This post was cowritten with Jude Hammerle.
If you talk to those in the advertising agency world, they will tell you that finding a great client is tough. Client behavior not only impacts the quality of the advertising developed, but it can impact the degree to which creatives are inspired to do their best work. Procter and Gamble used to think this was so important—learning how to be a great client—that they sent young brand managers to partner agencies to work for a few months as creatives. The belief was that by understanding how hard it is to be a great creative, these brand managers would return to Procter as better clients.
The reality, however, is that while inspiring and working collaboratively with creatives is an important part of the CMO’s role, few do it well. To better understand how marketing leaders can become better clients, we sought perspective from Andy Berlin—a co-founder of Goodby Berlin Silverstein and Berlin Cameron United. A gifted writer and strategist, Berlin has worked with many clients who are exceptionally supportive of breakthrough creative work, including Electronic Arts, Conde Nast Publications, the National Basketball Association and NBC, the International Olympic Committee, White Wave Foods (Silk Soymilk), The Coca Cola Company (Coca Cola, Diet Sprite, Dasani, Fresca, Georgia Coffee, Mr. Pibb, Mello Yello, Nestea), and Cadillac. Below, he offers five tips to help marketers elicit superior work from a creative agency.
Five Tips to Generate Superior Work from Creative Partners
The pressures facing chief marketing officers in too many companies are weighted toward short term results, measured by conventional and not always predictive metrics. These pressures can force a CMO into decisions that in the long run detract from a brand as much as they may help it in the short run.
The best creative resources are adept at bridging this gap, quickly creating high levels of engagement and transactions in brand-appropriate ways.
So, to identify and manage the best creative resources:
1. Never hire an agency based on fashion. Not even if you’re in the fashion business. It doesn’t follow that agencies skilled at self-promotion are talented at increasing the value of a brand in a competitive, changing marketplace. (Would that it were so.) But market results are often in inverse proportion to agency fashions. How come? Fashionable agencies have more to lose than to gain and when in that mindset, they miss opportunities for your brand. They tend to be bad listeners. They don’t need you as much as you need them. And they're “pretty”. Superficial attraction may be commonplace in advertising and even important, but without substantive depth behind it, creativity has too short a half-life. You want your brand to be a classic, not a fad.
2. The best marketing is a kind of content. I don’t mean that the bored and deluded former ad practitioners who’ve segued into what they now call "branded content" are the ones you should rush out and hire. But if you can find talented people who really can create information and entertainment about your brand that’s so attractive to your audiences as to be a destination of choice, and if they can motivate the right audiences to beat a path to your brand and contextually increase the value of your brand, hire them. Another way of saying this is that you should hire people who can fit your brand into the workings of lasting culture. It’s not easy to predict who can do this. Lots of people and firms claim they can do it when they never have and can’t. But if their current work does it, and if you like their taste and connect with them as people, and your customers fit their taste, you’ll have it right.
3. Don’t let bookkeepers hijack the choice. Instead of having procurement people involved in who you hire, use them to do what they’re smart at — building compensation contracts that force the agency to share the risks of their advice and skills with you and to share, with reasonable “investment" generously in any exceptional rewards they can create. Get 'em swinging for the fences. There’s a variety of proven ways of doing this that’ve been part of unusual successes that your procurement staff can research and get creative with. But don’t let this get mixed up with the process of choosing with whom you’ll work. That’s a terrible blunder and too many people make it these days.
4. Great CMOs elicit greatness from everyone. The best thing a CMO can do to manage great marketing success from an agency (and staff, for that matter) is to use his/her position of authority to infect the people working on the brand with permission to be great, to think bigger than their instincts, to dare more; to think and create as magnificently and as intelligently as they do in their brightest dreams; to surprise themselves and you; to be disrespectful of their own insecurities and fears; to strive at all times to amaze and delight the brand’s entire distribution chain and consumers. To make this work in practice, the CMO has to do more than just talk about it. You need to share great work in many categories with your agency; you need to listen to them with confidence; you need to care about their portfolios; you need to lead with the positives in every conversation; and then, at the moment of truth, you need to muster the courage to run their best work. If you can reverse-engineer your own managerial style with this in mind, you’ll become a growth medium for your staff and agency’s successes. I know this is hard to believe. Try it out.
5. Have more fun. Big marketing breakthroughs are cool to engineer and fun to run on. There’s this terrible convention that great marketing can only happen in an environment of fear and onerous pressures. Some very brilliant people believe that. This is not only unsupported by fact but worse than that, it daunts truly great marketing. The most brilliant ideas happen most frequently when people find a way to have fun by solving “impossible" problems and reaching impossible goals. (The people who think this is BS are also the ones who die young, alone and afraid. Look it up.)
I hope this helps you to joyously accomplish greater and more wonderful things, and I look forward to reading your comments below.
Andy Berlin co-founded and sold two famous advertising agencies (Goodby Berlin & Silverstein and Berlin Cameron United), which continue to serve some of today’s premier global brands. Andy also headed DDB in New York for Omnicom (OMC); was CEO of WPP’s United Creative Agencies group (WPPGY), a worldwide network of more than 60 offices; and was an Associate at Perseus LLC, the Private Equity Firm headed by Frank Pearl in Washington DC.
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