How to get creative with agencies - The Marketer magazine

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How to...

get creative with agencies

Want a campaign to set the world on fire? That elusive creative spark needs the right conditions before it will catch alight

Creativity spells success. Without it, your products risk rapid commoditisation and your services become hard to distinguish from those of your competitors. Given that the great majority of creative work is produced by external agencies, getting good results usually depends on selecting the right agency partners in the first place, supplying them with the information they need in order to meet your objectives and monitoring their progress towards a desired outcome. Expressed so baldly, this is nothing more than common sense. Yet there are numerous opportunities for things to go awry, and many client-agency relationships end in disappointment, exasperation and failure. So steel yourself, and lets begin at the beginning: hiring the best agency partners for your creative needs. Marriage guidance or divorce? Before you can get creative, you need to get along. If you already have an incumbent agency the first question you have to ask yourself is whether you can both make a fresh start because marriage guidance is cheaper than divorce, says Kerry Glazer, CEO of client-agency relationship specialist AAR. It may be that your current agency does not have the resources to meet your needs. But if theres a problem you should think about whether the relationship is salvageable and how you can remedy it. For public-sector bodies there are rigid tendering requirements, but most privatesector companies have the freedom to determine their own selection process. Glazer recommends making time in your busy diary to sit down in advance of any appointment process and clarify your objectives, setting the hygiene factors or basic necessities agencies must meet. Time spent doing this upfront will save time later on, cutting out the possibility that you end up dealing with agencies that are ill-equipped to meet your needs. If you decide to hold a competitive pitch, less is often more. Apart from being time-consuming, viewing presentations from eight different agencies may leave you more confused than when you started. Keep pitch lists small, three or four participants at most. Provide all the agencies with a comprehensive brief, wherever possible give them time to come back to you with any questions they might have, and have them present their ideas at their offices. Seeing them in their own environment will give you a clearer sense of the kind of people they are, how they work and whether this is compatible with your needs.

Hold workshops instead of formal pitches to judge which group of people will gel with you most productively

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How to get creative with agencies - The Marketer magazine

http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-get-creative-with...

Chemistry, though hard to define, is vital. If agency collaboration with you and your colleagues is top of your wish list, it might be better to hold workshops rather than a formal pitch, to judge which group of people will be able to gel with you most productively. For brand-led companies like us its important to find the right chemistry in an agency, says Orange UK head of brand communications Spencer McHugh. We have to find out if they adhere to our brand values. So we try to spend time with people, sometimes chatting about creative work, imagining working with them. Food company Bernard Matthews had three chemistry meetings with agency Isobel, one of which included a set task, before the formal pitch that led to Isobels appointment. However, the time investment in getting to know each other paid dividends. Isobels solution came from spending time with Bernard Matthews staff the creative was hooked on staff pride. Bigger briefs Great creative solutions emerge from clear strategies and in-depth briefs. McHugh says that a good, detailed brief is often the summary of various conversations held with the agency. Moreover, if time allows, he recommends delivering the brief in a relevant and inspiring setting outside the office. For instance, when briefing an agency to devise creative solutions aimed at a youth audience, Orange has taken the team to Topshop in the West End and on another occasion hired a bar. By breaking away from the meeting room, it gives us all time and space to think about things, says McHugh. It also demonstrates to an agency how important a project is for us. Which, needless to say, focuses minds wonderfully. Marketers promoting a drink intended to lower cholesterol, for example, arranged for the creatives working on the account to take cholesterol tests thereby highlighting a key product attribute, while giving several creatives something to think about in terms of their health and lifestyle. Will Awdry, creative partner at Ogilvy Advertising London, describes the birth of creative ideas as an endlessly elusive subject. How does a crab get to the sea when it only walks sideways? Most important, in his view, is a structured enough process to allow people to go off the rails. By laying down the fixed metal of a brief and a tight schedule, the imagination can travel out of the window at random points. Its these that create most interest; moments of insane logic that tell the story. Of course, the post-match checks for message clarity, branding and whatnot are important, but the truly unusual never emerges from predictive steps. Creative or crazy? What makes the combined clientagency team go with a mad idea? Simple those involved agree the risk of going with it is far outweighed by the catastrophic lunacy of not doing it, says Awdry. Justin Hooper, creative director on the Citron account at Euro RSCG London, says he always looks for the real truth about a product. The truth we picked for the most talked about commercial of 2008 was that the Citron C5 was a rather Germanic car for a French manufacturer. Controversial, slightly, but it was the truth that was most motivating to potential buyers in the C5s segment. The resulting adverts tongue-in-cheek send up of German clichs caused uproar among the humourless. But, argues Hooper, the great thing about Citron is that it was brave enough to risk alienating a few people, including the 25 Members of Parliament who signed an early day motion to get the commercial banned. It

Remind your agency partners of your business objectives and the metrics by which you will judge the success of their work

Dos and donts

Do be cute. For mash get Smash was the tagline for a series of jaunty 1970s adverts, created by the late John Webster of BMP. It

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How to get creative with agencies - The Marketer magazine

http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-get-creative-with...

