Holiday Shopping

Will you do more of your holiday shopping on-line or at retail outlets this year?

While I've been an on-line shopper for years - this year is the tipping point in which our family will be doing more on-line shopping versus visiting the retail store. Free shipping and great deals seem to be the rage this year for on-line shopping outlets.

The convenience of sitting on your laptop at home and picking stuff out has always been the draw for on-line shopping. But with all the incentives and free shipping this year - it is the year where on-line shopping will dominant in the Jenson household. Just last night on "Cyber Monday" we made some purchases on Land's End and got $20 off a purchase of $75 and received free shipping. With this benefit why would you even consider going out to a store and battle the crowds?

So this year we just put some Christmas music on the old iPod and shop away on the laptop. It's the future and for us this year we will be making the majority of our purchases on-line.

So how about you - are you going to be more of an on-line shopper or do you need to hit the stores to do your shopping? Let me know what your plans are.

How Goodby got back on track

When people in the advertising industry think about agencies that do great television advertising the usual names that come up are Fallon, BBDO, Crispin and Goodby Silverstein.

So I was excited to hear Derek Robson the Managing Director of Goodby talk about "Agency Evolution - Reinventing Goodby, Silverstein & Partners" at a Minnesota AdFed Breakfast this past Wednesday.

Derek was on the front line of the Agency Evolution at Goodby when he was brought in 2005 by Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein to change the course of the agency. The agency was fearful of becoming "irrelevant". This from an agency that typically churned out the best television creative year after year for clients like Saturn and Budweiser. But with tidal shift of interactive the leaders at Goodby felt that they were not ready for this shift.

Derek an Account Planner by trade from BBH in London set up a thorough assessment of GSP from clients, consultants, the trade press and from employees. His findings were pretty eye-opening. He heard often from the trade press they didn't align GSP with integration - ouch. And when visiting consultants he was able to see the video materials that other agencies sent out - very impressive "stories" about the integrated work that they did. He found that Goodby just had a TV reel and nothing else to show consultants. So clearly this was one thing that they needed to change - the "perception" that GSP was not just a TV shop but showing the other work that they indeed did.

His assessment was that things needed to change because in May '05 the creative work was 82% in traditional media and 18% interactive. Just one year later in May '06 it had changed to 58% traditional media and 42% interactive. So while the tidal wave of change was happening with the shift to increasing amounts of interactive work the creative department was staffed with more than half of the team being considered more traditional in their orientation. They started to shift this by pairing up a traditional and interactive creatives - and certainly there was turnover with those who were not willing to jump on the interactive bandwagon.

And since this shift in agency focus started five years ago - 75% of the staffed has turned over. They have recruited from areas like improv, gaming developers to content curators. It's a very impressive story and gives notice to all agencies out there to continue to evolve and change into a more digital mindset.

He closed with a great quote "Agencies of the future may not be the Agencies that have dominated in the past." How true this will be.

What do you think? Share your thoughts.