Ten years later, we've accomplished more than I ever expected to. We've worked with some of the world's greatest brands. We've been on the Inc. 5000 twice. BtoB Magazine named us either the #1 or #2 interactive agency in the country three times in a row. I'm proud of all that, but I won't lie. It's been a rocky road with some serious challenges.

Here are 10 random thoughts on a decade:

1. Everything is interactive. This industry has a bad habit of Hammer-Nail Syndrome (I have a hammer so every problem looks like a nail). This has lead to disconnects between online and offline that are just now starting to resolve. I've got a news flash: everything is interactive. People's attention is constantly shifting and they are constantly moving through their lives and every time they come into contact with brands it is part of an interaction. If you don't get it by now, consider hanging up your hat. It's time.
2. Silos are still dumb. When we started Traction, we had left other agencies frustrated by silos. Nobody knew what to do with us digital kids, so they siloed us away in the attic (literally, I was at Tribal DDB and our office was in an attic over Subway sandwiches and the Irish Bank). Today, nobody knows what to do with mobile so they create silos for it. Same with social. That's dumb.
3. Whole-brain thinking. This has been a tough couple of years. The economy has been difficult. We're able to measure things. The result is a lopsided left-brained industry. We focus only on the analytical, only on the measurable, and ignore the right-side of our collective brains. But this industry was built on persuasion, inspiration, creating desire. We can't forget that. We must use our whole brains. It will be the companies that do that pull ahead.
4. Opportunity lies in chaos. I started Traction in 2001—a very tough time for agencies. But we were able to get office space at a fraction of the cost it would have been a year before. We were able to attract great people and build a company around them. When the economy collapsed two years ago, we all told our clients to spend into the downturn. It would pay dividends in the future. We were right. Within chaos, there lies opportunity.
5. Creative matters. We work so hard to spend every media dollar so efficiently. We optimize, we use data, we target and re-target and target some more. All of which is smart to do and continues to give us incremental gains. But what about the power of a great idea. If a great idea can increase your conversion rates by 2x, how does that impact the efficiency of your media buy? It doubles it. So, why aren't more brands willing to take risks to invest in better ideas?
6. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In recent months, I've seen agencies try to act like publishers and publishers try to act like agencies. I've gotten calls from publishers who are trying to get better creative that they can give away for "free" to other agencies on behalf of brands. Everything is shifting and everyone is trying to make it look like they are getting everything for nothing, but the truth is it takes a certain amount of time to do work. A shorter amount for lousy work, a longer time for great work, but someone always spends that time and someone always pays for it. The more we try to kid ourselves that we can get something without paying for it, the more we push ourselves toward an acceptance of mediocrity.
7. Great work. If you know me, you know that I have certain ambitions. Not for Traction to be a bigger and bigger agency, but for Traction to be a greater and greater agency. Someone recently tried to convince me I should stop dreaming about being Don Draper and just pump out crap as cheaply as I can so I can make a quick buck and retire. Last week at our 10th birthday party, half a dozen people came up to me and told me Traction was the greatest place they had every worked. That's what caring does. That's what pride in your work does. That's what striving to be great does.
8. Power in perseverance. I look back at the ups and downs over the past decade and am sometimes amazed we've made it through. Man, we had some tough times. I remember staring at the telephone and wondering how I was going to get it to turn into payroll in two weeks. I have hustled. But never considered giving up. Never considered not believing. Even when we had to make the painful layoffs a couple of years ago. I hear many in the industry lament the days of old. How will we survive? they ask. Just adapt, believe and persevere.
9. Be careful what you promise. Sometimes you promise a top ten list, but you can only come up with nine things.
10. Work hard. Play hard. We bust our ass to make it in this business. We think harder every day than just about any profession I can come up with. We stay late and eat cold pizza. We battle for ideas. We are held accountable. We damn well deserve to have some fun at the end of the day. Don't forget to celebrate your success when you have it.

"Let's create an iPad app to engage our customers."

"Let's use a DSP to buy our media."

But let's open the windows and see what's going on outside of our industry. How are other companies innovating?

