Plan B™
The Agency Alternative
BORN BETWEEN A BRAND AGENCY
AND A BRAVE NEW WORLD.
Plan B was forged just over a decade ago out of a pragmatic frustration with the ‘big agency’ approach to advertising, with its straightjacket branding strictures and debilitating dependence on broadcast media.
We’d spent years toiling in the belly of the beast, and we knew the media landscape was changing, but we were trapped — unable to capitalize on the innovations happening around us.
That thirst for new thinking drove us to jump ship. And fortunately, it also helped us learn to swim.
We’ve always said that we earn our next project by outperforming expectations on the last one. So it’s in our nature to seek tomorrow’s answers, and develop far-sighted, innovative and effective solutions to our clients’ challenges, moving their business forward while faithfully representing their brand.
As we came of age during the digital media revolution, we saw potential in some technologies, hype in others. We were early adopters of any innovation that served our purposes, and proudly skeptical of many fads that flamed out.
We were employing social media tactics before Wired started calling it ‘social media’, building micro-sites for micro-brews when no one had heard of either; shooting viral videos while…Yeah, you get it.
The formula always seemed obvious to us: choose the right channel to convey the right message to the right audience with the right frequency, and success will follow. And we’ve done pretty well with it so far.
In the ten years our team has worked together, we’ve amassed a unique multidisciplinary skill set and broad-spectrum portfolio that touches on all facets of marketing communications: branding, broadcast, print, design, direct, new and emerging media — often within a single communications program.
A lesser agency might suffer from an irreconcilable identity crisis, and it’s a model we probably wouldn’t recommend attempting to duplicate. But still, the Big Fish seem to be trying, as they fight to snap up independent website development groups in an effort to appear ‘integrated’.
Funny. We never thought of ourselves as ‘integrated’. We were just born this way. And luckily, it works for us.
MISSION
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan
Sharp guy, Marshall. Definitely ahead of his time.
He was dead wrong about that whole “the medium is the message” thing, though.
Shocking, we know. Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.
We won’t hold it against him.
After all, Marshall never had to account for the ROI on an advertising campaign.
If he had, he might have understood that the message is the message.
And historically that message has been ‘buy’, ‘buy more’ or buy now’! But today’s customers are too knowledgeable and too cynical to be sold. It’s no wonder that ad recall scores are off, direct response rates are in decline and web click-through rates are dropping like rocks.
The problem isn’t with the media themselves. It’s with us. We seem to have forgotten that we’re trying to attract someone to us. Instead, we hound and harangue, interrupt and impose. The media is simply a conduit through which your customers engage with your brand. We decide how, when, in what combination and how often to employ them.
The message is this — what you say and how often you say it, matters every bit as much as where you say it and to whom it is said.
And it’s our job to help you balance all four.
Simple as that.
MANTRA
“We are truly living in the future.”
That’s what I thought the first time I saw Velcro shoes.
Silly, right? Sure. But at the time, Velcro shoes were the bee’s knees.
Once those strappy joggers hit the scene, I was certain we were mere weeks away from robot pets and flying cars. Suddenly, Stan Lee looked like an oracle.
Such a brave new world — where humans had transcended the laces that had afflicted our souls — eternally lashing us to our savage past.
Velcro seemed the death knell of the shoelace as we knew it. We would march toward tomorrow with our feet strapped securely into pointy nylon gym shoes, some with cool zippered pockets on the sides.
We would be as gods.
But curiously — in spite of all the hype and sexy post-modern zeitgeist surrounding Velcro shoes — the shoelace didn’t die.
Like the Telemark ski and the vinyl LP, this self-evident anachronism stubbornly refused to succumb to the inevitability of its obsolescence.
Reports of the death of shoelaces were wildly exaggerated.
Shoelaces just kept doing what they’d always done, with a level of efficiency and effectiveness that Velcro just couldn’t match for most day-to-day shoe closure applications.
Perhaps they incorporated new fabrics along the way, or experimented with innovative weaves. And then there was that whole “fat DayGlo” phase that still hasn’t quite died off. Still, they get credit for trying new things, and sticking with what works.
By the by, as shoelaces did their journeyman’s work, drifting along on the tides of fashion, Velcro gradually fell out of favor with foot owners. It lost its grip. Today, Velcro is relegated to baby shoes and those funny slippers cyclists wear.
We bring this up because lately there has been a great deal of talk about how advertising is dead, crushed by the black hole gravity of the ‘InterWeb’.
When we hear such speculation, we can’t help think of Velcro shoes, and how so many of today’s fads turn out to be tomorrow’s punch lines.
There’s a point in here somewhere. And here it is:
Performance trumps hype. Belief trumps buzz.
SERVICE
Doubling down on what we do right.
At Plan B, we don’t play phone tag. We’d much rather play real tag. But of course, we’re very busy, so making time for tag can be challenging.
In order to squeeze it in, we work fast. We return phone calls fast. We answer emails fast. About the only thing we don’t do fast is talk, because that’s just a vicious ad guy stereotype.
Our flat organizational structure gives you direct access to the person who can fix your boo-boo. And we begin every project by actually listening to our clients’ needs so we stand a better chance of hitting the mark with our first shot — avoiding boo-boos altogether.
It all adds up to a refreshingly personal approach to creative-client collaboration, without all those nasty padded timesheets.
Because time really is money.
And because tag is fun.