Hold On, Let Go, Jump In
What We’ve Learned from New-School Digital Media and Old-School Client Service
We hoped we could be the whiz kid in the corner. We were a scrappy start-up inside one of the country’s oldest and most highly esteemed media companies. Down the hall, celebrated journalists at brands like The Atlantic were writing for a rapidly growing digital audience of tens of millions, carrying forward a tradition with ties to Emerson, Twain, and Stowe. We were trying to figure out what was driving their success and how we could distill it, teach it and use it for other companies. We hoped we wouldn’t blow it.
This month our consultancy, Atlantic Media Strategies, won Digiday’s award for Best Content Marketing Agency. It was a nice moment of validation after many late nights spent poring over user analytics or developing content and code.
So, what do we know now?
Well, the habits of digital audiences are rapidly evolving and often fickle. Two years in, our small band of 20 can’t tell you what will be working two years from today. But we have learned how to learn—to listen, adapt and change. We’ve built our business around the same principles we use for digital audience development: we hold on, we let go, and we jump in.
1. Hold on to your mission.
The head of another digital agency once told me that my team appeared to handling all of the “boring” projects: advanced manufacturing, finance, complex public policy issues. C-SPAN! I indignantly adjusted my pocket protector. How wrong you are, good sir.
Articles on difficult, seemingly intractable issues have been some of the most successful in The Atlantic’s history. Why? Because journalists wrote about those topics like they mattered. Other organizations can do the same.
Communications professionals do their companies a disservice when they ignore internal, seemingly arcane expertise in favor of hot topics of the day. Readers see through the bland, “me too” copy that can result (recall that the antonym to “arcane” is “superficial”).
The more we connect to the beating, wonky, passionate heart of a company’s mission and expertise, the better. Writing about a recent event we worked on, one of our clients said it best: “This user conference had soul, because Opower is a mission-driven business.”
“Arcane,” reframed, describes the kind of mysterious and misunderstood concepts that are ripe for explaining and sharing. Mysterious is exciting. Hold on to your mission and the passions that underpin your expertise.
2. Let go of everything else.
About a year ago, our Editorial Director and I sat down with a potential client. We had our principles. We had our process. We had our PowerPoint.
What we didn’t have, as it turned out, was a clear understanding of the needs at hand. We were talking through an approach that made sense on paper when we should have been listening to the communications director across the table. If we had, we might have heard the cues: she needed a thought partner who could create small wins right away, not an elongated digital assessment.
To her credit, the director saved us from ourselves. “You two seem smart. Isn’t there a way that you can just… get going? Can we build the right model together over time?” We set aside the PowerPoint and walked out an hour later with a new client.
My colleagues and I joke that that was the day we learned the true meaning of the term “responsive design.” We’d been telling clients to “engage users where they actually are,” but we needed to do the same. An approach that can’t bend to real client needs is as useful as a beautiful website that can’t adapt to new screen sizes for its mobile users.
Let go of what others “should” want and respond quickly to new realities.
3. Jump in to the fray.
I left McKinsey for media because media is a mess. It’s exhilarating. Every day, publishers have to distinguish between the elements that are foundational to their mission and the trappings of an outdated model. Was “print” critical to long-form journalism? Or did someone need to develop a more elegant online reading experience that felt as good (or better) than print?
Successful media brands manage to stay true to the passions of their audience while changing as rapidly as possible to meet evolving needs and habits. They navigate between “principle” and “preconceived notion” by constantly trying new things and testing their assumptions.
The same is true of my team. Our clients’ needs and goals are going to change. We must change with them. We’ll stay true to the relationship at the core of the work, and then test and evolve as fast as possible to better meet our clients’ needs.
It’s exhilarating.