First, companies outside of our industry aren't quite so myopic in their definitions.

Look at Walmart. The Walmart customer experience sure ain't no iPad. However, Walmart is just as innovative as Apple. Walmart just chooses to innovate on how they deliver—their supply chain—instead of what they deliver—their customer experience. The Walmart customer experience is low prices. Low prices made possible by their supply chain innovation.

Second, the world has shifted to a collaborative economy that our industry needs to adapt to—within and across our organizations.

Take Boeing. They used to build the world's best airplanes. No longer. These days, their expertise is now in assembling the world's best airplanes. Boeing still builds some critical pieces of airplanes, but most of those components come from dozens of best-of-breed suppliers around the globe. The focus of their innovation has been how to become better collaborators.

Opportunities for Collaboration Innovation

The industry landscape is a cluttered mess. Sitting between brands and customers are thousands of companies offering a dizzying array of overlapping products and services to help bridge the gap. Meanwhile consumers are demanding more and more content and value from brands across more and more devices and channels. At the same time, they're becoming less tolerant and less trustful of brand-sponsored communications.

The range of expertise needed to successfully market in this environment is daunting. The need for coordination across all these areas makes it even more overwhelming. Players don't want to lose market share, so everyone says they do it all. But by trying to do everything, companies wind up being not expert at anything.

This situation leaves collaboration ripe for innovation. Here are some opportunities:

Agency partnership. Agencies have had our heads up our collective asses—too busy fighting for table scraps to come up with solutions to the greater problem. Brands are coming up with innovative collaboration models themselves. Pepsi now has an agency model where they brief all of their agencies at the same time—the best idea comes from anywhere. Then all of their agencies go back to their respective corners and execute at what they're best at.

Total partner collaboration. Last week I was at a "Strategic Supplier Summit" for one of my clients, one of the largest personal and business software makers in the world. Rather than solicit competing proposals from dozens of partners for their annual marketing push, they gathered all of their partners—their ad agency, media agency, publishers, ad networks, affiliate networks, Google—and requested one proposal that was best for the brand.

This approach delivered efficiency and performance. Win. Win.

Crowd-sourcing. A handful of agencies have come up with models for crowd-sourcing creative from the unwashed masses. While this model will unlikely satisfy the diverse needs of clients in an increasingly complex media landscape, it is certainly an innovative point solution.

Cross-functional teams. Collaboration within your own company is an opportunity for innovation as well. Knocking down the walls of departments, embracing the idea that a good idea can come from anywhere, structuring your process to drive cross-functional team cooperation early on in a project—these things don't just yield innovative results, they are themselves a better way of doing things. They are innovation.

I've seen time and again at Traction the benefits we reap when we leverage this approach. When representatives of technology and media are sitting at the table early on with copywriters and art directors, the ideas we produce become dimensionalized. A way of delivering a message becomes a way of creating an experience. We start saying things like "ooh, we could…" instead of "oh, that won't work," when we bring together minds early on.

Evolved two-person teams. Collaboration isn't just about ideation. Just like Walmart's supply chain, we can improve how we produce work as well. Process is ripe for innovation.

Historically, the art director-copywriter team has emerged as a model for producing advertising—two people with complimentary skills sitting in a room working on solving a problem together by challenging and inspiring one another until they nail the brief.

Today, the art director-programmer team is a model that ensures ideas are not just beautifully designed, but efficiently and feasibly designed. Having a process allows time for collaboration points up front, ensures efficient delivery of services later on.

Collaboration matters

The net-net here is that agencies and other marketing solution providers need to find better ways to work together and leverage strength in partnerships. The companies that innovate and find a way to collaborate better will ultimately provide greater value to clients.

My agency has created a LinkedIn Companies Strategic Toolkit that we are using to help our clients be strategic and make the most of this new feature. We've also decided to share it. So, take it. Yes, it's free. Just download it here.

Before you get started, I also recommend you read this article I wrote on Mashable called "How to Optimizine Your Company's LinkedIn Profile."

Please let me know if you find this valuable in comments. Pass it along.

