Better Client-Agency relationships lead to better Commercial Creativity. And that's a good thing.

Some time back I wrote a blog based on a report called "A is for Alliances", published by the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), in the UK. (Images below are from the report. Download it here)

In it, they provide real justification for the age old saying that Clients get the agencies they deserve.

Aprais, a renowned Business Relationship Management Consultancy, reckons that there is as much as a 37% differential in the quality of creative output between poor and good client-agency relationships.

Unless you've been under a rock you know already that better creative is a better business building tool - more effective, more efficient, better ROI. (If you're still unconvinced, please read The Case for Creativity. Again, if need be).

So adding the Apprais research and The Case for Creativity findings together, we get a simple equation:

Good relationship = good work = better results.

Scientifically proven, even!

My mantra when I started Adtherapy ten years ago was similar:

Better skills = better relationships = better results.

How I got to this piece of intuitive brilliance? By working back from the great campaigns I'd been involved with, and realising there was always a strong client-agency partnership behind them. And when I unpacked what was at the root of those partnerships, it was obvious. Skills. Other things too - chemistry, culture compatibility, bravery, fun. But skills meant that each party respected each other and had confidence in each other. That  'trust' thing.

One of my clients told me that she would jump off a mountain, that our Executive Creative Director was like her parachute; that was the extent to which she trusted him (and us). The work we did for her got her death threats and nearly got her fired, but catapulted their business into the stratosphere, so she knew what 'brave' meant.

What drives successful Client-Agency partnerships?

The IPA has come up with 4 basic drivers of good partnerships. They are:

1. Transparent and effective approval processes
2. Mutually agreed and maintained timing plans
3. Honest and open briefings with clear business objectives, budget, timing and brand guidelines
4. Respectful and collaborative behaviours built on shared goals and rewards.

So simple. And yet, and yet, and yet...

• Many briefs are terrible. Lacking in information, too long, no clear thinking, prescriptive, pedantic, clumsy, no insight.
• Many times the business objectives and the brand objectives are muddled and are not clear.
• Consumer understanding is limited and basic or super surface-level.
• These horrible briefs are often emailed; not even presented in person.
• Agency sometimes questions the briefs, but this creates a disharmony - "why are they being so argumentative"?
• Deadlines bear no resemblance to reality - they are imposed from the outside in, because of an internal deadline.
• Then the work that comes back is used as a guide to what the client team doesn't want, doesn't like.
• There are few evaluation skills, few skills that help in giving constructive feedback. B.t.w. - "it makes me want to vomit" is not a good one.
• Approvals become about second guessing the bigger boss, and then the next bigger boss, because many of the corporate marketing teams operate in a culture of fear and 'what would s/he like'?
• And would you believe it, because of all of this to-ing and fro-ing, deadlines are missed.
• And the agency is "useless".

Many of these marketers and agencies willingly submit to relationship audits, every month, twice a year, whatever, to 'measure the relationship'. Issues are raised, concerns are flagged. Until the next audit, when the same issues are raised and concerns are flagged.

What to do? *wrings her hands*

Back to Adtherapy maths formula.

Better skills = better relationships = better results.

What to do? Put the skills in place to make it work. Then, get some Partnership Principles in place. And move forward happily - or don't. You may both be wrong for each other. Acknowledge it and move on instead of perpetuating an unsuccessful relationship.

What are Partnership Principles?

The work done in the IPA exercise highlighted the concept of a Relationship Contract. Agencies and clients have lengthy legal contracts (which are often not signed because they spend so much time bouncing between lawyers) and detailed fee agreements but no real contract on how to work together. An example from Avis and DDB from the 1960's shows us how it's done.

From A is For Alliances, IPA

To get you started, you could consider the advice given by Gotz Ulmer, Executive Creative Director at Germany's best agency, Jung von Matt. He said they have three simple rules for working with clients. They ask:

1. Are we making money?
2. Are we doing great work?
3. Are we having fun?

If they can't answer 'Yes' to at least 2, then it's not the right agency-client partnership for them. 

Then make sure you and your client have the right skills.

