Sunday, February 17, 2008

sunday new york times, biz section, pg 5

Laggard. Instead of spending uncompensated time reading blogs like this, or posting on better ones, you could be making $535/hour brandspeeding. What's brandspeeding? According to a full page ad in today's NY Times, it's a no-nonsense, 10 day alternative to ponderous and overly expensive approaches to new products' and brand positioning creation. (Sorry, no link.)

Brandspeeding sounds like advertising on Adderall. Copy claims that it's helping companies invent a new product, create a brand positioning for it and coming up with a real introductory advertisement--all in 10 days.

How, old-school thinkers may wonder, is this possible? Because Speed allows great ideas to happen before bureaucracy and over thinking gum up the works. At last a way to eliminate client revisions (bureaucracy) and testing (over thinking) so that creatives need never go back to a drawing board.

The going rate for a 10-day brandspeeding project is $42,800. Plus expenses. Pro-rated that's $4280 a day. In a year, you could conceivably rack up over $1.5 million.

How to get started? First, get a client to buy into the process. Then, it's easy as 1,2,3:

#1. First, spend a half-day (a mere half-day!) with 15-20 client personnel in a meeting you call an invention workshop. Ostensibly, this meeting is to gather client input, but my guess is, what it's really meant to do is to fulfill marketing personnel's dream of "being creative"--something ad agency types are forever putting the kibosh on.

#2. Stage another half-day (half-day!) session with 12 invention specialists in varied creative careers. Invention specialists! Inspired title for friends and out of work colleagues (freelancers, failed novelists, artists without grants, photographers who haven't landed a job in years) who can be coerced into an afternoon at a corporate park in New Jersey--say you'll cater the meeting and it should be a cinch.

#3. Pick a product and positioning that comes out of the sessions and develop a real introductory advertisement for it. Thus cleverly short-circuiting the usual ad-making process which allows for pesky client feedback, revision rounds, legal mandates and testing.

I googled the agency that placed the ad which claims in a subhead that their client roster includes 66 of the Top 100 Global Brands. (For speed-mongers, their site takes a surprisingly long time to load.) But all I found posted were print ads for failed or ancillary brand extensions. Like a new sandwich from Wendy's featuring the dubious combination of chicken, ham and pecans. A sonorous spread for a bank service with the headline Be the early bird. Visual: Bird getting a worm.

I have to hand it to them, however, for the genius it took to come up with an agency deliverable that produces more fee than tsuris. And if they can make enough from it to place full page in the Times, just think of the riches awaiting ad grunts with talent.

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