Tough Love Amid the Blarney

Things you may or may not have noticed had you attended, as we did, the 23rd annual spring meeting of the Association of Promotion Marketing Agencies Worldwide in County Kilkenny, Ireland, in April:

Dublin’s not a very Irish-looking place. Gray and drab for the most part, the city is old and historic, but about as attractive overall as Youngstown without the steel mills.

The people, the pubs, and the Guinness, of course, are superb.

• Much more meets the eye in the sweeping hills and rushing streams of Kilkenny, an hour or so farther west, where the conference site of Mt. Juliet was as magnificent and well ordered as an English country estate — which, of course, it was for many years.

• The front-line status that requires promotion agency chief executives to be anticipators and interpreters of emerging marketing trends makes them a terribly tough audience for any would-be conference speaker to capture, let alone hold for long, with a conventional lecture-take-notes format.

• Also, while the creative extroverts that dominated the agency side of the promo business a decade ago may have come and gone, today’s chiefs are not so unlike their counterparts in other industries that they prefer at all times to listen rather than speak.

• Immerse such hardy souls as these in the give-and-take of a three-day, peer-group seminar focusing on issues like the globalization of brands, the consolidation of agencies, the integration of marketing services, and the need for differentiation among various agency “brands,” therefore, and you’ve got a hot meeting on your hands.

• Tough on themselves is what they were, not just with each other. Earnestly engaged but critical in a civilized and constructive way, a few score executives — who were and will remain ferocious competitors long afterward — were remarkably candid in a series of workshops led by outside facilitators, who themselves were brutally candid in summing up on the final day.

• You had to be there, of course, but the agency takeaway had to be: Wow. We’ve got lots of work to do. We didn’t know what kind, how much, or where to start, but we do now. It was a rigorous self-examination, directed by a team of informed but objective outsiders.

• Challenges to be faced: Develop a better sense of what the promotion agency is and what it does. Do a better job of communicating that message to clients, prospects, and the marketing community at large.

• Most interesting (this from the facilitators) is that, given the extraordinary range and depth of skill sets possessed by the typical promotion shop, the agency side of the industry needs to make a better case for getting paid for what they know, as well as for what they do. For starters, “You need to know what you know,” in one facilitator’s words.

• All of which, for participants as well as observers, made Summit 2001 a more interesting and productive event, albeit one that was probably easier to plan, recruit, and hold together than the Sydney 2000 program that we panned in this space one year ago.

• Also noted: Overseas agencies are becoming increasingly uneasy with the word “promotion,” which in any European language but English means merely “sale” in the mundane sense of a simple price cut. Be it “promozione” (in Italy), “promoción” (Spain), “promocão” (Portugal) or “promotion” (France), the word glares from store windows and gas pumps and from one end of the Continent to the other.

• Add to this the fact that, outside America, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, the term “promotion marketing” means nothing because it simply cannot be translated. Also that, in France and the U.K., agencies that used to specialize in promotion marketing have migrated over to retail merchandising, product sampling, special events, and direct marketing in recent years, and you have a bit of a conundrum.

• The discussion of which at the meeting may lead to a name change in the near future for the APMA. One being considered is the Association of Diversified Marketing Agencies, or ADMA. That would turn promotion marketers into either diversified marketers or diversified marketing service providers (DMSPs). Any takers?

Celebrity in absentia at the APMA get-together was Jeff McElnea, former head of Einson Freeman, who was this year’s nominee to the APMA Worldwide Hall of Fame. (He’ll be honored in November at the fall meeting and Globe Awards gala in Palm Beach.) Jeff joined Einson as a trainee after graduating from Dartmouth in 1970 and rose through the ranks, turning the point-of-sale specialty house into a full-service promotion agency over the years, and eventually forming a partnership that took the company private in 1978. He served as chairman and ceo until January 2000, when he left to form Satmark, a new media venture.

Kerry E. Smith is co-founder and former editor and publisher of PROMO. Reach him at [email protected].