He used to show up to lend a "helping hand" to all those lonely wives stuck at home mopping floors? When I was a kid, I remember those commercials on all the time. When that brand was introduced in 1958 (no, I was not a kid yet in 1958), it became the #1 cleaning agent in the country in just six months.

But at some point, Mr. Clean kind of fell off the radar. I haven't event thought of him in years.

Proctor & Gamble (who owns the Mr. Clean brand) aims to change that. P&G is very smart about branding. They know 3 things.

1. They know how valuable a space in my brain is because while it may shrink, once that space is there it never goes away.

2. They know that the Mr. Clean brand has a little of that space in my brain.

3. They know how expensive it is to create a new brand concept and drive it into my brain.

So, they're trying something new. Mr. Clean is becoming a car wash.

Mr. Clean is cleaning up

As this article Life Beyond the Shelf in Entrepreneur Magazine points out, P&G is responding to Wall Street's insatiable desire for growth by reinventing some of its most famous brands. You can now get your car washed at a Mr. Clean Car Wash in a select test market near you. Or you can get that ketchup stain out of your shirt with Tide... Tide Dry Cleaners.

Is this a good idea?

Well, there's definitely a risk of brand dilution. The marketing history books are full of brands that let go of their positioning and suffered dire consequences for it. Case in point: VW used to own "small" in the consumer's mind, but they wanted to capitalize on their brand. So, they rolled out big cars and over the course of a decade or so, they lost the "small" position. And they're market share. Now Mini has the small position. And so it goes.

Will Tide lose market share in the detergent space or will it just gain visibility and a new distribution channel (as it did for Apple)?

Only decades will tell, but once thing I can tell you is that this is going to be a trend we'll see more of. What will we see next?

Milk Bone Doggy Daycare?
Oscar Meyer's Weiner World?
A-1 Steak House?
Maxwell's Coffee House?
Pamper's Prenatal Yoga?

(I'm having too much fun now)

Vick's Vapor Rub Massage Parlors?
Pepto... OK I'll stop. You add your to comments.

The point is, with the never-ending pressure to do more with less, we are bound to see more and more brand reinventions. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a trend with Traction.

We created a SlideShare channel so you could learn too. Enjoy!

The Learn Phase: HTML5. The Geekening.

The Learn Phase: Recasting the Agile Manifesto

The Learn Phase: A Content Strategy Toolkit

Are we thinking small?

Spreadsheets do not create desire. In 1959, the call to "Think small" was a revolutionary thought. Today, it is business as usual in both agencies and marketing departments across the country—possibly the globe.

If you're a CMO charged with growing a brand, clearly your digital strategy is an important part of the picture. But you know the answer is not simply a new website or a marginally lower cost per click.

How will you escape commoditization?

The digital landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years. For the very first time, people are empowered to consume media on their own terms. Virtually every emerging tactic that has become available to marketers in recent years offers the opportunity for a deeper, more meaningful relationship than in years past—from mobile apps to social networks, from desktop widgets to podcasts, from YouTube channels to DVRs.

The notion of the website as a destination that brands struggle to get people to visit is rapidly becoming obsolete. Meanwhile, 83% of purchase decisions are now influenced by word-of-mouth (according to Forrester). The “sales funnel” as a functional planning tool is dead. The average click- through rate of an online banner is less than half of one percent and the average corporate website is a ghost town. Is this the model your brand should follow?

No, of course it isn’t. This model is being replaced with one where consumers choose platforms that they value and that meld to their lifestyle. An iPhone application, a content channel on YouTube, a website... these are all platforms for the delivery of content and functionality that can enhance a customer’s life.

As a CMO, your ultimate goal is to uncover the unique value that your brand can provide and to create a comprehensive delivery strategy that takes into account the myriad ways your various audiences consume content and experiences every day. Careful consideration must be given to which platforms you will invest in, what functionality they should contain, where content for them will come from and how it will be distributed across them.

At Traction, our core competency is designing brand experiences. We align our clients’ business objectives with human needs, desires and behavior. This is how we create consumable value. And consumable value is what your brand needs to deliver in order to sustain its growth in an increasingly digital, increasingly mobile, increasingly social age.

