codegent is a full service web development new media agency, based in clapham, london, uk, that delivers well-designed content managed sites, microsites and flash games supported by robust technology and integrated marketing solutions including search engine optimisation, pay-per-click and html email.
It's the Third Thursday of the month... and the nights are drawing in.
Mark completes the New York Marathon!
Other links referenced...
So it’s the third Thursday of November 2011, only 13 days from December and the undeniable “Christmas Season” that awaits us. Naturally in the world of the web agency it’s a very busy time of year. Several things are happening that contribute to this, firstly, every business that can make revenue from the Christmas season is attempting to fit in last minute updates to their digital presence. Secondly, most budgets will renew in January and eleventh hour ideas to use any remaining amount and capitalise on this year are being considered.
Which brings us to the subject of that big B word, Budget.
Many companies’ financial years are of course calendar years, which makes November and December months for planning - planning what to do with budget no one has actually got their hands on yet. Project briefs for whole new sites, web apps and major site overhauls fly around during this period and agencies are inundated with requests from both their long term customers and potential new business partners.
It seems like a period that should be conducive to synergy, ideas flow, budgets open up to accommodate them and deals can be struck. However this isn’t always the case as there’s a paradigm within this industry that needs to be stepped away from, the paradigm of the classic agency mindset. You see, people who work for agencies are generally very creative and therefore want to produce incredible work, something impressive, new, within the realms of “never been tried before”.
Clients on the other hand have a clear idea of what their web site/app needs to achieve and want creative ideas to surround that. It can be easy to slip into the mindset of competing on these fronts if not careful and it’s a big mistake, a throwback to a time when web agencies were “special”, when companies weren’t so technically minded and the agencies were needed.
Generally this classic idea of an agency lead to clients coming up with what they needed and agencies giving them a “big idea”, striving to reach the limits of their creativity and knowing they could command whatever budget they demanded.
This is a reality that could not last, it’s not the way Codegent operates and we’d like to hope we’re ahead of the game due to this, because there is an alternative. In fact there’s much chatter in our industry of late about adjusting the way in which we work with our clients, how agencies simply have to adapt nowadays to a new way of operating. Glue Isobar made this point very well at an agency conference recently, publishing an article hinting that there’s an emergence of a new operating system for agencies.
It boils down to the sentiment I’m alluding to here. Customers don’t always want a big idea, (some do, granted) but mostly they want you to listen to their needs. Most sites serve a particular purpose; ecommerce, social interaction, generating business and if you get hung up on the big ideas you can lose the core purpose of the requests being made of you as an agency. Clients will be living with the site you deliver them for the foreseeable future, they need it to be worth it’s cost, a long term revenue stream. Agencies want the short term revenue from completing that project and also the potential to flex their creative muscles. These two agendas are of course at odds with one another so how do you combat this problem as an agency?
The way to work in synergy with clients is simple, listen.
Understand the needs of your client's business, as well as the site they are asking for. If you understand their business you’ll understand why they have that brief, why they think they need those things. It may mean that you end up poking holes in the brief, pointing out what they really need and why it makes better sense for their business, but that’s the whole point. As an agency the goal should be to work collaboratively with a client, act as their advocate and understand their needs, the desired journey and the end goal. If an agency can do this then the relationship will only blossom, the customer will trust the agency and vice versa.
There’s the classic trifecta on any project which works on a principle that’s basically 100% true. You have cost, speed and quality. If you focus on two of these you will make a sacrifice on the other but the way to minimise the impact of these is by knowing one another. Clients who have no idea what work is involved in production often focus on speed and they don’t understand why the length of the process is so great. As an agency who’s attempting to work alongside your clients rather than against them why not educate them in this process? Don’t belittle their lack of knowledge, increase it and you’ll work much better together, with even more of the trust mentioned previously.
I don’t want to blow our own trumpet too much, there are several agencies out there who work this way, taking time to understand each client and forming a lasting partnership on their projects. In fact the Glue Isobar article I mentioned earlier speaks to much of this understanding of the client. Representing them in their digital endeavours, rather than battling them for more creative “fun” stuff to work on. Most needs are simple and every now and again those big, fun, highly creative projects come along, but trying to turn every project into one of those is a huge mistake and will mean missing the mark more often than not. Listen to clients, really know what they want, then understand why they want it, after that you’re on their side and it can only deliver the right result.
“I love your videos” said a client recently, delivered with a slightly wry Glaswegian lilt. Was she being genuine or just taking the piss? A low-level paranoia has typified mine and Mark’s feelings about the monthly ‘2-minute to camera’ videos that we put out each month as part of Third Thursday.