What are these magical skills, I hear you cry? Interestingly, I believe the same set of skills is required by both parties at the coalface - namely the agency account manager/strategist team, and the brand/marketing manager. They are the fulcrum of the relationship and need to manage up, manage resources, manage conflict and manage the risk.

Some of the skills are 'hard', some are 'soft'. This is not a complete list, but here are some:

• Hard: Brand strategy, positioning, segmentation, consumer behaviour, real insights, writing exceptional briefs, evaluating creative, integrated media options (including digital), budget management.
• Soft: Giving constructive feedback, being inspiring, managing conflict in a positive way, selling up the organisation, effective communication, body language, building teams, presenting well.

Honestly, if you are managing clients , or are managing an agency relationship without being super skilled in these areas, you are wasting other people's time and money. 

The whole point of having an agency is that they are able to bring to the business a degree of commercial creativity that will drive your business forward. A little like the man with the ladder in this picture:

Work together well, and both your businesses will thrive. Work together badly, and both your businesses will suffer. Or at least not do as well as they could. And you will get the advertising, and the agency, you deserve.
_________________________________________________________________

Adtherapy is premised on helping agencies and marketers work better together to develop better quality creative output, because it is better for business. We have numerous training options from Creative Fitness for marketers to Account Leadership for agencies, to a fully fledged suite of modules for up-skilling marketing teams in our new Business Marketing Academy. And we consult too!  

Browse our offerings on  www.adtherapy.co.za, or www.businessmarketingacademy.guru or email me on gillian@adtherapy.co.za or talk to me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Or just stop me in the street.

(Ladder man image courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net by JessaPhorn)

Marketers' Aha moments reveal the pressure points in Agency-Client Relationships

Adtherapy runs a series of workshops with Marketers called "Creative Fitness."

It is a programme designed to help marketers to get the best out of their agencies, by understanding the process and the key components in getting from good to great advertising. 

We look at the briefing process. We interrogate how to generate insights. We look at what happens to a client brief once inside the agency (the creative brief). 

We talk about the creative 'tap' - how we want it to be open as that's when you get the best value for money - when the best creative brains want to work on your business. The 'creative tap' closes when there are too many reverts or when the feedback is too prescriptive and it becomes ' give them what they want so we can get it out of here'. That's not good use of your money. The hourly rate is the same whether the tap is open or closed! 

So we talk about building relationships and  learning how to evaluate ideas/executions in order to give feedback that is constructive and inspirational.

All good stuff, right? (You can read more about the programme here.) 

Having run a number of them this year, I thought it might be fun to reflect on the Aha! moments that come of the exercises we ask the delegates to do. These usually come out when we ask our Monday Question: so, what are you going to do differently on Monday?

(Source: www.garfield.com)

In no particular order, here are the most often uttered Aha!s:

1. I'm going to give my agency more time. 
2. I'm going to spend more time planning, and writing, my brief.
3. I'm going to keep my briefs shorter.
4. I'm going to look for the good in a creative presentation, not just look for what's wrong.
5. I'm going to 'market marketing' inside my organisation.
6. I'm going to look for deeper consumer insights.
7. I'm going to spend more time talking to consumers.
8. I'm going to make time to do the brand work that isn't clearly articulated at the moment.
9. I'm going to make my briefs inspiring.
10. I'm going to learn how to evaluate ads so I can have the language to give constructive feedback.
11. I'm going to set up what the brief was and who the target market is before I ask someone in the corridor whether they like the ad.
12. I'm going to collate feedback from everyone involved so we limit reverts.
13. I'm going to spend more time looking at great work so I understand what it looks like.
14. I'm going to be less prescriptive.
15. I'm going to build a stronger relationship with my agency. 

And there are more. Marketers realise how hard it is when confronted by a brief and a blank page. They realise how much harder it is when given too little information. They also have an aha! about how difficult it is to choose the best option when presented with a pile of ideas. That shows them the value of the Creative Director, the job he or she performs and the unique skill-set they have.
Image courtesy of adamr/FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

At the end of the programme, we find that there is a renewed sense of excitement about their ability to do great work. A renewed commitment to their role in providing the inputs to the agency that will lead to that great work. And a renewed promise to work with their agencies in a way that will no doubt prove invaluable to the most important person in the process: the consumer.