To be successful at creating value-oriented strategies and conceptual visions, you must have an understanding of both advertising and technology. Technology ideas must be infused with the kind of insight generation that fuels great advertising. It takes both storytellers and user experience designers to craft brand narratives that align with how people actually act. This leads to innovative ideas that are relevant, technology solutions that work, and content that people want to consume.

Understanding your brand essence is mission-critical for the success of this effort. In the mind of the consumer, a brand can be one thing. What is your one thing? What is your powerful emotional draw? What does that brand essence mean to your customers? How is all that expressed in a connected world?

Delivering on this takes a well-articulated strategy for an integrated online presence that creates differentiating value for your brand online and a content strategy based on the reality that consumers are now empowered to consume media on their own terms. And it takes creativity at every turn.

Do you have what you need to deliver?

The bottom line is that if you're going to be outrageous in your advertising, hire someone who can do it well. Please.

Last night I had nothing to say, so I tweeted: "What should I write a blog post about?"

@Ray_anne responded:

@adamkleinberg write about accidents in life that turn out to be blessings...

So accidentally, here I am writing this post. A blessing? Maybe, maybe not. But I do believe that not only can accidents turn out to be blessings, there's a lot you can do to make sure that comes true.

My background in the ad agency business is on the creative side. As a designer, I've always seen my job as sculpting little accidents into solutions to creative challenges. To me, this is what the creative process is all about. Tiny experiments based on a framework of intuition, experience and common sense.

It's this framework that is the key.

When the economy collapsed and Theo and I got laid off from Tribal DDB in 2001—one year after being recruited to start their San Francisco office—that was an accident.

We thought we could create something better, so we started Traction. Now, BtoB Mag says we're the #1 interactive agency in the country. I feel confident saying that accident turned out to be a blessing.

Sure. Talent, hard work and luck all played a role. But I truly believe that it was having a consistent framework that has—and will—evolve us into a great company.

I recently peeked at the Wayback Machine to see Traction's original website. What struck me was that all the stuff we said when there were four of us working out of the spare bedroom of my apartment is still the stuff we're saying today. Things like:

"Messaging must be concise, relevant and compelling. The user experience rises to the forefront of consequence. A clearly defined benefit is imperative - a catchy tagline or jingle will not suffice. Simply put, a unique human insight must be presented to the consumer at all points of contact."

But, our goal is not just to produce great advertising, It is to produce a great company where the experience getting there is as great as the final work itself.

Life is the stuff that happens while you're making plans, after all.

To achieve our goal, we need accidents to become blessings all the time. We need a framework.

How do you define a framework? Well, what do you value?

At Traction, we've very clearly defined what we value: Candor, Communication, Great Work, Empathy and Integrity.

This means that everyone in my organization can intuit the correct answer to a "what should I do?" question by looking at this framework.

Watch.

Q. "Should I tell the client now that their expectations are unreasonable?"

A. (Hmm. Candor!) "Yes, I should."

Q. "Should I spend an extra hour on this ____ until I nail it?"

A. (Let's see. Great work!) "Yes, I should."

And so on.

By defining what it is YOU value and understanding how values contribute to your goal, you can give yourself the framework you need to fall uphill.

There will always be setbacks and challenges you can't control. Eventual outcomes, however, you have the power to guide. Having a framework, a mission and value system—call it what you will—sets you on a course.

Follow it.

Alibaba.com is one of those biggest-websites-you've-never-heard of, but you'll probably be hearing about them pretty soon following a $30 mil. ad blitz (orchestrated by San Francisco ad shop Traction) that kicked off Sunday. (Marketplace) "China's corporate giant of e-commerce" is looking to expand its $432 million dollar revenue base with a multimedia campaign (TV, print, digital) targeting small business owners and other entrepreneurs in the US (just 1.3 of the site's 8.6 million registered users are here). (Wall Street Journal)

At the core of the campaign is success.alibaba.com, a minisite featuring three catchy mockumentaries. There's also a deep well of training resources and local event listings to get you into the entrepreneurial swing.