This week saw the public lambasting of SapientNitro’s own take on just how cool it was to work there, with their “Idea Engineers” video. It lasted a short time on Facebook before the piss-taking became too much and they pulled it down. Publicis’ “I’ve got a feeling”, PHD’s “We are the future” and Agency.com’s “Going to work for Subway” have all come in for a similar amount of ridicule over the years, so there is always that fear that we could be next.
As you would expect from a busy agency, as the third week of the month approaches there is a bit of a last minute scramble to get articles written, a video recorded and an email produced. Sometimes Third Thursday has even become Third Friday.
The videos themselves are hastily planned, normally along the lines of ‘can we mention x yet?’ – ‘great, you say that bit then’. We don’t rehearse and we rarely start again if one of us messes up: resulting in an output that makes us wonder whether we just end up making idiots of ourselves.
Which all begs the question: is it worth it?
We thought we would practice what we preach and measure what it costs and whether it can be justified by ROI, and whether there are other intangible benefits to committing to a monthly newsletter.
So, what does it actually cost us each month to make? Well here is a rough attempt.
We write, normally, four articles: two serious-ish opinion-piece ones, one comedy one and one educational one. All but the ‘grind my gears’ ones take a few hours research, probably another hour to write and they all need to be proof-read by someone else and images found to go along with them. I’d say about 12 hours in writing time. Taking a point somewhere between raw costs of hiring and housing people and opportunity costs (the money we could have made had we been charging people out to clients rather than doing stuff for free), I’d estimate somewhere in the region of £800 to write the newsletter.
The video takes a few minutes to record, but about an hour to encode and edit. The design is probably another couple of hours. Building the email, testing it, messing about with various elements and then broadcasting is another 2-3 hours.
So all in all, we’re probably talking about somewhere in the region of £1,200 per newsletter. And we’ve been doing the full-on video-enriched Third Thursday thing since May 2010. So this month is number 19. Which makes it just slightly shy of £23,000 we’ve invested so far.
The newsletter goes out to just under 1,000 people each month, and we have an average open rate of approx 20%. So, about 3,800 ‘views’ of our newsletter email, plus the people who actually read the blog posts – about 6,000 (assuming most of them are newsletter recipients too).
So, all in all it costs us about £4 each time someone reads anything to do with Third Thursday. Would we be better off just buying everyone a sandwich?
ROI measurements
Ultimately, the ROI has to be financial. Unless it’s a vanity thing, at some point it has to deliver value. However, how this is measured isn’t always as immediately straightforward. Here are some of things we consider:
New work
Do we send out a newsletter and then see a load of orders the following week? No (is the simple answer).
But we do definitely win work off the back of Third Thursday, but bear in mind that most of the recipients are existing or former clients. If nothing else, it acts as a prompt to remind people we are here. They may have called us anyway, it’s hard to say, but often it acts as a catalyst.
Punching above our weight?
We’ve always loved the idea of out-teaching our competition. We know we have sector experts here because we only hire people who are passionate about the medium. And we know that bigger agencies are often forced to hire job-a-day software developers who just don’t care. So why not share the love? We actively encourage everyone in the agency to write. We think that their wisdom is of interest to our clients and ultimately shows us being thought-leaders (for want of a less hackneyed phrase).
New ideas
Much of what we talk about involves emerging technologies or practices. We think, if nothing else, we can give our clients a competitive advantage by keeping them abreast of what they need to know. And, hey, if they pick up the phone and ask us if we can help them, too, then that’s all the better.
Our company
We tend to be a bit too fluid to have anything that resembles a mission statement (not that anyone reads them seriously anyway), so writing about what we think seems to be a better way of reflecting who we are. It’s kind of low-key PR.
Personality
We all know people buy people. One value we’ve always espoused is honesty and transparency. It might put a few people off: but that’s a good thing. We only want to hire people who want to share those values and we only want to work with clients who do, too. So, in some ways, we get what we ask for by talking about it.
Hymn sheet harmonisation
Because it’s such a shared, collegiate kind of thing – and because we know we have to do it every month, it means that it’s not left to one person to think about. We don’t have a marketing department responsible for broadcasting the company line on “social media” or “Google” that everyone within the company promptly ignores. It genuinely means that we all have more of a stake in thinking about what we think about things.
Word of mouth
We’ve definitely seen our referrals increase over the last year or so, and many people when they write to us make reference to one or two of the pieces they’ve read on our blog. If we didn’t have this self-imposed monthly deadline, we’d certainly write less and there would be less for prospective clients to base an opinion on.
