How they put their MIND to work: an advertising agency changes its information strategy

Information Outlook, Feb, 2005 by Kristine Spanier, Deb Rash

Working in the advertising industry can be brutal because of tight budgets and tighter deadlines, but it has its perks, too. If Carmichael Lynch, where we both worked, reaches its financial goals for the year, it closes up shop for the week between Christmas and the new year. At the end of 2001 employees were once again rewarded with a free week off. Kristine Spanier, who is on sabbatical from the firm, had been a solo librarian at the agency for the previous two years. She took that time to spend a leisurely holiday in Florida with her husband. Upon her return, however, she discovered that life at the agency would never be the same.

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Beginning with the Name

While she was sunning on the beach, the president of the agency had been with his own family conceptualizing new plans for the agency. His biggest idea was to put a renewed emphasis on knowledge and information. He began by creating a whole new department, loosely titled "Marketing Intelligence." Kristine's supervisor, Doug Hagge, would be the director of Marketing Intelligence, and he would oversee the Knowledge Center, as well as a group of planning consultants who would focus on primary research.

Our department's mission: to become a more proactive resource to help employees become better informed and smarter on the job. We had a lot of ideas for how we wanted to get more information in front of employees, but there was a catch. In order to continue fulfilling research requests, as well as develop new information products and services, we needed a second librarian.

However, we couldn't hire a second librarian until we increased usage and awareness of the Knowledge Center. To do that, we were determined to be "top of mind" with employees so they would remember to turn to the Knowledge Center first whenever they needed information. We decided to jump in and start creating the products and services we could handle, and we hoped that the outcome would be what we envisioned.

The first task was taking the "Marketing Intelligence" name and making it something bigger and more marketable within the agency. We renamed it Marketing Intelligence and New Discoveries so we could have an acronym, MIND, at our disposal. We hoped that MIND would also make us look like the brains of the agency as well as be attention-getting enough to help people remember the name of our brand-new department.

Creating New Services

We used the acronym immediately with our first new service, a quarterly series called openMIND which features speakers who bring creativity to their life's work with provocative ways of thinking. These speakers do not have to have anything to do with advertising and marketing. Our goal is to get our employees to think a little differently and to open up their minds to something new.

So far our speakers have included an FBI profiler, an action figure artist (in this case we rented a school bus and toured his studio), an archaeologist from the University of Minnesota, a color specialist from the Pantone Institute, and a style expert. With each speaker we create a name for the session such as "Human Behavior: Lessons from an FBI Profiler" or "Dirt, Bones and Dark Places: The History of Tel Anafa" (the archaeologist's visit coincided with Halloween). Working in an ad agency has its advantages. We have had a designer help to create posters for openMIND that we hang through the agency. They have a tear-off section which reveals who will be speaking. The tear-off was created as a teaser in hopes of encouraging curiosity.

Next we created MINDreader, a monthly summary of the seven most interesting trend articles we have come across in our personal reading. We create a PDF document complete with the summaries and copyright-free visuals and send it out via e-mail.

Soon after that we rolled out abstractMIND which is a monthly repackaging of a book summary service. Each employee is able to read eight-page summaries of the top two or three business books a month--always helpful at cocktail parties or client meetings. It gives our co-workers a heads up on what is being talked about in our industry and the greater business world, and gives it to them in a format that fits into their busy schedules.

Our most recent product is alertMIND, "a daily dose of Marketing Intelligence and New Discoveries" delivered via e-mail that contains all of our client and agency news of the day and links to national advertising/marketing columns and other articles of interest. Keeping in touch with what is going on at Carmichael Lynch and the industry allows us to select articles that will be of the greatest interest to the agency. We are able to send this out every day by 10 am. We have received the strongest and most positive feedback on this product, including:

* "alertMIND rocks!"--president and managing partner

* "This is a GREAT service!"--chairman and chief creative officer

* "This thing is great ... I really think it will help us be better stewards of our clients' businesses."--director of account management