Ladies and Gents, The Age of Conversation 2, a collaborative study of today’s marketing and advertising environment by top bloggers and marketing gurus, is finally available for purchase.  A lot of people worked really hard to make this book a reality, and I want to specifically call out Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan for that.  I am very pleased and honored to have been a part of it.

My contribution is an article called “The Millennial Generation Will Change the Face of Hiring”, within the chapter Business Model Evolution.

Here’s an excerpt:

There’s no shortage of conversation about the impact of Millenials on the workforce, and yet most advertising agencies are still not listening. Agencies think it’s still all about them. It’s not. It’s about the people they need with the energy and ideas to keep their company alive in the new economy.

For more, and to purchase the book either in hardback, paperback or digital download, visit http://stores.lulu.com/ageofconversation

All proceeds from this book go to Variety, the Children’s Charity.  For a comprehensive, organized list of contributors, visit Kristin Gorski’s blog.

What are you still doing here? Go on, go! Click! Purchase!

As you can see we here at the DFBryant&Co blog took the summer off. We didn’t really mean to, but with kids out of school, multiple vacations, some really nice afternoons sipping cool drinks on the deck, and, AHEM, of course clients needing help, it just kind of happened that way. But, it’s officially September, so we’ve put away our white linen togs and we’re back now. And to get started here’s a quick roundup of what’s been happening in our little world of executive search and advertising while we were out.

For clients and recruiters:

• Can’t find interactive people? Hire From the Market You Have, Not the Market You Want
• Ten things every recruiter should know about Millennials.

For jobseekers and candidates:

• 7 Reasons Why You Won’t be Getting a Raise this Year and What You Can Do About it
• Get it together: 7 tools CEOs use to remain productive

And I’m sure I don’t have to be the one to tell you about the Mad Men folks taking over twitter, or that Google has released a beta browser called Chrome, or that we’re in the most interesting TV ratings period in a long time, what with the Economy, the Olympics, the Election, and some hurricanes thrown in for good measure.

Hang on. It’s going to be a wild ride.

The key to avoiding finding your cover letter or resume on sites like this? Avoid slang. Offer clarity in what you seek, and what you offer, not confusing chatter. Less is more. And so on.

• Ryan Paugh things that Henry Ford’s management style will not work in today’s Gen Y driven work culture. I think he’s right.
• Mike Drexler and Rochelle Geller think those brought up in the traditional agency media role of building relationships and younger, more strategy and impact focused Gen Y’ers can learn to work together to shape the face of the new media department. They’re right, too. But change is hard to bring in at the top. Many agencies find success bringing in change at lower levels, standing quietly behind them and helping them pick the right battles, and growing those people into the management of the future.
• Steve Rubel thinks that many social media jobs won’t exist in the future. This guy thinks he’s wrong. All I know is, this conversation is from March, and we’ve only seen social media get bigger.

There’s more to come. Jump in. Tell us what you think is interesting.

When the story broke, PR people got all worked up, academics got all worked up, but so far, the social media people are just standing back and watching to see what happens next.

Social media is a learn as you go mentality. How could it be that wrong to try something new and then have it cause such problems? This is where the movement overall gets a little tricky.

Various people quoted in the article think its a huge problem, the tricking of consumers in order to further a brand. But is it new ground? hasn’t guerilla marketing and viral marketing been kicking in for a while now?

No, of course not. Tricking the consumer has always been part of the deal, for many brands. The morality of advertising has been called into question for decades and generations. The difference is, in this time of social media, the consumer is smarter. And more cynical. What about:

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla campaign
• Lonelygirl15
• Ticketmaster creates fake friends on Facebook
• Does this wrinkle cream really do this?

Seriously, what’s the problem here? Is it because this idea was concepted in an educational, academic setting? Is it because it was a PR campaign, and the PR profession thinks it’s less morally corrupt than advertising? As one student says at the end of the article, “Public Relations people, in general, have very little morals when it comes being completely honest with the consumer…We were supposed to be working for Coach. If there was anybody who should have stopped it, it should have been Coach.” Ouch.

