Does your office, or your zoom background, or however you present yourself, even your RFP proposal covers truly express who you are as an agency? Is it expected? Is your website expected? Does it look like everyone expects it to look? And if so, could you dig down one or two more layers and find something that would be surprising, that would be delightful, that would make somebody think more about who you are and how you think and how you work together, either with your own team or with the clients that you serve.

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00:03 Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week. Coming to you from Johannesburg, South Africa. So we checked in last night to the African Pride Hotel, which is one of Marriott's autograph Collection hotels. And we are in the honeymoon suite.  00:23 So, as you might imagine, we have.  00:25 Never been to this hotel before.  00:27 And so when I saw the name.  00:28 Of it, I made some assumptions. I assumed that it would beautiful because it's an autograph collection hotel, which it is. I assumed that the honeymoon suite would be lovely, which of course it is, but I assumed that the decor would be, as you might imagine, with the name African Pride. Very sort of typical what I thought of as African. And so when we got here and it's really this kind of cool jazzy theme, and there's amazing artwork throughout the suite, and none of it is about lions or giraffe or animal prints. It's very elegant and sort of sleek and kind of got a cool vibe to it. And it got me thinking about how we present ourselves. And, you know, one of the things I think we forget is that for our clients, agencies are cool.  01:25 And so back in the day, when.  01:27 We all worked in an office, a lot of us worked very hard to make our agency space really kind of cool. And it gave us clues or gave our clients clues about who were and how we thought and how we worked. And I've seen a lot of amazing conference rooms and collab spaces and places where you guys really come together to do your work, even today, even COVID dow with most of you in a hybrid situation. But one of the things I think that the agencies that really got it did was they went beyond the expected. They went beyond the funky conference room names. They went beyond the big whiteboards. They went beyond that to give the clients and vendors who came into their space a true sense of who they were underneath the first layer or two. So it would have been easy for this hotel to be decked out in animal prints and all things African animals.  02:27 That would have been the easy thing. But they dug down deeper into their own culture because one of the cool things about autograph hotels is they always give you a glimpse into the culture and the people where the hotel is located. And this hotel is no exception. But they dug deeper than the expected, and they showed us a different layer of what they love, the music, they love sort of dancing and other elements of their culture which weren't so expected. So my message for you is your office, is your zoom background, is however you present yourself, is your RFP proposal covers whatever it is. Is it expected? Is your website, is it expected? Does it look like everyone expects it to look? And if so, could you dig down one or two more layers and find something that would be surprising, that would be delightful, that would make somebody think more about who you are and how you think and how you work together, either with your own team or with the clients that you serve.  03:32 This hotel made me think differently about how we present AMI. And we're working on that right now. And so what I'm thinking about for you and for us is how do we present ourselves in a way.  03:45 That'S truly authentic but isn't quite so expected? That's worth thinking about.  03:50 All right.  03:51 See you next week. 

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