Why Agencies Must Fight For The Right To Be Creative

Ten years ago, I made the decision to open a new business after watching three bad (TV) ads in a row and having a EUREKA moment:

I needed to rid the world of bad advertising.

But how?

I thought of the great campaigns I'd been involved with in my 20 years experience ("great" meaning very creative and astonishingly successful for the brand and business) and tried to isolate what made them possible.

Brave work? Tick
Brave client? Tick
Strong Relationship? Tick

Okay, good.

But what MADE those things possible?

Brave work needs to be sold. Brave work can only be sold by a team that has taken into account the possible risks the brand and business faces, and has mitigated those risks based on the strong possibility of success. This takes skill and wisdom and strategic ability. Equally, a brave marketer needs to have astute evaluation and feedback skills and the ability to hear their instinct over their fear. A strong relationship is based on trust, based on a true belief that the other person knows what they are doing. Look up the word "trust" and you get words like:

• to rely on
• to depend on
• to believe
• to expect confidently
• to rely on the integrity, strength, ability of...

This trust goes both ways. The agency has to trust the marketer as much as the other way round. You trust each other.

It's not a blind, stupid, trust. It's a trust based on cumulative experience and knowledge and track records and understanding business.

So the concept of Adtherapy was born: to help marketers and agencies work better together to get the best possible work, because it works better.

I'm not going to rehash the argument of why this is so, (if you want more, you can read my previous post here.)

Just quickly, here's a repeat of some of the cogent points:

The Case for Creativity reported on a research study commissioned by the IPA (Institute of Practitioners of Advertising) and Thinkbox in the UK and conducted by acclaimed researcher Peter Field in 2010, entitled "The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness". Some key findings were:

• Only about 0,001% of advertising wins a creative award, yet among highly effective campaigns (in this case winners of an IPA Effectiveness award), 18% are awarded. This means that there's on "over-index of 128,500" of how likely creative campaigns are to be effective.

• In an analysis of "Excess Share of Voice" (ESOV, which correlates a brand's share of advertising with its share of market, Field found that the "Return On Investment (ROI) for a highly creative campaign is on average 11 times higher". ie... "you need to spend 11 times more on media for an uncreative production" to achieve the same result.

• And, here's the kicker: Creatively awarded campaigns are more certain to achieve a higher rate of effectiveness by a "degree of confidence of 99.9%" as opposed to to non-awarded campaigns'  degree of confidence of 87%.

www.slideshare.net/jameshurman/the-case-for-creativity

"What this implies is that less creative campaigns are not only less efficient, but also less predictable than creatively-awarded ones - something of a departure from the perceived notion that a more creative approach is a less certain one"

James Hurman, Author of the Case for Creativity

In short, creative advertising is much less risky than boring advertising.

But "things have changed in the last decade".

Digital is all pervasive. The word Advertising is a no-no. Content is King. No, Distribution is King. No, CONTEXT is King. There is constant debate about what is King, or Queen or the most important thing in communication today. They're all interesting points and all add to the ongoing evolution in this industry. But to me there is a simple point that's missing.

Luckily, today, two articles addressed this point, albeit in different ways.

Creative is King.

"COO Sheryl Sandberg and her team have been relentlessly experimenting with how to make ads more compelling despite the limitations of small screens. "Creativity’s never been so important," Sandberg says. "When TV ads [first appeared], people thought the creative was important. Then when you moved into online, what really mattered was the targeting. What we’re [now] seeing on the Facebook platform is that it’s both."

Why Facebook is one of the Most Innovative Companies of 2007 

Or this one:

"Why have modern marketers shunned what will make them stand apart and define the new century by becoming cold, calculated, and analytical to the point where creativity has been ostracized? 

In this creative age (in which) we are crossing the chasm and entering, creativity is the main differentiator."

Brand Quarterly: Curing the new Marketing Personality Disorder: Be More Human, Less Analytical

In the article quoted above, by Geoffrey Colon, he imagines the characteristics of people he would hire for his own agency, that would define the "new century marketer". They will probably not surprise you. They are:

1. Intellectually curious
2. Always listening
3. Empathetic, inclusive and ethical
4. Learns, unlearns, relearns

And these wonderful attributes will help solve the problem he raises of marketers becoming more analytical but less interesting. As he says, "machines can do analytics better than any of us will be able to do. But empathy? That’s more difficult for machine learning to mimic."