What these learnings also show me is the pressure points in this tricky space between logic and magic, between expectation and delivery, in an area that is super subjective. Maybe if marketers used these Aha's as a How To list, things could work a whole lot better?


For more information about the Creative Fitness Programme, or to find out more about Adtherapy's other training, mentoring and consulting programmes, visit www.adtherapy.co.za or better yet contact Gillian:  m: 0832659099 or email gillian@adtherapy.co.za

The Cannes Festival is over. Is the winning work any good?

Well, what a relief that the endless stream of sun-dappled beach and cafe pictures, with the obligatory cocktail or glass of pink Chateau Quleque-chose in the foreground, are over. Back to the real world for the lot of you.

Pic Courtesy Arlene Donnenburg. 

Not that I'm envious at all. I managed to save my South African Rands, and still watched some great seminars from the comfort of my heated office in freezing Cape Town. And I didn't have a hangover once.

So given that I was a virtual voyeur of the Festivale, which used to be called the International Advertising Festival and now is known as the somewhat loftier International festival of Creativity, I have a few learnings, observations, musings, mutterings.

The first is the mobile is where it will be, and the developing world has the most opportunity. Watch Keith Weed from Unilever's views here

The second is that ideas still matter. More than ever.

The third is that the name should revert to the Festival of Advertising, not Festival of Creativity. Just because it's a 3-D billboard, or a prosthetic arm, or an App that looks after your kids on the beach doesn't mean that somehow it's stopped being advertising. 

MegaFon's MegaFaces Billboard at the Sochi Olympics

This is not a festival for pure creative, because that would then encompass art, and graffiti and music and film and books and a whole bunch of other creative pursuits. This is creativity in service of business. It's creativity that is helping brands grow. And that, in my humble view, is called Advertising.

Of course Sir John Hegarty said it best - listen to his view on this point here.

Another point is that many of the winners were familiar work, already. Both the Grand Prix Winners for Film had already been seen many times; in the case of Volvo Trucks  over 73 million times.  Fourth learning: great work gets shared. Great work is amplified. T'was ever thus, but so much more powerful today.

But for my fifth and I think most interesting learning, back to my headline. An article in the USA Today had this headline "Incredibly Unusual Ads take Top Cannes Awards".

Which got me thinking - why are they unusual? Awards shows are always controversial, but unusual? Are the winners any good?

And that's the beauty of Cannes. 

Whatever the festival is called. Because it forces those of us in the pursuit of great advertising to challenge our notions of what great looks like. And to share in the choices of experienced judging panels. And to ponder and wonder what they saw in those pieces, and why the mood of the winners feels quite different to the winners last year. And whether we personally think they're good or great.

And that's the greatest learning of all. Everyone in the business of marketing communication needs to constantly review, question, discuss, have a point of view. Watch the seminars. Learn. Listen. Grow. That's the practice needed to constantly get better at this.

Btw, the journalist of the "Unusual Ads win Cannes" story, quotes:

Harvey Nichols Christmas Campaign

The Harvey Nichols "Sorry I Spent It on Myself" campaign focuses on people who buy their loved ones inexpensive holiday gifts, such as rubber bands and paper clips that come in Harvey Nichols-branded packaging, so they can spend more on themselves. 

The retailer actually sold the cheap, unusual presents featured in its ad — and sold out in just under three days.

Harvey Nichols' advertising approach was "brave" and "flew in the face of convention around holiday advertising," said film jury member Pete Favat, who is the chief creative officer at ad agency Deutsch LA, in Los Angeles. "For a retailer to take their highest-selling season and do something like this is remarkably bold."

Brave, bold, convention-breaking, successful. Those have always been hallmarks of great advertising. So not really unusual at all. The only unusual bit is that so few marketers will make this type of work.

To summarise.

My brain is full. My heart is inspired. Onwards brave warriors. Do your best. Because in the end, everybody wins.

_________________________________________________________________

Adtherapy is a consulting and advertising skills-building company that is on a quest to #ridtheworldofbadadvertising

Contact Gillian on gillian@adtherapy.co.za if you want to join the quest, or want some advice on how to make better advertising.Or you can follow, chat on Twitter @grightford@grightford

Client-Agency Marriage Counseling?

