Articulating what your firm will always do and what it will never do.

Emanating from your purpose are your principles – a set of strongly held values that give you a framework for making business decisions. Principles are an articulation of what you will always do and what you will never do.

The most admired agencies are those that have a set of principles they follow no matter what the circumstance. They walk their talk. As advertising great Bill Bernbach said, “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.”

Agencies with strong principles aren’t afraid to say no to clients, because clients aren’t the highest value. Principles are. Agencies that have principles about the quality of their work say no to unreasonable budgets and deadlines. They say no to uninformed changes to creative work and media plans.

The self-promotion literature of one prominent West Coast agency plants this flag in the ground:

"We will not do everything we're told. We will make it our responsibility to bring you ideas you didn't ask for, and to keep solving problems in new and different ways. We will argue for what we believe in, but we won't be jerks about it. There are enough jerks in the world already."¹

In times of difficult decision making, when the work of the agency might be compromised, young agency account executives are often told by agency management, “Remember, it’s the client’s money.” This is code for “Stop fighting for what’s right and just do what the client tells you or we might lose the account.”

In times like these, consider which is more precious: the client’s money, or the agency’s reputation?

Money, once lost, is fairly easy to get back. Reputation, once lost, is nearly impossible to get back. In the agency business, managers have to make little compromises virtually every day of their lives. But principle-centered managers fight like crazy to avoid making big compromises that can destroy what has taken years to build: their own brand image.

Perhaps the question agency managers should ask themselves is not only “How much money will this client make us,” but “How much money will this client cost us – by destroying our reputation, our morale, and ultimately our ability to be successful in the future?” We all know this, but we need to be reminded: reputation is infinitely more valuable than money. And living by your principles is how you protect your reputation.

Consider principles as your agency’s “rules of engagement.” The more your business world revolves around principles, the less likely you are to overreact to changes in the marketplace. In fact, a company shouldn’t change its core values in response to market changes at all. Instead, it should consider changing markets to remain true to its core values.² Otherwise, how “core” are the values?

Uncovering your agency DNA

Companies are organic entities. Embedded in every organization is a naturally-occurring strand of values and beliefs. To stay healthy, companies have to be nourished by living and staying true to these principles.

Principles are guideposts for your staff that provide the direction they need to make the hundreds of day-to-day decisions that determine the success and direction of the agency. Those that feel passionately about it, like VitroRobertson, use language like this:

“We believe that when a group of people get together and decide to open an ad agency, that decision carries with it a group of responsibilities. The agencies that, over the long term, neglect those responsibilities and let them fall by the wayside are the agencies that will struggle and make foolish compromises and allow their creative product to erode until those agencies themselves fall by the wayside. The agencies that never lose sight of those responsibilities and that try to live up to them every day are the agencies that will be respected and do outstanding work and will prosper in even the most competitive of agency environments.”³

To discover your principles, look deep inside your company’s genetic makeup and ask:

1. What is core to the culture of the agency?
2. What are the things about the agency that we would never change?
3. What do we fight for?
4. When it comes to business, what are the lines we draw in the sand?
5. What are the things we will always do, and the things we will never do?

Then ask yourselves two more questions:

1. Are we prepared to make our business decisions based on these principles?
2. Would we hold to these principles even when a significant amount of money is on the line?

The value of values

Like a good purpose, a good principle is specific and pregnant with meaning. Platitudes like “We believe in being honest” are not only not memorable, they are not defining. If you feel strongly about the subject of honesty, you might have a principle that says “We believe in telling the truth no matter what the cost.” That draws more of a line in the sand.

One of the leading principles of a well-respected New York agency believed that growth should come from a small list of strong clients. The agency – Amarati & Puris – was an example of an agency that stuck to their knitting by doing high-quality work for a select group of blue chip clients.

A smaller New York firm follows a completely different set of principles to set itself apart from the crowd. “Whenever we’re uncertain which way to go,” they say, “we ask ourselves what a traditional agency would do. Then we do the opposite.”⁴ For starters, they will work only on a project basis.

