“Hey Clients, Get Rid Of Briefs And Make Agencies Pitch More”
Henry Innis is an ex-agency strategist who now consults in the innovation, digital and product space. In this opinion piece he argues that the agency-client relationship is broken and it requires a leaner, meaner but not necessarily more creative approach…
When I was in agency land, one of the things that used to consistently come up was a complaint about procurement departments. Client’s budgets and in-house capabilities were increasing and the ever-lasting question was simple: why should we pay large hourly rates for external (and sub-par) work? Why do we have these guys on a large retainer if they’re not working hard?
Clients don’t always need agencies
Most of the time, bluntly, clients could get 80 per cent of what an agency contributes from in-house resources. Or failing that (if they wanted to put in the effort) good external freelancers (or small teams). Throughout agency land it was rare that the full resources of an agency in an agency environment would be needed.
That makes you understand, if you’re not an agency guy, why procurement departments are so keen to squeeze agencies. Yes, they might not be getting the most creative work possible from their agency partners. But the hard truth is most of the time they don’t need extremely creative work. Not all marketing needs to be borne of creativity. Most of the time it’s about understanding and communicating to people about what they want.
Take Apple. They’ve had some extremely good campaigns over the years. But their bread and butter is product announcements — having an amazing set of new features to talk about each year that makes them the story.
Another example comes to me from my own experience. One campaign I helped out on wasn’t based around creativity at all — but pure, hard targeting of audiences with direct response messages. It wasn’t work that needed the resources of 5–6 people in an agency. It needed a couple of smart people making decisions and an in-house production team. When we overcomplicated it with creativity, we often reduced our output, which impacted the results we got. The reality was we didn’t have to be creative — we had to be smart about what people wanted.
And you know what? It sure was effective. Later, the client rightly questioned what they were paying for. It turned out that what they probably needed were some clever freelancers working with a great media agency, rather than a suite of agencies working for them.
Because agencies are considered a crucial part of the marketing ecosystem, clients continuously pay for their services. But because it’s easy to identify that you’re not getting the most value out of your agency, procurement continually tends to drive down the cost base. The result of this is a challenging cycle for both agencies and clients: a race to the bottom where one side isn’t getting the people it needs and the other isn’t getting paid fairly.
Briefs can exacerbate that problem
When an agency is briefed, they’re briefed by a client trying to (essentially) give creative direction or ask the agency for an answer. The challenge to this is often the agency is on retainer, and is more interested in trying to please the client/stakeholder giving the brief than providing any real answers.
Briefs are especially irritating because they set-up some assumptions, too. There’s a given weighting as to the advertising spend, the direction of the brief, the products being promoted and more. The unfortunate thing is briefs are often trying to solve all business challenges instead of doing what they should — focusing your agencies in on business problems.
As a result, agencies are trying to retrofit creative thinking and solutions back to briefs rather than trying to uncover the problem. A common complaint from clients is that the agencies never really nail the brief. Why does that happen? Mostly because they’re trying to cover all bases in the brief and as a result, don’t give you (the client) the best thinking possible.
And retainers reduce competition to fix the problem
Agencies often value retainers extremely highly — they’re the mark of a partnership with a strong client. Except, mostly they’re not really.
Retainers are a funny thing for agencies. They provide a large amount of stability, but create two very distinct problems for agency culture:
- The agency is forced to sell in a large gamut of services, mostly political in nature, to service the client. And they’re often selling in hours rather than solutions as a result.
- The agency is in a less competitive environment when it has it’s revenue guaranteed. As a result, you might get more thought through ideas (because they have time to think on them), but less drive and willingness to make those ideas work in execution.
While agencies may love retainers (as they give their business model stability), the very essence of creativity is to be disruptive and changing. In a marketplace of ideas, reducing the level of competition doesn’t make much sense to do that.
Which gives us three clear issues…
- Most clients need specific people in agencies, rather than the agency itself. As a result they’re often paying bloated amounts to access 3–4 key personnel.
- Briefs force agencies to retrofit thinking to provide a client/stakeholder-driven solution rather than responding to business and market challenges.
- Retainers reduce the overall competition and drive of agencies to make things work. You might get more ideas and more audacious thinking, but you’ll also get less accurate thinking.
And we think the solution is renumeration
You hear a running theme around value-based renumeration between both agencies and clients. The argument goes something like this:
- Agency doesn’t feel it’s being valued and asks to be considered on a performance basis, but doesn’t want it’s margins being squeezed (so almost asks for a bonus in effect).
- Client doesn’t want agency being paid at all if they fuck-up, so ask only to pay in the event of success (so almost asks for the agency to take on all the risk in effect).
