And we keep growing! After looking for new interns and an Account Coordinator, now we are in the search for the most amazing and passionate Assistant Account Executive to join our melting pot of talent.

This position is ideal for someone who already has a few years of account management and agency experience. For someone who can keep cool in a fast-paced environment, work across all forms of media, including digital and mobile, and bring fresh ideas to the table every day 3294783673284 times a day.

What will the most amazing Assistant Account Executive do?

• Provide support to overall management of assigned accounts, serving as primary day-to-day client contact for projects and client requests.
• Manage project status reports, project timelines, and project costs.
• Work with media planner to understand and manage media deadlines.
• Assist in the creation of creative briefs and facilitate internal team briefings.
• Independently manage projects with internal team, coordinating with production, traffic, media and creative departments.
• Oversee delivery of project elements to clients, ensuring quality and accuracy, capturing client feedback, managing changes and guaranteeing final delivery of all materials.
• Actively prepare for and participate in client meetings, facilitating portions of meeting, capturing meeting notes and generating conference reports.
• Perform, summarize and present secondary research as directed by account managers. Proactively seek out and track advertising and client industry news, trends and insights.
• Assist the account team with other organizational tasks or projects as needed.
• Contribute to Jigsaw’s online presence.
• Be awesome.

What will make you the most amazing Assistant Account Executive?

• Bachelor’s Degree; Advertising/Marketing/Communications major strongly preferred.
• 2-3 years of agency experience or equivalent professional experience in a marketing/communications capacity.
• Team player who is enthusiastic, flexible, highly organized, implicitly motivated, dependable with an innate attention to detail.
• Strong writing, communication and presentation skills.
• Interest/experience in social media.
• Proficient with Microsoft Office programs: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Knowledge of Keynote is a bonus.
• Awesomeness and brilliance.

Interested? Submit your resume and cover letter to humanresources@jigsawllc.com.

“Don’t be so bourgeois. This isn’t a mess. I’m experimenting with deconstructive art.”

Copy: Dione Baker

Art: Anne Linginfelter

Bringing in exactly 50% of the votes was our new victor, Ben Halpin. He took this gem below:

Here’s how the polls look:

1. New Born – Ben Halpin, 50%

2. De geboorte van een tulp – Jen Kuhn, 30.77%

3. New Day – Sue Spaight, 14.1%

4. Spring, WI – Trevor Eiler, 5.13%

Next Monday please come back to vote again, and don’t be afraid to bring some friends. Ben will be defending his crown against Nick Pipitone, Danielle Fritz, and Michael Prince. Should be nothing short of amazing.

Fear is like fire.

Controlled, fire and fear can be tremendously beneficial. Fear can help motivate you to work harder. Prod you to keep trying to come up with just one more idea. And it can push you to try new things.

Uncontrolled, it’s destructive — a self saboteur’s greatest weapon.

Fear and creativity.

As a creative, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let fear get out of control and allowed self-doubt, self-criticism and indecision ruin the chance to do good work.

Putting it into perspective, I don’t rush into burning buildings to save lives. Or deal with the tremendous weight of life-and-death decisions borne by those working in the ER, law enforcement or on the front lines. In advertising, facing fears isn’t facing life or death.

But it is failure or success.

Which is why over the years, I’ve come to realize that learning how to play with fire without getting burned is one of the most important skills a creative needs to master.

And the only way I’ve learned how to get better at managing or controlling fear is through experience. Every failure, I learn something about myself or business or other people or writing or life in general. Every success, I learn a little something more. Little by little, by living and doing, I’ve become better and better at using or ignoring fear.

I think RuPaul says it best:

“I have one thing to say ⎯ you better work.”

If you’re facing the fear of failure.

Work.

The fear of mediocrity.

Work.

The fear of not being able to come up with a good idea.

Work.

The fear of your best being not good enough.

Work.

The fear of being too old or too inexperienced or too this or too that.

Work it girl.

Because the only thing that reliably works when facing fear is working through it. Doing something. Making something. Trying something new. Thinking. Moving. Building. Creating. Sometimes you’ll fail. Sometimes you’ll aim high and hit it. But every time you face your fears, you’ll get stronger, more resilient and more resistant to the self-eroding, self-defeating effects of fear.

