Turn your agency into a content powerhouse with Scott Ginsberg

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid sized agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. We’ll show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. We want to help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want down the road, sellable. With 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. As always, please know that I am super grateful that you are hanging out with me. I know you’re busy and I know your time is at a premium and so I am very grateful to have some of it. So I promise I am going to earn it with this episode. So before I tell you a little bit about our guest and what we’re going to talk about, I want to remind you of a couple of resources that we have on the AMI website that I want you to be able to go and download. The first one is so many of you struggle. You wrestle with the idea of, should I niche and if I should niche, what niche and all of that? So I actually developed kind of a report card that you can grade different ways you could niche your agency. So it might be by an audience, it might be by an industry, could be by a deliverable. So you can basically … It’s an Excel spreadsheet and you list all the different ways that you’re considering niching. And then you answer a bunch of questions along the side and give yourself a letter grade for each of the niches and it does the math for you and voila.

It will tell you which niche you’re already furthest along in to be able to step into a position of authority and to claim that position of authority. So if you want to download that tool all you have to do is head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com/nichecriteria. So again, agencymanagementinstitute.com/nichecriteria. So hopefully that’s helpful. Another thing I want to remind you about is that we put together a mini course on sort of thinking about how you want your work life to be and how you want it to interweave with your personal life and what you want for the future of your professional career. And so if you go to the Agency Management Institute’s website and you go under how we help and under that tab there’s going to be something called mini courses. And you can grab that mini course and self administer it. And I think you’re going to be surprised at some of the things you learn. I did an exercise like this. I’ve sort of modified this for agency folks. But I did an exercise like this many years ago. And I will tell you that the life that I painted for myself really had no resemblance to the life that I was living at that time.

Fast forward about 10 years, I am living that life for the most part. And so happy to have a conversation with you about why that is or how I think that happened. And if you go to the website, that landing page, I explain a little bit of why I think it works the way it does. But I think you’re going to find both it’s very insightful as to what you really want and two, I think you’re going to find fascinating and gratifying that you can have that life even if it doesn’t look like your life today. Your work life today. So I encourage you to try both of those tools.

All right, so let me tell you about today’s episode. I have known Scott Ginsberg for many years. If you have heard of Scott, you have probably heard of Scott in relation to the fact that he is known as the nametag guy. So Scott for over 20 years has worn a nametag that says, “Hi, my name is Scott” on whatever he’s wearing. His shirt or whatever. Jacket. Over 20 years he’s been wearing this nametag. And he wears it every single day all day long. It’s not a shtick. It is just what he does. And we’re going to talk a little bit about why he started it and what he’s learned from it over the years and why he continues to do it. But Scott has worked in many agencies. He’s a prolific writer. He’s a creator. And I want to talk to him about his creation process. He’s written like 40 books and he’s … I don’t think he’s 40 yet. Maybe 40 but not much older than that. So he’s written 40 books. I think he’s put out 12 albums of his original music. He’s written thousands and thousands of articles.

One of the things I find fascinating about Scott is he speaks all over the world. You name a conference, he has spoken at the conference. He has never given the same speech twice. So that’s what kind of a creator he is. So I want to just tap into his process. How he does it, how he keeps his bucket full, how he has over his career encouraged other people to be great creators. So this is going to be a fun conversation. I think it’s going to be a high energy conversation. But I’m hoping it inspires you to think about how you and the agency create. And are there other ways to think about going about that work? All right. So without further ado, let’s just jump right into it because I’m excited to introduce you to him.

Scott, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Scott Ginsberg:

My pleasure. I wish I could be there in Des Moines hanging out but this is going to have to do.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I know. We were just saying before we hit the record button, it’s been a few years since we got to hang out together so I look forward to making that happen again soon.

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. I know. I miss the Midwest being up here in New York. I don’t get back there as much as I’d like to and now that things are opening up I shall be back soon.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. And I get to New York fairly often so maybe I’ll return the favor and catch you in your home turf.

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

So let’s start with telling folks a little bit about you. I gave them a little sense of sort of that you’ve just created this prolific amount of business of guides and material over the years. But it’s all started with this notion of a nametag. Based on your website on the day you and I are recording it, you have been wearing your nametag for 7,489 days. So what’s up with that?

Scott Ginsberg:

That’s 21 years for people who don’t like math. And it started out, like most things in college, a goofy experiment. A fun little joke that I was playing. Like yeah, let me leave this event that I’m at and leave my nametag on my shirt just for fun. See if I can say hi to some people. And it was pretty transformative immediately. Everybody was saying hi. All these cute girls were greeting me out of nowhere. I’m like, “Oh, this is awesome.” And so it kind of changed the dynamic of communication and I just … The first couple years of college were really lonely for me and I was struggling to figure out where I fit in, where I belonged and who my people were. And the nametag didn’t necessarily find that immediately but it did allow people to see me in a way I hadn’t been seen before and that was really powerful. So it just led to this chain reaction of sort of going viral on campus.

This is 2000 so this is before social media. Probably before Google existed. So viral in the very grassroots sense of the word. In terms of like over six months, people just say, “Hey, you’re the nametag guy.” And I’m like, “What the hell is going on? So crazy.” And I sort of started in earnest documenting kind of the stories and the observations, sort of nonscientific sociological field research and eventually published my first book which was called Hello, My Name is Scott. And that actually did go viral for real in terms of CNN, USA Today, all of that kind of stuff in 2002. And boy, that really blew things up. I’ve been riding my own coattails for the past 20 years since then.

Drew McLellan:

It’s still working for you then. So part of what you discovered there with the nametag was it made you approachable. It made you accessible in way that even though you were dressed exactly the same, you looked exactly the same, people just felt like the nametag was a little bit of an invitation. And I know you spent a lot of time, not just looking at the nametag aspect of it but just thinking about the idea of approachability in business. So talk to me a little bit about sort of your take on that, its importance, how short of wearing a nametag we become more approachable. Because for a lot of our listeners, they’re trying every day to figure out how to connect with strangers who might be a prospect, might be a client and it starts with being approachable.

