July 15, 2007 | Author: Tim Williams
Most advertising professionals are earnestly looking for the right answers to what they should be doing to make their agencies more relevant and valuable to clients.
But most good answers are the result of asking good questions. Here are three of the most important:
The Wrong Question: How can we get paid for all of the time we're spending on our client's business?
The Right Question: How can we get paid for the value we are adding to our client's business?
The system most agencies use to price their services – hours, costs, full time equivalents, etc. – are all focused on internal operations and have nothing to do with the external value created for the client. We are chasing the wrong rabbit.
The Wrong Question: How can we become more efficient in the way we service our client's business?
The Right Question: How can we be more effective on our client's business?
Advertising agencies don't exist to be efficient; they exist to create wealth for their clients. A compulsion to increase efficiency (doing things right) reduces the firm's effectiveness at doing the right things. The relentless pursuit of efficiency hinders agencies from focusing on the things that truly matter – proactive ideas that build the success of the client's brand.
The Wrong Question: What do we need to start doing to be more successful?
The Right Question: What do we need to stop doing to be more successful?
Most agencies don't need to add to their list of capabilities and category experience – they need to subtract. They need to decide what they are not. Increasingly, clients are looking for "best of breed" partners, not "full-service marketing communications firms."
Unless we ask the right questions, we'll always get the wrong answer. The point for advertising agencies isn't to get better; it's to get different.
June 15, 2007 | Author: Tim Williams
The traditional advertising agency is now facing competition on all fronts. Upstream are marketing consultancies, brand consultancies and research firms—all claiming to provide better strategic planning than agencies. Downstream are media firms (who are now also in the business of strategic planning) and production houses (who are getting into the business of concept development).
Most agency revenue from non-traditional sources
Growth in the agency business can no longer come from traditional sources. In fact, most of the large agency holding companies have come to a major tipping point: more than half of their revenues now come from non-advertising activities. Today, big national advertisers are dissolving their longstanding relationships with agencies of record and turning to branding specialists, media specialists and CRM specialists to increase the effectiveness of their marketing dollars.
To grow, agencies must stop focusing on reclaiming old territory and instead discover new territory. The model is Columbus, not Napoleon. The role of the agency must move from helping clients create and place marketing messages to helping them evaluate and strengthen the relationship their customers have with the brand—at all points of contact.
Helping clients keep brand promises
This is a much broader and more valuable role. And it often has very little to do with traditional advertising. The real opportunity for agencies stems from the fact that most companies make brand promises they can't keep. Agencies have the right skill set to help clients bridge this gap and improve not only the way the brand is perceived, but the way it is experienced.
"Experience design" is an emerging discipline in forward-thinking design firms (see www.aiga.org for an interesting job description), and it's a role that could fit just as well in an ad agency. Imagine that the creative team consists of a word designer (copywriter), a visual designer (art director), and an experience designer, whose job it is to improve how customers actually interact with the brand at non-advertising touch points.
At the foundation of experience design is a competency in ethnographic research – observing consumer behavior (in place of focus groups and surveys). The best account planners are rabid ethnographers. At Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a planner's business card actually reads "Cultural Anthropologist."
Who's in charge of the brand experience?
Looking after the experience of the brand is a critical job that is sorely lacking in American business. Most surveys of corporations show that nobody is really doing this job. Marketing thinks operations is doing it, operations thinks marketing is doing it, the agency thinks the client is doing it, and in reality nobody is doing it. And who is better suited to step up to the plate than an agency – an organization that is expert in consumer behavior?
