Aligning Expertise With Interest
John Madden once told a story about attending a coaching clinic when he was a young football coach. At the clinic, Vince Lombardi held the audience’s rapt attention for eight hours as he spoke about one single play - the power sweep.
Madden said, “I went in there cocky, thinking I knew everything there was to know about football, and he spent eight hours talking about this one play…I realized then that I actually knew nothing about football.”
Think about that. Eight hours. One single concept. Complete attention from everyone in the room. This story tells us so much about expertise and interest. For agency leaders, there are two takeaways:
There is so much value in finding a topic or focus area that you can talk about for hours while maintaining the same passion and interest that you started with.
That value is only real if you can identify an audience that wants to know more about that topic and grow with you to explore, understand it, and marvel at it.
So many firms have a misalignment between expertise and interest.
It’s the generalist agency that touts a deep focus in healthcare. Yet, when it comes to in-depth conversations about HIPAA, service line differentiation, and BAAs they don’t have the knowledge or passion to keep up.
Or the CPG branding firm who bases their entire marketing and sales strategy on mission-driven principles - while their industry contacts at Unilever and Nestle roll their eyes.
There’s a fundamental misalignment between what the agency wants to be known for, and what their audience actually cares about.
If you want to grow, you need to develop real expertise and align it with real market interest. IDEO is a great example. They didn’t just get good at design thinking, they recognized that the market was hungry for it. Then they packaged it, marketed it, and sold it.
You can have all the expertise in the world but if no one in the room wants to hear about it, you’re talking to yourself.
That’s the tension for agency leaders. Expertise is your responsibility - it has to be deep, specific, and continuously refined. But interest belongs to the client.
And you can market and sell to it by understanding what your clients actually care about. What keeps them up at night. What problems they’ve tried and failed to solve. Then you bring your expertise to bear.
The most successful agencies don’t just have expertise, they align it with client curiosity. They build a reputation around solving a specific problem for a specific type of person. They speak in a language their clients already think in.
If you want to grow, build expertise that’s real. and make sure it’s pointed at something the market cares about. And if you can talk about that focus for eight hours, great. Just make sure someone’s still in the room by the end of it.
