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ONE-ON-ONE - March 2006
by Ed G. Lane
'We Will Not Let You Be a Boring Ad'
The head of the Red7e advertising agency in Louisville talks about his company's creative approach to image-making
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Dan Barbercheck
Dan Barbercheck is the president and executive creative director of Red7e, a Louisville advertising agency whose clients include Churchill Downs, Hilliard Lyons, Baptist Hospitals, Kentucky Farm Bureau, Kentucky League of Cities and the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, among many others. Barbercheck has more than 20 years of experience in the advertising industry and has worked with several agencies as writer, art director and creative director. His work has been featured in ADWEEK, Advertising Age, Creativity, Print Design Annual, and has won hundreds of local, regional, national, and international awards in all major media. A native of Illinois, Barbercheck received a Bachelor of Science from the School of Communications & Fine Arts at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. |
Ed Lane: What does Red7e stand for?
 Dan Barbercheck: Red7e means different. Our name is meant to raise curiosity. It reflects what our agency tries to do for clients: gain attention, set them apart, compel their potential customers to want to know more.
Click here to see some examples of Red7e's work
EL: What was the previous name of the agency?
DB: The agency actually has been around a lot longer than people realize. We’ve been Red7e since Christmas 1998; that’s when we rebranded. Prior to that we were known as Halbleib/Beggs, Inc. The agency was founded in 1974 by Tom Halbleib.
EL: Do companies make a major mistake when they fail to consider the image their brand creates with potential consumers and how easy it is for their company to be found on the Internet or in the telephone directory?
DB: Most companies do a bad job of naming themselves. They will name themselves after what they do (i.e. Industrial Systems, Inc.). Those names are generic and they don’t really stick in people’s minds. Most companies would be served by thinking more deeply about what they are going to call themselves before they get started. Obviously when you have 10 to 20 years as a going operation – it’s hard to change your name. Even if it’s a boring name, a company still has some equities in it.
EL: How did your firm conceive its new brand?
DB: The management and leadership decided to reposition the agency as a highly creative resource for advertisers. They recruited me on that point.
EL: Where were you working at that time?
DB: I was working for myself. I had a fairly good reputation for developing effective marketing concepts and being a solid creative director. If the agency could hire me to be a full-time creative director, they would have a proprietary position in the market. The condition of my joining was that the agency would have to change substantially in its focus and the way they marketed themselves. They agreed to that. And that was the beginning of becoming Red7e. The name was a natural outgrowth of becoming a different kind of agency. If you don’t have a different agency, if you don’t have a different product, then there’s no need to put a different shine on it.
EL: How did you start your career?
DB: I was recruited to Kentucky from Illinois in 1985 by Kip Cornett and his then- partner, Stuart Crawford. I worked in the Louisville office for that organization. I only lasted about a year and a half with Cornett & Crawford, then I went to Doe-Anderson Advertising. I worked there for four years, then went to Tokyo and worked for a huge international ad agency, Dentsu Inc. When I returned from Japan, I wanted to try my own thing. I was self-employed for almost three years before I joined Halbleib/Beggs, Inc. and helped make it Red7e.
EL: What was your assignment when you were at Dentsu?
DB: Dentsu was the largest agency in the world. There were 6,000 employees in their Tokyo offices. Basically, I did global English-language advertising for clients such as Panasonic, Hitachi, Yamaha Motorcycles, and Japan Airlines.
EL: As a creative director, do you have to create a balance between the copy and the visual portions? Do you work on the copy or the visual idea first? How do you approach creativity?
DB: There really isn’t a formula. If there were, everyone would be able to do it. That’s the reason some folks consider what we do to be mysterious or really difficult. Our team at Red7e seems to be able to supply a very high level of objective-appropriate creativity on demand and on time. We’re very fortunate to have people with those abilities. But the process happens organically. Pose a problem, and we throw ideas at it. We don’t divide solutions into parts like words versus pictures; they just come together.
EL: When working on a new campaign, is it critical for you to spend a lot of time with the client?
DB: Yes. You have to spend a lot of time getting to know not only what a client technically does, but also how their company operates. What’s the personality of the company? What value does a company offer to its customers and prospects? We spend just as much time on the personality of the brand as we do on the substance of what they might do or make. You have to understand at a very deep level what clients and their prospects are doing and why.
