to focus on your core business. Abundance – There’s more than enough for everyone; our organizational success is cumulative. It is rooted in helping our clients succeed and does not come at the expense of others. Nobody must lose for us to win. Transparency – The more our team members and stakeholders know, the more information and data we provide, and the more collaboration in the decision-making process that happens, the more connected and committed they’ll be. Understanding the bigger picture means everyone is pulling in the same direction and operating with an ownership mindset. Happiness – Understanding the needs, wants, goals, strengths and weaknesses of our people, our clients and their brands means we’re better able to invest in them, teach them, support them, defend them, and help them be successful. If we’ve got it right and the engine runs like it should, happiness is simply the exhaust. Not sure if your agency works like this? Here’s a test: Throw out a terrible idea in your next meeting and see what they say. A good partner will (diplomatically) tell you when your ideas are bad.

Not going to discuss this week’s linen-clad, rosé-fueled Cannes festivities or the award-winning work that nobody ever saw and delivered zero business results. Instead, we’re going to discuss bloat. Many years ago, when a friend and I were solidly entrenched in middle management, we couldn’t help but notice the layers of people at our respective companies that drove up costs but seemingly added no value to clients. We would joke that if half of them didn’t show up the next day, the organization wouldn't miss a beat. In fact, it would actually work *better.* More recently he described an organization as a car with three types of people inside: 1.       Passengers. 2.       Road watchers. 3.       Driver. Passengers are fine, as long as they’re not distracting, but do nothing to help you arrive at your destination any quicker. Road watchers can help point out obstacles and possible dangers, but they’re only slightly more useful. What a successful organization needs are drivers. People willing to get behind the wheel, take ownership of a situation and guide the car (organization) toward a more prosperous destination. As Austen Allred stated more eloquently on Twitter/X, “There’s a small handful of people in every impactful organization who move mountains, and huge swaths of other people making a living from the consequences of that being true.” The unfortunate part of this reality in the agency business is that clients are paying for headcount that either a. doesn’t add value to their business or b. doesn’t work on their business at all. This, of course, is on top of funding the opaque parts of SG&A…like the overhead of “centralized services,” Class A office space, and travel & entertainment (not just to Cannes). On the other end of the spectrum are agencies like Triunion that deliver all the results without all the bloat. Our senior-level team is not learning on the job at your expense or overcharging you for junior (or non-existent) talent. Our clients benefit from our experience of investing billions in advertising across clients and categories of all shapes and sizes. Plus, we’re fully transparent with our process, your data, and your results which helps you make smarter, faster decisions. If experiencing average (or worse!) performance while paying for boondoggles and bloat isn’t your thing, we can help.

As a consumer, I’ve made a lot of “dumb” decisions. I’ll bet you have too. Example: We bought our first big car (full-size SUV) when our kids were little because, I was told, it was the only way we could participate in carpooling. In other words, if one mini-van-owning parent dropped 6 kids off then we would reciprocate by picking up those same 6 kids. Therefore, we needed a car that could accommodate this many occupants. What was annoying to my rational, media-guy brain was that we had to pay for, insure, maintain, and put gas in a car 100% of the time so that it was available ~5% of the time when we needed the extra space. More recently, some friends and I were discussing the size of homes we needed now that the kids had grown and left the house. One argued that a 4 bedroom was the right size. One bedroom for them, one for each of their two children + eventual spouse, and one for the eventual grandkids. So again I challenged: You would only need that much room for a week or so during the holidays, right? If so, wouldn’t it make sense to purchase a smaller, less expensive home and then pay for hotel rooms or a larger AirBnb when everyone is in town and pocket the difference? [Cue the “See what I live with?” look from my spouse, who is likely the only reason I have friends in the first place.] Where am I going with this? When you work in advertising you inevitably become a student of human behavior and how people make purchase decisions. Is it rational? Is it emotional (or the industry-preferred “intuitive”)? Is it practical? And, if so, how do we determine or define what is practical? Add in the dynamic of deciding as a couple and the influence of a peer group and it gets even more complicated. This not only applies to our client campaigns and their audiences, but it equally applies to our new business efforts. Long ago I learned that clients never “buy” what they need. They buy what they want. Sometimes it’s a solution to a short-term pain point or in response to an unpleasant stimulus or frustration with failing to meet business projections. Yes, it’s our job as their agency to help unlock more value from their advertising investment. But to do so, we have to first show them how we solve their immediate need. Fortunately, we have a track record of delivering results, the experience to take the risk out of the “Should we hire Triunion?” decision and an onboarding process that makes getting started with us painless. If you need a team that will challenge your ways of thinking while contributing to your growth, give us a shout.