You’re a superstar. Now do your thing.

Today’s post is a follow up to my post from a couple of weeks ago on agile development.

Last time I focused on a few definitive characteristics of an agile environment – many of which Sue Spaight highlighted on originally in her SxSW session recap. There are a couple of things that I’ve run into since then that have me thinking, so I thought I would share them. Primarily my muse for the past week has been a presentation on Slide Share by digital agency Made by Many, Agile Planning, Learning to Iterate.  

First off, let’s be clear – the type of evolution I’m talking about is digital integration beyond what many are just addressing now. “Marketing, Advertising; please meet Technology – I think you guys should get to know each other.” Yes, beyond that.  And beyond a campaign support cast of minisite, banner ads and a Facebook page. Tim Malbon, founding partner at Made by Many, in a comment to his own Oct 7, 2009 post said, “I’m certainly not arguing that everything should be digital. Rather that digital platforms are increasingly ‘the glue’ that makes the sum of the parts greater.” This means fundamentally innovating the way a brand is available for and useful to a consumer. Innovation is change, change is new, new requires development. Smart and fast development.

So I’m thinking about two basic, but big, concepts of such smart and fast development and how they would require some fairly profound changes in the way we think and act.  

Basic Concept #1: At the heart of the agile methodology is the MVP – the “Minimally Viable Product,” defined as such by Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup.  It’s not that the product is not well planned  – or just half-baked. It’s fully planned to be the product that will be the least burdened, that will meet the critical needs of a specific target market and that will be viable enough to test and learn from.

Corresponding Agency Paradigm Shift: Planning is guessing. This statement in the book Getting Real, by software development firm 37 Signals, seems to be either interesting or insulting – or BOTH, depending on your perspective.  For the planners of the world – the strategists, the researchers, those of us that just value logic – this is harsh! The word “guessing” connotes carelessness. Guessing is irresponsible. Guessing is what we do when we have no idea. On the contrary, we have a lot of great ideas. Our plans are based on really legitimate fact and well-studied trends, but still we are guessing/predicting what will happen.  In agile, the quicker we can develop an MVP that is based on our top 5 (or so) “guesses,” the quicker we’ll be able to PROVE IT.  If we don’t KNOW, we should make our best guess and move forward so we can test.

Basic Concept #2: Iteration. So after we have the MVP, then comes iteration. Where the cycle of traditional project management/product development would go learn>make>test, an agile environment needs to embrace make>test>learn. This process MUST include iteration because an agile (or “lean”) agency would have planned (guessed, if you will) that they might learn a thing or two once the product got out in front of the early adapters (or perhaps the brand fans/followers).

Corresponding Agency Paradigm Shift: Not only do we need to embrace iteration, but our clients do as well.  I think it’s not completely random that we look to start-ups when we seek the best agile performers. It’s because they started from scratch! Agile developers seek agile-friendly client? Done! But for agencies contemplating this metamorphosis while at the same time crafting campaign work with existing and beloved, I might add, clients – it is more complicated. Committing to iteration means committing to something longer term. It’s taking a bigger step.  The Made by Many deck hits on the distinction between iterative and incremental.  Incremental means to build “it” in parts – Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, etc. – smaller steps to reach a whole.  Each phase has a launch date and a subsequent phase rarely has anything to do with learning about or altering the prefacing phase.  Iterative means to build “it” completely the first time, then build it AGAIN.

There is some fear on the part of agencies of even going there (Do we have the right people/processes? How will this change our relationship with our clients? How much does it cost? ) And there is no doubt some legitimate questions on the part of the client as well (Is the risk too big? How will we sell this to the CEO? How much does it cost?) Iterative is making a commitment together (agency and client) to the product and to the product’s responsibility to the (ever-changing) end users.

This is not a journey all agencies will choose to navigate. And it may not be the right path for all clients. Certainly there has already been a share of agency splits and start-ups over this leap within our industry.

The way we see it here though, it’s lose-lose if we worry too much about rocking the boat (both our own as well as our clients’). To stay relevant in what Malbon described as our current “rapidly mutating media convergence culture,” we’re having some tough heart-to-hearts about our digital future. If our clients aren’t demanding this, don’t we owe it to them to get them there?