Reader Nic Justice wrote with this feedback on my previous email: Unhealthy amounts of repeating business seems counterintuitive to me. Repeat business seems like a good thing from where I am sitting. Yes, I’ll admit at first blush my statement about “unhealthy amounts of repeat business” sounds crazy. After all, isn’t that the dream? To…
Joel Pilger
In the 9-week, drinking-from-the-firehose experience known as Jumpstart, one of our biggest topics is pricing. Often my group of up-and-comers are asking questions such as: How do we determine – and raise – our rates? Should our proposals include detailed cost breakdowns? How do top firms get away with charging more than competing firms? My…
Jonathan Stark’s Ditching Hourly is one of the few daily emails that I actually read. So imagine my delight when this email below had this to say about the podcast he and I recorded last Friday… all about positioning: Joel Pilger from RevThink joined me on Skype yesterday to record an episode about positioning for…
If your studio or production company produces a lot of marketing content for TV networks, these days you’re probably worried. As you should be. Traditional broadcast/cable is in a long, slow decline. But here at RevThink, we don’t react to the future. We create it. So let’s consider this major shift (a.k.a. earthquake) presently underway:…
Still stuck finding “the right salesperson” as the answer to the sales problem at your creative firm? You’re not alone. But is this really a game worth playing? To illustrate what I mean, let’s play a different game to examine some of the unavoidable realities. In this game, over the next 10 years… Every year…
Mailchimp finds success with in-house video (and audio) campaigns And, how it weaned itself off of agencies like Droga 5 This was a fascinating read because it highlights a direct-to-consumer brand taking creative into its own hands to convert small business owners to customers, and pushing its agencies aside. The nine-person Mailchimp Studios team (six…
(Thanks to many of you who completed our industry survey. If you haven’t chimed in yet, the survey closes in just a few days. Visit https://revthink.typeform.com/to/tpKZNP) This past weekend I climbed the tallest mountain in Colorado: Mount Elbert, elevation 14,440 feet / 4401 meters. On the ascent, I was reminded (again, as I’ve climbed many…
While holding briefings and meetings in New York City this past week, I was pleasantly surprised to hear how many studio and agency owners are reading (and benefitting from) these weekly-ish emails. But even in a major market like NYC, the challenges keep coming fast and furious… What challenges, you ask? Among the top hot…
Deepfake technology is forcing reforms on publicity and privacy rights And those reforms, alongside developing technology, point to coming controversies on the horizon I have written about the challenges of deepfake technology before in Newsletter #146, and this piece above reflects a crossroads for deepfake technology in entertainment. Because though “many of the nightmare scenarios…
Like many workaholic creative entrepreneurs, I rarely took meaningful breaks from running my busy studio. I had every intention of doing so, but my self-talk usually went something like this: “As soon as this huge project is finished, I’m taking a much-needed vacation!” Then weeks later after said project was finished: “Ugh! That project was…