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah I think so. And there’s a couple ways to look at it. The word approachable comes from the Latin derivative which means to come nearer to. And I think that’s a really interesting way to frame it because think of all the things we want to come nearer too. So in your case for doing business development we want to come nearer to people would would potentially hire us to do agency work for them. So to come nearer to them it’s like okay, physically, do we have to come near to them? Great. How do we make that happen? Does that mean the way that I interact at an event out in the community? What can I do to physically be nearer to people? Which is kind of hard in the past year. But it also intellectually there’s a way to come nearer to people and certainly from a digital perspective, agencies are sort of known for having the cobbler’s kid syndrome where they’re really good at building brands and generating materials for their clients but when it comes to their own blog they have two posts and they’re from 2012.

Drew McLellan:

So painful. So painful.

Scott Ginsberg:

I’ve worked at a variety of agencies over the years and I’ve struggled with that. Like, “Guys, what are you doing? We have to do this.” So that’s another way that you become approachable, certainly digitally, by sharing your worldview and your philosophy and letting people know hey, here’s what we think about this and here’s what we believe, here’s some stuff that we’ve done. That’s another way. It’s sort of a nametag in that way of getting to be more approachable that’s equally as effective as a sticker.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. As you got out of college and all of the sudden you’re the nametag guy which is sort of how you’re known even today, what prompted you to decide to create content? Because you have created a ridiculous amount of content. You’ve written dozens and dozens of books. You’ve written all kinds of eBooks and blog posts and articles and music. It’s like every genre of creation you have done. So what A, prompted you to sort of ahead of the curve … Before content marketing was a thing you were a content marketer. What made you think that was the path? And then how in the world do you create at the volume and quality level? Because it’s not just that you create volume. Every one of your books is well received. It’s popular. People are sharing it with each other. So it’s not that you’re just writing crap. You’re creating great content but at a volume that most people can’t imagine.

Scott Ginsberg:

Thank you. So two different questions here. The first one in terms of being ahead of the curve, I happen to not like the word content. I try to avoid using it at all possibility. Despite the fact that my day job at a startup is head of content. I don’t love that term. And I think it’s because I have been a writer and a creative person my whole life. So I was born in 1980 just for the people who want to know my age. So at the very early part of my life growing up in the ’80s, I was already writing stuff and I was aways making music and doing various projects. So there was never this decision on my part from a career strategy where it’s like okay, I’m going to be the content guy. It was already a forgone conclusion since a very early age that I was already doing this. I started writing music when I was 12 or so and then all the other stuff sort of came into play.

So pre nametag, pre “content marketing” as a job title, I was already doing this stuff. So to me it was certainly validating to see that the world … Like, “Oh, oh, this is a thing that can make you money and that can help grow your brand.” Like, “Yeah. Yeah. No shit guys. I’ve been doing this my whole life. Like let’s go. Let’s everybody get on board now.” It’s a little different now. It’s 2021 so content marketing has come a long way in the past, I’ll say five to 10 to 15 years. And the secret’s out now and the algorithms and the AI are working overtime doing things that I probably will never be able to do and I’m okay with that. But, it has been an extension of my personality and my true self my whole life. So there was never a decision to do it. Although, knowing that people hire for this kind of thing, I certainly had to be strategic on letting people know this is my specialty.

Drew McLellan:

So again, you’re a kid. You’re a writer by sort of habit and sort of by calling. Again, started with music. You could have written a lot of things. You could have written murder mysteries. You could have written romance novels. You could have written plays. What drove you to create business content as opposed to something else?

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. The short answer to the question is, that’s what people were buying. I wrote my first book … I started writing it when I was 21-ish. So I didn’t have business experience. I didn’t have the years or decades of experience that most people have when they write their first book. I didn’t have that. I just had a story. I had some ideas. But in terms of focusing on business, I knew that’s where the money was and I knew … Got to go back to 2002, 2003. I knew that there were conferences every day all around the world and they needed people who wrote books and who did seminars and trainings and all this kind of stuff. And I’m like well, that’s what I’m going to do. And just kind of a fun story. So in terms of approachability which we talked about earlier, I had kind of like my personal philosophy about being approachable. But in order to market it effectively to, say large companies, conferences who need speakers, et cetera, what I had to do was figure out the type of language they would use that I probably don’t know because at the time I don’t have corporate experience.

So what I did is I started using very early Google stuff. But even on very early proto Google website what I would do is I would kind of reverse engineer it. And I would say okay, there are probably three 60 evaluations for leaders. There must be some sort of survey that companies are doing to find out if you’re not approachable. Because there must be some literature out there. And sure enough there was some stuff out there. So it’s like let’s say some psychologist from UCLA in 2005 said, “Okay, here’s the 50 question inventory that you give your CEO of giant company X and then if they get a 20 or below, they need some help with their approachability so they can be a better leader.” Great. All that stuff’s already been done. So I go there and I go, “Ah, okay. So let me reverse engineer this. If these are the 50 things that you need to get better at, I can help take my ideas and filter them through that using the words and lexicon that are going to help me get booked.” And sure enough, it worked.

Drew McLellan:

Well, one of the things that’s interesting about you, and again, it gets back to how you create content in a different way. One of the things you are known for and one of the things you market about your speaking career is that you never give the same speech twice. So talk to us about that. Because most speakers have three or four canned speeches. And they might pepper in some stories about the specific business but for the most part it’s the same speech.

