The Oldest New Trick in Advertising

The first thing to understand about Lessing-Flynn is that its age is interesting but not especially useful. Plenty of old companies become museums with payroll. This one, founded by Paul Lessing in Des Moines in 1907, has lived through radio, television, email, search, social media and now generative AI. The useful question is not how it survived each invention. It is why the inventions never became the point.

The point was the person on the other side. Often that person is deciding whether to buy a baler, a crop-insurance policy, a seed variety or an excavator. These are consequential purchases with technical language, dealer relationships and long consideration cycles. They do not become simple because an agency buys a new tool. They become simple when someone understands the machine, the economics and the human being expected to sign.

The glamorous business of knowing a hay rake

Lessing-Flynn is a full-service agency: strategy, brand, creative, media, public relations, digital marketing, websites, video, customer journeys and training. Its market position becomes clearer when you look at the nouns in its portfolio. Vermeer. ProAg. Champion Seed. Apache Sprayers. Hitachi Construction Machinery Americas. The National Pork Board. This is advertising where a copywriter may need to know what soil compaction does to yield, how an independent seed dealer earns trust, or why an equipment launch must fit the calendar of planting and harvest.

That knowledge is the difference between decoration and sales help. For Vermeer, the problem was not a shortage of national brand material. Independent dealers had uneven time, staff and marketing skill. Lessing-Flynn built an opt-in program with creative customized to each dealer's name, relevant equipment and geography. Programmatic display, video, Facebook and Instagram were aimed at local buyers using interests, behaviors, brand affinities and business classification data.

The reusable idea is wonderfully unflashy: a sales channel is not a pipe through which headquarters pushes finished advertisements. It is a collection of local businesses with different markets. Give them a common system, then leave room for local relevance. The approach depends on participation and good local data. Without either, customization becomes mail merge wearing work boots.

What failed first was the list

The ProAg assignment began with a familiar corporate object: a long webpage containing useful material in an unusable order. Crop-insurance agents could scroll, and scroll, and perhaps discover the form they needed. The content was valuable. The retrieval was not. Lessing-Flynn rebuilt it as an Agent Resource Center with search and filters based on the way agents think - product, material type and language - then refreshed the collateral and helped create a co-branded print store.

The reported result was an additional 3,000 page views year over year and five minutes of average engagement per agent user. The interesting metric is the second one. In consumer media, five minutes can indicate distraction. In a working library, it can indicate that someone found the right shelf.

“Happy teams do great work.”Willow Hill, Champion Seed marketing manager

Another thing failed inside the agency: spreadsheet formulas. Lessing-Flynn once assembled reporting by manually pulling results from multiple sources into Excel. Broken formulas created errors; copying numbers consumed time that could have gone into interpretation. A TapClicks dashboard automated much of the collection and added publisher media, trade-show activity and traditional tactics to the same client view. Clients could log in. Strategists could compare time periods. Most important, one campaign stopped vanishing when the next one began.

Average is a suspicious little word

Since 2019, Lessing-Flynn has grouped results from similar clients and normalized them into its own benchmarks. The agency argues that broad publisher averages can set a bar so low that ordinary work looks accomplished. Its 2026-2027 aggregate data makes the point. Across LF-managed Google search campaigns, click-through rate was 12.59 percent versus a cited third-party benchmark of 6.64 percent. Conversion rate was 22.18 percent versus 8.18 percent.

This is a strong system with a necessary condition: there must be enough comparable work to make the comparison honest. Lessing-Flynn says it uses outside data when its own sample is too thin. It also declines to force silly metrics onto channels. Connected television is judged by completion, not clicks. Print is excluded when reliable performance data is unavailable. Measurement becomes useful at the moment an agency is willing to say, “that number does not answer the question.”

Make the editor's afternoon easier

At CONEXPO-CON/AGG in 2023, Hitachi was launching 27 machines into a show with 139,000 attendees and 2,400 exhibitors. Every competitor had news. Lessing-Flynn began months early with personal invitations to a pre-show press conference and promised editors hands-on equipment access and time with product experts. On site, a QR code led to releases, photographs, biographies, a recording and a transcript.

Nearly 40 trade editors attended. The work earned four same-day placements and more than 60 placements overall. There was creative theatre - a countdown and “See What's Next” - but the decisive gesture was administrative kindness. Reporters on deadline were handed the pieces required to report. The agency made its client's news easier to use.

You can copy that logic without hiring an agency. Start with the bottleneck, not the format. Ask what the dealer, agent, editor or buyer must do next. Then reduce the number of decisions between interest and action.

A family business with its sleeves rolled up

Tom Flynn, the president and CEO, represents the fourth Flynn generation. Family continuity can produce long memory or long complacency. The public evidence here points toward memory used as a tool. Paul Lessing's early publication, The Melting Pot, argued that clients hired specialists because keeping up with advertising required more reading and investigation than a business owner could reasonably do alone. The language is antique. The proposition could sit on the agency's website today.

The culture is less solemn than the heritage. Team biographies pair professional experience with confessions about hostas, hot-air-balloon weddings and cheese-ball windfalls. An agency post catalogs staff painting 100 matchbox cars, filming on a sled and lending a family farm to a hay-rake shoot. The stated values - investor, creator, explorer, teammate - become credible through this mixture of craft and cheerful inconvenience. In 2025, employee feedback put Lessing-Flynn among Iowa's Top Workplaces for a seventh consecutive year.

Its newest community program makes the ethos concrete. More than 50 nonprofits applied for the first LF BrandKind partnership. Des Moines Children's Museum received a package of donated marketing services valued at $25,000 for 2026. It is a useful way to structure generosity: a real brief, a declared value and a recipient with work to accomplish.

Lessing-Flynn fits between the specialist boutique and the national integrated agency. It can run the whole assignment, but it competes on intimacy and category fluency. For a company with a technical product, a scattered dealer network or a marketing department short on hands, that can be valuable. For a consumer brand seeking global scale in dozens of markets, the same model may need partners or a different network. Longevity does not erase fit.

The oldest new trick, then, is not nostalgia. It is attention. Know why the farmer worries about compaction. Know why the agent cannot find the form. Know why the editor will skip a launch. New channels keep arriving. The distance between a complicated product and a busy person remains stubbornly old.