EL: What makes your business different from others?
DB: Most jobs require people to figure out how to do something and then replicate that over and over with a great deal of quality and consistency. We’re in a profession that requires us to re-create the wheel every single time. Every client wants the new ad to be different from the last ad… and its strategy and campaign to be different from anything else we’ve ever done and from everything else in the market.
EL: Does coming to work and doing something different every day make your work enjoyable and something you look forward to?
DB: Oh, yes. It can be intimidating intellectually but we thrive on it. Creative people, in general, are those that get bored easily. They tend to be those who had ADD when they were in grade school. They may be smart and disciplined, but they can’t stay entertained very long so – they are constantly bouncing around. We look for people who are mentally gregarious, who are busy “upstairs” all the time.
EL: Owners or managers think their business is one thing, but the general public perceives it to be something else. How often do you recommend to a client that they conduct research to find what their customers think about their company?
DB: We recommend it for most of our clients, especially if they are doing regular advertising. They should do research every year that measures against the benchmarks of attitudes or perceptions. That is a way to chart the progress of what we at Red7e are creating for them in the mass media. If they go out and do a research check every year on where they stand, it informs us in terms of how to enhance their messages. More importantly, the research tells them what people really think about their company.
One of the services Red7e provides may seem like a “no brainer” – we pride ourselves on our candor and being very upfront. If we believe a client has a negative image or other problems, we get it out on the table early. Some agencies or advisors only want the client to hear what the client already knows. We don’t try to be abusive, but the only way we can go about changing a negative is to recognize it and to create a marketing plan to solve the problem.
EL: Red7e has won a lot of awards. Would you say your agency is one of the top creative agencies in Kentucky?
DB: Well, the fact is Red7e has been highly awarded for five or six years. Often Red7e wins 30 percent of the awards in the entire Louisville ADDY competition – and we’re a small agency of 24. There are probably a half dozen agencies larger than Red7e in this market. Some of them are two or three times larger than we are. Red7e is very proud of its creative product, but that is what we are. That’s who we set out to be.
EL: If an advertiser wants to use your services, can they do it with an affordable budget?
DB: One of the things that makes Red7e different from a lot of agencies is that the size of the advertiser does not matter to us. Our own size does not matter to us either. We’re exactly the same size we were 10 years ago. We do not measure our success in total billings, billings growth, or the number of our employees.
EL: How do you measure success?
DB: It’s three things: We want to be proud of what we do; we want to eat, clothe, and house our families well; and we want to work with people we like who are on the same page with us professionally.
EL: Clients like clever advertising because it adds a cache to their business. But, they also want advertisements that produce sales.
DB: There is a misconception that a lot of people have – if it’s creative and if it entertains, then an advertisement can’t possibly move the needle in terms of sales, public perception or moving a company forward. A lot of people like to say:
“I remember the commercial, but I don’t remember the advertiser.”
Advertising should not only reward people for spending time with you but it should also strongly, strongly, strongly identify the client. The people that say creativeness and effectiveness are mutually exclusive just don’t get what we do.
EL: The public does not like advertising because all day long they are bombarded with commercial messages.
DB: I wanted to write novels for a living when I was in college. The reason I got into the advertising business was because I couldn’t stand advertising, and people were making a lot of money to do stuff badly.
It’s just as hard to do a bad ad as it is to do a good one. Creative teams are going to spend the same amount of time and money on film, typography, client meetings, creative briefs, research and strategy development.
EL: Who are some of Red7e’s clients?
DB: Hilliard Lyons; Churchill Downs, Inc. and its family of properties; Kentucky Equine Education Project; Baptist Hospitals; Hillerich & Bradsby and the Louisville Slugger Museum; the Presbyterian Church (USA); and the NTRA.
I’d be crazy not to mention Kentucky Farm Bureau – they have been a tremendous client for us. We’re now in our third year and couldn’t be happier in the direction they are going in terms of taking an old conservative brand and giving it a freshness and contemporary relevance. Advertisers like McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie and Kirkland law firm, the Kentucky League of Cities, and CHA Health have been great clients in recent years.
EL: Do you have a vision as to where you want Red7e to be five or 10 years from now?
