E-mail. Voice mail. Overnight deliveries. Cellular phones. Pagers. Laptop computers. These are the tools that allow you to be on the job 24 hours a day. They are also the ones that can make your life a living hellif you let them.
Chuck Carmone, president of Nail, calls technology a “two-headed monster.” Steven Rosa president of Advertising Ventures says it’s to blame for a “mind-boggling pace.” And Peter Marcionetti, senior vice president and creative director for Duffy & Shanley, says he’s “just learned to deal with it.”
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What these Providence ad executives feel about technology is neither dismay nor resignation. Instead, it’s a realization they must control the technologies that keep them employed and competitive, or risk being controlled by them.
Carmone, who opened his Dorrance Street shop with Creative Director Brian Gross last fall, is experiencing the benefits and pitfalls of technology on an almost daily basis.
A benefit: e-mail and digital imagery have allowed the agency to snag a disproportionate number of out-of-state clients compared to in-state clients. The recent landing of the Atomic Ski USA account out of Amherst, New Hampshire, is a good example.
Nail won the Atomic account after developing a trade campaign that ran in Sporting Goods Buyer, Winter Sports and Skiing News. Atomic’s marketing director e-mailed the company logo and a digital image of skis to Nail’s office, and Nail took over from there.
Thanks to technology, “we’re able to go from concept to a finished ad in three days,” Carmone said, adding “that’s what got us the account.”
Streamlined production has allowed the start-up to handle multiple accounts with the addition of only a single employee, an art director out of Boston. “We’re able to stay really low-fat here. We really run a lean agency,” Carmone said.
”With what I’m able to do on my laptop I can play account guy by day and then bring my laptop home and be the billing guy at night,” he said. “Every night and every weekend I’m carrying my laptop around.”
In terms of saving money, the routine is a good one, Carmone said. On the other hand, he’s looking forward to the day he can hire someone else and stop doing the work of two people.
The downside of technology is more often in the details, Carmone said. For example, “my biggest mistake was telling people Fedex (Federal Express) is open until 7:30 p.m.. Now they think those are our new hours.”
Technology can result in a loss of creative control. There are clients who will ask “once you design an ad, to deliver it on a disk and we’ll do the re-sizing,” Carmone said. “What’ll happen is they’ll change some copy here, cut some lines there.”
In those cases, “you end up doing (the work) for nothing practically so you can control it. Or you give it up,” Carmone said.
Rosa, of Advertising Ventures, says strong client relationships are the best way to avoid conflicts between the creative and the technological.
“When I started working my first professional job, Federal Express was the only way to go. You knew you had four days to brace yourself and kind of clear your desk. Then faxes became the rage and people wanted things acted on that same day,” Rosa said. “Now with voice mail and e-mail it’s almost instantaneous. Can you blast it to me now?”
The problem is, “creativity isn’t something you can always do on demand. Sometimes you need to do your homework. Sometimes you just have to plant the seed and walk away and sometimes it hits you in the shower,” he said.
When those conflicts arise, “you have to find the balance between what’s a true emergency” and “getting the client to understand the process,” Rosa said.
Then there’s the risk of taking on too much work because more can be done in less time.
“We never want to make promises we can’t deliver on,” Rosa said. “As a result, we’ve said no to some things which hurt us at the time but, in the long run, it’s really helped us grow.”
Marcionetti of Duffy & Shanley agrees that client relationships are key.
From e-mail to digital editing, “technology has aided us by allowing us to be more efficient in terms of doing our job,” Marcionetti said. But that doesn’t have to change the nature of the agency-client relationship.
“A good client is a good client. And a good client will say I realize it takes time to do anything,” he said. “Only bad clients will use technology as a weapon to deliver a bad product.”