How was it for you?
The consensus internally is Third Thursday is worth it. It can always be improved and should always be evolving. But we’ve found a voice that suits us and we think that it can only be a good thing.
In August I flew north to Chiang Mai to attend Barcamp, a geeky gathering held once or twice per year. Looking out of the window of the plane shortly after takeoff I was shocked to see an inland sea. As far as the eye could see, sunlight reflected back off the surface of the water, roads were submerged, small villages and temples had become islands.
Prior to this flight I had seen news reports on TV, but only when witnessed from the air did the extent and magnitude of the flooding hit home. On the flight back I kept a close eye on the water and followed it right up to the northern edge of Bangkok. Over the following weeks slowly but surely the water progressed south, swallowing industrial estates, university campuses, and whole neighbourhoods in it's wake.
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/thailands-disastrous-slow-moving-flood/100188/
By late October it became clear that those in power had little or no clue what they were doing. In scenes reminiscent of Monty Python, hundreds of boats were strung together and used to push the water down the river and out to sea. Daily there were assertions of "confidence" and reassurances inner Bangkok would be "100% safe". Once you have been in Thailand a while you learn that an assertion of confidence by someone in power means exactly the opposite. It was time to prepare for the inevitable. Bangkok was going to flood, and it wasn't going to be over in a few days.
We made a list.. sand bags, plastic sheeting, duct tape, boards, silicone sealant. I had nightmares about power cuts, or worse, losing internet connectivity! We sourced a generator, stored up water, and mentally prepared for the worst.
By now some of our team members homes were flooded or at grave risk of flooding. The water was putrid and they were forced to leave and stay with relatives. Our work continued without too much interruption thanks to distributed source control and a wide choice of communication options ranging from Skype chat rooms to Google hangouts.
Then one night it hit me. We didn't have to stay, we could do our best to protect the house then move our office. Once the decision was made we just had to work out on when to leave. I looked at satellite images of the flooding overlaid with elevation data and expert predictions. Based on my unscientific estimates it looked like we had about a week.
We booked flights and I found a few large houses in Chiang Mai and a reserve in the mountains. If you have to evacuate you might as well do it in style. Luckily I think we booked a few days before the main exodus started. As people left, Bangkok was transformed, the traffic jams evaporated and highways were lined for miles with parked cars seeking higher ground.
Moving our office isn't that hard. Everyone on the team has a Macbook and can live without hefty desktop computers. We packed a box with our office essentials:
Before leaving I setup some webcams and installed tracking software on the computers left in the office. If someone was to break in and make off with them we might as well have some fun tracking them.
The day the evacuation came was not without minor drama. Over night water had overflowed the canal and was within 500 metres of our house. In times of flooding a friend with a pickup truck is a friend indeed. Luckily our designer Nor had such a vehicle and that day was a saint coming through the floods to transport our family, luggage, and french bulldog to the airport.
Upon arrival I discovered my beloved laptop had been left outside the house! If you are a geek you will understand the terror this caused. Nor rushed back and thanks to the lack of traffic on the roads was able to return to the airport before our flight left. Phew!
Later that day she made yet more trips to the airport, collecting Jirasak from his flooded neighbourhood with his two cats and getting them out safely. We are all grateful for her help.
Once we arrived at the rented house in Chiang Mai we plugged in our network and settled right back into work. We spent a week working out of a house in the suburbs then moved to an amazing reserve in the mountains where we were reunited with the rest of the team.
We have been here for a week so far and its the best office I've ever had. The internet connection is a bit lacking but the view more than makes up for it. I grew up in Snowdonia,North Wales and so feel a certain connection to mountains. Waking up in the morning and watching mist roll over mountains while drinking your coffee beats commuting through busy city traffic any day.
I feel this break from our routine has been productive. We mix activities with long quiet periods of sustained focus. Fresh air, walks down country lanes, and wood fire under stars provides the perfect setting to discuss what really matters to us and has helped us define our strategy for the year ahead.
Next year be there floods or not I think we will return here. Arthur C Clark described a future in which knowledge workers have the privilege of working from anywhere. We are lucky to live in the future and yet we seldom get up from behind our screens to make the most of it. Just because we work as a team doesn't mean we have to be stuck in an office. If your team is small and your systems are lean you can work different.
We have one more week in Chiang Mai before we are scheduled to fly back to Bangkok. When we left I felt a little guilty leaving friends to face the floods but in retrospect escaping the mental stress and relocating the team was the right thing to do. The flood waters will recede and Thailand will rebound as it has done many times in the past. No amount of water can wash away the character, resilience, and pure ingenuity of the Thai people.