DB: Ten years from now I would like Red7e to be widely appreciated for having a good creative product. It seems kind of lame to say we’re going to continue what we do, but that’s not as easy as it seems. When we talk to a client, especially a new client, expectations are way up here for what we’re going to do for them. That’s pressure.
In most agency environments, the agency is trying to get a client to do something with which they are not comfortable. In our case, there is an expectation by the clients that they going to approve something that everyone really likes. I hope to have that pressure on us 10 years from now.
EL: Has Red7e assisted the State of Kentucky?
DB: We did a tremendous campaign with the Council on Postsecondary Education and we’re proud to say that the campaign was very compelling to the target market. Obviously, Red7e can’t take all the credit, but the numbers of people entering and sticking with postsecondary education in this state have been ballooning for the past three years.
EL: What advertiser would be a “fantasy client”?
DB: A fantasy client would be a high-profile advertiser in a category that is underserved in terms of the creative quality of its messages. Banks are underserved, not so much by their agencies but by the culture of risk management. Bankers are born to be risk adverse, so it’s reflected in what their messages are.
EL: What advice do you give to advertisers?
DB: Be honest, candid and courageous; people respect courage. There are 4 million people and 2.5 million adults in Kentucky. Of those 2.5 million people, maybe 100,000 are going to object to anything that is remotely courageous when it’s done in marketing and advertising. They are going to write letters and they’re going to make phone calls. Just ignore those 100,000. Appeal to the much greater mass of people waiting to be rewarded for spending time with your ad.
EL: What advice would you give to a young person who wants to get into advertising?
DB: If I had to give one piece of advice – whether you are going to be an account executive, a media planner, a creative writer or art director – it would be to learn to write. Learning to write gives you discipline in your thinking.
EL: Has being an owner cramped your creative style?
DB: It has taken me away from the creative a little bit, but I still look at everything that goes through here and weigh in on everything we do. Fortunately, I have a couple of partners, Steve Kuhlman and Jim Hoyland, and some other folks around here who take a lot of the functional aspects of running a business off my shoulders. I spend time with clients and creatives. The two things I can’t really give up are personal time with clients and direct involvement in the creative product.
EL: When you are dealing with Red7e’s creative teams, can you be frank and say “this sucks” and start over?
DB: Candor is absolutely essential to who we are. Running any good business requires an ability to talk to each other about problems, about opportunities and to grow and to provide improvements. We try to interact in a constructive and evolving way. At the end of the day, somebody has to stand up and say this is good and this is not so good. I just try to do that with tact and without alienating some pretty big egos.
EL: Are you fairly blunt?
DB: Yes. The reason my coworkers allow me to be blunt is that they know that it’s not personal and that I really care about making their work the best it can be. As soon as someone suspects that maybe your motives aren’t pure, then you have a problem. I work very hard on my own creative ability and try to make sure I’m being honest with myself and I’m not making decisions that are flimsy.
EL: If you meet with a client to present your new creative campaign and they don’t like it or they don’t understand it - how do you deal with rejection?
DB: I’m very honest with a client. The important thing is that if we are honest with our assessments, we expect our clients to be honest with their assessments. If they say, “I just don’t like it,” there isn’t much I can do about it. It will be more productive and instructive if I just propose trying something else.
Red7e can be prolific in terms of providing quality ideas. We will wear a client out. If you hire us to do your advertising, we won’t let you fail. We will not let you be a boring ad. We will show you three ads. You say, “I don’t know…” All we ask is that you tell us why, and we’ll come back with three more ads.
EL: You continue creating ads until they like one?
DB: Yes, we will wear you out in terms of “here’s a different approach.” We don’t hold any grudges or anything. We will just continue to act in your best interest and that’s the way we look at it.
If at some point though, we are still unable to satisfy you as a client, then we realize maybe you’re not a good fit for us – and we’ll have no hard feelings.
We know that Red7e is always going to be a reservoir of good ideas, and we’re always going to apply those to the best of our ability for clients that want them.
Before our agency became Red7e, we made an assumption that only 30 percent of the clients in the marketplace actually wanted what we did – and that is “entertaining advertising.” And lo and behold, it is way more than that. Conservative clients we never expected to assist are now hiring Red7e.
Ed G. Lane is chief executive of Lane Consultants Inc. and publisher
of The Lane Report.
edlane@lanereport.com
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