Principles often provoke debate and discussion. For an agency to have a section in its promotional brochure titled “What We Believe” is not very unusual. What is unusual is to have something concrete and provocative to say about what you believe. Most of the time, an agency’s values are described with shopworn terms like “We believe in results” and “We believe in being partners with our clients.” The question is, what kind of agency doesn’t claim to believe in things like results and partnership? Deeply-rooted, well-defined principles are thought-provoking and sometimes even controversial. They give your organization character.

One agency states prominently in the first few sentences of their brochure, “We actually hate advertising. In fact, hating advertising is a prerequisite to work here.” They go on to describe their belief in “advertising that doesn’t look, sound, and smell like advertising.” As a result, a lot of their print work looks more like magazine articles than ads, and their commercials play more like mini-movies than TV spots.

No one knows his way around the subject of principles better than best-selling author Stephen R. Covey, who offers this insight:

“If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluation, correcting, or controlling. Principles have universal application. And when these are internalized into habits, they empower people to create a wide variety of practices to deal with different situations.”⁵

The inventor of the Total Quality movement, W. Edwards Deming, believed that even manufacturers can improve quality by teaching principles. Central to his philosophy is eliminating quotas and rating systems and replacing them with innovative, self-directed principles – even on the production line.

The man who built one of the most successful business enterprises in history, Dee Hock, founder of VISA International, knows firsthand the value of a common set of principles. Says Hock:

“Your organization needs to be absolutely clear about purpose and principles. If the purpose and principles are constructive and healthy, then your organization will take a very different form than anything that you ever imagined. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with (the old model of) command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they’ll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.”⁶

Imagine that kind of alignment taking place in your agency.

The power of a point of view

The best agencies have a strong, well-articulated philosophy. They put it in writing, and they go to great lengths to make sure everyone on their staff understands and embraces it. One of the best-known examples of this stems from the early years of Ogilvy & Mather. A series of O&M philosophy pieces were used religiously in agency training, new business, and self promotion. Titles like these clearly paint a picture of an agency with an opinion:

How to Create Advertising That Sells
How to Launch New Products
How to Run an Advertising Agency
How to Make Agency Presentations
How to Write Better

You may agree or disagree with what David Ogilvy had to say about the advertising business, but you’ve got to give him credit for having a point of view. During its first 25 years, O&M was propelled from a start-up agency to one of the largest in the world, fueled by a strong philosophy that made the agency famous. In writing his “Principles of Management,” David Ogilvy said, “If you endorse these principles, promulgate them, apply them, add to them and revise them during the years to come, our offices will be inspired by unanimity of purpose. This will give Ogilvy & Mather a competitive edge over international agencies which lack such unanimity.”⁷ He was right.

O&M is perhaps the best-known example of an agency with strong principles. They run deep in the collective soul of the organization. David Ogilvy, in his trademark colorful style, put most of the agency’s principles in writing, including these:

1. We admire people who hire subordinates who are good enough to succeed them. We pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferior specimens as their subordinates.
2. We admire kindly people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings – particularly the people who sell things to us. We abhor quarrelsome people. We abhor people who wage paper warfare. We abhor buck passers, and people who don’t tell the truth.
3. Our system of management is singularly democratic. We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.
4. We despise office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses. We detest nepotism and every other form of favoritism.
5. We attach importance to discretion. Clients don’t appreciate agencies which leak their secrets. Nor do they like it when an agency takes credit for their successes. To get between a client and the footlights is bad manners.
6. We are revolted by pseudo-academic jargon, like attitudinal, paradigms, demassification, reconceptualize, suboptimal, symbiotic linkage, splinterisation, and dimensionalisation.
7. We use the word partner in referring to each other. This says a mouthful.
8. We admire well-organized people who keep their offices shipshape, and deliver their work on time.