Scott Ginsberg:

Right. It was something that I realized that I was starting to do more and more. Certainly the first dozen or so speeches I don’t know what I was doing. But once I had enough material … If I’m say 27 years old at this point, I don’t know, 15 years ago, I had several books to my name. And I’m like, “Okay, well I have so much material to pick from. I’m fortunate that I’ve written so much so why give the same speech twice? Why not carousel in these different modules that I have and try stuff out?” So the strategy of positioning myself as a performer who never did the same show twice, that was sort of a downstream effect of someone who wrote a lot. One of the reasons people who do public presentations are sort of always rehashing the same speech is because they don’t write.

My mentor is a baptist preacher which means he had to write a new sermon every week. So when Bill Jenkins, my mentor, when he would sit down with me and help me go over stuff I would realize oh, so for 50 years you’ve been having a new sermon. You had to give a new speech every week because it’s the same parishioners. And I’m like well, I’m not running a church but I like that idea. I like that forced savings account of like all right well, I got to write for five hours every single day. It’s not all going to be good but there’s going to be enough here where I can keep cycling in new stuff so that way somebody wants to hire me they can hire me again, one, two, five years from now.

Drew McLellan:

And one of the things I find interesting about your career path is, all these books you’ve written and all these other things, you weren’t sitting around in your apartment just writing all day. You had a day gig and you were doing this around a full-time job. So how does someone … Because again, this is a constant challenge inside agencies is yes, as you said, they can create content for their clients but the well runs dry or they run out of time. And again, it’s the cobbler’s children have no shoes. So how did you avoid all of that? Because you could have used any of those excuses to not write.

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. And one of the ways to think about it is to change your relationship with time. And so forgive me if I get Einsteinian but this is a really helpful way to think about it. So if you want to have sort of a time abundance you have to realize okay, I work in an agency, there are so many hours in the day. I have meetings. I’m on a billable hour system where I have to satisfy my client’s brief. So you have to figure out, if I can’t add time and if I can’t steal time from the crowded day by doing a 30 minute instead of the 60 minute lunch, what you have to do is try to compress time. And you have to think about, where are the interactions already happening where I’m already doing these things that I’m doing, where all I really have to do is take notes? What … Already going to be doing that could later be turned into something? So here’s a good example. Years ago I was working at an agency as head of content and we had I’ll say 10 to 12 people on the account side and then a variety of other people doing media and creative.

And I told them like, “Hey, I’m just going to show up on your phone calls. I won’t even talk. You won’t even know I’m there. But I’m just going to hang out and listen and take notes and write stuff down. And then when you’re done if you could give me like five minutes after the call, I’ll show you some of the stuff we wrote.” And people were amazed at not only how smart they were and the incredible insights that they had. When you’re rattling off digital marketing numbers you don’t realize you’re that good. I’m not a digital marketing guy so when people are like waxing poetic on performance marketing, they don’t realize how insightful it is. And I’m like, “Ooh, that was really good what you said there. And then when the client said that, that was good.” It became this back forth that the serendipity of an office environment enabled for us. And so the content generation is actually really easy because we could kill two birds with one stone as long as someone was willing to take some extra time to document it.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Interesting. And so you’re doing that all day on the agency’s behalf and then you’re creating content on your own. So was that a no sleep? Was that a write all weekend? How did you bake all that in?

Scott Ginsberg:

It’s definitely not a no sleep thing and it’s definitely not a write all weekend. Look, one of my favorite stories is when Einstein was working at the patent office six days a week and he came up with the Theory of Relativity. I love that idea because here’s someone that knew, okay, I got to satisfy my responsibilities from say whatever, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. But he built in this extra time to do the work he needed to do. I’m really grateful that I’ve over the years now built a system that is portable. So let’s say I have my first meeting at 11:00. Okay. I’ve got to do some stuff before that to get ready. But I may know that between 12 and 12:30 I’ve got a great little pocket right there where I don’t have an immediate responsibility. I always have something that I’m writing and I always have my ideas in my queue in my inventory ready to go. And I think the word inventory is really important because one of that reasons people don’t take that time to write is because nobody wants to start from scratch and nobody wants to face the blank canvas. I haven’t faced a blank canvas in 20 years because my inventory is so strong.

So I have just my list of files, my list of ideas very organized and very neat. So if I’m thinking about a topic, say like resilience. Maybe it’s been a tough week at the company and resilience has been on my mind. I just type that word in my inventory and then I got 500 potential avenues I can go to write about it. And that allows me to get my operating temperature for writing up way quicker. Whereas people will be sitting there for 28 minutes like what the hell should I write about and then write for two minutes. I’m the opposite. I’ll write for 28 minutes and then spend two editing because the system is in place and I don’t need to get up at three in the morning. I don’t need to stay up all night because it’s a nice organized, relaxed way to do it.

Drew McLellan:

So really you’re a curator first and then the curation leads to better writing.

Scott Ginsberg:

I think that’s a really good way of putting it. To me, writing and reading are the same thing. It’s on the same continuum. I don’t know how much I read, I don’t know how much I write, but it’s a lot and it’s all the same. One of the first things I do every morning after I’ve done like journaling and all of the usual personal development things that Tim Ferriss says we should do, I do all that. And then I always take time … I don’t know. Probably 10 minutes is probably all it takes. 10, 15 minutes. I always transcribe my notes from the day before. So whatever I’m reading, and I’m always reading something, I go to my Kindle Cloud Reader which is just the greatest invention of all time. Because all your highlights from your Kindle reading from the day before are right there so I go onto it and then I transcribe it. I literally write word for word the other people’s words just to practice writing, get warmed up and get my inventory built up. So that way anything that I read from the day before it is documented, it is cited and quoted so that way I’m not stealing. And then I use that just as inspiration to be ready to rock and roll when I’m ready to do my own stuff.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I know very few writers that are not prolific readers. And I’m like you, for me, those were two skills or habits … They’re probably both. That I just had from the time I was a kid. I didn’t know I was developing career skills. I was just reading and writing because that’s what I did. And so one of the things I worry about with, if you will, the younger employees, then newer generation is, it seems like they don’t consume content. So they don’t read the same way we do. And so I wonder is, how did they curate? So you’ve supervised content departments many times. How do you instill that reading, writing symbiotic relationship in your employees if they say to you, “I don’t read books.”?

