Find a Strange Bedfellow

Promotion is such an incestuous business. How often do you hear people say that? Usually they’re talking about how everybody’s “in bed” with everybody else, the frequency with which clients and suppliers swap sides of the desk, or how your employee (or even your partner) today may well be mine tomorrow – and yours again the next day.

This may be typical of a professional community as small as promotion’s, but that still doesn’t make it healthy. We see real evidence that promotion’s gene pool is becoming polluted, diluted, and convoluted by too much inbreeding. There just aren’t that many names out there, or at least not as many as there ought to be.

“Get me some different kinds of people!” a corporate-side client recently implored. “I don’t want to see the usual suspects, the re-treads and the flunkies. Let me see some candidates from PR, from advertising, even from media. I need some nontraditional thinkers in here.”

We wish we heard such a mandate more often. As your friendly neighborhood headhunters, we see the sad effects of promotion’s incestuous proclivities each day – agencies and marketing departments that just aren’t as smart or as strong as they should be. It’s not that we don’t ever see outsiders being invited in, but that we don’t see it enough. On the relatively rare occasions we do see outsiders, the result is usually rewarding.

Ken Potrock, now vp of alliance marketing for Walt Disney World, was recruited into the promotion agency business by Ryan Partnership after spending the first part of his career in sales and marketing at E. J. Gallo and Vintner’s International. “My sales and brand management experience helped me bring a brand-equity orientation to promotion,” Potrock recalls. “I was better prepared to stay on strategy and be complementary to the rest of the marketing mix, while pushing the promotional envelope.”

Potrock seeks a similar outlook when recruiting promotion talent into Disney. “We want people who clearly understand that the value of the brand takes precedence over doing the deal, getting more media value or other short-term orientations,” he says.

Hire smart, they’ll learn Still, there persists an odd and pervasive mindset that says you must “have worked” in promotion “to work” in promotion. Too many of us have convinced ourselves that promotion is so remarkably complex that it’s all but impossible to do it if you have no experience.

Bull. There’s little to nothing about promotion that a really smart strategic thinker couldn’t learn in short order. You could take a lawyer, a scientist, or an architect and in no time they’d be coming up with new promotion ideas that aren’t so constricted by what’s been tried – and failed – in the past. Well, maybe not a lawyer. But, more often than not, they’d more than compensate in creative energy what they may lack in promotion bench time.

“I don’t think there’s any substitute for smarts and savvy, not to mention character,” says Howard Steinberg of Source Marketing, Inc. “I once hired someone who was pursuing a Master’s in psychology who turned out to be one of our greatest employees because she had amazing insight into people.”

So why is it such a stretch for the promotion business to look outside its own, and hire talent and not just experience? We think risk is perhaps the biggest issue. People don’t want to take a chance at giving someone a job they haven’t done before. There’s always the chance that the recruit may eventually – or quickly – decide that he or she really does not like the promotion business and set off in another direction.

In other words, it takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude – guts – to bring in people from outside promotion’s quiet little enclave. You need to be prepared to invest in someone who may be somewhat less likely to work out for any number of reasons. It also requires more work for the employer to bring the new talent up to speed.

“It’s a little too easy – even lazy – just to hire someone who has exactly the experience you need,” says Steinberg. “But if the promotion business took the time to train talented people instead of all the employee-swapping that goes on, our industry would have a much better chance of getting out of the quicksand of mediocrity it’s mired in.”

Good point, Howard. Promotion people are often heard to complain that they are not taken seriously as strategists. So long as they hire people based on tactical experience, that non-strategic perception isn’t likely to change.

Hire talent, not experience.