An interview with Seth Godin (mostly about ad agencies and CMOs).

It’s a podcast. Some excerpts:

Sally: How can CMOs stay ‘small’ if their primary objective is to gain market share?
Seth: If any CMO’s primary objective is to gain market share, she should get a new job.

• “What ad agencies ought to do, in my opinion, is not focus on
  selling ads anymore. And instead, focus on getting in deeper within the
  clients, and help the clients make products that people want to talk
  about.”
• “The problem is that ad agencies have defined themselves as the
  people who take the mediocre products and add interesting ads to them,
  and washed their hands and say, we can’t do anything about what the
  factory brings us. And my answer is, of course you can, and the clients
  actually want you to, you’re just not working hard enough to get that
  piece of business.”
• “Style and fashion spread through the ad agency business really
  fast. But they’re very bad at changing what they do for a living,
  they’re very bad at any form of new media, they’re bad at pushing
  clients to really dramatically, fundamentally reinvent themselves. What
  they’re very good at is adopting a new slogan or a new look or a new
  image. That’s deckchair re-arranging.”
• “The way to get promoted in an ad agency is to get a new client who
  spends lots of money on television. Well, if that’s the way you get
  promoted, what do you think people are going to do all day?”

Thanks, Sally.