Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Creativity, Culture, Cunning, Management, Meetings, Professionalism
I know I am the last person in the World who should talk about professionalism – and I appreciate what I’m about to write about highlights my absolute lack of it – but there’s one thing I hate and it’s meetings.
More specifically, meetings about meetings.
For reasons I won’t bore you with, I’ve found myself increasingly getting into these positions over the past few years and while I quickly extract myself from them, I have got myself some notepads that ensure – in the short time I am there to ascertain if I should be there – I can feel some sense of quiet retaliation for being in the position in the first place.
It’s not big. It’s not clever. But it’s a nice feeling.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Business, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Experience, Innovation, Insight, Management, Marketing, Meetings, Perspective, Planners, Planning, Presenting, Relevance, Resonance
Yes I’m back.
If anything will help you be excited about the oncoming weekend, it will be that.
So the picture above is from a presentation I give to planners.
The reason for it is because I find it fascinating when ad folk try to be like their client.
Exactly like their client.
The way they speak. The way they dress. The way they think.
Of course, I understand the importance of knowing your client, their business and their challenges, but the problem with mirroring your client is that you end up looking at the World in the same way as them … and as much as some people may think that’s a good thing, it’s not.
You see when you focus on being like an insider, you ignore the benefits of thinking like an [informed] outsider. You know, the perspective the client actually hired you for in the first place.
As one of my old senior Nike clients once said to me …
“Senior management need and want to be challenged because that’s how we keep things moving forward. If you’re not doing that, then you’re not doing anything for us”.
Now I appreciate not every client thinks this way, but this shift to client mirroring is – in my opinion – another thing that has undermined our industry.
I swear the reason for it is an attempt to be taken seriously as a client partner when the easiest way to achieve that is to do work that shows we are a serious client partner.
Do the people who say, “we’ve lost our seat at the boardroom table” seriously think this approach will change that?
Maybe … but then they will be wrong because there’s only 3 things that will do that.
1. Talk about the things that are important to the client rather than important to us.
2. Know their audience/culture better than they know their audience/culture.
3. Solve their business challenges in creatively imaginative, distinctive, culturally resonant and sustainable ways.
Oh, and there’s a 4th point … prove it.
Not just in the short-term, but in the long … where client can see the economic value of investing in their brand voice. Not just through ‘brand campaigns’, but in how they approach everything they do.
Now I know some of you may think this whole post is my attempt to justify wearing shit t-shirts and birkenstocks to client meetings for the last 25+ years – and maybe it is – but if we are to get back to where we belong, I passionately believe it’s not going to happen by behaving more like clients, but by getting back to the things they need and no one else can do.
Filed under: Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Comment, Creativity, Culture, Cunning, Design, Entertainment, Insight, Luxury, Marketing, Meetings, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Presenting
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, when I was in NY, I was invited to speak at design gods … Pentagram.
Whenever I’m asked to speak at something, the first thing I think is ‘why?’
The second thing I think about is ‘what right have I got to talk about this subject?’
And the final thing is ‘what am I going to talk about’.
In the case of Pentagram, I didn’t know what I could say that would be of any interest of them.
Then I remembered the only reason they asked me to come is because of my relationship to a certain, famous rock band so instead of doing a deck – where, let’s be honest, they would be judging the design of each slide rather than listening to what I said – I bought 12 iconic albums on vinyl [they’re the ones in the picture above] and talked about the relationship they had with the music and the fans of the music under the heading, ‘Design is not decoration’.
Now I have no idea if they actually learnt anything from my talk, but it certainly created a bunch of conversation and debate and for me, that’s a big win.
Actually, getting out alive was the big win, but seeing some of the most talented design people in the World talk about the relationship between music, design and fans was something I’d pay for just to witness.
Which is why one of the best lessons I learned about strategy is less about what you are going to do and more about what you’re going to sacrifice.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Agency Culture, Creativity, Culture, Emotion, Empathy, Insight, Meetings
For reasons I’m not entirely sure, I am on some planner group on Facebook.
To be honest, I tend to ignore it because the last thing I want to do is cultivate even more of a planner bubble than there already is.
However a few weeks ago, I read something that I couldn’t ignore. It was this:
Anyone have any good interview questions (thought-experiments, creative challenges, brain teasers) that have helped you identify good intern/junior planner candidates?
To be honest, I was kind of alarmed by it.
I was even more freaked out by the responses some people gave.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own approach – but this person is looking for an intern or, at best, a junior planner – so using some kids quiz to evaluate potential seems a bit harsh when I believe the most important criteria you should be looking for is character and attitude.
For that reason, I responded with this:
Don’t ask questions about planning. Ask them about what their chip on their shoulder is. How long they’ve had their best friend. What have they committed to despite moments of hating it. Don’t ask about planner things, then you just get a planner.
To be honest, I ask these questions to everyone – regardless of their position or seniority – because I value honesty, openness and empathy far more than I do someone being able to solve the planning equivalent of some sudoku puzzle. Besides, if someone is sitting in front of me, they must have done enough to intrigue me or they wouldn’t be there … so at the face-to-face stage, it’s far more about who they are than what they’ve done.
