Seven marketing lessons from the smoothest man on Madison Avenue – and what ignoring them cost real companies between 1965 and last Tuesday.
There is a moment in season four of Mad Men when Bert Cooper – a man who is roughly nine hundred years old and has not worn shoes at the office in a decade – delivers the most surgical line in seven seasons of television. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has just lost Lucky Strike. Roger Sterling, partner, rainmaker, wit, the man whose name is on the door, comes looking for sympathy. Bert declines to provide any: “Lee Garner, Jr. never took you seriously because you never took yourself seriously.”
Seven lessons from Sterling Cooper, stress-tested against linear TV’s collapse, the $32-billion creator economy, and an algorithm that does not care how clever you think you are.
The Secretary Who Outlasted the Medium
Peggy Olson walks into Sterling Cooper in the first episode of Mad Men as Don Draper’s secretary. She walks into McCann-Erickson in the last season with a cigarette in her mouth, sunglasses on, and a piece of pornographic Japanese art tucked under her arm like a briefcase. In between, she does the single hardest thing in this business: she gets good, and then she gets credit.
Everybody Already Knows This. Almost Nobody Checks It.
The 100-Marketer Persona Panel on the most frequent errors and oversights in web marketing – 20 groups, 60 answers, 20 distinct problems, and the outside research that says the panel called it right.
Every company has had this meeting. Somebody proposes a new channel nobody has staffed, somebody else proposes AI creative for it, and not one person in the room can say with confidence whether the contact form still sends email to a human being. That gap – between the clever thing on the slide and the boring thing that broke in March – is the entire subject of this report. Twenty panel groups of five practitioners each were asked for their top three errors in web marketing. They came back with 60 answers that normalized into 20 problems, and they agreed far more than anybody expected. Not one of the top eight is exotic, and all eight are cheap to fix. That is the bad news.
Six lessons from Mad Men, stress-tested against real effectiveness data – and against the last time a technology made a whole country lose its mind.
The Man Who Never Existed Has Outsold Most People Who Did
Don Draper is a fictional drunk with a stolen name and a worse marriage, and he has probably shaped more marketing careers than any textbook published since 1960. Slightly humiliating for our industry. Also true – Mad Men wrapped in 2015 and the man is still getting quoted in pitch decks eleven years later.
A Q&A on mining local and trade-press coverage of family businesses for real buyer language – and why almost nobody bothers.
I’ve written before about reading a public company’s SEC risk factors to find the exact words its leadership uses about its own problems. Somebody asked me, reasonably, “what do I do if my buyer isn’t a public company?” Most aren’t. Here’s the version of that technique for the other 99.99% of American businesses.
Turning Down Work: A Q&A on Capacity, Credibility, and the Profitable No
Published by 1000Startups.com | A practical guide for solo consultants, boutique agencies, fractional executives, and any founder whose calendar is the product.
The short version: the hardest work to decline is not the bad work. Bad work declines itself. The hard one is the good engagement – squarely in your wheelhouse, priced properly, funded, pleasant people – that you simply cannot do well this quarter. Below is how serious practices handle that, why buyers reward it, and the exact language to use.
Quick answer for the impatientPublish a capacity policy before you need one. Three numbers and a name: concurrent engagements, current lead time, named backup.Decline early, in writing, with a referral attached. Speed is the courtesy; the referral is the gift.Constraints published in advance read as a practice. Constraints discovered later read as an excuse.Your referral network is built entirely out of your no’s – the only channel that pays you for business you didn’t take.
Q: Why do the most successful operators say no to almost everything?
Because the yes is loud and the cost is quiet. Warren Buffett’s line – that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that the really successful ones say no to almost everything – is possibly the most-quoted and least-followed advice in business (widely reported, including by Inc. and cataloged in Buffett quotation collections). It gets quoted because it sounds wise. It gets ignored because a yes feels like growth and a no feels like leaving money on a table you can still see from where you’re standing.
A straight-talk Q&A on why the software running in the back office reads to acquirers like a credit score reads to a lender
Every staffing-agency owner eventually hears some version of the same question from a buyer: “What system are you running?” It sounds like small talk. It isn’t. Below, we answer the questions we get asked most often – by agency owners preparing to sell, by buyers running diligence, and by advisors caught in the middle – about why a piece of software can move a valuation, and what to actually do about it.