Will sanity prevail for ad agencies in 2011?

Anyone working for an ad agency will know that one of the most desperate feelings on earth is losing an account. More so, perhaps, than most other businesses because, in the majority of cases, agencies lose clients for reasons totally beyond their control.

My worst experience of this was 35 years ago, when I was a copywriter for Lindsay Smithers in Natal [now KwaZulu-Natal] and we were pitching for the India Tyres account. This was the first time, incidentally, that a video recorder was used in an agency presentation. Anyway, we put our hearts and souls into it, did the presentation and the client loved it. All that needed to happen, he said, was to sign the contract.

Getting stuffed

Two weeks went by without a word. Eventually, he plucked up the courage to face us and sheepishly admitted that when he showed our campaign to his boss (who was marketing director for both India Tyres and its mother-brand, Dunlop), he was told that the India advertising was so strong it would diminish the Dunlop brand value and it therefore had to be "toned down" or what we would today call "dumbed down."

We suggested they go and get stuffed.

A lot of that sort of thing still happens today.

International account realignments are also among the most common reasons for agencies losing accounts and probably among the most frustrating. There is simply no recourse, no way of trying to rescue something.

Two takes

But, in the few cases where agencies actually lose accounts because they are not performing to the client's satisfaction, one of only two scenarios is usually played out.

The first is a situation where the intellectual capital of the agency is simply on another and much higher plane than that of its client. It is no secret that a lot of clients are riddled with unskilled, untrained brand and product managers who not only find it difficult to take decisions but inevitably, when they do, they are based on either pandering to the perceived wishes of their bosses or on avoiding any possibility of risk.

The second is just plain bad communication. Thankfully, today more and more clients are realising that the success or failure of their advertising agency, in terms of the work they do and strategies they create, is very much based on the human factor, more particularly compatibility. It has nothing to do with producing bad advertising. For an agency and client to work together, both teams need to have relationships not too dissimilar to those required to make marriages work.

Pooh-pooh

Of course, there are still far too many agencies and even more clients who simply pooh-pooh the importance of compatibility. Which is strange, indeed, because it is so basic a tenet of human nature.

Even the most superficial research into agency/client failures will show that by far the most common cause is purely and simply the inability for the two parties to understand each other.

It is the answer to why, in just about any agency one cares to mention, there is a history of doing wonderful work for some clients and really screwing up badly on others.

Teamwork

A clue to whether compatibility exists certainly seems to lie in the structure. Those clients who involve their agencies and make them part of the team more often than not find they have a successful situation. Those who treat agencies simply as outside suppliers and nothing more inevitably end up gnashing their teeth and shedding tears. Equally, those clients who insist that the pitch should be done by the ad agency team that is going to be working on the account end up with a far happier situation than when the charismatic CEO does the pitch and then is never seen on the account again.

I am convinced that there is no such thing as a bad agency or an impossibly difficult client. Just people who can't see eye to eye.

And yet that's the last thing most clients look at when they are putting their accounts out to pitch.