Both sides claim they’re talking about a better model, but they’re actually talking about a completely different thing altogether. Each side is asking the other to assume more of the risk.
On top of this, you have the fragmenting roster of agencies on clients anyway. Everyone is eating everyone else’s work (any agency that tells you they stick to their ‘digital’ or ‘traditional’ remit is flat out lying). Most agencies are lazily pitching against one another anyway — but doing it from the safety of their retainers. The result isn’t a competitive pitch for your business, but a political pissing contest between agencies.
The real solution: move from reactive to proactive
If you’re in the business of using agencies for what they are — creative change agents — then start using them as such.
Currently, the model with agencies is pretty broken. We’re expected to sit on big retainers, pitching ideas to try and please a client brief, then wondering why we’re not that passionate about the work either we or the clients are crazy about.
Basically, our current model makes us reactive to client challenges — and that means we start doing work that just… doesn’t work.
So, to change that, agencies and clients should redefine their relationship from client > agency to agency > client. And that means some structural changes to the relationship itself:
- Removing the need for briefs. Briefs are ways to shape and define creative thinking around your business challenges. If you have to brief your agency to get them to understand your business, they’re not the right agency for you anyway.
- Get rid of large retainers for agencies. If your agency isn’t good enough to sell you an idea, why should they be on retainer anyway? And if they good enough, they won’t need that retainer full stop.
- Start building client budgets around outcomes, rather than timelines. Customers don’t think around an annual planning budget. Neither should your marketing or product spend then.
- Pay agencies for their effort and their results. If you buy an idea, make sure the agency is getting paid properly (including for their pitch work). And if they achieve a strong, commercial result for you, make sure they see some of the upside. An agency doing good work should get paid handsomely for their effort. Why would you want to pay the same for a poor performing idea versus a good one?
When agencies are in a constant pitch mode, but know you’ve got the budget for ideas rather than quarters, they’ll be more likely to produce commercially effective work. And when you’re focusing them on business challenges rather than stakeholder briefs, you’re likely to get the right solution rather than the pleasing solution.
In essence, it would work a little like this:
- Rostered agencies are given the time of day and regular, deep insight into business objectives. Clients won’t give every agency this insight — because in practice, that would take up too much time in meetings.
- Slim down marketing teams to work as analysis units, rather than briefing units. They should be assessing the value of an idea to the business, not how well it fits their brief.
- Clients respond to ideas and agencies work to carry them through. Clients pay for both cost to pitch an idea and extra renumeration if an idea is highly successful.
How would this work in practice?
Often, the hardest thing about throwing up these sorts of ideas is seeing them work in practice. I thought I’d sketch out an idea for a large services firm and see how it lands. Let’s call them A, and their agencies B, C and D.
Agency E isn’t currently officially working with Client A, but they want to and are making sure to look out for them anyway.
Under the previous model, A would have a bunch of marketing managers responsible for managing the digital, traditional, acquisition and other bits of the brief. Basically — there are different departments that are signing off on different ideas.
Client A scraps that model, and instead has a marketing team of four tasked with getting the best out of their agencies. Importantly they’re a team whose job it is to synthesise top line business problems and answer questions from the agencies, or know who can give the agencies answers. In a sense the function of this group is business analysis rather than being a specific stakeholder.
Those four put together a monthly ‘business briefing’ to their agencies, discussing the various business challenges and underlying costs/revenues and similar. It gives the agency group a good understanding of what’s going on and at each briefing they’re reminded to pitch for ideas.
Agencies B and D see opportunities in their respective crafts and decide to pitch some ideas. Agency C hasn’t had a good idea, so they neglect to pitch.
Agency B pitches a big TV campaign to rebuild brand awareness, putting forward the hypotheses that brand trust is low and therefore they’re no longer performing well in the market. They’ve spoken to the consumer insights team and gotten that team on board and have convinced the CRM department that this can activate some of their leads. When they go in to pitch, they’ve already used their relationship with internal actors to validate their ideas — in effect working with business rather than marketing stakeholders.
Agency D pitches a digital-first acquisition campaign. It’s built around the premise that most of the marketing budget is wasted, and so they should be going after a narrower base to outflank competitors. It’s smart but requires a personalisation engine, so they tend to go back and try and work with something a little more specific. They try and win over the CRM team but fail, but the customer loyalty team is more receptive. They also get the internal content team onside by showing them how this campaign will commercialise a lot of their activity. When they go into pitch, they’ve again been forced to find and bring on-board the right internal stakeholders to get ahead.
In this scenario, the agency has been forced to be proactive. They’ve each had to identify their own path forward and engage broader business units outside of their direct stakeholders to secure success. Because the client is setup this way, they’ve automatically rewarded their agencies for breaking down their own internal silos. The agencies behave less like staff augmentation and more like external change agents.