Scott Ginsberg:

And I say that’s okay because reading is just one way to do it. Actually, I don’t use those terms. I use the terms inhaling and exhaling. And I mean that in a yoga sense of the word, not a drug sines of the word. Although, people can do whatever they want. I’ve worked at enough agencies.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right. We don’t judge.

Scott Ginsberg:

Absolutely. So inhaling and exhaling and that’s the way you have to think about it. So I live in New York. People for the most part are commuting to work on the subway. I mean not recently but historically.

Drew McLellan:

They’ll get back to it. Yep.

Scott Ginsberg:

So your average commute time in New York is somewhat significant so it’s like great. Most likely if you’re a millennial or gen Z you’re probably going to be listening to podcasts or you might even be watching recorded episodes on your phone on the train. Great. That’s inhaling. Everything there is valuable and there’s good stuff that you can glean from. So you may not have read a book in the past four years. I don’t care. If you’ve watched … The average person watches 30 hours minimum of television a week. That bothers me but if that’s the only way people inhale, okay. I’ve watched enough TV to know there’s some brilliant stuff out there so like you better be taking notes or you better at least be getting your brain going because there’s no right or wrong way to inhale but the way that the human lungs work, you can’t exhale if you haven’t inhaled first so think of it that way.

Drew McLellan:

Right. So I want to take a quick break and then I want to ask you about your curation system. So you say it’s super organized. You type it in. So I just want to hear a little bit about that. But then I want to talk about ways that we can help our team members, our creatives typically whether they’re in a content or a traditional creative department, how we can help them do their job better. So let’s take a quick break and then I want to talk about your curation system.

Hey there. Do you have an up and comer inside your agency who’s become like your right hand person? How are you investing in them? Who are they surrounding themselves with and who are they learning from? You might be interested in taking a look at our Key Executive Network. It’s built to help you groom leaders in your agency. It’s designed to surround them with other AMI taught agency leaders and it’s facilitated by one of AMI’s top coaches, Craig Barnes. They meet twice a year and they stay connected in between meetings with calls, Zoom get togethers and email. AMI agency owners call it one of the best professional development investments they’ve ever made. Head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com and look under the membership tab for Key Executive Network. All right, let’s get back to the interview.

All right, we’re back and we are talking about inhaling and exhaling and how we have to take something in to produce something in an outward way. So you were talking earlier before we took the break about how you in essence catalog your notes, your thinking, whatever you have taken in through a book or whatever medium you’ve taken it in. How do you keep that organized? What does that look like?

Scott Ginsberg:

Okay. I used this term before but I think of it as inventory. I find that to be really helpful for me. My father spent 40 years of his career in the logistics wholesaling business so I always visited his warehouse and I like the idea of a warehouse. So that’s the way I think about it. I have a warehouse of ideas. And this warehouse I have been building since day one for the past 20 years. In terms of building it, I think there’s a couple best practices that I’ve found to be really successful. Number one is, you’ve got to add to the warehouse every single day. It’s not hard to do. You don’t need that much but there should be at least a couple things that you’ve learned, discovered, read, inhaled, whatever. And you got to be adding those. It just has to be part of your job even if it’s five minutes a day.

The second thing I want to recommend to people is to find a way to cross reference your ideas in your warehouse so that way they’re easily searchable. For example, I have a pretty basic MacBook laptop right here so in the morning let’s say … I’ll give you an example. Yesterday I was reading a book about the history of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Highly recommend it. And I was transcribing my notes from that. So on that let’s say there is a sentence that Jon Stewart said that was very interesting and I highlight that. Okay cool. So then I’m going to type that on a document. Brand new document. I’m going to just put one sentence on the document. I’m going to save that document with the title of the document as the actual sentence. If you’re still following me. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to do that 50 times for all of the notes I took from Jon Stewart. I’m going to save those as individual files. One idea per file in my inventory system. Then … And this is the important part. Then I’m going to take all of those and copy and paste just the titles onto one page that is titled Jon Stewart Daily Show Book 2021.

That way when I’m searching down the road about, again, I don’t know, resilience, creativity, whatever, I’ll see, “Oh yeah. Oh shit. Where did that come from?” And I go, “Oh wait, that’s from the Jon Stewart book. Great.” So now I have a double reference of the actual idea, where it came from, and then over time when I start quoting that insight or doing my own version of that insight, whatever it is that I do, it will now start showing up in other things that I have written. So if I read a book like Lee Clow, the great bearded advertising executive. If I read one of Lee Clow’s books 10 years ago and I searched for one of the ideas from his book, I’ll see his book, I’ll see the original idea and then I’ll see, I don’t know, five different books of my own where I’ve quoted him. And what this does is it allows you to have a good sense of context for where the ideas came from and it also helps you to make sure you’re not overusing them. Like, “Yeah, I’ve already done this one a bunch. Let me find something else.”

Drew McLellan:

One of the things I’ve always loved when I was early in my career as a copywriter was I never knew what I would need to know the next day. So as you’re describing, you sort of just collect these odd factoids and tuck them somewhere because you never know when you’re going to say, owls mate for life or whatever the truth is. And I think that’s one of the things that’s cool about our work is that you get to pull ideas from so many different places and knit them together in a new and interesting way.

