I’ve always been better with clients who are in trouble.
Clients who need to change a situation in a hurry.
Do something drastic.
What I’m not very good at is maintaining the status quo.
Clients who are comfortable and don’t want to rock the boat.
I like to work with clients who’ve been spending a lot of money with another agency doing advertising that hasn’t worked.
Clients who now need to change things, fast.
What this gives them is the clarity of desperation.
They suddenly find there aren’t a dozen different jobs for the advertising to do.
There’s really only one job that’s absolutely essential.
Because of course, advertising can only ever do one job properly.
Then they’ve got the clarity of desperation.
I was talking to Robin Wight and John Hegarty about this.
Robin’s agency had just lost BMW after several decades.
And yet Robin’s agency had done the advertising that built BMW.
John’s agency had done the advertising that built Audi.
I was saying that the problem was both agencies had been great at building the brands.
Great when the client needed great advertising to change things.
But now the advertising had worked and the brands had been built.
Now the client doesn’t think he needs great advertising anymore.
Now he just needs maintenance advertising.
And maintenance advertising is a different job to building brands.
The advertising doesn’t have to work so hard.
One pound doesn’t have to do the work of ten anymore.
You don’t need revolutionaries once the revolution is over.
That’s what Che Guevara found in Cuba.
After the revolution, he had nothing to do, no job.
So he let Fidel Castro take over the maintenance and went looking for another revolution in Latin America.
The same was true of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky was the revolutionary and Lenin’s right hand man, the one who would obviously take over after the revolution.
But Trotsky wanted to keep the revolution going, not do maintenance.
So Stalin took over and Trotsky was ousted.
The same was true of General Patton: during the war he was the best, most aggressive tank general the Allies had.
But in peacetime there was no job for an aggressive tank general, so Patton was out and administrative men like Eisenhower ran things.
In 1940, Britain was about to fall to Germany and consequently had that clarity of desperation: Churchill’s single vision was victory.
As soon as victory was achieved, Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee, who would do the mundane job of maintaining things.
Steve Jobs was essential to Apple: he built it.
But once it had been built he was seen as a loose cannon and ousted.
Until Apple collapsed, and regained the clarity of desperation.
And had to bring Steve Jobs back for another revolution.
Revolution is about the clarity of desperation, a single powerful vision.
Maintenance isn’t about that.
Maintenance is about doing lots of smaller things, keeping lots of people happy, politics, rather than simply getting a result.
Maintenance is process-driven, revolution is result-driven.
Maintenance dissipates energy and resources.
Desperation has a clarity that maintenance doesn’t have.
We all have to decide what we are: revolutionary or maintenance.
Probably what did it for Maggie in the end, don’t you think, Dave?
Good point, look who replaced her: John Major (known as ‘the grey man’)
That’s when they thought it was time to get the slippers on, “Cause in sleepy London Town there’s just no place for a street fighting man, no”.
Dave, looking at it from a business problem perspective: if the brand solely needs maintenance, why should it go for revolution if maintenance solves the business problem? Unless of course the attitude of the brand (owners) is per default revolution, always challenging the status quo in everything (even if maintenance would suffice). I think brands with an attitude of constant revolution are the exception (but there are many maintenance brands who think they are revolution). Only a few are fully aware that resting on your laurels might result in realising some day that the revolution has continued – without them.
There’s a saying in my country; ‘Getting to the top is easier than staying on top’.
So one might argue that good maintenance work is harder than it looks.
Because when you’re a revolutionary, your enemy most of the time is just one (the best).
But when you’re maintenance, your enemies are everyone (the rest).
Parvez and Irfan, remember I’m talking about advertising not marketing.
Advertising is the voice of marketing.
So if marketing decides maintenance is all that is needed, why spend all that money on advertising?
Why spend money on a loud voice in order not to change anything?
You can either spend less money because you don’t need to.
Or you can spend the same amount of money on advertising that doesn’t do much.
Either way, I’m not very good at it.
I like to do advertising that works harder and beats the competition.
The problem with a lot of marketing departments is they want a very visible advertising campaign that doesn’t do much.
So it gets seen, but it looks like bad advertising and a waste of money.
Dave,
would you say, In your experience, most agencies have a mixture of both types of clients and expect their creatives to be able to cross the divide
or do they employ firefighters and auxiliary personal and deploy accordingly?
Would you say most clients by definition don’t want to rock the boat, they want to increase market share or growth but don’t want to stand on anyone’s toes?
John,
In my experience, nearly everyone wants to do maintenance work and pretend it’s revolutionary
I agree with your thesis Dave. But I also feel brands in trouble often it is a product/service issue. They are falling flat in the market place with poor offerings at their current price points. Advertising can’t fix a bad product. It can get someone to try a product thinking ‘this time it will be different’ but usually only the ads are different and the product is the problem and hasn’t changed. Of course then the CEO blames the ad agency that did great work for them.
But bad ads can easily sink a staid product in a rapidly changing marketplace like TBWA-LA has done to Pepsi. But even there we have more choice at more price points in a splintering marketplace with changing consumer tastes and health views. Not sure great ads would save Pepsi but bad ones are driving them into the ground. They are better off with no advertising than what they are paying for now.
Viva La Revolution!
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