In early 2015, after I had just given birth to Magnetry, my wife became pregnant with our first human baby. We hastily decided to take our last big pre-kid adventure and booked a flight to New Zealand. Even with the rushed trip-planning it was an amazing experience because duh, New Zealand and those Kiwis are awesome. I'll spare you the Kodak Carousel® of vacation pictures, but there is one shot I took that IS relevant.  

On Valentine's Day, we were in the Marlborough wine country of the south island during a week-long wine festival. We were drawn to the small taproom of a craft brewery called Moa that sat on the fringe of all the activity. That's where I stumbled on what I still consider to be one of the best mission statements of all time. Displayed proudly next to the entry, it was in harmony with my mindset as a new creative agency owner. It articulated the type of work that I wanted to pursue and a refusal to cut corners. But first some prologue. 

To be in advertising in the modern era, you have to move incredibly fast. And not just move fast, but create, adjust, and reiterate fast. Social feeds and targeted digital campaigns are deployed, optimized, and relaunched at a breakneck speed that would give Bill Bernbach motion sickness. Combined with an increasingly fractured media landscape, the ever-shrinking lifespan of a campaign makes advertising an industry that does not suffer ambling well. Agencies like us are on the autobahn, where the slow are run over and left behind before you can say "performance marketing.' 

There ARE advantages to this speed. Since we're often making more of this smaller rapid content, not everything is so precious. Risks can be taken and miscues stomached because the stakes are more easily digested. Our team likes that we can test our creative to prove something is working, or learn how to make it work even better with quick iterations and almost-live feedback. This creative agility also allows any business to answer in real-time, whatever is happening in their world or within culture at large with an intelligent and leads-friendly response. We have fully embraced the challenge of bringing calm, cool creative solutions into this whirling dervish marketing environment. We double down on this efficiency with a distaste for bureaucracy and groupthink which allows us to really put the pedal down. 

Suffice it to say, our little efficient marketing machine can move fast, and we have a history to back it up. But...

Slow and inefficient can be pretty damn great too. 

The brands that only move fast are missing out on game-changing ideas that simply require more time to bring to reality. While fast marketing can check all the existing boxes, slow ideas often upset the entire field of play. While fast marketing requires smaller financial investments upfront, slow marketing can make every single dollar you spend stretch beyond your wildest imagination thereafter. Choosing between the two is also a false duality. You can operate at more than one speed, you just have to find the right partners to make that happen.

We force slow marketing into the mix with something we call the Irrational Tenth. We work with our client partners to set aside ten percent of their marketing budget for the unpredictable, off-grid, industry-shifting ideas that can't be put onto a calendar or categorized up front. (Turns out, making a financial commitment to support ideas that may start off in the slow lane, is a great step in fostering them into existence.)

Slow gets harder to pull off with every passing day. Fewer and fewer CMOs have the support and patience from boards and C-suite peers to foster time-consuming ideas. Our typical relationship starts off with us getting solid hits on the most urgent problems as quickly as we can. Moving fast and proving our worth across a wide variety of marketing functions. But what do we do when we've built up enough trust? We pull the sheets off a challenging concept that has the potential to change everything. 

My question to any new client is: Are you willing to operate at two speeds? We know you want all the things as quickly as possible. We can do that. But, do you have the courage and patience that slower solutions require? Can you let something simmer and resist the temptation to broil everything? 

By all means, come to Magnetry for the speed and we'll pin your cheeks back with full-throttle effort and solutions. But we hope you'll stay for the creative ideas that as Moa put it, are brewed using traditional costly, inefficient and labour intensive techniques. Most of the best things in life are made this way, whether it's a beer, a piece of furniture, or an ad.  

One of a year-long series of things learned, pondered or thought worth sharing to celebrate Magnetry's tenth anniversary.