New York (August 14, 2013) – SSA & Company, a leading innovator in operations consulting and data-driven decision making, today announced a partnership focused on achieving efficiencies in advertising – and driving a productive balance between creativity and efficiency. Recognizing the transformation in advertising from an industry driven exclusively by creativity to one in which data analysis and digital targeting play an increasingly important role, SSA and famed advertising executive Jerry Della Femina have formed a partnership to help companies address the challenges of the changing face of the advertising industry. The objectives of this partnership were recently framed in an op-ed article in the Financial Times co-written by Della Femina and SSA after a year of exploration.
“SSA’s partnership with Jerry Della Femina, one of the ad industry’s most respected icons, is unique in the world of management consulting,” said SSA & Company President David Niles. “Our collaboration this past year has already given us the path to create ideas and new service offerings that I am confident will do for advertising what we have been able to do for many in retail, manufacturing and professional services. Jerry’s involvement underlines the importance of creativity as together we look to new processes that reflect the new reality of the advertising landscape and embraces the role of data in informing creativity.”
SSA & Company, a global management consulting firm based in New York, helps the world’s leading companies win through smarter operations by focusing on three critical business issues: faster results, design and data discovery, and up-skilling talent. Della Femina, Founder and Chairman of Della Femina Advertising, has been recognized by Advertising Age as one of the 100 most influential advertising leaders in the 20th century and inspired the award-winning television series Mad Men.
The SSA/Della Femina partnership was created with the belief that reliance simply on placing a brand name and tagline in front of the right consumer at the right time in the right place to sell products and services is not enough to build strong brands and customer loyalty. The partners believe that the heart of successful advertising will always be big ideas and creativity – but married with today’s capabilities of measuring and managing efficiency.
“Advertising today is obsessed with digital solutions,” said Della Femina. “This is causing a wild stampede to digital by many of the finest companies in the world while they minimize or ignore many of the traditional forms of creative advertising. To ensure every advertising dollar is effective, we will offer analysis and solutions that balance the newer digital forms of advertising and traditional creative forms, which will always be necessary to keep brands at the top of a highly competitive marketing world. Our greatest value is proving to be in advice to companies on how best to work with their existing agencies to achieve that balance.”
The partnership has started to focus on three core activities:
“We will help provide a perfect balance across the spectrum of media and creative, and across traditional and digital,” said Della Femina. “Through our new partnership with SSA, we will advise on how to harness the power of creativity efficiently and effectively in the digital age in order to achieve both short- and long-term competitive advantages in the crowded marketplace for consumer goods.”
“Efficiency in business stretches far beyond operations,” said Niles. “By utilizing the analytics found in digitally targeted media and the highly effective creative center invented and implemented for decades by experts like Jerry, we expect this new partnership to uncover areas of huge value to advertisers and advertising agencies, and in the course of our work we hope this new partnership will also help define 21st-century advertising.”