Another month and another light-hearted rant in a series that we have called “Grind my gears” after the popular US cartoon, Family Guy.
This month, I will be ranting on about the inconvenience of undelivered parcels, and my frustration of how other companies don’t have the same ‘communication is key’ and ‘get it done’ mantra that we here at Codegent follow.
Working in the creative industry we are familiar with deadlines; my irritation when others don’t seem to understand the importance of these, and having what is needed there and ready to go when it is needed has been bubbling at a high temperature this last fortnight.
The phrase ‘next day delivery’ is being spread thinly across every form of e-commerce, we expect everything to be in our hands instantly. Is this asking too much, or is it just part of our fast paced modern day needs?
Going through any online e-commerce purchase is often a strung out painstaking process. Click to add to basket, go to basket, proceed to checkout, double check that is what you want, proceed, address, address look up, delivery address, payment, pick payment, card details, address of card.
Then near the end, you get that little ray of hope, you can almost see the light at the end of your tunnelled problem, when you read the phrase “next day delivery”. You fork out that extra £5-£10 for that relaxing, reassuring feeling that the product that you have just paid hard earned cash for is going to be at its required location tomorrow.
“aahhhhhh” Time for a cup of tea and a sneaky choccie biscuit.
If only it could go that swimmingly every time. You sit there all day clock watching, imagining your parcel on route, wondering if your parcel is all lonely sat in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, or is just around the corner, in throwing distance. Some companies supply a tracking number for your parcel however, most the time this code does not seem to clear the muddy, confused location of your parcel any more than imagining where it is does.
When my deadline specific parcel did not arrive on its projected day, I called the store that I placed the order with to try and find out where the hell my parcel was. As you can imagine, my irritation and frustration was flowing through my voice box down the phone. I got passed from one person to the next just to ask the simple question – “where the f##k is my parcel?”. After explaining how I paid for next day delivery and it hadn’t arrived, I then asked them to find my nearest store and to have it couriered to me. Regrettably, I received a “computer says no” answer. I don’t appreciate being passed around like a new born baby, being charged a fortune on their phone line just to be back at square one. “arrrghhhhh”
To further my annoyance they then decide to deliver my parcel three days later, when I no longer needed it, and are yet to refund my ‘next day delivery’ payment.
The frustration comes from my own extended efforts of making sure things get done on time, no matter how short the deadline. I and others within the agency, go above and beyond to make sure everything runs to a schedule and clients are equipped with everything they need to attack their digital design problems straight on. It is just unthinkable to set a design delivery date with a client, decide you are not going to give it to them on that date, just sit on it and randomly post it through a few days later to their surprise. When they no longer need it, or have found another form of getting the same product somewhere else. So what gives others the right to do it?
Companies and people need to learn to stick by their word, if you state something will be their next day in black and white, then it should be there. Don’t give me the hope and optimism to think it is possible, for you then to rip it away from me, and turn me into a squabbling toddler who isn’t getting that bike I wanted for Christmas till after Christmas.
I was happy to hear this week that I’m not the only one frustrated by companies delivering habits. MP of Corby and conservative party politician Louise Mensch broadcasted her annoyance with Argos’ lack of delivery service on Twitter and BBC Breakfast on Tuesday 15th November. Her frustration was sound and clear, being told that her delivery had been cancelled and Argos have the right to not tell her. Utterly ridiculous lack of communication with consumers, she Tweeted that Argos “need to add reliability to complete the package, letting customers know is just good business”.
She encouraged her 41,000 followers to rally together and Tweet their delivery hells to the world and companies, GoGirl! Stories included @TaraLouRico who waited home for Virgin Media to arrive on five different delivery occasions, only for it to be cancelled each time without being told. Rightfully so, Virgin Media lost her as a customer and she switched to Sky.
Now, you could be reading this as a one in a million individual who has never had to encounter the irritation of delayed deliveries, thank you for letting me cry on your shoulder, and cleanse my soul. A big shout out to anyone currently reading this while waiting for a delivery, good luck!
Is it so bad for me to want things to run on time and to what was expected? Do I expect too much? Maybe I’m too demanding, but we can't afford to waste a day in modern day society merely walking back and forth up and down the hall way, peeking outside the front door to wait for something to arrive. We have much better, more productive things to do with our day, like writing an article about it, that I must clarify I delivered on time!
All I can say is Good Luck on your delivery quests for the future!
That my friends is what really grinds my gears.