The relationship between a Marketer (Client) and an Agency is often compared to a marriage. Although procurement people have tried to muscle in on the dating and wedding processes, the truth is that the relationship is between the people in the bed together, so to speak. This relationship has its ups and downs, and the primary reason for its “marriage” analogy is that it veers from moments of great joy to being quite often unreasonable, it is prone to emotional and subjective responses, blame and above all, is always high risk.

There are a number of companies offering tools (e.g. Y-Care, RAM) to help ad agencies and their marketing clients assess the status of their professional relationship. These are usually survey based and can be done on an ongoing basis, a few times a year or even just once a year as an annual assessment.

The assessments are usually mutual – agency scores marketing team and marketing team scores agency. The assessments flag areas of high and low performance and hopefully shed some light on those areas that one or both parties need to continue, or need to improve, if the relationship is to be the best it can be.

Whilst I believe there can be flaws in the collection of this data, it often provides the marketing team and the agency with a score – a number – which is either good or bad.

“My agency’s an 83, what’s yours?”

“Oh, mine’s terrible, still a 58”. 

Ideally if either party consistently scores below average, or below 'acceptable' levels, then remedial action needs to be taken. Does the team, or one specific person need training? What sort of training? Capabilities training or soft skills training like people management, managing conflict or time management? Are there process issues on one or both sides that need addressing? Is there a cultural incompatibility? Instead of changing the agency, does the agency need to be changed?

The assessments will highlight key success areas, and urgent issues that need to be addressed. Unless the agency and the marketing team take immediate steps to address these issues, the relationship is heading for the divorce courts. A friend I once worked with was married to a divorce attorney. He said this: 

“once a divorce file is opened, it’s never closed”.

And that’s a bit like the 'underperforming score' situation. Once that doubt settles in, frustration starts building, trust starts falling and the divorce file is metaphorically opened.

So, it's a no-brainer that both marketing and agency teams would assign the highest priority to getting the problem areas sorted, right? Although it sounds simple sometimes these areas are not improved, or even addressed. You may well wonder why this happens, when improving these areas has such important ramifications for both businesses and such dire consequences if not done?

Who knows, but I’ll hazard a few guesses:

1. Because it falls into Steven Covey’s Important but Not Urgent box? No-one will be harping on this on a daily basis and so it slips through the cracks while the urgency of the day job takes priority?
2. Because addressing the issues might rock the boat and the agency thinks it might destabilize the relationship and they might lose the business?
3. Because the parties don't know how to fix the problems?  
4. Because one party is too arrogant to do it and expects the other party to change completely while they change nothing?
5. Because no. 4 is allowed to happen because of no 2?
6. Because one or both parties don’t take the measurements seriously, or thinks its all the other parties fault anyway? 

That's why Adtherapy starting offering Agency-Client Interventions, running successfully since 2007. The current 'score', and the issues that have been identified, are only the starting point.

A recent client asked what the ‘success rate’ was in Agency-Client Interventions and it was an interesting question. In all those that I have done, I have only recommended one partnership to split, as the relationship had deteriorated beyond what I felt was salvageable. Was that a failure? I think not – maintaining a destructive client-agency relationship is toxic for all parties and especially destructive for the end creative product. That agency and that client went on to find new partners with whom they have done great work.

The reason why Client-Agency Interventions are like marriage counseling is that they examine whether it’s possible to improve the relationship to save it, and how. 

A recent study by the IPA suggests that the costs for pitches are extremely high – for the agency and for the client. So we ideally want to keep the relationship intact but make it commercially and psychologically viable for both parties. We want to look at the drivers for successful relationships and what the drivers are for the relationship under duress. 

Just so you know, the IPA recently concluded that four drivers of successful agency-client relationships are:

1. Transparent and effective approval processes 
2. Mutually agreed and maintained timing plans. 
3. Honest and open briefings with clear business objectives, budget, timing and brand guidelines. 
4. Respectful and collaborative behaviours built on shared goals and rewards.

The most important thing is this: like the divorce lawyer’s sad observation, the sooner this counseling takes place the better for the eventual outcome of the partnership.

