A couple of months ago, Mitsubishi North America awarded its $185 yearly advertising account for strategy, creative and interactive to an agency called Traffic. This item would not necessarily be gamechanging news, except that Traffic is a start-up agency that did not exist before 2008. It was formed specifically for the purpose of winning the Mitsubishi account.

In picking apart the story, one discovers all sorts of threads entwined into the win for Traffic.

Thread #1: Traffic’s co-founders were veterans of the auto industry. Tom Cordner had been the executive creative director for Team One when he introduced Lexus to America in the 1990s, and after that, ran creative for the Ford Motor Company for the J. Walter Thompson Agency. His partner in Traffic, John Powers, had built Lexus’ dealer channels in America. I cannot say it enough: Cast your team well, and you’re halfway toward the objective.

Thread #2: John Powers has a name that implies automotive expertise (akin to power trains and the J.D. Power Awards). A slender thread, yes, but still excellent meta communication that reinforces a theme of reliability that was crucial to Traffic’s win. Likewise the name of the agency itself, Traffic, served Mitsu a steady diet of reminders that they were dealing with industry experts and an agency tailored to the automobile business.

Thread #3: In his pitch to Mitsubishi, Cordner promised a different, more flexible agency model, one that focused on the realities of the market instead of what he called the “empty tricks” of more established (and more rigid) shops. Traffic is, in effect, a ‘hybrid’ model, and everybody in the car marketing biz knows that’s a magic word. Furthermore, the Traffic bid offered Mitsubishi better value for its budget, because it didn’t have to support big agency infrastructure.

All these threads and more spun out of the game devised by Cordner, Powers and their backers at the Cimarron Group, a Los Angeles-based film marketing and post-production company. It was a game that differentiated them from their competitors, and gave them many opportunities to highlight advantages they offered the client. The game was something you could call ‘Build an Agency and They Will Come’.

See, it was the act of bringing the agency into existence that best communicated to Mitsubishi what kind of performance they’d be getting from Traffic. The beauty of this game is that it expanded the context of the pitch into one that Traffic alone of the four agency finalists could own. I can’t say this enough, either: In an age when information is ubiquitous, owning context is more important than owning content.

The context created and owned by Traffic was not confined to storyboards, demos, research, resumes–the usual vocabulary for agency pitches. The context they owned was reality–a reality validated by their very existence. It was the act of forming the agency that elevated Traffic’s pitch from the context of speculative –which is where its competitors would be coming from, where agency pitches usually come from — and into the real.

Cordner and his Traffic team were able to replace ‘This is what we will do for you’ with ‘This is what we are doing’. And that, as the poet once said, has made all the difference.

Tags: Casting, Cimarron Group, Game, GameChangers, John Powers, Mitsubishi, Pitch, Tom Cordner, Traffic, Virtual Agency

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Casting, Entrepreneurship, Networked World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.