One of the best worst decisions ever: Two years ago I skipped the upfronts to take the family to Hawaii. Missing time with celebrities, clients, and colleagues wasn’t the best worst part. It was the decision to body surf at Magic Sands Beach on our first day in Kona. Imagine a sunny day in Windex-blue water with me moving faster than ever with the upper half of my body extended beyond the wave for what seemed like an eternity. I felt like Poseidon…until I looked down and noticed I was no longer traveling over sand. Because of my rate of speed, I had missed the sandy channel between the rocks. And now with the wave breaking, I was about to meet them. A knee, shin, and elbow took the initial brunt, but because the rocks were slippery and waves kept coming, instead of being able to stand up, I was dragged back and forth over them. On my back. Like a block of cheddar on a cheese grater. As George Costanza once said, the sea was angry that day my friends. After finally making my way to the beach, I composed myself under a towel and assessed the damage. Then I returned to where the fam was hanging out past the break. They had witnessed my epic fail and I showed them my back, which was bleeding in several places. After making sure only my pride was hurt, they absolutely howled. Because, of course, I was the one who *lectured them that morning* on being careful. To this day they burst into laughter about it. Anyway, before this turns into one of those recipe sites that make you scroll through a novel before showing the ingredients, let me tie it back to advertising and what we do at Triunion: You don’t get abnormal returns from normal people. Or a normal agency. You see, abnormally strong results are the product of people who: ·     Push themselves and their clients to get comfortable outside of their comfort zones ·     Make hard, smart decisions based on experience and know-how ·     Relentlessly pursue processes and innovations that improve both efficiency and effectiveness ·     Hold themselves and their partners to the highest standards of excellence. What does this look like for clients? Well, this month one client shared that they experienced a 100% YoY increase in sales. Another challenged us last month to hit a 1000% ROAS and we did this week. Earlier I used the phrase best worst decision. By this, I mean one that might seem risky at the time but pays off in a big way. Because the impact of advertising itself can be difficult to forecast (especially when trying new things), I’m curious to hear how your results and reporting calls are going. Would considering a team of abnormally talented media pros be the best worst decision for you?

April was a month of connectors, API integrations, and custom code. Maybe not what you’d expect from a media agency whose job it is to define growth audiences, create strategies to change consumer behavior, and plan and buy media to deliver business results. But with great power comes great responsibility…to manage client activity, steward budgets accurately, and provide near-real-time visibility into performance data. As we continue to evaluate vendors and have the ‘should we build or buy’ discussions, we lament that among the dozens (hundreds?) of products and SaaS offerings currently available, none of them come close to solving a fraction of what we believe a full-service agency or client needs for reporting, visualization, insights, and decisioning purposes. In fact, what we’ve found is all require additional custom code to parse, display, roll up, track and/or share important data. So we ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t this exist? Are we the weird ones? Doesn’t any other agency do this?” The answer continues to be the same: yes, we are the weird ones. No other agency that we know of – at least of our size – does what we do to run their business. I add the size qualifier because we have seen this type of work for some clients at the holding companies. The difference, of course, is that they charge six figures for development plus five figures (or more!) for monthly maintenance. Outside the holding companies, it’s a sea of Excel spreadsheets that contain islands of disconnected client information. Not at Triunion. We believe that our clients should have full transparency into where their money is going and how it’s performing. We believe in systems and processes that require more investment upfront but allow for checks and balances and redundancies. We believe computers can do much of the "back office" work faster and more accurately than people. And because we don’t overcharge clients for busy work that should be table stakes, it should be automated to the extent possible. Which brings us back to the simple reason why we have built our proprietary infrastructure: To be a client’s most valued business partner, we must spend as much time as possible tackling their toughest business challenges. To accomplish this, we deploy a balance of automation, information, innovation, and optimization – instead of burning billable hours overcomplicating a problem or chasing down the latest version of a spreadsheet on a server.

