Einstein proved it, yet agencies don't do it

Yes, you read that right - clients who want to leave an agency are more impressed with the creative work than the average. On further investigation (or just thinking about it), it is quite logical and could probably be due to contravening Einstein's 55/5 maxim:

"If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."

Clients defect, because they predict that they will receive better value somewhere else. Initially the agency is seldom to blame - "client doesn't know what he/she wants," is the usual mantra. Truth be told - that is usually the case. And that's where Einstein's theory comes in, and also explains this somewhat unusual anomaly of clients leaving when the work's improving.

Too little, too late

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," might be somewhat of a cliché, but I think it explains the problem accurately. When the agency-client relationship becomes strained, we resort to doing what we think we should; what will save us: brilliant communication. We focus our efforts on that outcome, and usually succeed in producing great work worthy of admiration. However, the end result is a failure; a relationship that is severed, because we just did what we do best, not what we should have done: to find and define the real problem.

Mary Wells Lawrence was the first female CEO of a company to be listed on the New York Exchange. Interestingly enough, the company was an ad agency. She states the issue clearly:

"When a client comes to us with a product, he is, in effect, giving us a problem to be solved... Some of the biggest advertising mistakes are made by people who imagine they know what the problem is, or they're not even thinking about it; they're just coming up with that brilliant idea and trying to force the problem to fit it."

Perhaps a gorier example will drive the point home. Procrustes, an inn-keeper in Greek mythology, wanted to make sure that travellers would fit in his bed. So he cut off the limbs of those who were too tall and stretching those who were too short. But he had the bed fitting with total perfection.

Ask 'Why?"... And then ask again

The reason we get fired is that we have not discovered the brief - we have just taken it. We haven't asked enough 'whys' to determine the actual problem. Although you might say that it's not your responsibility to save clients from themselves, the brutal reality is that sometimes you do. They think they know what the problem is, and then brief you accordingly. However, they have not asked a series of 'whys' so that they can arrive at the real problem that needs to be addressed. Just a brief to 'increase forward share by 7%' is one of the warning signs that we're not really dealing with a problem, but a symptom.

The term spadework has never been more apt. To find the real problem you need to do some digging. Einstein kept asking why. Perhaps we should do the same. We may not change the world, but we will change the desire of a client to find better value somewhere else.

Ref 1: Henke L. L. A longitudinal analysis of the Ad Agency-Client Relationship: Predictions of an agency switch. J Ad Res, March/April 1995. Yes, that's right - proven as far back as 1995!