The core team of four put some ROI projections around Agency B’s idea and choose to secure some budget for it. The ROI projections are important — they force the agency to be accountable to commercial outcomes, at least partially. And the agency remuneration model is built here — the costs of the agency are covered for execution, with more rewards built in for success.
When Agency B’s idea is implemented, they’re rewarded for their success by covering the costs of the pitch and execution. Extra comes if they hit commercial targets above expectations.
Finally, Agency E notices a trend in the market and pitches an idea to one of the four marketing folk at Client A. They come into see Client A, researching the correct stakeholders, and get buy-in. Working with a small internal department, they get a pilot case up, which validates them to have a discussion with the central marketing/BA team.
Why does this work?
It’s unconventional, given the way everyone complains about how well they are valued in the industry. But I think this kind of model helps the relationships on both sides for a few reasons.
For clients:
- No more paying for bad work on retainers and more paying for good, effective and commercially driven work (rather than awards shows).
- More open communication between agencies and better value for overall money.
- More flexibility for departments to function as departments. E.g product, acquisition, retention.
- Better able to receive ideas for business challenges instead of briefs.
- Less personnel to craft (largely useless) briefs.
For agencies:
- More money. If you’re getting paid for good work, you’ll generally work to do better work.
- Passion. More chances for people to do the work that has an impact, rather than the work that pleases a stakeholder.
- Less competition in execution. How many times have you as an agency had a great idea that was built by another agency?
- Less constrained thinking. This model allows agencies to operate in true partnerships. And if you don’t think you can win work without a retainer, you probably shouldn’t be winning the work in the first place.
It’s a radical idea
There’s no doubt this model is a bit of a rant, designed to get some people thinking. But all in all we’ve got to have this discussion. And it’s my strong belief that agency land is broken.
The essence is this. Agency-client relationships aren’t good right now. And we’ve got to find ways to change the relationship from a reactive to a proactive one. Only then will agencies start addressing business problems with business solutions.
Read more of Innis’ articles at www.medium.com
Please login with linkedin to comment
Advertising Standards Bureau david cameron Designworks Fundraising governmentLatest News
TV Ratings 29/4/24: Farmer Wants A Wife And Lego Masters Lock Horns In Overnight’s Battle
Who won the battle of the big guns - Lego or Farmer Wants A Wife? One thing's for sure, it wasn't Great Train Journeys.
Nielsen Data Reveals Brands Spending Big To Attract Aussie Tourists
Nielsen Ad Intel data has revealed that the travel and tourism industry spent more than $153 million on advertising in Australia in Q1, 2024 – an increase of 8 per cent from the previous quarter, with TripADeal the biggest spender, followed by Virgin Australia, then the Flight Centre-owned Ignite Travel. As many Australians return from […]
IAS Awarded New Responsible AI Certification From Trustarc
Integral Ad Science tossing up over the mahogany or teak frame after being awarded TRUSTe Responsible AI Certification.
AWARD Calls For Hall Of Fame Nominations
B&T's noms for AWARD Hall of Famer includes Louis The Fly, Chums' talking Scottie dog & Mumbrella's coke dealer.
Havas Red Wins PagerDuty PR Account
Havas Red wins PagerDuty's PR. And judging by B&T having to Google PagerDuty, it could probably do with some help.
ACA Poised To Release Results Of 2023 Create Space Census
The Advertising Council unveils date for its census results. Hey, why not coincide it with an office lamington drive?
Why Fear Is Essential To Fernando Machado’s Creativity
If there's anyone B&T loves to chat to, it's fabled marketer Fernando Machado. Although the 5am time difference sucks.
Superdry Drafts AFL’s Patrick Lipinski For New Campaign
B&T fast regretting that poncho we just bought, as it appears the puffer jacket returns as winter's hottest trend.
Elon Musk vs eSafety: Legal Experts Warn That ‘Rogue Operators’ Like X Are Unlikely To Win Federal Court Battle
If this legal stoush boils down to who can afford the better lawyers, B&T's backing Mr Musk every single time.
Amy Poehler Presents First Look At Inside Out 2 At Vivid Sydney 2024
Vivid isn't about freezing your arse off while looking at lights on a wall, as you'll learn with this Amy Poehler news.
Mutinex Launches DataOS Improving Data Warehousing & Quality For MMM Marketers
Work in marketing? Does your data warehousing resemble a teenager's bedroom? Here's a Marie Kondo-approved read.
IMAA Celebrates Three Years Of Group Trade Credit Insurance Deal
Are you a struggling indie? Thinking of firebombing the building for the insurance money? IMAA has you covered here.