Scott Ginsberg:

I love that aspect of it. I was working for an advertising agency several years ago whose biggest client was the New York State Department of Health. So we did all these public awareness campaigns around like soda has too much sugar and make sure to get tested for HIV and if you want to quit smoking here’s how you can do it. Come get help. I found it to be very meaningful. Especially like doing focus groups, learning from people that are struggling with various disorders and illnesses. And I found that just my own personal health journey with whether it was mental illness, addiction, whatever my stuff was, all the work I did on that actually came in very handy. We were doing an opioid crisis campaign. This is 2016. This didn’t workout the way I wanted it to workout but I was still proud of the process which was I’m like, “I know so much about this. I have tons of experience with recovery and 12 step and addiction. Guys, I got this. Let me handle this campaign.” So I was doing all these copywriting and various campaigns and ultimately the department of health rejected all of my ideas. They said … This is just horrifying that I have to reveal. They said that, “Our subway ads can’t look too good or the public will think it’s a misuse of tax funds.”

Drew McLellan:

Huh. So you needed to dumb it down so that they were spending their money better.

Scott Ginsberg:

If you’re hearing something right now, part of my soul is dying.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right. That’s horrible.

Scott Ginsberg:

But look, hey man, anyone who works and manages services and client services like look, you got to hit the brief and you got to make them happy because when the budgets come in October you want them to hire you for next year.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right. That’s right. It is not our job to create art for art’s sake.

Scott Ginsberg:

I know. I save that for my music.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. Yep.

Scott Ginsberg:

Nevertheless the value in that was like oh cool, I can use all this stuff for my whole life to enrich something I’m doing for the client and if they don’t like it, hey, we gave it a shot.

Drew McLellan:

So a lot of your success comes from things that you learned either on purpose or by accident as a kid and then how you sort of tapped into those skills or gifts and sort of figured out how they fit in your professional life. So now looking back and you’ve managed a lot of creatives and a lot of younger people in the agency business and in the communications business, how do you … You have the natural ability to connect the dots. How do you help employees and team members connect the dots if they’re not sure how to figure out what they’re good at naturally and how to bring that to the workplace?

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. It’s hard. I like the way you’ve kind of separated it into like identify the thing and bring it to the world. Because those are two steps that people either don’t do both of them or just struggle kind of like with the whole process. So the first agency I worked at … This would have been 2012. Yeah, in 2012. We had interns that would cycle in every six months. They were juniors in college so they were 19, 20 years old. And I had a chance to lead a bunch of their smaller teams because … I’m not a manager, I’m not a coach but I am a really good mentor. I had a lot of mentors. I have a lot of mentors so that skill is something I do quite well and I was able to run some mentoring programs for the youths. And we talked a lot about this. We talked a lot about understanding where the gifts you are and what they’re called. And then how to operationalize them. So one of the exercises that we would do is I would just kind of have a conversation with people and ask them like, “Tell me something you’re so good at that you make look easy that other people are bewildered by?”

And people had various skills that they would answer that question. That’s just one of many ways to kind of dig into it. And not everyone had an answer for that. So a lot of time if they did and say, “You know what I’m really good at,” I would just watch and I would just say, “Hey, do you know how much you lit up when you just did that? That last assignment that we did for that client, you crushed that. Where did that come from?” And just kind of have a sense of curiosity and excitement about it with some encouragement there and just kind of think of yourself as a mirror. I think that’s what mentoring is. Mentoring is mirroring. And reflecting back to people, “Hey, let me just hold this mirror up. I want you to see how good this thing is that you have.” That is scary for people and I appreciate that the confrontation with this genius that people have is difficult, especially if you’re young. But if people hear it enough times and if they’re open to that and they’re willing to accept that they have something great, then you have to say, “Okay, so now we have this thing that you’re really good at. So now we’re going to figure out how to use this in service of two things, which is the team internally and then to people that work with which would be our clients.”

And then it’s kind of a matter of trial and error at that point. You got to start trying stuff and you have to start finding ways to kind of plug people in. I’ll give you an example. So there was a woman that I worked with at a different agency. This would have been 2017, ’18. And her background was in fashion. She spent her teenage years while going to school also modeling in India which was extraordinary. And her experience was unparalleled of someone having only had been 22 years old. But her fashion expertise was outstanding. And I know every woman in New York has better fashion expertise than I do so that’s not saying much coming from me. But she had a sense of like, photography, lighting, textile, runway, everything you need. How do you hold a product so that way your hands are positioning all these little things and I’m like, “Have you been on a photo shoot with one of our clients yet?” She’s like, “No.” I’m like, “Let’s talk to the CEO. You should do that.”

Oh my god. Because at that particular agency most of our clients were D2C retail brands and a lot of them were like athleisure and performance athletic material. So Sophie would start going to the photo shoots with like the account manager. Even if she wasn’t on that team she’d be there and be like, “Hey, the lighting is off. We’re going to get the best results if the hands are like X, Y and Z.” And it was so effective that we talked about launching a separate company within our agency just to do consulting for photo shoots for fashion brands.

Drew McLellan:

Huh, fascinating.

Scott Ginsberg:

She ended up getting another job which I’m not surprised by because amazing people always get other jobs. So she ended up moving on before we could do it but let’s just say she didn’t leave. Imagine, we could now have a whole new service line that says, “Hey, direct to consumer brands started by finance bros who have no idea what fashion is. Why don’t you let our specialist Sophie spend the day with you, do the photo shoots and then that way when you do the photo shoots and then that way when you do Facebook ads they’ll actually convert.”

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That idea of innovation and creating … One of the silver linings of COVID I think was that it forced agencies to innovate. Because the way their clients were spending money, the way their clients were connecting to audiences just went away. And so a lot of agencies had to figure out how to solve their clients’ business problems in a way that they had never done it before. And that was sort of this magic moment in time. And it was fascinating to watch them do that and to cheer them on and coach them on. But when COVID’s not happening and we all just go back to sort of in the grind, getting the work done, how have you contributed to or helped create a culture of innovation inside an organization that is typically lean and mean, running fast, trying to keep up with the clients and yet they’re still supposed to create something brand new?