stuck to its guns to be sure of getting the message across to people who would be interested in buying a proud French car that was unmistakably German. Some marketers immerse their creative team in the brand challenge. LG UK marketing director Andrew Warner says he has shrunk down the print adverts of rivals and mounted them on a wall for direct comparison. You can see where people are following sector rules, he says. For a challenger brand, it gives you some insight into what you can do differently and, if you marry that with good research, it can help you get the best from an agency. Mark Slaughter, group brand manager at computer games company Ubisoft is a big believer in inter-agency development, bringing various agencies together to help develop creative solutions, with Audacity recently acting as lead agency in the development of the Imagine brand of games for girls. Inter-agency meetings are held each month to share creative ideas. The number one rule is honesty and openness, says Slaughter. They are an extension of your business. I dont see a line between client and agency. They have to live your brand and be integral to your brand. But while comprehensive briefing is a necessity, there is sometimes the risk that too much information will clog up a creative agencys thinking. As Landor Associates executive director Andrew Welch puts it, a brief with everything in it is likely to lead to a lowest common denominator blancmange solution that ticks many boxes but fails to inspire or break new ground. So prioritise what is important and be single-minded in discarding the peripheral. Mastering the art of sacrifice helps bring about singular ideas. Ask the boss Getting approval for an idea is a crucial point, and often a bone of contention between client and agency. Stories abound of campaigns that fail to see the light of day after a painstaking development process because a senior stakeholder is only brought into the equation late on. Its an unpalatable scenario when the creative work is presented only to be vetoed, to the chagrin of the agency and to the great embarrassment of whoever is responsible for the project client-side. Sarah Davies, group business director at agency Republic, says that the biggest bugbear for agencies is presenting work to people who dont sign it off. She has worked with clients who have used creative development as a team-building exercise to give more junior marketers the chance to manage a project. It can then be that someone more senior sees it at the end and realises that they shouldnt have given that person the responsibility of a project, so it doesnt go ahead, she says. There are lessons in this for both junior and senior marketers. If youre more junior, make sure you keep your bosses in the loop to nip false moves in the bud early on. If youre more senior, be sure that you keep on top of what your less experienced staff are doing with a project at different stages along the way. Whoever is managing the process also needs to make sure the agency is on course to develop work that will meet the objectives of the brief that has been so carefully put together and delivered. Remind your agency partners of your business objectives and of the metrics by which you will judge the success of their work. Also, provide access to any relevant data you have and ensure the agency understands your brand and corporate culture. It can be hard to find time to do this, but if the campaign is important it is time well spent. The more proactive agencies will be reaching out to you for this sort of input. DDB London CEO Stephen Woodford says that the worst client-agency relations are distant ones, particularly those where the client views the creatives at an agency as a breed apart. In Woodfords experience, bringing clients face to face with agency creatives always works well. In this way, client and agency can work better as a team.

featured metal Martians laughing at Earthlings and our primitive ways, such as the labourintensive peeling of potatoes, emphasising a product truth relating to convenience while securing enduring affection through the decades. Do tap into youth culture. Bartle Bogle Hegartys sublime fusion of classic pop music and cool imagery in its adverts for Levis 501s, beginning with the 1985 launderette scene starring Nick Kamen, enhanced brand desirability and helped boost sales by a staggering 800 per cent. Don't be afraid to be different. Abbott Mead Vickers BBDOs 1999 surfer advert for Guinness is held by some to be the greatest of all time. Sumptuously shot, it is advertising as art, but its brilliance also lies in the fact that it turns a potential downside of the product into a glorious positive good things are worth waiting for. Don't stray into unpopular territory. Youre never alone with a Strand, ran the now infamous tagline for the cigarette brand Strand in an early 1960s TV commercial that showed a raincoatclad man lighting up in a deserted street. The product bombed and was quickly withdrawn from the market because of the negative associations with loneliness created by its advertising.

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How to get creative with agencies - The Marketer magazine

http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-get-creative-with...

Sometimes, unfortunately, despite best endeavours in the briefing and agency handling process, the solution is not what you envisaged or would wish for. What to do then? Lay all the blame at the agencys door? Avoid an adversarial approach, says LGs Warner. Better to say, we are where we are, lets draw a line under it and look at how we move forward. If you build a reputation as a client who doesnt work collaboratively you wont get the work you want because the best creatives wont want to work on your business. A relationship with an agency is like any important relationship. Trust, hard work, openness and clarity greatly enhance the probability of a happy outcome.

Gliding unhindered by baggage

When developing its latest campaign with agency BBH, Barclaycard deliberately freed its creative partner from the shackles of past campaigns Through the use of comedians such as Rowan Atkinson and Green Wing stars Julian Rhind-Tutt and Stephen Mangan, the Barclaycard brand has long used humour in its advertising. However, during the briefing process for a new campaign, the card company made it clear it wanted to break new ground. We said to BBH, lets forget about the past advertising, even though those ads were incredibly popular and successful for us, says Barclaycard chief marketing officer, UK cards, Gary Twelvetree. That lifts a great weight from the creative team and allows them to get out of the box. We were clear it was a step-change. If you are going to lead in a category, you have to lead with your comms. The Glide campaign, which shows an office worker sliding down a water slide, swiping his cashless card on his way down, has been well received, even spawning a viral parody from Specsavers in which the protagonist takes a flume into a builders skip. Twelvetree says he was able to proceed with confidence because he secured the backing of senior stakeholders in the business, including his CEO, early on in the campaign development process.

Robert Gray is a freelance writer for marketing titles including Campaign

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