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Why do clients and ad agencies have so many rows? And what can you do about it?

Guest post by: Drayton Bird

Article Overview: Your ad agencies’ creative people and you almost certainly have entirely different objectives. Why? What can you do?

Why do clients and ad agencies have so many rows? And what can you do about it?

Too often they don't have the same point of view or the same objectives. No wonder the result is mutual misery.

The American wit Robert Benchley said the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who think the world is divided into two kinds of people and those who don't.

In my experience, clients divide neatly into three kinds: those who want their advertising to sell; those who want it to be admired; and those who want both.

Far-sighted clients - especially those who run their own business - want their ads to sell, because otherwise they will go broke. Shortsighted ones (and in large firms junior ones, who approve most of advertising initially) are far less concerned about selling because few stay with their firms long enough to see the results of their decisions.

They love awards because their peers then admire them. So do agency creative people for the same reason, besides the fact that awards help them get better jobs. Agencies that win lots of awards also attract talented potential employees and potential clients (though not necessarily customers, who have more important things to think about than clever advertising).

Sales don't come first for them Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying agency managements don't appreciate the importance of sales - but their creative people have a very different perspective.

You doubt me? Well, take the U.K., whose agencies win more awards, pro rata, than any other country. When creative directors there were surveyed some time back to find out what mattered most to them, not one - and this was a large survey - even mentioned the word "sales".

Essentially, then, advertising is created by people to whom sales do not come first. This creates what might mildly be called a conflict of interest. This would not be a problem if those who judge the awards or those who decide what runs and what doesn't knew anything about advertising.

Very few do, though. That's because very few clients at any level really study advertising; they think judging it is something to do with personal taste. The fallacy of this is demonstrated in the book "The end of marketing as we know it" by Sergio Zyman.

Few people can have been much better at judging advertising in recent years than Zyman, who ran marketing at Coca-Cola for six years. When he took over, few believed Coke could do much better than it did already. Yet he and his team managed to increase sales and profits by some 50% in that period.

In his book he tells a story about showing his boss, Roberto Goizueta, the first advertising he proposed to run. Goizueta didn't like it. Zyman said, more or less, "Well, if you're going to buy all the product yourself, that's fine. Otherwise, why not just let the customers decide."

You are not your customer And that's where so many clients and agency people go wrong. They forget that they are not the customers. They rely on their own taste. Yet most of us live very different lives to those who buy our products.

Of few people can this be truer than creative directors. In "Ogilvy on Advertising" - the best book on the subject in the last 90 years - David Ogilvy told a revealing story. A few years ago the top U.S. creative directors were asked to choose what they thought the best current advertising. Their choice had absolutely no correlation with sales success

This brings me to Rosser Reeves, the man who coined the idea of the unique selling proposition - or U.S.P. Advertising Age, interviewing him in 1965, asked why his ads weren't more tasteful.

Reeves replied with a a highly relevant analogy. He asked the interviewer to imagine he owned a business that supported himself and all his family - and it suddenly started going broke. "What would you want from me? Fine writing? Or would you like to see the goddam sales curve stop going down and start going up?

Mind you, Reeves was a bit of an extremist. The wise agree with Raymond Rubicam, who said that the ideal is an advertisement that both sells and stays in the mind long afterwards as an excellent piece of work.

A difficult trick to pull off.

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Article Tags: american wit, conflict of interest, creative directors, decisions, different perspective, experience clients, important things, jobs, misery, nbsp, own business, peers, point of view, robert benchley, strong sales, two kinds, word sales



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