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. I think it’s really hard. I think in the agency word when you have billable hours and you are incentivized to workaholism, unfortunately, I think it’s really hard. I saw this at a different agency I was working at where like … It’s like hey, people are staying there until eight or nine every night. It’s not about efficiency, it’s about putting in the hours and satisfying client requests. It is a fundamental uphill battle in terms of the way employees at agencies are incentivized to innovate. It’s really hard. It’s like you have to have this balance. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do all the things the client wants. I’m going to make them happy.” But it’s worth saying, “You know what, but I’m going to have a couple things in my back pocket that are going to blow them away. I’m going to make them happy. I’m going to prove that we’re trustworthy professionals and that our CPA is going down and it’s where it needs to be. Then I’m going to throw some stuff out that’s going to get them shaking a little bit.” They don’t have to do them but there is a way that people can bring those.

So one of the ways that we did that in a place that I worked is we put together a very simple innovation framework. And one of the mistakes people make about innovation is they think that it’s sporadic but it’s actually systematic. It can happen sporadically. But if you put some systems in place and if you put some constraints which, that’s what COVID … COVID is nothing but a constraint. Well, it’s a strain but it’s also a constraint.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right.

Scott Ginsberg:

That’s my horrible COVID humor. So if you figure out how to install constraints you can do it post COVID. You can do it when there’s nothing like that going on. So you can do this in a number of ways but one of the ways we did it was with a Google sheet. So this became a cool exercise because one of the rare things you have at an agency is when someone says, “You know what, I have nothing to do right now. I have an hour where I have nothing to do.” And people are like, “Oh God, what do I do?” And it’s like, “Okay, I got to look busy. I got to put a pie graph on my screen so my boss walks by and like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s really working hard.’” Because I’ve done that before. But what we did is like, “Hey, when you’re in that moment when you don’t know what to do with your time right now, I’m going to give you an answer.” And we put together this very basic Google sheet that took people through a series of questions. And I forget what all the questions were. But it basically was just starting like okay, we almost always start with a problem. I’m sure you mentioned this with like solving business problems with of our clients. So give me an example of a client or a type of client that you might have.

Drew McLellan:

So let’s think of a healthcare system that is trying to drive elective surgeries.

Scott Ginsberg:

Okay. Interesting. Okay. So now you have a healthcare system so some of the big issues are probably going to be technological in terms of like the way that they have their computer systems set up. And then you’re going to have issues with patient care and like the number of beds and hospital recidivism. All these problems that those kind of people have. So what you do is, if you’re sitting there with a half hour with nothing to do and you need an innovative idea for your meeting tomorrow at 3:00, grab that Google sheet … And the way that we had it set up was like start with a problem. So at the top you would write, “Okay, the problem is, my hospital doesn’t have enough elective surgery. We would like to increase it.” Okay. Then you would start putting down like, “So if that’s the problem, what are some insights around that?” So after the problem comes an insight and that’s where the research comes into play. So you have to start looking around of trying to see what are the studies out there? What are the medical professionals saying about elective surgery? And through that research you might find an insight and the insight is to find what is something really surprising that we now know about our customer that I don’t think anyone else is going to know? Especially the client.

I didn’t work on that type of healthcare thing but one of the examples that I can share is with the opioid crisis, when we were doing our campaigns and getting insight, it was not so much about the patient but about the person who brought the patient in. Because if you have someone who has an opioid addiction, more than likely it was not their decision to come into the hospital. It was a spouse, a family member, a parent, a child. Like, “Hey, my mom is really sick and we need your help.” So the insight was these ads aren’t going to be for the person who’s addicted. This is for the person who’s doing primary care for them, who’s not-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Because it’s the caretaker who’s going to drag them in.

Scott Ginsberg:

That’s right. The nonmedical caretaker who doesn’t know anything about these different factors. So that became our insight and then one of our campaigns in particular was just for those people. So in your innovation framework, once you have the sense of this problem, once you do some research and look through your notes and listen to your client conversations, put your insight down. Once you have the insight, that opens up your brain for a campaign idea, if a campaign is what you’re doing. So let’s say we discover that, okay, for elective surgery for hospitals, we know that a certain percent of people are only going to be doing this based on their, we’ll say, net worth or their income and it’s going to have something to do with the time of the year. I’m making this up. I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Drew McLellan:

For example, a lot happens in the fourth quarter because they have already used their deductible. Right?

Scott Ginsberg:

Oh. Oh, that’s good. I like that. Okay. There’s a great insight. We know that these happen in the fourth quarter based on a deductible. So right there you have a constraint, which is what we want. So now we know that if this is going to happen in Q4, that means you’re probably going to have to start working on that campaign in August. Maybe earlier. I mean, shoot, when I was doing eCommerce at this agency, we started doing Christmas ads in August. So you have to think of it in that same way. From a planning standpoint, now you have some good constraints on it and then you can kind of build from that insight. So if we know that there’s an issue with the deductible, we have to decide, okay, do we want to introduce the idea of the deductible in the copywriting? Is that going to be part of the campaign? Is it going to be implied? I don’t know. But the brain starts cooking when you go problem, insight, concept.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. And one of the things I think that you said that is critical to this is that we have to bake room in for this to happen. So one of the things that we talk about a lot at AMI is one of the reasons why clients fire agencies is because when we were courting them and we were trying to get them as a client, we were throwing ideas at them left and right. We were dropping roses off on a Tuesday. And when we do research and we say to clients, “Why do you break up with an agency?” What they say is, “You know what, in the beginning it was awesome. They loved me. They dropped off the flowers. And now, I don’t even get flowers on my anniversary anymore.” So baking in for certain clients that you have these innovation sessions, whatever that looks like. Again, you build a construct. Then now we are planning and scheduling and calendaring that we need to think differently about this client so we can show them that we still care enough about them that we’re thinking about them even when we’re not getting paid to do so.

