Insight 7 – Everyone hates credentials

This is a simple one really, and is more to do with how Agencies engage with Clients (although i also think it has some long term relationship significance, but will go into this later)

As a Client, I get literally hundreds of sales calls and emails a month from Agencies wanting a meeting to show me their credentials. Now, as much as I like loking at great work for other clients, its not something I have the time for. (see Post 2 for the reason why Clients don’t have enough time)

Nor I have to say, are creds relevant to my business. And if I’m looking to draw up a shortlist, chances are I’ll go and spend a concentrated time with an organisation like the lovely AAR to look at work.

Creds are not the way of getting into clients. They are vanilla, and frankly egotistical, and for me, serve little purpose. What Agencies need to think about is how they show their value to that Client’s business, not what they have done for other businesses.

At Heresy, we used to approach a Client

Insight 6 – Clients need Agency leaders

Back in the late 80’s and even the early 90’s, the Agency world was quite a simple beast.  A client tended to have an Advertising Agency, probably a PR Agency, maybe a DM Agency and if they were an FMCG company probably a Sales Promotion Agency.  The Ad Agency was pretty integrated and through the development of planning, tended to be the Agency leader for the Client in strategy and budget for communications.  An integrated idea flowed throughout the Agency (and agencies) and all seemed to work well. 

Then Agencies started to self destruct.  The biggest loss was in house media departments, who, frankly frustrated at playing second fiddle to “what the message was” in an Ad Agency love in decided that they were better taking their “how do we get the message to the audience” philosophy and doing it solo with Clients.  Other disciplines – strategy, design etc also began to split.  The atomisation of Agency, and the specialisation that came from this had begun.

Fast forward 15 years or so and Digital has merely increased the speed of this atomisation.  Quickly looking at the landscape of digital agencies shows that we have specialists in web design build, advertising, usability, SEO, PPC, media planning, media buying, strategy, branded content, sponsorship etc etc.  Its a bewildering array of different disciplines (which often shamefully cry after any dollar even if it isn’t their specialism) and one that brings tears to a Client’s eyes.  Because instead of a handful of agencies, they have to now manage tens. 

I’ve said before that Clients are busy, and don’t have time to manage agencies here. With this wealth of agencies to choose from, all trying to pinch a piece of budget, it is simply a nightmare for Clients. Now what I am not advocating is a movement towards integration (although this is one of the opportunities, and may work for many agencies) as I personally like the focus of specialism. What I want though is a lead agency who can help to co-ordinate these other agencies. And guess what? The Agency that gets it is the one that owns and develops the strategy (see this post for more).

But there’s a bigger prize here than leading a Digital strategy. Digital is now so crucially hardwired into business, that in fact the strategy that exploits Digital is probably the strategy that exploits all channels (in rich idea style). The opportunity is for Digital Agencies to take their place at the top of the table and lead all comms, strategies and business solutions. But currently, I don’t see this happening as it seems that Digital Agencies are prepared to scrap against each other for morsels than take a leap to eat the total budget. If Digital Agencies are not careful, they will be sidelined by resurgent traditional Agencies who after 10 years or so are starting to wake up to digital and starting to bear their strategic teeth.

I’m not being the prophet of doom here, just trying to show you from a Client perspective how important it is to look at the bigger picture of the impact of digital. Richard Huntingdon a phenomenally clever planner by trade from “Traditional Agency” background  said in a recent presentation

After all Digital is too important to be left to Digital Agencies

Insight 5 – Clients want Rich ideas, not Big ideas

There has been a great explosion of industry insiders blogging over the past eighteen months, and in particular planners seem to have been prolific in their adoption of blogs, generating something aptly called the “plannersphere”.  If you haven’t already dipped into this, I suggest a glass of wine and a couple of hours spare to read the thoughts, musings and arguments on excellent blogs such as Richard Huntingdon’s Adliterate, John Grant’s Brand Tarot and Russell Davies’ we are observing your earth (or whatever it may be called this week).

In true “standing on the shoulder’s of giants” fashion, it’s from Russell that I shamelessly pinched his thought of “Rich ideas, not Big ideas”. For me, Rich ideas can be applied to business problems; Big ideas only inhabit the world of communications. But I won’t try and explain it myself – do go and read Russell’s thoughts directly on Rich ideas as he makes a much better job of it than I. After all, as Russell says

Give a good digital agency (a rich idea) to play with and they’ll do something magical, give them the average advertising idea and they’ll do a stupid flash game.

Insight 4 – Creativity comes from anywhere and everywhere

The communications industry is the only industry I can think of that has a specific “creative department”.  I find this an incredibly narrow and restrictive shackle on our industry as by definition, what comes out of this department is “creative” and what the rest of an agency does is merely to support this; ergo every other department is not “creative” in itself or its output.

Digital as we know is not simply about communications; it is merely a platform which all departments within a Client have to deal with, be this marketing, sales or operations. To solve business problems, you have to be creative.  As I mentioned in earlier posts, I feel that in the digital world Agencies have to get closer to, and address, business problems rather than simply communication problems.  This is why for an Agency, defining a department which deals primarily with communications as being the only “creative” department in their set up is plainly misguided.  Its a factor of digital companies following traditional agency structures rather than building a business around solving the Client problems themselves.

When I worked at heresy, we had a simple idea that marketing was simply about the removal of barriers along the customer journey to make a purchase/repeat a purchase.  Only some of these barriers were communication issues.  If we could remove a barrier – any barrier and not just a communications issue – we saw this as a way of helping buyers buy.  The opportunity to remove a barrier was a creative opportunity.  Which is why it wasn’t just the creatives who came up with ways to remove barriers – it was the planners, the account men and the receptionists who were creative as well.

