As a new-business director, I’m not hearing crickets quite yet, but I have noticed that many of the RFPs we have received are either project-based and/or aren’t quite as solid of an opportunity that we’d like to think it is.

Consider two increasingly common questions found on RFPs:

Question #12: Tell us what a creative program/campaign might look like.
Question #13: Please tell us what a program such as the one you outlined above might cost.

It’s becoming a trend.

At that point, I thought Noelle must have our offices bugged. Or if she was reading my mind. We have had some interesting RFPs come our way lately. Some of them were so “interesting” that we had to pass on participating. There was a review for a new product launch a month or so ago that our agency was uniquely qualified to handle. We would have gone into it feeling like we were the front-runner for winning the account. The account was large enough to get us all excited. Then we read the RFP. They wanted a full spec creative campaign presented in their headquarters, 1000 miles away. And they wanted it in a week. We’re a small shop. We couldn’t possibly get that done. So we had to pass.

In a perfect world, all new business would grow organically out of relationships made through networking. A new client would go through our capabilities and get to know us and then decide to engage our services. Also, in a perfect world we would all ride on unicorns and it would rain candy. So, we have to deal with the RFP process. It is a process that is inherently flawed. And we learn more and more questions to ask up front every time we go through one. For instance, we put a whole lot of time into a response, only to not make the first cut. We found out later that there were 26 agencies invited to respond. Now, we ask how many are involved up front.

I could go on and on about the RFP process. But I won’t. I will say this, if you are looking to hire an agency and you are going with the RFP route, there is some responsibility on your end. You need to do some due diligence up front. Investigate potential agencies and narrow down your choices. Don’t ask for spec creative to be conjured up in an information vacuum. Don’t ask for responses from agencies you have little interest in working with as “a favor.” Remember, it’s a Request for Proposal. Make your requests reasonable.

Or, better yet, just hire us.

Last Saturday, our own fabulous Account Executive, Mia Jones Hughes, sang the Star Spangled Banner at the Toyota Truck 200 race at the Nashville Super Speedway. She didn’t know she was going to be on National TeeVee till her phone started ringing from all around the country from friends who saw her. Way to go, Mia.

Notice on the second listing, the warning to stay away from our website because we may harm your computer. Stunned we were, indeed. So I started poking around and noticed we had been hacked. And I noticed that all of the warnings were coming on the agency blog, not on the main site. So I went and looked and found that someone had gotten in and inserted some Spam text into several posts. So Chris, who sits in the big corner office and whistles all day, had to go in and de-hackify it and install the newest version of Wordpress. The only negative result was that we lost the tags on all our posts.

Finally, yesterday, the warning disappeared from Google. So we’re back in the blog business. I know how excited you must be for us.

If you define a friend as someone you have frequent communication with, I would say people I knew growing up had four or five real “friends.” And I think the reason for this is the inherent shyness and social awkwardness that is present in everybody. I might have sat next to Bob everyday in math class for a year, but if I had never called him before, to do so would be taking a huge risk of possible awkwardness. The thought of having to explain who you are on the phone to someone can be quite daunting. “Hi, Bob, this is Jim. From math class? I sit next to you? Remember, the skinny guy with the bad complexion?”

Email changed all that. It is much easier to explain who you are in writing, because you don’t fear the awkward silence from the other end if the person doesn’t recognize you, no matter how unlikely that might be. Suddenly, people were comfortable striking up communications with folks they hadn’t talked to in years, or only met briefly, because it was from the comfort of a keyboard. Suddenly, the number of “friends” people could claim skyrocketed. Adding someone I just met to my address book and forwarding jokes was a great way to begin lasting friendships. Even if I never found myself in the same room with that person again.

Now, email is old school. Adults send three emails for every text. With teens, it is the other way around. Young consumers play by their own set of multi-tasking, micro-messaging rules. And most marketers are failing at getting any message through to them. In a world they completely don’t understand, marketers just assume more is better, and they increase the frequency of their old school messages. This is a generation that can do homework, chat on Facebook, keep up with Twitter and text messaging, all at the same time. According to a 2007 study by MTV and Microsoft, 14-24 year olds have an average of 53 people they consider friends. Multi-tasking is all they’ve ever known. They can filter the noise out.
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The smart marketers are getting involved, and they’re getting noticed for it. Every company should have a blog. Every company should be on MySpace. Every company should be on Facebook. And guess what? If you do all that, you’re already behind the curve.

I’ve mentioned my current obsession, Twitter, here before. Some people I follow were having a debate over which theme park within driving distance from Nashville provided the best bang for the buck. I had something to add a few days later, but couldn’t remember who was talking about it. One of the parks was Holiday World, so I did a tweetscan search. Lo and behold, Holiday World had just started using Twitter. I went to their Website. They have a blog. Because this communication is all personal and engaging, I now follow them and added them to my RSS reader. Come summertime, when I need a quick getaway with my kid, you’d better believe Holiday World is going to be top of mind when considering destinations.

There’s always new stuff coming down the pike. The next application I need to explore is something called BrightKite. All the cool kids are doing it. I’ll let you know what I find out. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go Twitter a bunch of friends, many of whom I’ve never actually met, a recommendation of my new friend, Holiday World, a place I’ve never actually been, as a great family vacation destination.

May 4, 2008, Nashville, TN - “Frank/Best International, a full-service advertising agency located at 705 2nd Avenue in Nashville, was the recent recipient of four Telly Award Finalist trophies at the 29th Annual Telly Awards based out of Ashland, KY. The Telly Awards are a national and international advertising competition honoring videos and television commercials produced at the local, regional and spot market level. FBI won for television commercials produced for Honda Lawnmowers, the Nashville Zoo, Columbia State Community College, and Honda Generators. (See commercials below.)