Scott Ginsberg:

I think so too. I think before they become a client, you treat them like a client. When they become a client, you’ve got to think retention, you’ve got to think longterm. It’s like a marriage. Like hey, my wife and I have been together 11 years. We have our date nights. We know the dangers of not doing those dedicated time for each other and I think professionally it works the same way. One of the great questions that agencies need to begin asking themselves is what new conversation does this thing earn me the right to have? So let me break that down because I just wrote about this the other day so it’s kind of fresh in my mind.

So what new conversation … Meaning, if we have a healthcare company that we’ve worked with for three years and their churn risk is up to a red light, okay, they might fire us. So what is a new conversation we can have them? What project have we not tackled? What department of the hospital needs us but they don’t know that it needs us? And then the next part of the question is what new conversation can we earn the right to have? So what could we do? Maybe it’s a new case study of someone in their industry. Maybe it’s an interview. There’s got to be something that we can do. Maybe it’s launching a new product internally. I mean, I do a lot of that in my startup. We do a lot of product launches. And it’s like maybe there’s a product launch that we could do in two weeks. We could do an interactive web tool or small piece of software with one of our engineers. I bet you we could ship something in two weeks that would be good enough that we could send it to the healthcare company and say, “Hey, we made this for you. All of our clients are seeing this but this is a healthcare tool and we think you’re going to love it. Can we come show it to you? I think it’s going to be great.”

And then it’s like, “Wow. The other agency we used to work with, they didn’t do this kind of thing for us. These guys built us something.” I’m like, “Damn right we did. Let’s go.”

Drew McLellan:

Right. Yeah. I mean, it is all about the reinvestment. And a lot of agencies get painted by their clients by the brush of, “You know what, sort of feels like they’re dialing it in. We see the same ideas, we see the same stuff.” And when I talk to agency people they’re like, “Well, that’s because every time we bring them a new idea they don’t buy it.” And I’m saying the purpose is not for them to buy it. The purpose is for you to take them a new idea so that they know that you’re always thinking on their behalf.

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. It’s actually sometimes better that they’re not going to buy it. It’s like, “Well screw it, they’re not going to buy it anyway. Let’s think big.” We did that all the time. My former ad agency owner, incredible guy, an award winning ad guy named Jose here in New York, he would say, “Look, our job is to go to these meetings and get rejected with giant ideas. Show up with something that they’re going to be like, ‘First of all, amazing idea. We’re never going to do that, but thank you for doing it.’” They need to see that. And matter of fact, part of our compensation was based on that stuff. If you’re showing up and just meeting the brief every time, there might be some 22 year old who’s going to take your job because they’ve got big ideas and they’re not afraid to get rejected.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think taking an idea that you know is crazy or big or off the mark or something that they don’t have the budget to do reminds them, if you can think that big, you certainly can think small enough to do the stuff they need you to do. Right?

Scott Ginsberg:

I like that. That’s good. Yeah. And all these ideas are useful everywhere. So okay, healthcare company doesn’t buy it and then three weeks later you’re talking to a financial services firm, you’re like-

Drew McLellan:

I could twist that thing.

Scott Ginsberg:

“We could because the spine of that idea is valuable when you’re doing X, Y, and Z so we can just change it to A, B, and C. That’ll work.” And I don’t mean that in the way where it’s like you do your pitch deck and you just change the first slide with the client’s name on it. That bothers me. I’m talking about like, you can repurpose something and then re-skin it with some basic work that can let them know originally we designed this for healthcare, but look what it does. It’s like Viagra. Viagra was originally designed for, I believe … What was it? Heart disease or blood pressure. And as we know, it has many other purposes now.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. See. There you have it. Well, post-it notes were the same thing. They were a colossal failure. And now we all have them on our desk.

Scott Ginsberg:

My whole office is a [crosstalk 00:51:25].

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. All right. Last question for you. How do you keep your bucket full? Creative people have to have energy, inspiration, enthusiasm, passion. And COVID or not, I just think that’s hard under normal circumstances. So how do you replenish your creative bucket?

Scott Ginsberg:

Well, first of all, tell me why you think that’s hard. I’m interested in this.

Drew McLellan:

Because I think there’s a constant drain of the bucket and so you have to keep sort of refilling. And for some people who are naturally creative, I think the act of creation rather than draining is filling. So when I write, I want to write more. Because that’s how I’m wired. But for some people, they’re sitting down and making themselves. A lot of agency owners are creating content for their agency. They may not be wired to be a writer but they have this stuff in their head and they know they need to get it down. So how do you stay full?

Scott Ginsberg:

Okay. Great question. I mean, my short answer is I have a system. I have an entire framework to keep myself inspired on a regular basis from many different avenues. And I’ll just give you a couple of examples. I’m a songwriter. I’ve recorded 12 albums, play concerts every week at the park, I’m a busker, I’m a perform in public. And I always have a new stream of songs coming so I have to continue writing new songs because I go crazy if I don’t. It’s too important to me. What’s important is that because I’m producing so much music on my own is that I listen to music all day. Not everyone’s work environment is conducive to listening to music all day so I appreciate that and if that’s not their thing, I totally understand that. What I find helpful is that when I find individual single songs anywhere in the world that I love … And I know when I love a song. My body changes. I’m like a dog with snausages. I’m like, “Oh my god, what is that?” I always find out what song it is. I’ll use Shazam or Spotify or whatever I can to identify the song. And then I have a specific playlist on my phone. It’s a Spotify playlist. And it’s called songs that make me want to write songs.

Now, what’s great about it is it’s not just songs that I know I’m going to like, but there’s 500 songs on there so at any time if I’m like, “Okay. My bucket is empty. I got to fill her back up so I can go write some music because I got a show and I want to have a new song.” I’ll just pick any song at random of these 500 because I know it’s going to get me excited. Now, it might take 10 or 12 songs for me to get to the place I want to, but I think when you’re a creative person, the goal is to inhale so much that you just can’t take it anymore and if you don’t make something you’re going to freak out. That’s going to be different for everybody. Some people are going to inhale something else so much till they can’t take it. Great. Do what you got to do. But figure out what it is that when you consume lots of it … I’m talking about a form of art or a form of content that gets you really excited or maybe jealous. That’s a good way to do it.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Like oh, I wish I had written that.