Get over it. Twitter is the new black, if you’re a marketing person. If you aren’t talking social media to your clients, who do you think will?

Dustin Jacobson, Technical Director at Barkley here in Kansas City, gave a presentation on Twitter yesterday, and posted it on his blog, Shake Gently. Its valuable, I think. Even behemoth cable companies have figured out how to use it. And coming soon, more people will be using it to find talent.

Are you on top of where this is all going? Can your agency, your clients, your management, afford not to be?

You can follow us on twitter here and here.

Make sure people are a culture fit. Culture fit is about more than hiring people you’d want to have a beer with. It’s about work styles, drive, belief in the agency vision. We’ve all worked with that one person who didn’t pull his weight. In a big agency, there’s (arguably) room for this — there are enough people rowing so that one non-committed rower won’t sink the ship. But we’re not talking about those Viking long ships at a small agency. We’re talking about two to three people in a dinghy.

How does your agency make sure you’re hiring the right people? Do you focus more on making sure they can satisfactorily answer all your questions about doing the job? Or do you try and get a feel for personality, common goals and vision, and where they want to take their career? We tell candidates here all the time, its not about what you need as an employee, its about what you can provide to solve that agency’s problem. But that’s a two way street. As the employer, its not always about making sure thhe person you hire can do the job. It’s also about what you do as an agency to make that person part of your team, and make sure your job solves their career needs. We call it “mutual need fulfillment.”

Find the entire article at Small Agency Diary at AdAge.

As conversations go regarding the Mommy Wars (working moms vs. staying-home moms, and the My-Way-is-Better catfighting between them that the media likes to propagate…), there are really only two topics. Do you leave your career permanently and dedicate the rest of your life to raising your children? Or do you maintain a career and raise a family? Is one a martyr and the other selfish? No. Either stance holds truth and consequences. And nevermind that there is actually a spectrum of choices in between the two.

Technology has brought us the Mompreneur, the Mommy-blogger who makes money from her ads, and a new generation of party consultants like Pampered Chef, Passion Party and Arbonne that make Tupperware and Avon look like relics from the June Cleaver age, a modernizing problem both are trying frantically to solve. And corporations have changed in these modern times, too, offering more employee-focused benefits like flex-time, job-sharing, and providing laptops and crackberries for free, actually increasing productivity by making their employees available to work 24/7. It is possibly to do both career and raise a family, and live to tell about it.

But when the conversation turns to “taking time off” to raise kids, with the intention of going back to your career someday, most opinions become negative. Most people believe leaving work for a few years to stay home full-time and raise kids is career death. But then why are so many doing it?

Many of the best and the brightest women choose to go home in the middle of their high-earning years (between the ages of 37 and 42), says Myra Hart, a professor at Harvard Business School. Fifty-seven percent of them are considering going back to work, reports the Boston-based research firm Reach Advisors. How hard is it for them to get rehired? To read some news accounts, it would seem that once women quit, they’re off the job path permanently.

The trouble with returning back to work after a mid-career break isn’t finding a new job, most studies show. Its finding a new job which will give moms the flexible time they think they need in order to maintain the accessibility for their families that they enjoyed while not working. But here, we go back to the same issues surrounding getting hired into any job, at any point in your career. Its not about your needs, its about how you solve problems for that employer. If what you bring to the table solves the right problems for that employer that no one else can, you can get what you want.

However, most companies won’t negotiate upfront what you want or need in the way of flexibility and family priorities, unless its clear upfront what you bring to the table. They want to know that as an employee, that you are focused on their needs, not your family’s. Most companies want you to prove your worth, first, and then after a trial period may be prepared to offer you more flexibility. So be prepared to go back full time, normal office hours, just like everyone else in that office who doesn’t have kids (or have responsibility for them). Get daycare lined up, it won’t kill them (it may even help their immune systems). Or if you have family in town, get them to help with the kids. Do whatever you have to do to be able to accept a full time job that puts you back on your original career path.