When strong principles seep through the collective consciousness of an agency, they serve as a set of boundaries that guide daily decisions. One of the true professionals I have known in this business, creative director Dave Newbold, once committed some of his agency’s principles on paper as follows:⁸

1. We are dedicated to making creativity the horse and billings the cart. Not vice versa.
2. We only work for clients who seek honest, objective input, who decry “yes” folks, and who value partners with spines.
3. We cannot work for everyone. We will resist the temptation. Our agency must and will position itself based on our strengths and experience, then pursue only clients whose needs match those attributes.
4. We will not accept a client that has a system which deters creativity and risk-taking, or which has multiple levels of approval.
5. We must care. A lot. Advertising is brain surgery. The work matters. The ideas matter. The execution matters. It makes a difference how the headline is worded, how big the type and how small the logo is.
6. All members of the agency are, first and foremost, accountable for the creative excellence and reputation of the agency.
7. We will not permit “closet” accounts. If the work is not good enough to show new business prospects, the account is not good enough to keep.

Clients respect a strong, even controversial point of view. Bartle Bogle Hegarty is famous for a set of principles that have contributed not only to their stellar reputation, but ultimately to their bottom line. When BBH first opened for business, they announced their policy of refusing to prepare speculative creative work in new business pitches. London papers like the Financial Times and The Observer called it "A potentially suicidal policy," and "A recipe for disaster."

Much to the contrary, BBH has one of the best new business conversion rates of any agency anywhere. Other BBH principles astound and confound, such as the agency’s policy of presenting only one creative option to the client at a time. And when it comes to client compensation, they have only one approach: theirs. You can argue with these policies, but you can’t argue with their success; BBH is an agency brand in demand. And their principles are a big part of it. As one BBH executive says, “There’s real strength in saying ‘We’re not for everybody.’”

Testing your principles

How do you know if a principle is effective and authentic? Apply this litmus test:

1. Is it memorable?
2. Is it differentiating?
3. Can you logically argue its opposite?

It’s an observable fact that principle-centered agencies seem to have certain things (principles, actually) in common. Of course, agencies have their own personalities and cultures, but the best of them tend to share a set of recurring values. Here are a few of the most important ones.

Valuing greatness over bigness

“Grow or die.” This is a classic principle, deeply embedded in the American business psyche. Agencies, like other businesses, are obsessed with size. Eavesdrop on any elevator conversation between executives of different agencies and the first question will be, “So, how big are you guys now?” The question should be, “So how good are you guys now?”

What exactly is the benefit of growth for the sake of growth? In a creative enterprise like an agency, you can either care about great work, great people, and great clients, which usually results in growth. Or you can care about growth, which only sometimes results in great work, great people, and great clients. Bigness does not lead to greatness.

As Wieden + Kenney co-founder Dan Wieden observed, “At the end of the day, size and scale isn’t king, relationship is king. And getting bigger doesn’t make relationships easier, it makes them much more difficult.”⁹

Minneapolis-based Carmichael Lynch has grown with the same philosophy. The agency’s Jack Supple once said, "We're probably the only agency in America not looking for a big client."¹⁰ He wants the agency to grow carefully – not quickly – in a way that’s aligned with the agency’s principles.

New York agency Kirshenbaum & Bond has a similar view. Says partner Richard Kirshenbaum, "My personal philosophy has never been about getting bigger. It's always been about getting better. And every time we've ever tried to get better, we've got bigger."¹¹

Are these aggressive growth philosophies? Not on the surface. But have these agencies grown anyway? Quite impressively. Just one more example of the advice of many psychologists: do what you love and the money will follow.

When less is more

I know of one small agency that felt they were constantly running to keep up the demands of 24 clients. Then one day the partners made the decision that they would muster the courage to say goodbye to the accounts that weren't adding much to the agency's income or reputation and cut their client list in half – down to 12. They immediately lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. But in less than a year the agency literally doubled in size.

A well-known and much larger agency in the Southwestern U.S. had a similar experience. In the 1980s, the agency had grown to four offices, spreading the time and attention of the founders among too many locations and too many clients. The agency made the brave decision to close all but the headquarters office, which required them to resign two-thirds of their clients. The agency billed about $60 million at the time. Today (with just one office), they bill well over $1 billion.