But wait. 

Agencies HAVE these types of people don't they?

So why are they not allowed to do what they're good at; creating empathetic work that differentiates the brand and connects to consumers' deepest motivations?

That's sadly an easy one to answer. Marketers often under perform in this critical area, that of unlocking the creativity of their agency partners for their own business success. Why?

• They are disconnected from their consumers.
• They lack insight.
• They are prescriptive.
• They issue terrible briefs due to all of the above.
• They are not brave. In fact, they are terrified by the stresses of shareholder delivery, Quarter-itis, and internal politics.
• They lack of evaluation and feedback skills.
• And so they lack confidence.

The effect of all this on agencies?

Complete demoralisation. Many of the best people I know in the industry feel bowed down, crushed, by their lack of "professional freedom". By which I mean, crushed by clients forcing them to do work they don't believe in, based on their considerable skills, experience and expertise.

The upshot? Good talent will leave the industry. And the industry, and its clients, will be the poorer for it. Or the good agencies will end those oppressive client relationships. Those marketers will get the advertising they deserve. And the true giants, true leaders, will continue to nurture creativity, to innovate and break barriers. And soar.

That's why agencies need to fight for the right to be creative. And when I say fight, I don't actually mean fight! I mean persuade, convince, inspire. Great agencies have to produce great creativity to keep their souls from self destructing. It's their lifeblood. But it's a win-win because it turns out that great creativity is also a key driver of brand success. 

Of course, they shouldn't have to fight. But the fight is real and fight they must.

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Adtherapy works with Marketers and Agencies to help them work better together so that they create better work. Contact Gillian Rightford on gillian@adtherapy.co.za, +(27)(0)832659099 or visit our website www.adtherapy.co.za if you want to know more.

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.
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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)

Would your brief for a SuperBowl ad be different from how you usually brief?

Every year I adapt a post I've written over the years asking what makes a brief for a Super Bowl ad different from the briefs we usually write, everyday briefs?

Here are my thoughts in a 2017 world.

If writing creative briefs is hard then writing great creative briefs is extremely difficult.

The main problems are a lack of clarity of thought and an inspiring proposition. These arise because sometimes the brief-writer isn't clear why they're really asking for this piece of communication, or what they really want to say, or who they really want to say it to. But, most of all they don't know why anyone should believe them.

So they write briefs that offer their creative teams, and their consumers', too many choices. Then they use the creative offering to whittle down to what they think they should say.
"Actually, that wasn't really what I had in mind... What I think we really should be saying, maybe, is ....."

Of course it's not always that bad. Some creative briefs are perfect.

But every year, the Super Bowl ad-fest inspires me to ask this question:

How does a Super Bowl Ad Brief differ from the Common Client Ad Brief?

And, with so many eyes on these ads, why is that some just don't hit the mark, some are bad, and some are amazing?

In 2013, when I first wrote an article on this question, I picked up a quote from a Bloomberg's Business Week article entitled : "Game on: SuperBowl ads are already playing online". It was from David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America,  who "advises keeping an ad simple and honest. “It should also be an easy, reductionist message,” says Lubars. “You’re getting a canvas that 120 million people will see. You have to go where nobody has gone before. The ad has to be single-minded, relevant, funny, and emotional. If it’s done right, $4 million* (for a 30 - sec spot) is a bargain. I would say 90 percent of the people running ads are wasting their money.” (* now $5million)

So back to my question. Is the brief for BIG work different from your common and garden version?

Or is the work different because maybe  the agencies recognise that this is THE brief and assign their best teams to work on it? But even that doesn't always deliver great work. 

Even if the Super Bowl Ad brief is perceived by the agencies to be much cooler and high-stakes with more chance of creative risk-taking than the average Client Brief, then why do some of the Super Bowl ads come out boring, done-before, irrelevant and imminently forgettable?

It seems that the enormous viewership might have something to do with it. Possibly a bit of stage fright and a trying-too-hard aspect? Or a client wanting to cover all their bases to justify the enormous spend?

