BIMA Blog

Hello.  I’m Ross Sleight, Strategy Director for Virgin Games. What am I doing writing on the BIMA blog you ask? Well Paul and Juliet very kindly invited me to give a talk at the BIMA dinner last week, and under the influence of too many glasses of pop, I agreed that I’d blog it for general consumption.

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.