Specialization!

As Mason grows, specialization becomes more of a thing.  When there were four of us, everyone did everything.  At 10 people, there were individual teams.

About three years ago, at the suggestion of Adrian Padron, our VP of Operations, we broke the larger media team into smaller individual teams.  My sole contribution here was to agree with him.

Those Media teams - Team Hawk, Team Turbo, Team Viper, and Team Nitro - were between three and five people deep, and were responsible for everything: client facing; partner selection; optimization; reporting.  SEO, Email, Sales, and Creative teams were/are separate.

Of course different teams have different strengths, and we track things like client growth by team, employee retention by team, and more.  But each one has traditionally been responsible for everything pertaining to their client portfolio.

Now in 2022, specialization continues to be more of a thing.  We have hired a Data Engineer, full-time, out of our Charlotte office.  He will handle reporting and analytics for all of our Media clients.

I foresee this trends towards specialization becoming more important as we scale the company.

“13 Industries That Would Benefit From AR Shopping Experiences”

I am pleased to be featured on Forbes Agency Council again, this time for questions around AR, and which of our clients might benefit.

Pigeonholed.

Our culture is to grow our clients’ business, and we do that through Media Buying, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, and Creative work.  Each of those five main services has several subcategories.  

Not everyone hires us for everything, and that’s fine.

One thing we need to better at, though, is letting clients know that we do do all of those.

• One of our oldest clients once hired us for SEO, and Media Buying.  Three years later, their then-new Marketing Director moved the SEO to another agency.  One year after that, their new Marketing Director pulled me aside and said “you know, if I could make a suggestion, you should really offer SEO,  we’d really like to have one agency handle it all, but you don’t so we had to hire another agency.”  We’d lost out on that business again, because we got pigeonholed into being their Media Agency.

• A newer client recently hired a new Marketing Director, a very impressive person who knows the brand very well.  Our contract with the client, which obligates us to perform CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) predates his arrival.  None-the-less, they opted to hire another agency to work on CRO “because Mason doesn’t offer CRO.”  This is despite the fact A) we do and B) it says so in our contract. We got pigeonholed into being their media agency,

• A third example: an investor hired us for two of his companies, Company “A” is a lead generation client, and company “B” is an e-commerce brand. We knew that the e-comm brand was going to be very, very challenging for these reasons: Nobody at “B” was in charge of Marketing; they had no sales goals; their budget was too low. We would not have taken them as a client if he didn’t make it clear that this was a package deal: he wanted one agency for both of his projects. When “B” didn’t work - as we knew it wouldn’t - this client said “well, I should have known, after all you are a lead gen agency.” We got pigeonholed into being a lead agency, when in fact a huge number of our clients are e-comm.

To be clear, it’s my fault that we got pigeonholed.  I don’t feel comfortable banging every new hire at every client with a list of our services, but maybe I should.

The Value of Lunch

Our HR Director asked our 35 employees to complete an anonymous satisfaction survey, and the results were striking.  There was plenty of expected feedback, but some genuinely new things, too.

One new thing, was that the monitors in our new office weren’t all working up to employee expectation. This is not in and of itself interesting, this problem can be solved for $1.50 on Amazon.

Another new thing was, more than one person said they feel too busy to take a bathroom break.  This is not in and of itself interesting, either.  Obviously nobody here is overworked to the point of being unable to use the bathroom, and to complain that they are, is… a lot.

BUT!  What I do have to self-reflect on is, why did nobody feel comfortable saying to me or HR or our Directors or our VP “hey this monitor is janky, can I order a new dongle?”  Why did none of the new people say” I’m having a hiccup around time management and expectation, can we talk?”

I think part of this is not being in the office.  Lots of these 35 colleagues have never met me more than once.  They hear the most-disaffected of their colleagues voicing fear or whatever over slack.

And in the office, everyone can see that I model behavior like, taking lunch.  Going for a walk.  Our office is on the water in Brooklyn, and I love getting coffee from Blank Street and staring at the river.  And by the way, I did when I was starting my career too. And a few days a week I walk two blocks to Love & Dough and get their GLuten free pasta.  I sit there with a book and read for 30 minutes.

And so I think being in the office would actually help people see that “hey the boss takes lunch, I can too!”

But whatever the cause, and however self-reflexively I roll my eyes over the idea that people are saying they’re afraid to go to the bathroom, it is 100% true that I need to do a better job letting them know they can ask me for advice.  So I need to hear that, absorb it, and model the idea that it’s a good thing to take lunch.

The Execution Trap: Ad Tech vs human intervention

We’ve a client who values a certain kind of daily actions on their advertising.  Fair enough. 

Essentially, this client wants a series of ROAS-optimizing tasks performed everyday, seven days a week. If a certain campaign is doing X, perform action 1.  If a certain campaign is doing Y, perform action 2.  Etc…

If we ask our reps at Meta and Google, they’ll reply with some variation of “there are automated rules you can set to take care of this!” But there are not. These rules fail.

Eventually though, these rules will not fail. Eventually, the AI will become strong enough to pull these levers. And I for one, welcome it.

The more time we can spend being creative, ideating on new ideas, and the less time on Execution, the better.

“The Great Resignation,” or “On the Bus!”

I wanted to take a minute and write about the unfortunate reality that not every employee I value, will work at Mason forever.

I had the pleasure of working for Court Cunningham at Yodle.  Court recommended that I read Good to Great, by Jim Collins.  Collins writes that great businesses are like buses, and that leaders “start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”  I am flattered by Court’s implication that I was the right person for that bus.

Yodle was sold for somewhere around 350 million dollars.  That’s a heck of a bus.  I had gotten off several stops before, but I don't regret a second of it.  I was not a good fit for that bus at that time, and that’s fine!

Now, 15 years later, in the midst of The Great Resignation, I think about Yodle, and my time there. We’re at 35-ish people here at Mason, and can’t hire fast enough. In the last 30 days, about three people have left. I will miss those people (one in particular whose fantastic attitude and strong empathy makes them a constant pleasure to be around) but I can’t view it as a failure of leadership that 3 out of 35 people left A) as we mandated a one-day-a-week return to office, especially when B) 2 of the 3, live more than 1.5 hours from the office.

I appreciate their time on the bus, I will miss them, and I wish them well. There’s no deep flaw in any part of this that made them leave. It’s my job to get new people on board, self reflect on what we could have done differently, and keep the bus on the path.

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Post Script: I was hired at Yodle as Director of Search Engine Marketing, my wife was 5 months pregnant, and I reported to the founder. Within 3 months, the founder was out, I reported to no one, and I was sent to Charlotte to conduct a training session on Search Engine Marketing, But nobody told anybody in Charlotte that I was expected, so I sat alone in a hotel for three days, totally unable to reach anyone, and flew back to NYC without having met a single colleague. That’s why I left that particular bus.