This year, the Telly Awards had over 14,000 entries from film & video production firms and advertising companies representing all 50 states and several countries. Over the years, Tellys have been featured as coveted marketing accolades in movies and TV shows alike. They’ve appeared on shows like the Bob Newhart Show, Thirtysomething and The Closer, as well as in films such as Nothing In Common and What Women Want.

“We’ve been very fortunate over the years regarding Tellys,” said Tim Best, FBI creative director and founding partner. “We’ve won a bunch but it’s always nice to be recognized by one’s peers and, of course, clients don’t mind having a cool trophy on their shelf, either.”

Telly Awards are the same height and weight as an Academy Award and are manufactured by the same company. In its 11 years of business, FBI has won nearly 30 Tellys.

Besides Honda Lawnmowers, the Nashville Zoo, Columbia State Community College and Honda Generators, Frank/Best International works with clients like Sprintz Furniture, RODE Microphones, Honda Marine, SmartSpace, Honda Engines, New Fossil and, just this week, was awarded television production assignments from Austin Peay State University.

For more information, contact Jim Reams, VP Public Relations at 615-255-6234 Ext. 103

Honda Lawnmowers:

Nashville Zoo:

Columbia State:

Honda Generators:

We had burgers and brats and cole slaw and potato salad and beer and Cokes. (If you aren’t from the South, “Cokes” is the term we use for all soft drinks. It is equivalent to “pop” or “sodas.”) I put my camera in the hands of Greg, who was obviously more interested in the beer than the picture taking. We did get a couple of shots.

If you were our client, you would have been invited. Don’t you think that’s enough to hire us as your advertising agency?

Hopefully, this addition to the Frank/Best International Galactic Headquarters will inspire some great creative thinking.

Which, for businesses, means interactive marketing and public relations. And because of it, branding has never been more vital than it is right now.

Search Engines, bloggers and chat rooms have made brand reputation one of the most important aspects in success or failure in this Web 2.0 world. A brand’s reputation used to be defined solely by product quality and the message a company pushed out from its headquarters. There were very few avenues for consumers to find out about product quality, good or bad, without shelling out the money to buy it. Clever 30-second TV spots, slick magazine advertising and a good training program for the staff could cover a multitude of sins. Today, pissing off the wrong person, such as a blogger, can cause irreparable harm to a brand’s reputation.

Restaurants and moviemakers have known this for a long time. A bad review in the Sunday paper could always do far more harm to a film or eatery than a good review could help.

If your company doesn’t have a two-way interaction going on with your customers and potential customers, you are way behind the curve. And the companies who are setting the curve are finding more and faster ways to respond to their customer’s needs. Case in point: Twitter.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks the question, “What are you doing?” And the posts, or “tweets,” are limited to no more than 140 characters. You decide whose updates to follow, and it becomes sort of an ongoing, online chat fest.

Many companies, LinkedIn, H. R. Block and Southwest among the most notable, have Community Managers who follow what people are saying about them on Twitter. This allows them to contact, (instantly in some cases) folks who are having problems. For instance, Helen Mosher, who blogs at The Mosher Pit, had trouble with a company called Mixx, and wrote a short tweet about it to vent her frustration. What happened next surprised her.

“Next thing I knew, Mixx had added me on Twitter. The good folks at Mixx asked what hiccup I had run across. I was very impressed: within a few minutes of making a complaint about a technology, the technology folks approached me with “Hey, I see you had trouble with our platform. What can we do to make it better?”

OMG if VW had done this with me when my Jetta was made of fail, I might not be driving a Toyota today!”

Twitter can also be used as a direct marketing tool, something Southwest occasionally does, to announce sales and specials to its Twitter followers (which includes me).

Obviously, if Twitter’s popularity continues to grow, the logistics of following your products and services in real time may become impractical. That is what traditional customer service channels are for. But tech-geek early adopters will always be looking for the next new social media communications platform. And smart companies will follow them there, too. And if done well, it will only help their brand reputation.

If you need help integrating your company into the ever-evolving world of Social Media networking, send me an email at jim at fb-i dot com. Or, if you’re already on Twitter, shout out a tweet to @jimreams. Maybe you’ll end up with some Frank/Best drumsticks.

(This is the blog for Frank Best International, an advertising agency in Nashville, Tennessee. This post was written by Jim Reams, Twitter Geek.)

But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Search marketing is the most targeted form of advertising in existence. Your ad is only seen by people searching for keywords you choose. In other words, if you are selling spiked dog collars, and someone is searching for spiked dog collars, you’d certainly be happy to pay a dollar or so for that person to click through to your site.

We have the Super Bowl coming up on Sunday. If you are a Pepsi or a FedEx, the $2.7 million dollars you are shelling out for thirty seconds of air time is worth it, because not only is the audience tremendous, but it is one of the few times where millions of people actually look forward to watching the commercials. However, when you do the math, you could buy $7,400 per day for an entire year in highly targeted, paid search advertising for that kind of money. I expect that the marketers buying time on the broadcast will also be buying keywords related to their ad creative. If they’re not, they are missing a huge opportunity to convert the passive experience of watching a TV spot into an active customer connection.

We think that the rumors of the impending death of the thirty-second TV spot are greatly exaggerated. And if you are looking for an advertising agency to do your Super Bowl spot for next year, by all means, give us a call. We still believe in the power of TV. But remember, it’s a brave new world out there. Incorporating search into your overall marketing plan is a great opportunity to make sure your message is getting to the specific people you want to hear it.