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>> We really started from scratch.
A couple phone calls, an idea that we could challenge the status quo of advertising,
and felt like there was a major kind of disconnect as to how advertising agencies
and marketing companies were talking to consumers.
And we felt that we could do better.
>> In 1925, Allen Odell convinced his father to try advertising the family's line
of brushless shaving cream on roadside signs.
The Burma-Shave campaign became a revolution in how products were marketed,
as they touched people on the road where they were gathered in groups, usually bored
and easily engaged in an interactive way.
But commercial, played through the radio age and then into the era of television,
became the staple, the companies looking to connect with new customers.
Ultimately, though, you could argue that the passive nature
of the 30-second commercial made advertisers somewhat lazy.
Then, in the 1990s, a remarkable revolution found broadcast television eclipsed by cable
and old-school radio challenged by satellite subscription broadcasts.
Advertisers had to scramble again to try to engage their audiences
in those places that they had moved on to.
And no opportunity has proven more intimate or interactive than the internet.
The Night Agency, located in New York City, is on the cutting edge of a new movement
to involve potential customers in engaging interactive environments in the hope
of really connecting and communicating their clients' products
and services in an unforgettable way.
>> The goal of advertising varies really depending on who you ask the question.
Our goal is to help consumers like brands more, possibly to change perception of brands.
Often times brands come to us to help them to speak to a specific audience,
generally defined as an 18-to-34-year-old demographic, only because that's
who we are and who we relate to best.
So in a nutshell, it's to help brands get a better connection to consumers.
The advertising industry is huge.
It goes all the way up to service the Procter & Gambles of the world with their, you know,
billions of dollars of advertising, down to advertising to your local pizza shop, where,
again, you know, the message has to get out there somehow.
It is traditionally and currently a very competitive industry.
In the past, that brand would stick with that agency for many, many, many years.
Today, agencies have to work harder to please their clients,
whereby they have to get end drive results.
And if they're not, then they'll look elsewhere.
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>> Of the four Ps of marketing, promotion is the most dynamic and most popular.
Everyone loves a funny commercial, while an invasive advertisement popping up suddenly
on a cellphone or before a movie at a theater can elicit groans.
Effective promotion takes personal selling, public relations, sales promotion,
and that competitive well of creativity we call advertising.
>> I don't necessarily have a canned answer for the definition of promotion.
But I think the act of promotion is the act of pushing and being proactive with a brand
and setting a strategy and executing on that strategy.
Promotion comes in with many shapes and sizes.
It can be through on-the-street gorilla promotion.
It can be through a buy-one-get-one-free promotion.
It can be seasonal or calendar based promotion.
It's just the act of pushing.
It's the act of executing and following your business goals.
>> An advertising agency like the Night Agency can be called upon not only
to promote a product, but to help in the very design of the brand,
the packaging and how it's distributed.
>> We have created a hybrid company where we're part agency, part production company.
And we can not only come up with explosive ideas, but we can also produce the ideas.
And it can start from the ideation stage, the conceptual stage,
all the way to the end distribution point.
Or it can come where an advertising agency actually already has an idea and comes
to us to help them produce the ideas.
>> Advertising is a business-to-business endeavor,
even when the end products are sold to customers.
In the same way that Darren [phonetic] promotes products to client customers, he has to pitch
and sell his own company to potential clients.
>> The business-to-business and business consumer goals differ primarily
in who it is that you're trying to reach.
The business consumer campaigns that we do a much broader and potentially global,
whereas the business-to-business campaigns are really hyper-targeted and based on the quality
of impression versus the quantity of impression and really start on determining who it is
that you're trying to reach, setting out and trying to reach them and really getting them
to actually go and raise their hand or provide that response that we're looking for.
>> Sometimes the Night Agency's duties include public relations.
That's where Darren and the rest of his team have
to help refocus a market past misconceptions and toward a more positive
and fair understanding of a product.
>> It is a peripheral part of our business in that it's important that the work
that we do does get coverage in the mainstream press to help our messages spread.
>> But the center of the Night Agency's business is advertising
to a client's potential customers.
And one of the most innovative ways that they do it is through the internet.
Using interactive games and demonstrations, the Night Agency puts potential customers
into situations where clients' messages or products become potential solutions.
>> The difference in the interactive space is really speed to market.
In the traditional advertising business, it was impossible for any small company
to create a 30-second TV ad and buy media across all networks and so forth.
Whereas the interactive space, it's totally turnkey, and anybody can really come
up with an idea, produce a website and have that website live
for the world to see in a matter of a day.
>> It's a fairly cutting edge idea, so Darren and his team have to keep a good line
of communication open with customers to make sure the technique is working
and that the intended message is getting through to the right demographic.
>> On the planning end, we use less market data.
When the campaign is done, we actually measure data very closely
to find out the success of the campaign.
The beauty of the web is how measurable it actually is.
And you can see how many people are coming to our websites, how much time they're spending,
how many people are signing up, how much e-mail we're collecting,
and really measure the success of the campaign.
>> Strategic locations ensure repetition.
And repetition creates consumer remembrance,
driving home a message not once, not twice, but many times.
>> The Night Agency is hugging a leading edge in the new age of advertising.
And that innovation brings with it the challenge of measuring success.
The old yardsticks simply don't work here.
Darren and his partners resort to more direct means
to keep themselves pointed in the right direction.
>> We think that we're very effective.
We're a very different company.
And we don't really have any direct competitors, per se.
We operate in a very unique space.
And we focus more on our brands and our clients and the work that we do for them
and don't really spend that much time focusing on our competitors.
>> Maintaining direction and measuring effectiveness are two ways
to streamline innovation.
That means the future arrives faster at the Night Agency
than it may at some competing firms.
>> I think that ad agencies or interactive agencies are judged on the work that they do.
And if you don't have a great campaign to call your own,
then what really do you spend your day doing?
So I'm very proud of the accomplishments of some of our campaigns.
At the moment, a very exciting initiative we're working on is for the first-ever global lottery
for a new company that's going to be launching soon called playotto.com, which is,
as we see it, the first-ever run solely through the internet and through cell phones.
>> With all this talk about innovative projects and ideas, we've left out one
of the most impressive facts of the Night Agency.
While most recent college grads moved to New York City hoping to get an entry-level job,
Darren and his two college roommates decided to skip that step, and,
well, just run an ad agency instead.
>> Really started from scratch.
Myself and two partners all went to Syracuse University together.
>> My partners and I were 23 and 24.
We started with a couple of phone calls,
and an idea that we could challenge the status quo of advertising.
We were lucky enough to get Microsoft and MTV as some of our first clients.
And it's been a wild ride.
>> These hundreds of thousands
of buyers repeatedly receive up-to-the-minute information concerning products necessary
to their daily living.
>> Our space is heating up.
And more and more brands are coming to us.
So what once started as, you know, we really were working
with pretty edgy forward-thinking clients, now we're working with more broad spectrum
of clients that are kind of turning over and learning about buzz marketing
and the different ways that you can use the web to your advantage in marketing your business.
It's an amazing time that we live in with technology today.
So we think that the trend is only going to continue and the business is going to grow.
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