Why? Because by focusing on what they did best, they were more efficient, more effective, and more profitable than trying to be everything to everyone. Being focused proves the old adage, “Sometimes less is more.”

Nothing to hide

Stanley Pollitt, founder of a London agency and widely considered to be the father of the discipline of account planning, said that "Success means a total agency management commitment to getting the advertising right at all costs. It's more important than maximizing agency profits or keeping clients happy."¹² What a standard for an agency to live up to. These words would no doubt send cold chills down the spines of many agency presidents, client service directors, and new business directors, but what Pollitt was advocating was that if you get the work right, the rest will follow naturally.

When I have conducted interviews with employees at agencies with stellar creative reputations, I have usually heard them say something like, "The partners here are perfectionists." I ask, "Does that drive you crazy?” "No," they say, "it just makes us work harder to try and hit a home run. Otherwise, the partners will just send us back to work again." It’s no coincidence that these are the kinds of agencies where the work is not just good, but great.

Agencies that have great (instead of good) as one of their principles don't tolerate sloppy work, sloppy service, or sloppy thinking. They don't do one round of color, they do five. They're rarely satisfied with the first edit. They rewrite their marketing plans. And they keep trying to make everything better right up until the moment the work goes out the door.

As one well-respected agency principal once said, "You can measure our agency by the clients we don't have."

Walking the talk

When it comes down to it, the real difference between truly outstanding agencies and everybody else is that they not only talk the talk, they actually walk the walk. They have a strong alignment between what they say and what they do, between principles and practices.

My friend and long-time agency executive Charlie Decker wrote a book titled 99 Principles and Practices of Procter & Gamble's Success. His conclusion? “Many business decisions have effects that go beyond beating the competition or making a profit. It often comes down to the hard choice between what's right for the long term versus the short term. If decisions are inconsistent with principles, the principles will ultimately be undermined."¹³

It all boils down to two important questions:

1. Does our agency have a set of principles which guide every business decision?
2. Are our policies, procedures, and daily practices aligned with our principles?

If you answer no to either of these questions, involve your agency in some serious self-reflection. And remember that you don't invent your guiding principles, you discover them. They're in there, just waiting to come out. Find them, put them in writing, and emblazon them on the agency consciousness. When you walk into the entrance of GSD&M in Austin, you find their principles literally carved in stone (in the granite floor of the lobby).

It's time to recreate the "all things to all people" mission statement and decide what it is you really stand for – the things you will always do and the things you will never do. Socrates said, “The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.” Said another way, to be successful, we must align our practices with our principles.

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¹John Robertson and John Vitro, VitroRobertson, Agency Capabilities, 1999.

² James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, “Building Your Company’s Vision,” Harvard Business Review, September-October 1996.

³John Robertson and John Vitro, VitroRobertson, Agency Capabilities, 1999.

⁴Tom Nelson and Steve Gardner, “Déjà Vu Vu Vu,” Adweek, September 18, 2000, p. 16.

⁵Stephen R. Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, Summit Books, 1990.

⁶“Transformation by Design: An Interview with Dee Hock,” What is Enlightenment?, Fall/Winter 2002.

⁷David Ogilvy, Principles of Management, Ogilvy & Mather, 1968.

⁸Dave Newbold, The Agency Bible, 1995.

⁹From a speech by Dan Wieden as quoted in “Why Size Doesn’t Matter,” One: A Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 2.

¹0Jack Supple, “Carmichael Lynch” by Warren Berger, Communication Arts, September/October 1996.

¹¹Richard Kirshenbaum and Jonathan Bond, Under the Radar, John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

¹²Stanley Pollitt, “How I Started Account Planning In Agencies,” Campaign, April 20, 1979.

¹³Charles Decker, 99 Principles and Practices of Procter & Gamble’s Success, Pocket Books, 1998.

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