As this post says with wise words from Vanilla Ice: Stop, Collaborate and Listen.

My advice? Don’t wait till Terrible Assessment Number 4. or 5.

Deal with it urgently. Get stuck in. If it helps to have an outside party manage the process, then let us add the qualitative and interpretive layer to what you already know but might not think you can do anything about. Let’s scope some Partnership Principles and deal with any process or people issues. Let’s be proactive rather than defensive.

And let’s all live happily ever after.

_________________________________________________________________

An Adtherapy Client-Agency Relationship Intervention is a positive and constructive process that aims to learn from the relationship challenges and ensure that the right partnership principles are applied for each party. 

The ultimate aim? A successful business partnership that produces the best work. A recent client described the process as 'part agony aunt, part freedom fighter'. We like that.

Mail gillian@adtherapy.co.za or phone on 0832659099 to chat about how we can help you.

What Do Ad Agencies Actually Sell?

In our workshop on The Business of Advertising, I usually start by explaining the basic principles of business. Any business. 

You are able to produce something, which you think has some value to someone. It is somehow different from what they can currently buy, and so it has some value. The key issues are - what is the value of the thing, how do you sell it, and can you make a profit by selling it at a price that covers the costs and leaves something over for you?

Image by bplanet

Everyone gets that. 

And then I ask: so, what do Agency's sell?

The usual answers?

• Time.
• Ideas.
• Creativity.
• Solutions.
• Ads?

These answers just raise more questions:

• If you sell time, how is your time different from another agency's time?
• How do you decide on the price for an idea/creativity/solutions?
• Is an agency a service business or a product business? 

The correct answer, in my view, is none of these. It was perfectly explained in this blog by The Ignition Consulting Group, called Are you really in the Service Business?

Many agencies lament that they have become “order-takers.”  But why?  Who turned your agency into an order-taker?  You did – not your clients.  You did it by forgetting what it is you’re really selling.  You’re not selling service.  You’re not even selling ads or ideas. You’re selling business results. 

Yes - what agencies sell is the chance for the marketer to realise their marketing objectives. This is the continuum - business strategy, marketing strategy, communication strategy, implementation, results.

Without the agency providing the stimulus materials in the best channels to persuade the target consumer to think, feel or do whatever it is that they want them to think, feel or do, the marketer doesn't get to deliver the results.

Here's more from the article:

The fact is that agencies shouldn’t be regarded as professional service firms, but rather professional knowledge firms.  Clients don’t just hire you for what you do, but rather what you know.

What this change in emphasis does is empowers an Agency's recommendations. They are the ones with the specialist knowledge. Agencies often compare themselves to other 'professional' firms like lawyers. "Those guys are taken seriously, and their recommendations are listened to. Why?" Because their clients assume the lawyer knows more than they do about the law and the application thereof.

If Agencies are simply "servicing" their clients, then where does the specialist knowledge lie? Is the assumption that the Client has the knowledge, and Agencies are simply implementing it?

Research conducted by The Ignition Group underscores this:

Over the many years that Ignition Consulting Group has been conducting surveys of advertising agencies, we have discovered that agencies give themselves the highest ratings in the areas of “Responsive service,” “Listening to clients,” and “Meeting timetables and budgets.”  The lowest-rated areas?  “Developing proactive ideas and delivering marketing leadership to clients.” 

Service is a commodity.  Smart thinking is not.  Clients can get good service anywhere, but proactive marketing leadership is in short supply.  In fact, most surveys that seek to diagnose why clients switch agencies usually produce the same answer: “Because our agency never gave us anything we didn’t ask for.”

I asked delegates in an Account Management workshop to define the role of Account Management. One of the answers was "to keep Clients happy".

Image by Ambro

I would suggest that the happiest a Client is, is when their marketing campaigns deliver better than expected business results. And Agencies can do that only by protecting their expertise so that they get to prove what they can do.

Which is not to "service" clients. It's to delight consumers.



Adtherapy is a training and consulting business which aims to make your bottom line healthier, and your business happier. We specialise in helping Marketers and Agencies get the best out of each other. Read more about what we do here

All images courtesy of freedigitalimages.net