At one of the last ad-agencies I worked at I didn’t enjoy it.
A bank had phoned me direct and asked me to do a campaign for them.
Gordon and I did something we really liked and we worked it up into a presentation.
As we were getting ready to go, the Head of Planning asked if he could see the work.
He hadn’t been involved, but I said sure and showed him the campaign.
He said, “What else have you got?”
I said, “Nothing else, why?”
He was shocked, “You’re only taking ONE campaign.”
I said, “Why would we take more if we think this one is right?”
He said, “But what if the client doesn’t like that one?”
I said, “We’ll listen to their feedback and we’ll do another campaign, and repeat the process until we get something we’re both happy with.”
He said, “Why don’t you just give them the choice up-front and save time?”
I said, “Are you saying we should take a lot of campaigns we don’t think are right so that, if the client doesn’t like this one, they can pick something from the pile we don’t think is right?”
He said, “But if you only show one campaign the client’s got no choice.”
I said, “So you’re saying we should just put the campaigns up around the wall and let the client walk around and pick whatever they like. So they’ve really just hired us to crank out a selection of any-old campaigns, so really we’re just a studio.”
Obviously we couldn’t agree.
He’d only ever worked one way and I’d only ever worked a different way.
I was in the business of advertising, that agency was in the business of making money.
They are not the same priority.
In the business of advertising, the consumer is the most important.
In the business of making money, the client is the most important.
If the client likes the ads they’ll give you money, if they don’t they won’t.
In that world the agency serves the client, the job is to second-guess what the client likes.
In my world, the agency and the client both serve the consumer.
Sure every agency will pretend they’re serving the consumer, no agency is going to admit that it will do whatever the client wants just to get its hands on the money.
But I’d never worked in an agency like that, so it took me by surprise.
Many years ago, when I worked at BMP, John Webster and I had each done a separate campaign for the same pitch.
John couldn’t decide between them, he liked both, so he recommended that we show both at the pitch.
Stanley Pollitt (the man who invented Account Planning) said absolutely not.
In his opinion that was an amateurish way for professionals to behave, we didn’t give the client a range of campaigns to choose from.
That was the equivalent of saying we have no opinion so you choose for yourself.
The client had hired us because we were specialists in advertising, it was our job to recommend the right solution for their problem.
A doctor doesn’t give you a range of ailments and ask which you’d prefer.
They evaluate the possibilities and recommend the correct course of action.
It was our business to select the best advertising solution for the client’s problem.
Stanley was happy to research both campaigns and make a recommendation, but he wouldn’t provide options any more than a doctor would provide optional diagnoses.
Options, if they happened, would occur in sequence not in parallel.
I think agencies, and account planning, have changed and not the way Stanley intended.
We are self-service now.
IMHO, the Mac /desktop publishing is to be blamed.
In the past visuals meant drawings, that took time. With scrap art, it’s faster. So agencies that can’t win with their thinking try to impress with volume.
In one shop, we’d spend 2 hours thinking of an idea. And 10 hours printing it up.
The same headline and visual would be printed up as a Full Page broadsheet ad.
Scaled down as a Full Page tabloid ad.
Stretched up as a 64-sheet poster. Trimmed down as a leaflet/shelf-talker.
Thank God this was pre-digital.
Imagine having to print the same idea as a facebook banner, an eDM …
The only winner was the colour printer-cartridge guy.
And anyone else pitching against us.
Hi Dave, my creative partner and I have followed the principle of only presenting what we believe is the right idea since we launched our business just over two years ago. We even wrote about it too: https://mixedupmakesbetter.com/insight/what-do-you-think/
We’ve found that the clients we build long lasting relationships with are really receptive to this approach and it has been successful for us. Some of us haven’t given up fighting the good fight…
I think the industry has made clients, in general, expect precisely that, an array of options with “different avenues” to let them pick. It usually ends up in a mediocre Frankenstein monster with bits and pieces from each “option,” which only fuels the client’s ability not to decide and commit to anything at all. Presenting only one good idea is the best idea, and then you build or rebuild from that. It would be beneficial for everyone. Let’s hope we can go back to that by changing minds with great work and even better accounts teams.
The problem with giving a client who knows nothing about “the big idea” choice, is you end up in an advertising supermarket where one of the client team may like the beginning of one ad and another member of the client team may like the end of another.
One pulls tomato soup off the counter whilst the other chooses porridge.
The result is tomridge or porrato.
This is similar to going to a butchers shop for a new pet and walking out with the front half of a panda and the back end of a zebra which everybody agrees to and nobody is happy with.