Despite a goal to post weekly, I’ve missed a couple of weeks. Not to make excuses but a combination of work and travel got in the way. However, some really great stuff happened since the last time we spoke: ·     A client told us that their sales have increased 100% YoY with the only change being the campaign we launched. ·     Another client has increased spending by 4x with us in less than a year since we won the assignment. ·     We’re being invited to participate in more new business pursuits, which seems to indicate that we’re dialing in on our product/market fit. But all that aside, something a friend said recently has been bouncing around my brain. Before getting into it, a little background. Both of us have spent a chunk of our careers within big organizations and we were discussing how cultures and team dynamics are different in smaller, more dynamic companies. One analogy was that big company teams become complacent, similar to domesticated house pets who’ve become dependent on their keepers for survival. If you've ever thought, “If I were in charge, this is what I’d do (or would’ve done)” or "If they'd just let us do X" this could be describing you. It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially after the results of a decision are apparent. However, it’s entirely different when you’re the one making the call that will impact your reputation and possibly the organization overall with access to whatever information may or may not be available. Nobody gets it right every time, but it’s also more difficult than you think. Anyway, to continue… Paraphrasing here, but to bring about a culture change within his line of business, his challenge to the team was this: ·     We need to change from being indoor cats to outdoor cats. ·     Indoor cats are protected and operate with low levels of risk. ·     Outdoor cats have more freedom, fewer constraints, and eat what they catch – while learning quickly about all the stuff that can kill them. Yes, of course, it can be scary out there. But, it’s also where the greatest adventures happen, where one learns the most, and where it’s possible to make the biggest impact and achieve the greatest rewards. What kind of rewards? Well, yesterday a client told us, “You’ve built yourselves a great agency.” So we have that going for us.

There are two kinds of scope creep. One good and one bad. Let’s start with the bad. This is where the amount of work done by the agency increases over time without a commensurate increase in compensation. Because we’re in the service business, oftentimes “making an exception” and “doing a favor” is fine. But, when the exceptions become the rule without recognition of the value being delivered, it's an issue. Anyone who’s worked at an agency has experienced it. Sometimes there is a fine line between being a responsive, flexible partner and getting taken advantage of. The approach to resolve this is to have “the talk.” If you’re not familiar, this requires dusting off the Agency Agreement’s staffing plan, scouring timesheets, estimating excess hours, and calculating the burn rate. Then the uncomfortable part: explaining that they have a choice to either start paying for the difference or agree to remove existing scope and deliverables elsewhere. Fun conversation, right? 😬 The client/agency relationship is, by nature, imbalanced. While either party can fire the other, only one – the client – can make the hiring decision. And because it’s easier to keep a client than to win a new one, agencies generally try not to antagonize clients. Healthy client/agency relationships, on the other hand, are based upon transparency, respect, shared goals, and performance. With recognition of value and alignment in ambitions, good things happen. This leads us to the second kind of scope creep. Because Triunion is independent, we can be more client and less (not) shareholder-focused. What this means in practice is that we often answer questions like these: 👉 What is working? 👉 What do we want to do more of? 👉 What are we doing that we don’t need to do (or can automate)? 👉 What are we missing? 👉 How can we contribute more to our client growth? 👉 How do we keep the momentum going? 👉 WHAT’S NEXT?   You see, bringing solutions TO clients is the opposite of managing scope creep FROM them. It’s the difference between leadership and servility. And it leads to productive conversations about the value and cost of new initiatives. Balance is not something that exists in the client/agency relationship. It’s something you create.