My two cents worth would be that there's too much playing to the masses and too much losing sight of the one person that actually counts - the person who may do something, buy something, think something, as a result of your ad. 

Is there a different approach to writing the brief for communication that will be watched, and analysed, and talked about, by millions?

The usual Client Ad Brief claims to want to be original, single minded, relevant and emotionally engaging, right? So what's the big difference? Truthfully, having never seen a Super Bowl brief, I have no idea.

Here are some ads that I thought were interesting.

A few ads I thought hit the mark are Budweiser Immigrant ad (totally coincidentally spot-on from a political consciousness point of view), the 84 Lumber ad (ditto, very topical and bound to polarize both ways, they also gained huge traction from being "censored"), the Kia ad with the inimitable tree-hugging Melissa McCarthy and the Hyundai live shoot ad living up to its promise of making things better, and showcasing tech in all its storytelling magic. I also loved It's a 10 Hair care, for being hilariously political while strongly selling their brand benefit.

All these are fresh, single-minded, and totally relevant. They all hit an emotional chord. One is funny, one is deeply chilling, one makes you want to cry and one makes you laugh. They speak to the truth of their brand message. And all of them address, in totally different ways, an interesting insight. The Kia ad for me tapped into an interesting insight: being an eco-warrior is hard, but you can still do your bit by driving a Kia Nitro: the target consumer cal still do her bit to save the planet without going full eco-warrior. 


These ads have managed to create an ongoing dialogue, online, offline, in people's hearts and minds, about what their message. 

And the interesting shift this year, coincidentally or not, is the political nature of the messages. There was an apparent rejection of the right wing shift in American values and the need for big brands to continue to honor diversity. 

This ad for Airbnb is case in point - based on a really strong insight and business challenge. I would have guessed that the message was aimed as much as consumers as Airbnb hosts.

Interesting side story: the ad space was bought on Thursday and shot on Thursday night (using Airbnb people as actors).  Reading this article though, the ad claims that Airbnb "was using the Super Bowl to highlight its commitment to provide short-term housing for 100,000 people in need over the next five years, including for refugees, victims of natural disasters and aid workers."  


I'm not sure it achieved that, although CEO Brian Chesky tweeted additional information.

There were many more, and many more opinions. Watch them all here

Whether the ads were a hit or a miss, here's what I like to imagine sets a Super Bowl brief apart form a common Creative Brief:

1. The client (and agency) are aiming for GREAT. You have a much better chance of getting there if you aim for it, than if you don't.
2. It's presumably agreed upfront that the ad has to be entertaining with exceptional production values (with budget allowed for) - great advice for the Common Brief to borrow from.
3. The ad aims to be memorable, relevant and engaging. Tick, tick and tick.
4. It simply has to be distinctive. And talk-able, and shareable. And that means some brave decisions need to be made in the approvals process.
5. The message has to be totally singleminded.
6. Time has been invested in mining a really strong insight about the consumers motivations or beliefs in the category. 
7. The brand has a strong point of view, which may or may not please everybody.
8. A powerful proposition and very clear brand positioning are the cornerstones.

Maybe we should treat each ad brief like a Super Bowl brief and see what happens to the work?

Dear CEO, we need to talk about "integration"

As you know, there is much pressure to cut costs, everywhere, all the time. One of the areas consistently in the spotlight is the communications budget. Just how much are you paying your ad agency, digital agency, media agency, PR agency, media buying agency, social media agency, internal comms agency, shopper marketing agency, direct marketing agency...? And come to think of it - DO YOU NEED all those agencies? That's a lot of duplication right there. That's also a lot of meetings, confusion, lack of integration for your harried and harassed marketing team to deal with. Right?

Right.

So integration makes sense. Somehow you'll find a way (or ask your Lead Agency) to build a core team of big thinkers and surround them with excellent implementation specialists and get the agencies to build a simple yet complex workflow process that gives you the best talent you need, across disciplines, in one team. Not only will you cut down on duplication, you'll save money, you'll cut down on the time creative takes to get out, and everyone will be happy. Right?

Wrong.

Because what's actually eating up your agency fee and killing your creative product stone dead (along with a few of the creative talents working on your business) is your own processes.

Integration is the only way forward in order for marketers to make sense of every increasing channels and agency specializations.

