We will never be a ‘true’ Ad Agency because we are here to fix the printer
Are you here to fix the printer?
These words will stay in my head for months, years maybe. Not because someone asked that of us, but because well we are geeks at heart and hence geekdom falls under this sudo type of demeanor that you really can’t shake.
About two weeks ago we visited a company on the other side of town that had a project for us to bid on. The project was somewhat intensive. They have this monster of a website all in static HTML with all sorts of variations with the no less than 100 differing templates they have running from page to page.
They needed some sort of CMS system that would fix that monster, and keep their “frontpage expert” off the server.
We spoke over the phone and realized the size and scope of the project. The website is huge, thousands of pages, all used with a mixture of some template, and gasp.. Frontpage. The company in question had decided to float an RFP out to allow others to bid on it to fix the problem. Virtually everyone replied with the standard $85,000 one time and $5000-$10,000 a year in proprietary software licensing fees with the company not even given FTP access since they don’t own the code to change anything. Hence they get the standard 200 dollars an hour to change an image somewhere.
Being the type of people we are, our CMS of choice for the client was an opensource platform with no fees and the overall cost being far less than the others. Though we were not charging anywhere near the $100,000 for the first year everyone else was, it still was a pretty substantial project that justified us driving out to meet the client across town.
We dusted off our seldom used dress pants and button down shirt, wiped the dust off our dress shoes and went out and met the client. Remember now, we are not really used to this.
This is where it got weird. We know we are not the $100 a plate people where we dine and get our potential clients drunk enough to sign a contract. We are just InterActive Marketers that see more of a computer screen than humans. Our sole mission in life is to make sure that the site is designed in a way that the client can use it, the visitors can use it and that it ranks well in the search engines.
However when we showed up at the location the lady at the front desk, her eye lit up like seeing us was like seeing the man of her dreams. She rushed out the sign form for us, and quickly offered coffee for us.
As we were in their break room discussing if we needed 1 or 2 search engine readable sitemaps, We knew that Yahoo had problems using the sitemaps.org standard so we were discussing if we needed a Yahoo urllist.txt She overheard us and then looked at us and stated ‘Wait? You are not here to fix the printer?”
Being as polite as possible and choosing the most simple words I could, I explained to her that we are here to help create and market the company though the internet.
She replied “So you guys don’t fix printers?”
My programmer replied “I am sorry, we code websites”
This is the kicker, and this is where I fully understood why we will never really fit in with the older ad agency types.
She goes “I am sorry, you guys just sort of looked like type that can fix printers, you had this hard drive thingy around your neck, you are both carrying laptops and you just have this geeky look”.
Lucky for us the VP of Marketing came in and saved us from this women.
At least she didn’t tell us where the duster and mop are.
The best news is that the VP of Marketing said that our proposal was the best by far.
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You will notice on this blog that we are the oddball in the marketing area. Many of the other posters here are Ad Agency Executives, owners of moderate sized firms that have a strong local or regional presence, then you have us. The InterActive Marketing guys, the coders, the developers, the guys that worry more about Google rankings than look and feel. This whole underground of marketing, but as the sole InterActive only firm, you tend to see us more in shorts, t-shirts, anything but ties and what would be considered formal business attire. Hence I guess this is the reason we stuck out like a sore thumb.
on March 16th, 2007 at 8:56 am
I’m glad to see that you’re using open source for WCM (and glad to see that you know how! It’s actually shocking that more ad agencies aren’t like you - how can the others effectively serve their clientele if they can’t build the vision they talk about?). You’re probably using Drupal, Plone, Mambo, Joomla!, or Typo3, all of which are great.
I’d like to ask that you give us a chance, too. Alfresco. Founded by the founder of Documentum and comprised of the core development teams from Documentum and Interwoven, we offer an enterprise class ECM system (Web Content Management, Document Management, Records Management, Image Management, Business Process Management) that is 100% open source. No proprietary upgrade. No silly hybrid approach. It’s all GPL, though your customers could get a commercial license from us if they wanted to.
It’s already powering the websites of several of the Global 2000. Please give it a try.
Matt
on March 16th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
haaahaha!!!
Hilarious!!!
Thank you for sharing that moment. Thousands of geeks like me can perfectly relate.
on March 16th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Our firm could have hundreds of employees.. and I still would rather talk to the guy figuring out how to configure something on Ubuntu than the guy that does the accounting for the firm.
on March 16th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
You should have fixed the printer. Really. How hard could it have been? And what good will you would have earned.
Definitely should have fixed the printer