What keeps you up at night?   I ask because I’ve known a lot of salespeople who will do (seemingly) ridiculous things to motivate themselves to make more sales.   Like what?   👉 Buying a super expensive house for which they barely qualify. 👉 Leasing a new car with a massive monthly payment. 👉 Booking a pricey non-refundable vacation.   This is an insane way to “find” motivation to me. And every one of these hanging over my head -- and balance sheet -- would keep me from sleeping. But for some, the pressure of debt keeps them on the hunt for the next deal to close.   The principals at Triunion see it differently.   Maybe it's because we’re rational, math-minded media pros, but the absence of this stress allows us to make unbiased recommendations to our clients. Plus, we get a kick out of telling them to save their money when that is what we truly believe…even if it’s contrary to the interests of our for-profit entity.   Of course, we’re coin-operated as is required in this capitalistic society in which we live. But wisdom, experience, and a strong set of core values give us perspective and the ability to see things along a longer time horizon.   We believe:   💡 When you’re not distracted by a mountain of debt or expenses, you make better decisions. 💡 When you’re not expected to deliver this quarter’s targets to Wall Street, you make better decisions. 💡 When you don’t have to sell the products of the latest company your CEO decided to buy, you make better decisions.   This advantage allows us to think bigger picture and long-term versus thinking reactively and short-term. Which is not only common in advertising, but often to the detriment of the client’s business.   Don’t get this confused with complacency, however, as we have big goals aligned with client success. It’s simply the difference between a transactional relationship and a strategic one focused on performance & growth.

There’s a Word doc on my desktop named “10 Problems to Solve.” Here’s the thing: they’re not problems. It’s just a list of projects that need to be done. But I like the drama and urgency of seeing the word Problem. As we embark on Q2, now is a good time to revisit the things you want to achieve this year and *also* address the things preventing you from achieving them. Back in our holding company days, our Outlook calendars were chock full of meetings. Plus the meetings about the meetings. And the follow-up meetings after the meetings. Sadly, this never-ending series of meetings meant that more of our time was scheduled with obstacles than with space to attain goals. And when an organization’s priorities (and your goals) are not aligned with calendars, innovation and progress suffer. Here's how we solve that at Triunion: 1.       Write before action. Researcher Conor White-Sullivan writes down what he plans to do, and how he plans to do it (in detail) before he does it.   Why? “Because sometimes I realize as I am halfway through writing things out that there is a fundamentally better approach." "...my main reason for writing things down is because I want to find out if there is work I can safely avoid." "Another advantage of breaking down the steps into detailed and discreet chunks of work -- you don't have to do everything yourself." Hence, the Word doc on my desktop. 2.       Understand the Job(s) To Be Done “Jobs to be done" is applicable far beyond product innovation or strategy. It applies to everything we do at work. Clients “hire” media through us to support their marketing objectives in the same way we “hire” and build software tools to automate and streamline our operations. The better the understanding of what we are trying to accomplish, the more effective we can be in applying our unique set of skills and services. 3.       Ask why three times. If there’s one piece of advice that will save you countless hours of work (and frustration), it’s this: understand the context of requests first. How? By asking “why?” three times to get to the real root of a question/request/problem. Here’s a true(ish) example: Them: can you verify the amount of the monthly budget? Us: why do you need me to verify the budget? Them: because we need to send it to the client and want to make sure it’s correct. Us: why are we questioning if the budget is correct? Them: because it’s less than we were carrying previously. Us: It shouldn’t be less than before. It appears that you’ve only included the budget for a portion of the scope and need to include the other portions as well. We get that agency life means that we’re continually busy and moving a hundred miles an hour. BUT… We believe that if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it again?