Commentary

Hey, Agencies: Marketers Are Pretty Clear About What They Want

In the movie “What Women Want,” Mel Gibson plays an ad executive who, after a freak accident, discovers he can hear women’s private thoughts. He of course uses this great gift to his own advantage to score with “da ladies.

Perhaps it’s time for agencies to collectively gain the ability to listen clearly to what marketers want. Because last week a number of very senior marketers were very clear about their wishes.

Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at P&G, was asked what he wants from his agencies. He acknowledged that the agency ecosystem has gotten way complex, and that he's looking to his agencies for solutions to decomplexify (a word I just made up) the situation. He was quoted as saying “Frankly, your complexity should not be our problem, so we want you to make that complexity invisible.”

Most agency ecosystems have organically grown into the monstrosities that marketers now struggle to manage. When websites were the thing, agencies offered specialist functions to develop and maintain websites. Then search came along, and in came search agencies. The same happened when social media became the thing, and again with mobile, messaging, e-commerce, and so on.

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I am a firm believer and supporter of free and open trade, so one could argue that those agency solutions simply cater to a new need in the marketplace. But Pritchard is also right to place some of the blame with the agency holding companies which, like airlines, started pushing every addition as a separate service (and profit center) where it wasn’t before. Clients, under pressure not to be seen as outdated dinosaurs, happily signed on each new addition to the agency holding Christmas tree.

This has made it more and more difficult to develop and distribute integrated content. And that is where Pritchard is pushing: He wants his agencies to seamlessly orchestrate marketing communications. Other marketers might want to take on the orchestration role themselves, but they, too want the same level of seamlessness Pritchard envisions.

There were other voices last week as well. Lou Paskalis, senior VP/enterprise media executive at Bank of America, echoed a call to action from Pritchard about ad-blocking. Marketers understand very clearly what consumers want, he noted: less intrusion, less irrelevance, less over-the-top frequency and other tactics that are driving consumers to ban advertising from their lives. Marketers are looking to their partners to come up with solutions to address this issue.

The problem is that as long as the industry keeps on focusing on efficient delivery of messaging, ignoring effectiveness beyond delivery, and as long as we keep telling marketers to focus on and incentivize cost performance, we will have a hard time moving to where marketers say they want to go. Paskalis put it this way: "Somehow we have divorced efficiencies and effectiveness." Agencies and marketers could certainly find common cause around this issue.

So if I were to have the gift Mel Gibson has in the movie, I would start to develop solutions that address these issues. And I bet conversations that address what marketers say they want (need!) could go a long way toward repairing marketers’ trust in agencies, a trust that is currently at an all-time low.

3 comments about "Hey, Agencies: Marketers Are Pretty Clear About What They Want".
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  1. dorothy higgins from Mediabrands WW, April 11, 2016 at 12:58 p.m.

    In other words, time to rebundle and address the mess. 

  2. Jeff Thaler from GroupM, April 11, 2016 at 1:18 p.m.

    To its credit, P&G has been making an effort to manage it's agencies effectively & efficiently for quite awhile. The notion of minimizing complexity for seemed to be the driver. For awhile, P&G would appoint one ageny the Brand Agency Lead (BAL) and put them in the difficult postion of "managing" the other agencies on a brand. I may be butchering the approach and I don't know what has come of it.

    While complexity-aversion is understandable, simply asking one-party in a multi-faceted "partnership" to take full responsibility for the nature of the relationship has it's limitations. Clients and their agencies should address the issue of how they work together deliberately and diligently. The topic should be covered comprehensively during an agency's onboarding and visited on regular (hopefully not too frequent) basis.

    Importantly, the geniuses who can identify a great brand strategy or deliver exceptional creative are not necessarily the same people who have the skills or interest to architect and oversee a functional relationship. Both agencies and clients need identify accountable representatives to collaborate and own HOW they work together.

    More on other operational topics here http://pm2pm.blogspot.com/

  3. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, April 11, 2016 at 2 p.m.

    It's all very fine----and typical----of advertiser management types to dish out advice and/or demands to the agencies, knowing that the latter aren't free to respond less they offend their dear client. But, in the sake of fairness, you---the clinet---usually get what you pay for and constantly penny pinching your agencies is one of the reasons you get inbreeding when it comes to expert advice. Often, the real "experts" aren't those who work daily on your account and the moment their names appear on the mothly time sheets your head bean counter will ask his/her agency counterpart, "Who are these people and why should I pay for them?". Another agency complaint is client unwillingness to invest in anything beyond a given year, yet expecting the agency to do that for them so they will be ready if something new looms on the horizon, Finally, regarding "silos" just look at the way many marketers are organized, with totally separate promotional and branding ad activities and barely trained "brand managers" giving their agencies "direction". Yes, there are exceptions but in my experience a typical advertiser changes brand managers every two or three years and as this happens, the typical agency account exec or media planner, who has worked on the business much longer, knows more about the brand than the novice brand manager. Is that a good thing? All the brand manager in such a system has to do before getting promoted to a larger brand is not take any chances----that kind of thinking is not conducive to getting the most out of your ad agency.

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