But there is no point getting your agencies to integrate if your own business isn't.

Here are some thoughts to ponder (and with each one, please imagine the sound of money going down the drain):

• Your junior marketing team is most likely briefing the agency on work that has not yet been agreed between your various silos.
• The integrated agency team will start work, and sometimes do considerable work, and present to your junior team many many times before the presentation moves up to a more senior layer, at which point someone (possibly from one of those silos) will say: "why are we doing this?"
• That might  require a debrief or a re-brief and so the cycle will continue. This time there is possibly a more aligned brief. This is good, although time and energy and money have been wasted.
• After the agency has got through this stage, the work will be presented to the CMO, or the CFO, or the CEO, at which point someone might say: "I don't like it", or "why are we doing this?" And thus the agencies go back to the beginning.
• Or the C-Suite are dabblers. Or everyone in the team is a dabbler. And they dabble with a bit of this, and move that to the right, and upweight this and can’t-we-also-mention that. An agency I was with recently was on revert 56 for a print ad. How different was it from revert 55, or 54, or even revert 21? Had it been materially improved? Would the consumer notice or care? What was the cost of that dabbling?

And worse than the fact that your team has literally flushed gajillions down the drain through this process, that's not the only cost.

The cost is the “creative tap closing". 

At a certain point creative teams, generally optimistic and determined to help you, will simply say the worst words imaginable if you're paying. 

"Just. Give. Them. What. They. Want". 

Those are expensive words. Because you are paying for talent and then forcing them to give you mediocrity. Which they will, eventually, just to get your job out the system.

This does not make them happy and it should not make you happy either. You may ask why agencies don't try and change your system to make it work better. Truth is they try, but often end up being bullied by the junior marketing teams to curry favour with their bosses. Once in a process workshop,  a brand manager admitted to briefing an agency to develop a promotion off a creative big idea that had been bombed. What? Yes, that poor promo agency worked for a month on work that could not possibly ever be approved. Why? Because the brand manager had a meeting scheduled with his boss in a month and needed something to present.  Do I need to play you the sound effect again?

What to do? *wrings hands*

• Get your stakeholders to agree briefs and communication needs from a business point of view, before the agencies are briefed;
• Give fewer but better briefs;
• Give senior input early in the process;
• Approve the big ideas early, before the agency has developed the full campaign;
• And - and I love this - institute a Wastage Report. Anyone in your Marketing Team that goes over a maximum of 4 reverts has to sign off the responsibility for it. They have to answer whether it was really really necessary to move the logo to the left and change the type to blue? These reports must be evaluated at the end of each quarter/6-months/year. It's dead easy to see who's costing the company money, time and good work. If someone is repeatedly going over 4 reverts, then they are either not briefing well, or the approval process is flawed, or they are a frustrated creative director. All costly habits.

The result of these simple changes?

Gajillions saved. Happy shareholders. Happy creatives. Good work. Happy consumers. Jingling tills.

Now we're talking.

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

Now's The Time To Sort Out Your Client-Agency Relationship

It's 2015 and already the year is galloping by. The relationship with your ad agency or client that might have started wearing thin towards the end of last year, may now be basking in the ever fading glow of the summer holiday. But as the tan fades, and you both start feeling crushed by the relentless torrent of work, so too may the renewed desire to play nicely. It might just be time to do a Client-Agency intervention. 

Image courtesy of holohololand at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

An Adtherapy Client-Agency Relationship Intervention is a positive and constructive process that aims to review and learn from the challenges that are getting in the way of doing great work. And to then ensure the right processes and partnership principles are applied for each party. 

The ultimate aim? A successful business partnership that produces great creative work for the brand. 

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 the “marriage” analogy is that it veers from moments of great joy to the depths of despair; from compromise to utterly unreasonable; 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.

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 rocks. 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”.

Once doubt settles in, frustration builds, trust falls 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 and noise 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 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 party's fault anyway? 

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

A client once asked what the ‘success rate’ was in Agency-Client Interventions. 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.

My advice? Don’t wait till it blows up.

Deal with it urgently. Get stuck in. You can do it yourself, or you can let us help. We can add a qualitative and interpretive (and totally objective) 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.

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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.