The question really is, how dedicated are you in returning to your career, given the things you have to do in order to get there? Do you really want to commit to it at the level you did before your break, or are you just bored and want some adult interaction? The difference between getting a job to get out of the house and returning to a full-force career can be enormous.

If you are still deciding whether to quit your day job and stay home to raise your kids, and how it might effect you later, consider this:

In research conducted nationwide in 2005 among 2,443 college-educated women of all ages, the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWP) found that 74 percent of women who want to go back to work do manage it. … “We’re finding that women who want to come back are having great success,” says Eliza Shanley, a cofounder of Women@Work Network, a resource center for women looking to reenter the workforce. “This is not the story of the woman with an MBA who has to work at Starbucks. You can come back.” Headhunter Julie Daum, from the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, echoes, “It’s important to realize that leaving for a few years is very different from dropping out.”

Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin are the authors of Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-At-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work, a book offering strategy and advice to women resuming careers after extended time at home with children. One of their key points? Network, network, network. It’s more important than polishing up your resume.

So plan your staying-home exit strategy, just as you would with anything else. If you know you will one day want to get back on the career train, stay in touch with your network, have lunch with work friends and close industry affiliates regularly. Offer to consult or freelance for the company you are leaving, and through your network, you can gain other consulting projects, too. Keep getting the trade magazines and email newsletters and stay up on industry trends. Go to industry functions once in a while, and show you still know how to present yourself in a professional environment, regardless of the fact that you mostly run around in your yoga clothes and a ballcap.

And when you’re ready to get back in, you can work those connections that never got dusty to land the job that will work best for you, and your family, too.

[Mataki] “The business model in which the agency’s sole function is to create advertising and buy media is no longer viable,” he said. “We need a new model. We need to develop relationships where both parties share risks and rewards equally. Rather than just accepting assignments, we must be proactive. To manage change, we must take risks.”

I think Mataki gets it – agencies must come up with fresher, more creative ideas to reach that post-cynical consumer. Not neccesarily fresher creative messaging, but creative targeting, and this includes the roles of media, research and respecting the presence of marketing strategy provided by clients who are on the same page. The riskier, the better.

Levy, however, although he admits it’s near broken, doesn’t seem to really think the old model of advertising is all that bad. In his mind, the creative message is still the most important piece, and besides, he would rather change the clients.

Still he cautioned that the agency will increasingly look at creative that doesn’t just talk to a consumer, but enables interaction between consumers and marketers…He suggested the change will give rise to a new golden age of media where walls and silos will come tumbling down and creative is ultimate, but where services provided by agencies may have more value that physical assets. …”To build that new model, we need visionary clients not led by procurement and number crunchers, but people who can understand and appreciate the sheer value of our work, our ideas.

Creative is ultimate? Sure, the silos can come down between departments but everything still takes a back seat to the message and how that message is crafted to speak to the consumer. How is that different from the attitudes of most agencies now? And wouldn’t we all like to have visionary clients who aren’t worried about the bottom line? I mean, jeez, wouldn’t it be nice if the clients would all just shut up and let us do whatever we wanted to promoted their products instead of killing our creative spirit with concerns about things like MONEY and EFFICIENCY?

Maybe this is a prime example of the large scale, stereotypical difference between the Japanese and the French. Take risks, embrace and get ahead of change in the industry, working together, or whine about how clients need to appreciate your creative vision more, relax and turn over their pocketbooks.

And then there’s the American point of view, possibly the most salient of the bunch. Chuck Brymer, president-CEO of Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide, thinks agencies need to change their entire mentality because of how technology has changed consumer interaction.

…technology that allows consumers to communicate with each other increasingly makes consumers behave much like swarms. In this scenario, advertising becomes a two-track challenge of not only influencing the overall herd, but also influencing swarm behavior.

“In the past, we’ve always seen the big eat the small. In the new knowledge-based economy, the fast eats the slow,” he said. “Speed is the new big.”

Now there’s an idea. Acknowledge the speed with which information travels from brand to consumer and back to brand, change the way you approach the route of that information, and you may just be able to stay ahead of it. Brymer offers solutions, not just ideas. Don’t dream it, just do it. A slogan made in America, after all.