An example in digital would be that whilst I get hundreds of Agencies talking to me about flash ads, only one that I can remember has asked me about improving my shopping cart experience and looking at abandoned carts.  This is all about immediate lost sales, its a big business problem, a big barrier to purchase.  But digital agencies are too immersed in traditional communications models to recognise this.  Which is why creativity must come not just from a creative department, but also from anywhere and everywhere in an Agency to help solve the Client’s business problems.

Insight 3 – Strategy is essential, Evaluation is crucial.

 Now as a Strategy Director you would expect me to extoll the virtues of Planning, but I fundamentally believe that there is a dearth of good strategy from digital agencies.  The introduction of Planning to the Advertising discipline in the 70’s fundamentally changed the communications industry, and gave Agencies the ability to sit at the top table of Clients by providing insight into their customers and their business that Client’s did not have before.  Whilst Clients have become by necessity more focussed on external factors to their business, its still the area where Agencies can, and should, add significant value.

In digital especially, there seems to be too much “we should” rather than “why?”.  Not enough time is dedicated into the process to understand customers, drivers and proposition.  And not enough time is given to a single piece of paper that should define the strategy, the work and the criteria for success - the brief.

In a brief, a document that has to be mutually written by Agency and Client, insight is everything in our push for differentiation. But too often, briefs are ignored, or badly written, or seen as a step to overcome and then forgotten about.  A brief will define the strategy for both parties, and allow both parties to judge the solutions that are presented.  So in terms of defining and shaping any work, the brief is the singular most important document on the table.

But it isn’tjust in defining work that a brief is important.  Digital more than any other media provides the opportunity for us to measure interactions and goals at an individual customer level.  Thus the brief should be a vital point not in just evaluating work, but also in evaluating the work’s success.  We need to set clear goals for success against the brief’s objectives, because if we do not evaluate work, we cannot understand how it has performed, and take learnings from this in order to improve and tweak, or radically overhaul our intended strategy.  

If goals for success are mutually agreed by Client and Agency, then both parties know the lie of the land, expectations are set, benchmarks created and arguments avoided.  Success can be defined and budgets set against it for the future. Setting a clear strategy and goals for evaluating it mean an Agency has to be disciplined, and not accept work from its’ teams unless it is going to hit these goals. 

So ensure you have at least one, or better a group of people  in your Agency who lead this process with Client, with internal teams and with external tools for evaluation. And if you want to call them a planner, or a strategist, then do so.   

Insight 2 – Clients spend 90% of their time on anything but outsourced marketing

When I became a Marketing Director, I expected to be immersed in working with Agencies.  Instead, I spent most of my time working on business issues – budgets, sales, targets, planning, product; anything except talking about marketing with Agencies actually.

This means that most Marketing Directors (and this is also true of any Director in a business) know their business inside out.  So the easiest way to lose the interest and respect of a Client is to swan in and try to tell them how to run their business without understanding it first.

What Clients want are business partners, not simply creative agencies.  So Agencies need to invest time in understanding the mechanics of the business, not just the communications.  The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to get the Client to run regular business update meetings for Agencies; at least quarterly if not monthly. Clients love to talk about their business and this should be simple to set up.

You’ll understand the real challenges facing a business from these meetings; competitive, supply chain, operations, product development and above all budgeting and prioritisation challenges.  Which will probably throw up even more questions that need answering strengthening a Client/Agency relationship further. 

You’ll also begin to appreciate that a business is like a living entity, expanding and contracting; its not the graceful duck swimming on a pond that you need to understand, its the frantic paddling feet under the water.  You’ll appreciate that timelines, priorities, budgets are constantly in flux, and understanding will bring insight into, rather than frustration at, a Client from an Agency perspective.

Remember, you reap what you sow. So understand the soil, the weather patterns, the predators and you’ll see what the Farmer’s problems are and be in a better position to help them.

The talk I gave was titled “What Clients want – what I wish I’d known when I was Agency side”, because I’d spent over a decade in the (digital) agency world before jumping over to client side. When Juliet and I discussed the talk, it seemed as if i might have some interesting insight having lived on both sides of the fence. Whether that is true or not I will leave to you and your comments.

The premise of the talk was 10 insights into the Client/Agency relationship, some big, some small, some radical, some bleeding obvious. To save both you from reading a long, long post, and to save me from writing it, I thought I’d blog it in ten posts in ten days (or so). Sound like a good idea? Well we’ll try it and see what happens eh? 

So here we go my friends…

Insight 1 – “The logo is always too small”

This may seem like a rather petty place to start, but in every job I’ve had there has been a tussle between Client and Agency over the size of the logo. General experience points to the fact that the Client wants the logo to be larger, and the Agency for it to be smaller.

Whilst a petty, fruitless and often bruising argument for both sides, I think this is symptomatic of a larger issue, in that there is in general a misalignment of what Clients and Agencies want out of communications. Clients see communications as tools to sell and influence. Agencies often see communications as an opportunity for “creative exploration” (see peer recognition and a few awards in the old cabinet). No wonder there’s an argument over logos and branding if the two parties are not aligned their objectives for communications. If the core objective is is to sell and influence, then there shouldn’t be an argument over the logo surely?

So I’d ask all Agencies to sit down for five minutes and do a bit of soul searching. What is your reason for being? Why did you start/work for this company in the first place? Once you’ve thought about this then see if there is an alignment with your client objectives. Go on – even ask your clients what they want their communications to do. Go on – get some balance.