Scott Ginsberg:

I know. Ad agencies are great because there’s so many ad campaigns out there that are on display that we can see online, out in the world. I mean, shoot, there’s entire digital banks of effective emails that you can write. And I read those all the time. I’m like, “Oh, Casper, you bastards. That was so good.” So I find that jealousy and anger is a great healthy emotion to fire into yourself. So that’s one example that I share.

Now, another totally different type of example that I share is the kind of thing that you read in most creativity books which is just like get out of your head, get out in the world. And my wife and I got a COVID dog. I don’t tell my dog she’s a COVID dog.

Drew McLellan:

Right. No, no. That’d be mean.

Scott Ginsberg:

We all know what COVID puppy is though. But one of the great things that we learned last year when we got our dog is that having a dog … At least for me. I can’t speak for other dog owners. But I don’t bring my phone when I walk my dog. And any opportunity I can give myself to not have a phone is so healthy. Because I’m just as addicted to my phone as everyone else in the world so I’m not going to deny that. And I don’t miss it and I don’t care. And yeah, my Instagram feed hasn’t been as good lately because I don’t take as many pictures. I don’t care. Because I’m out in the woods and my dog is chasing squirrels and we’re meeting other people and talking to other humans. Oh my god. Who knew? So again, I’ve said constraint many times during this talk today and I think that not having my phone and forcing myself to be hyper present without digital distraction, that’s huge. And people can do that in lots of different ways. And if you want to talk about filling your bucket, man, I come back from the walks with my dog, I’m like, “All right, let’s go. I’m ready. I got stuff to say.”

Drew McLellan:

Right. And I think just getting up and moving, for a lot of people.

Scott Ginsberg:

For sure.

Drew McLellan:

I mean, we’re so sedentary. Yeah.

Scott Ginsberg:

I know. Exercise is a huge part of my life. I do yoga and I swim and I run and all that kind of stuff. And another great way to fill the bucket is if exercising is somewhere where you get ideas, and it is for many people, I would say don’t leave it to chance. I would say right before you exercise or before you start, think of a problem you’re trying to solve and set the intention. Like, “Okay. I got a 40 minute run around this park. Okay. Before I start, let me just think about this problem. Okay. Healthcare company. Elective surgery.” Maybe elective surgery’s not a great thing to think about while you’re running. But you get the point. Prime yourself before the endorphins start kicking and then just get on with your life and let the subconscious do its thing. Because I do that all the time and I come back, I’m like, “I don’t even want to shower I’m so excited to get back and start writing some ideas down because this stuff works.”

Drew McLellan:

Right. Yeah. You’re right. I mean, the endorphins are a powerful part of that for sure.

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

This has been a great conversation. I knew that we would go off in a million directions, which we did. And as I said to you in the beginning, I expect us to meander wildly and we did so I appreciate your being willing to do that. If folks want to learn more about you, if they want to read some of your content, hear some of your music, what’s the best place for them to track you down?

Scott Ginsberg:

Yeah. Unfortunately, there is no best place so I tell people just google the word nametag and you will find all of my stuff. I mean, go to Spotify. That’s pretty easy. You can get the music. Books are on Amazon. The most exciting new project that I launched last year is called Prolific. And Prolific is the world’s first framework for personal creativity management. So PCM is this new discipline that I’ve essentially spent my whole life doing but have now recently codified it. So all the different tools and all these different strategies that I’ve been sharing, it’s on Prolific. It’s getprolific.io. That’s my new company. And yeah, this is software with hundreds of tools. Everything I’ve said is in there somewhere and it’s all searchable. It’s all organized. And you can essentially figure out how to overcome the blocks and figure out the rituals that are going to help you do it. It’s an extraordinary resource and I highly recommend everyone go check it out.

Drew McLellan:

That is awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show and for sharing your stories and telling us a little bit about your background. I think you gave us a lot of very tangible things that we can begin to play with, which is great.

Scott Ginsberg:

Well, it’s my pleasure. Thanks Drew.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. All right guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. As you know, one of my goals when I have a guest on the show is I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to hear something and go, “I’m going to try that.” Or, “I’m going to stop doing that.” Or, “I’m going to twist what I’ve been doing.” And Scott just gave you dozens of things to try and so I encourage you to grab a couple of them and play and experiment and figure out how you can adapt some of the things that we talked about today to help you be more of what you want to be. Whether that’s creative or strategic or whatever it may be, you’ve got lots of building blocks, I think, in this episode to do that. So I hope you will grab hold of some of those building blocks and get back to me and let me know what you did with them. Before I let you go, couple things. One, huge shout out to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know, they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So you can head over to whitelableiq.com/ami and they’ve got a special deal there for the podcast listeners. So they do white label, PPC, design and dev for agencies. Lots of AMI agencies swear by them. So check them out.

And in the meantime, also want to remind you that we are going live. The Build a Better Agency Summit which has been rescheduled three times thanks to COVID is happening in Chicago on August 10th and 11th. We have a little less than 100 tickets left so grab your ticket now, come join us. Killer speakers, great networking, and just other human beings in a room with you. So we’re going to keep it super safe. You’ve got to have a negative COVID test or you’ve got to have proof of vaccine. So everybody’s going to be healthy and ready to connect with you. So we would love to have you join us. Head over to the Agency Management Institute website and read more about it and grab your ticket.

All right. I will be back next week with another guest like Scott who’s going to ask you to stretch and think differently and try some new things, which I think is good for all of us. So in the meantime, you know how to reach me. I’m [email protected]. The longest URL known on the planet. And I look forward to talking to you next week. Thanks for listening. See you then.

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency podcast. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid sized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.