A few years ago, a friend from a larger agency was touring The Phelps Group. Standing at the top of the stairs, he looked down from the 2nd floor into our Ballroom (which holds our agency at its present size and whose name is derived its name from being the home of our BrainBangers' Ball and said, "I love your BrainBangers' Ball. It's a powerful tool. But, Joe, what will you do when you have 300 people?"
This challenged me. I didn't have an answer for him. So I thought about it, off and on, for months.
Then one day, some of us were at The Wall critiquing a team's ad that was aimed at adult women. We looked at the comments on the layout and realized that the opinions of the agency's women were more insightful and therefore more important than our comments. It dawned on me then that as we grow larger, we'll get larger sample sizes from our associates and these larger sample sizes will contain more of the actual intended targets.
We can get comments from the older associates for cruise ship advertising. We can get comments from associates who are parents or outdoor sports enthusiasts or whatever target's opinion is most pertinent to the project at hand.
There will be more people commenting at The Wall. We can divide The Ball into different groups depending on the work at hand. And our eBangers' – our name for internal email queries on our work – will deliver even more valuable results.
Bring on the growth. The concept just keeps getting stronger!