Adam Sandler Seemingly ‘Slams’ Ukraine In Pro-Kremlin Campaign
Host of A-list celebs caught slamming Ukraine's president. Thankfully it does have the Milli Vanillis about it.
New Marketing & Comms Agency For Defence & Aerospace Industry Takes Flight
As painful as this is to say, judging by current world events, the bomb & tank industries must be in rude health.
Opinion: Do Punters Want To Wear Your Brand?
This columnist asks do punters want to wear your brand? B&T'd say yes if you were Nike, no if you were Anusol.
WiredCo Builds Portfolio With Appointment To G.J. Gardner Creative Account
WiredCo 'cements' its relationship with home builder G.J. Gardner. Did you see what B&T cheekily did there?
Keep Left Reveals ‘Strategically Assembled’ Strategy Team
PR agency announces serious upgrade to its strategy offerings. Thankfully stops short of calling them Delta Force.
Initiative’s Michael Chong: What Do Mountaineering, Media & Marketing Have In Common?
Yes, B&T's running an inspiring mountaineering story. And this from people who won't come to work if the lift's broken.
CMOs To Watch: DrinkWise’s Part Time Builder, Part Time Marketer, Nathan Kent
Despite his love of DIY, B&T can't see Drinkwise's Nathan Kent in any "you can get it" VB ads anytime soon.
Mari Kauppinen Pops Up As MD Of ITA Group ANZ
Mari Kauppinen set to bring some zing, some song and some va-va-voom to her new role at ITA Group.
“It Is Getting Better But At A Glacial Speed”: PR Guns On Shaping A More Diverse Media Industry
B&T has a love-hate relationship with PRs. Love if they take us for a boozy lunch. Hate when you send releases as PDFs.
GoTransit Media Group Unveils The Power Of Regional Transit Advertising
Need reminding lots of people live outside the Surry Hills enclave? It's the regionals &, yes, they have almond milk.
Slew Of Promotions For Special Senior Creative Leadership Team
Special announces a slew of promotions in its creative team. And, no, they didn't order Uber Eats to celebrate.
Kantar: AVOD Subscribers Double In 12 Months
Study finds Aussies happy to watch ads on their streaming services. Or, are they just putting the kettle on more often?
Val Morgan Digital Exceeds All Campaign Uplift Benchmarks Via A 12-Month Brand Metrics Study
Val Morgan announces it has exceeded all its campaign benchmarks. Still can't get under an hour for the City To Surf.
Australian Retirement Trust launches monster of a campaign, by M&C Saatchi and Bohemia
Get offered a seat on the bus today? Knees creak like an old pirate's galleon? This retirement ad may be of interest.
Print Audits To Discontinue As Audited Media Association Of Australia Pivots To Support Influencer Marketing
Is it just B&T or are audits in the media industry suddenly becoming murkier than Roxy's husband's tax returns?
News Corp Australia Launches 2024 National Education Advocacy Initiative With Expanded Program
News Corp set to shine a light on the nation's schools in new series, giving illegal bikie gangs a well-earned rest.
Decoding The Consumer Maze: Urban List Report Reveals How Modern Shoppers Spiral From Discovery To Purchase
Latest report unravels a shopper's journey from the joy of discovery through to a nasty letter from a debt collector.
Cosmo Returns To Australia!
Ever get the feeling we've weirdly warped back to 1988 at the moment? Confirm it with the relaunch of Cosmo in print.
People & Culture Consultancy Human Kind Collective Launches To Plug HR Gap For Media Agencies
Does the very mention of HR have you struggling to remember last year's Christmas party? Get the sweats with this news.
‘We Want To Be A Growth Partner, Not Just A Media Buyer Or Someone That Makes Ads’ – Bohemia Boss On Agency’s Ambition
B&T's chatting with Bohemia boss Paul ‘Hutch’ Hutchison. Although we do think 'the dagger' a far superior nickname.
Initiative’s Geoff Clarke: ‘Youth Hits Targets With Enthusiasm, Experience Hits The Targets You Can’t See’
Initiative’s CCO Geoff Clarke on the value of experience in agencies. Not to mention quoting lines from Pulp Fiction.
The Iconic Teams Up With 5 Aussie Athletes For Latest Campaign
Fashion label brings in the athletes for new campaign, many of whom appear to have prepped with re-runs of Zoolander.
Seven West Media Secures New Director Of News & Current Affairs
After a tumultuous few weeks, Seven unveils director of news & current affairs. And B&T never uses tumultuous lightly.
Seven Network Expands NSW Sales Team With Two New Group Business Directors
Seven ramps up its NSW sales team. Both of whom are well versed in pronouncing Manu Feildel's croque-monsieur.