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Tim’s Take on the Industry

WHEN I WAS A BOY…

That’s how one of my favorite high school teachers started out many a lecture. Father Cochran taught me logic at the all-boys Catholic prep school I attended. From him, I learned Aristotle and Aquinas in Greek and Latin, plus all the modern thinking of the day. His opening set the tone, namely, encouraging us to keep all things in perspective and never forget the lessons of our youth, no matter what changed along the way.

My point? In today’s ad agency, we have technologies galore that didn’t exist just 43 years ago, when I was a…fledgling copy boy at my first ad agency, writing display classified ads on a “modern” electric typewriter for the agency that handled the American Grease Stick Company, maker of products such as SqueakEase, DoorEase and LockEase. Thrilling, I can hear you say.

Today, we offer clients social media, website development with full back-end tracking, augmented reality to enhance trade show and online experiences, Google ad word programs that capture people seeking their products and equipment, then put an ad in view online through retargeting with back-end tracking protocols, highly complex interactive blasts and conferencing options for training and press events, plus the very cool (is that still a multi-meaning adjective?) technology of mobile attraction, whereby we put a message from our client on every phone in a zip code or x-mile radius of a trade show venue. People come up to the booth and say “show me,” whereupon I smile knowingly at the client and say, “Told ya it would work!” And it does. Call me and I’ll tell you how. (Actually, one of the young guns here will do that.)

Truth is, our agency brings the best of the “traditional” marcom techniques, hand in hand with this new tech, to our clients now. What’s happening is this…people go to the internet, when they know what they want. Clients tell us they’ve seen how people are calling them ONLY after doing considerable homework to narrow the competition for an order. Nothing new there, really, except in the compressed time frame and order urgency scenario, a remnant of the just-in-time philosophy that was the “hot new thing” in industry a decade or two ago, i.e., ancient history! Anybody remember 8-tracks and floppies?

By under-reported and under-appreciated (not by our smart clients, of course) contrast, people are still reading trade magazines to get new ideas, track emerging technologies to help them make their products better or run their factories more efficiently and to find out what they DON’T know. One of the OEM design books with a very young average circulation showed me a study that concluded 75% of their readers still wanted the paper copy of their magazine. Did you know there are currently ELEVEN magazines serving the additive manufacturing market? And we see new titles galore in such emerging markets as bioplastics, advanced composites, cloud computing and more.

In the end, it’s all about communicating with your market, in EVERY way necessary to max up the messaging and branding of your company. We can help in EVERY way, because we know all the ways AND we know your markets, being strictly industrial.

Thanks for reading…you learned something, didn’t ya? Thanks, Father Cochran!

Tim Daro
President
Bernard & Company
A strictly industrial, full-service ad/PR agency…and we mean FULL service!