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AAF National Conference 2004
Welcome Remarks  Welcoming Remarks: It's About Service AAF President & CEO Wally Snyder AAF National Conference Dallas/Fort Worth June 13, 2004 Welcome Thank you Carla, for your unwavering enthusiasm. Today, I'd like to follow up on Carla's remarks by telling you about the future of the American Advertising Federation. The AAF has always had the mission to advance the business of advertising. Our values have been to preserve, protect and promote this powerhouse industry to ensure its vibrancy. But today, as I outline new and invigorated AAF services in the year ahead, I want to pledge to you that now, more than ever, we recommit to this credo: The AAF exists to provide bottom line services to our members - our academic members, our corporate members, and the lifeblood and driving engine of the AAF - our club members. H.G. Wells once said, "advertising is legalized lying." Well, I disagree. Perhaps a wiser man, Mark Twain, said, "Advertisements contain the only truths in the newspapers." Well, whether he was joking about that or not, the AAF strives to bring integrity and truth to our profession. Today, I want to outline how our staff is driven by a value system that recognizes the irreplaceable and invaluable role our members play in our efforts on behalf of the business. Let me just tell you a few of those values: 1) We are hungry. The AAF has a drive and a determination and never rests on its laurels. 2) We are honest. We are upfront and pointed with our members about our status and motives. 3) We are humble. We know we are an organization that operates best as a team with our member's expertise and input. 4) We are inclusive. The AAF represents all of America, committed to ethnic and cultural inclusiveness as well as an embrace of companies both large and small. And 5) We are member driven. We exist primarily to serve our members needs. And that is what I want to discuss today - Service. Before I go on, I'd like to talk about Carla Michelotti and what she has done this past year. Talk about service! She has given tirelessly of her time, her remarkable intellect and her sheer drive to influence this business for the better. Leo Burnett himself once said, " The sole purpose of business is service." Carla epitomizes this philosophy as evidenced by her service to the AAF this past year. Personally, I want you to know how much I appreciate all she has done to make us a better association. We can thank her for enhanced communications, significant expansion of our ADDY Awards, emphasis on government affairs, which is a critical component of service, and the utilization of the brainpower of the industry by convening the Chairman's Advisory Committee of past AAF chairman. It is important to note that every one of our signature brands this past year grew and exceeded our expectations, due in no small part to Carla's involvement. Carla, thank you for all you continue to do for the AAF. Importantly, our AAF leadership has a continuity as we transition into our new chairman. We are pleased to have Jack Griffin of Meredith coming on board, who will build on the successes and the tremendous foundation that Carla has built. We expect great things in the year ahead as well. New Services of the AAF Indeed, AAF's future looks bright. Let's outline the new services that this AAF is committed to bring you in the coming years. The heartbeat of the AAF is its 200 ad clubs and federations. We were formed 100 years ago around these clubs to bring together successful groups that had sprung up across America at the same time advertising was coming into its own as an industry. As the profession grew into an industry, practitioners became concerned with assuring high business standards and joined together to protect and promote their trade. As a result, an organization of professional advertising clubs located throughout the country was founded on the principle of upholding high industry standards and servicing its members in their business endeavors. So the commitment of the AAF to service is long-standing. Our staff in D.C. is organized to provide instant fulfillment of the needs of the ad clubs. In fact, we are reorganizing the staff around a regional model. Individual staff will focus on the three AAF regions to better respond to needs of the clubs. The goal here is to provide enhanced communication through increased visits. Each of our club services staff receives an average 15 calls a day on a range of subjects - our new model will help expedite the answer to those calls. We are creating direct methods of assistance with regard to programming and revenue generation. We are developing program templates so that our most successful and important events can be replicated on a local scale. These include our Mosaic Awards and our Mosaic Career Fairs. For those that cannot attend these events in person, we take programs into local markets with video streaming and are also working to bring certain live events into the regions. Always looking for ways to collaborate and enhance our successes, the executive committee has approved a new revenue sharing program for clubs that help to recruit corporate entities into AAF membership. The team model is not just a catch phrase for the AAF; it is a blueprint for success. ADDY Awards We understand that the ADDY Awards are the biggest revenue generator for the ad clubs. You can expect significant advancement in tools for increasing those capabilities. Here's how we envision it will work:
Academics One of the greatest services the AAF provides is our programming to bring the best and brightest to the advertising world. When David Ogilvy heard someone state that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions, he exclaimed "That's absolute poppycock." I agree with Ogilvy's "eloquent" response. We have many success stories here of students who, through programs like our National Student Advertising Competition and our Most Promising Minority Student program, got started in the ad business and have now risen to the top ranks. One of those individuals is Steve Pacheco, who now heads FedEx's advertising and is a new AAF board member. When at Memphis State, Steve participated in the NSAC, and look where that led him. Our over 500 Most Promising Minority Students and Honor Roll alumni are now employed throughout the industry, working at top organizations like Interpublic, Leo Burnett and others. We don't take lightly our responsibility for shepherding young talent into advertising - we must ensure the future of our industry. There are new services coming your way in the academic realm as well. This fall, we will host our first ever National Student Advertising Conference, to be held in Chicago. This annual conference will be for our student members and their professors to experience recruitment opportunities, professional development workshops teaching resume and interview skills, and more. In addition, regional job fairs will increase the opportunities of our business to build the staff infrastructure necessary to success. And all signs point to these programs being triumphant. At our recent Mosaic Job Fair in Atlanta, we expected 100 students to attend. We got 314. Now that was a high-class problem! Students and recruiters alike want, need and are asking for such services. And we are responding. We continue to work with our districts to bolster recruitment opportunities through the NSAC program. We are responding to the need to constantly recognizing the expertise of our professors. We are utilizing their knowledge to deem our students "pre-qualified" to enter the ad industry with skill, knowledge and experience under their belts. Our students are the best prepared to help run the companies of the future. Corporate Services We also value our corporate members. We are enhancing our signature AAF recognition programs, which honor those that have made a profound impression on the industry and its practices. Our Advertising Hall of Fame program will become a black tie dinner to give this premier industry honor the prestige it deserves. The Advertising Hall of Achievement will include a conference to provide a top-level panel discussion by the best in the industry among our Hall of Achievement alumni. In addition to our many awards, which celebrate the successful careers of our corporate members, we recognize that that this group too needs service in addition to recognition. To better respond, we've reorganized the staff to give enhanced representation to corporate members through institutionalizing the account executive program. In this capacity, each corporate member is assigned one AAF staff person to oversee the management of their membership to obtain better and deeper coverage. The newly proposed structure, however, will focus on markets and will assign AE server "markets" to oversee. This new structure would allow an AE to:
Our commitment to service is evidenced by the new corporate members that have come to the AAF over the past year. I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome our new corporate members: Bartle Bogle Hegarty Fed Ex Home Depot Korn Ferry International Manatt Phelps & Phillips MBC Network McDonald's Yellow Pages Integrated Media Welcome them all to the AAF family. Multiculturalism Importantly, through our AAF Mosaic Center, we can help with our corporate members' multicultural marketing and diversity programs. The AAF has taken leadership though our AAF Mosaic Center and its brain trust of industry leaders and staff. We are equipped to connect our corporate members with qualified minority professionals, to provide case studies on effective programs and to offer guidelines on operating an inclusive company. The touchstone here is our AAF Mosaic Principles and Practices , which is the primary industry document with specific steps for building a multicultural company. One of our most popular programs - the Most Promising Minority Students - will continue to expand, as it did this year by honoring 28 percent more students and offering an industry immersion program. I have some good news to share with you on this subject. The AAF national office and AAF District Two are teaming up to promote a more inclusive and diverse industry. Seizing the platform provided by Advertising Week New York, a star-studded awards show luncheon combining the District's Diversity Achievement and AAF's Mosaic Awards will take place on September 22. These awards honor individuals, groups and corporations who have demonstrated, either personally or as a company, their commitment to the principles and practice of diversity. In addition there will be panel discussions and a roundtable with young professionals who were honored as AAF's Most Promising Minority Students. I trust we will see many of you there. Conclusion As you can see by these remarks, I take great pride in the AAF and its commitment to service. The AAF is all about service to our members, plain and simple. Expect greater service, and as a result, a greater AAF in the coming years. In addition to the services I've outlined above, there are countless others that I would discuss here but that would take up the whole conference. So I'll end with another quote from Leo Burnett, who said, "What helps people, helps business." We aim to help you in order to help the greatest and most exciting business on earth - the business of advertising. Thank you. AAF Chair Carla Michelotti's Welcome Remarks Back to Conference Main Page
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