Andy was the one who taught me the ‘how long have you known your best friend’.
At first I thought it was a bit bizarre but then I realised it revealed all manner of things, from loyalty, commitment, understanding and an ability to work through issues … and yet when I tell some people I do this, they look at me as if I’m weird.
Me!
Why is it weird to want to find someone who will contribute to the team, the culture and the possibilities of the future rather than someone who will just do their job and shut the hell up.
I appreciate everyone is different, but being smart doesn’t mean you’re always bright.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Context, Corporate Evil, Creativity, Culture, Cynic, Differentiation, Emotion, Empathy, Experience, Finance, HHCL, Imagination, Innovation, Insight, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Meetings, Planners, Planning, Point Of View, Positioning, Premium, Professionalism, R/GA, Relevance, Resonance, Standards, Wieden+Kennedy
A while back I wrote a post about the best bit of advice I’d ever had regarding solving problems.
Or should I say, on how to present how you are going to solve a problem.
But this is dependent on knowing what is the right problem to solve … and quite often, it ends up being the problem we want to solve versus the problem that needs solving.
Now of course, we can only solve the problem that relates to our particular discipline.
For example, as much as adland likes to claim it can solve everything, we can’t build a car.
[Trust me, I’ve tried]
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Too often, when there is a huge piece of business on the table, our goal is to get all of it.
Every last piece.
Doesn’t matter if it’s not our core expertise.
Doesn’t matter if the work won’t be interesting.
We. Want. It. All.
Now there’s many reasons for this – mostly around money – but what it often ends up doing is destroying everything we’ve spent decades trying to build up.
It burns out staff.
It undermines the creativity of the agency.
It forces quick fix solutions rather than ideas that create sustainable change.
It creates a relationship based on money. rather than creativity.
It positions the agency more as a supplier than a partner.
Now don’t get me wrong, money is important, but when you let that be the only focus – it is the beginning of the end.
Before you know it, the money becomes the driving factor of all decisions and – because you have had to scale-up to manage the huge business you’ve just won – you end up looking for similar sized clients to ensure the whole agency is being utilised rather than chase the business that can elevate your creative reputation.
Oh agency heads will deny this.
They’ll say they still value creative, regardless of the size of client they work on.
And maybe I’m utterly wrong.
But as I wrote a while back, we had a [small scale version] of this situation when we had cynic … and while we were making more money than we had ever earned, it had made us more miserable than we’d ever been.
Thank god we noticed in time, because we were in danger of seeing more economic value in the processes we were creating for the client than the work and then that would be it.
People would leave.
Our reputation would be damaged.
We’d have to pay more to bring people in to deal with the situation.
The profit margin money we were making from the client would be impacted.
Soon we would be doing work we didn’t like without even the excuse of making tons of cash.
The client would call a pitch.
We would have to do it because we were so dependent on them financially.
They’d pick someone who would do things cheaper.
We’d crash and burn.
We would hate ourselves.
OK … OK … that is a particularly bleak possible version of events and I know there’s a lot of big agencies that have found a way to manage doing work for big clients while marrying it with maintaining their creative credentials [but not as many as they would like to admit] but I am surprised how few agencies say which part of a big job they want to do.
I get why, because there’s fear the client will write you off because they want a simple solution rather than a complex.
But if you’re really good at something, then you have the power to change that mindset from complexity to effectiveness.
Of course, to pull that off, you have to be exceptional.
A proven track record of being brilliant at something few others can pull off.
Which means I’m not talking about process or procedures … but work.
Actual, creativity.
In my entire career, there’s only been 3 agencies I’ve worked at – and one of those I started – who have told clients they only want a slice of the pie rather than the whole thing.
More than that, they also told the client how they believed the problem should be handled rather than simply agreeing to whatever the client wanted in a bid to ‘win favour’. Of course, the slice they focused on was not only their core area of brilliance, but also the most influential in terms of positioning the entirety of the brand – the strategic positioning and the voice of the brand – so what it led to was a situation where the benefits for the agency far exceeded just an increase in revenue.
They had the relationship with the c-suite.
They set the agenda everyone else had to follow.
They were paid for quality rather than volume.
They made work that enhanced their reputation rather than drag them down.
They were more immune from the procurement departments actions.
All in all, they ended up having a positive relationship rather than a destructive one.
Now, I am not denying that in all 3 cases, the relationship lasted less time than those who were willing to take everything on. In many cases, once the initial strategy and voice work was done, many companies felt we were no longer needed. Not all, but a few.
And while many will read this and say my suggestion to choose the part of the work you want rather than take it all on is flawed … my counter is not only did all 3 agencies enjoy a reputation, relationship and remuneration level that was in excess of all the other agencies they worked with – and often delivered in a fraction of the time – but they ended up in a position where they attracted new business rather than had to constantly chase it.
In all business, reputation is everything.
Don’t make yours simply about the blinkered pursuit of money.