Hasta La Creative!

When Cramer-Krasselt decided to publicly break up with client Panera Bread last week, they were quite definitive about labeling the client as difficult. I saw two reactions to this: “Good for C-K,” and “They’re just doing this as a PR stunt, who’d want to hire them?”

Frankly, many clients have rightfully earned a reputation for being difficult. Just like people in business have a reputation for being a-holes or some agencies have reputation for being sweatshops or prima donnas. Clients put their accounts in review faster than ever and public comments are often made. These days, reputations aren’t secret, and there are even websites where you can rate agencies, corporations, even people. So for both agencies and clients, reputation management is needed both proactively and for CYA purposes if something goes south.

Rarely, though, do ad agencies willingly walk away from accounts and usually there are only a handful of senior managers at an agency willing or empowered to make that call. More often than not, rank-and-file people — the account executives, project managers, and creatives — have to suck it up and do the work even if the clients is unreasonably difficult and demanding. Incidentally, they’re the ones in the agency who often know what is working, and not working, in the agency/client relationship long before senior management knows. Being closer to the day-to-day work makes the red flags all the more apparent.

It’s the subject of my latest column on Talent Zoo.

The post When An Agency/Client Relationship Goes Publicly Stale appeared first on AdPulp.

Generally speaking, clients across the board are not impressed. They want results and all ad people have to peddle is their sacrosanct creativity.

That’s the news from The Fournaise Marketing Group (c/o Warc, which interviewed more than 1,200 chief executive officers and decision makers around the world for its 2013 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program.

A full 78% of CEOs thought agencies were not performance-driven enough and did not focus enough on helping to generate the business results they expected their marketing departments to deliver.

In addition, 76% felt agencies talked too much about “creativity as the saviour” while not being able to prove or quantify it. Indeed, they believed that agencies were frequently opportunistic in claiming credit for results that could be attributed to other factors such as the product, sales force, channel or pricing.

So much suspicion fouling love and respect’s nest. Can we agree that we are all creative people? If we can agree to this basic tenet, I think we can make progress.

The truth is ad people can be aloof, disinterested and bitchy. Meanwhile, clients can be blind to basic realities, particularly as it relates to the value of their product or service in the marketplace. Bad clients can also be coarse and needlessly demanding. What we have here are two groups of highly opinionated “professionals” talking over and at each other from their respective sides of the polished Rainforest wood table.

You can blame the money involved for part of the hostility problem. If the client wasn’t “risking” millions and their own professional reputation, it wouldn’t be such a scary transaction. But it is scary, which means we must bring more empathy and compassion to the proceedings.

I think ad people would do well to bow to the pressure the client is under, and clients will absolutely get better work and results from the work, when they cop to the difficulty involved in making truly moving brand communications on a consistent basis.

[UPDATE] John Winsor of Victor & Spoils, arguing for new compensation models, notes in Harvard Business Review, “While some in the industry wish that we could remain as creative free spirits with our clients as patrons, clients are becoming so squeezed — and so focused on ROI — that that model isn’t sustainable.”

The post CEOs Not Pleased With Creative Snots Who Pack No Data appeared first on AdPulp.

I always take company reviews I read on Glassdoor or services like TripAdvisor with a grain of salt. Because you never really know who’s behind the review and if they have an ax to grind. Yes, if you take these reviews in the aggregate you can get a good picture of a restaurant or service business, but in the end, I trust my judgment most of all.

Which is why I’m a little wary of this Ad Age story which suggests CMOs are launching a private rating service for agencies.

The CMO Club, a group of 700 heads of marketing, has launched what it dubs a private “vendor rating program” for the purpose of allowing marketers to share recommendations on vendors across 18 product and service categories, which includes everything from creative and media agencies to mobile and analytics firms.

According to CMO Club founder and president Peter Krainik, he often witnessed chief marketers swapping recommendations informally at the club’s dinners and events. “This is us helping people behind closed doors,” Mr. Krainik said of the new program. “We’re connecting people, that’s what the club is all about.”

I’m not privy to the clubby network of CMOs, but what we do know about CMOs is that they tend to play favorites with agencies and personal contacts they have, like to come in and shake things up then quickly leave, and either micromanage agencies or let them bring unique thinking without requesting it. That this rating idea is being proposed in private makes it sound all the more arbitrary.

And when you rate an agency, you’re rating its people. All the people, because the management of an agency doesn’t do the day-to-day work on an account. The work of a junior copywriter could affect a rating. So perhaps someone in the agency world should turn this idea around and rate marketers:

• What CMOs like to come in, fire an agency, change its marketing, then leave in 18 months to go and do the same thing somewhere else?
• Which CMOs are primarily looking to enhance their personal brand, not the one that employs them?
• Which ones empower their lower-level marketing managers and directors to make decisions?
• Which ones demand great work and then never approve it?
• What’s their method for evaluating marketing strategy, creative work, or agency costs?

Advertising agency people would love the chance to rate their clients — but just like the CMO Club idea, it could get really petty and ugly very fast. But turnabout is fair play, I suppose.

The post If CMOs Can Rate Agencies, Then Marketing Directors Should Be Rated Too appeared first on AdPulp.

Over at Small Agency Diary, Phil Johnson of PJA Advertising & Marketing tackles the topic of why good clients are good and bad clients are bad.

I’ve always heard agency people complain about clients who treat them badly. My attitude has been “Why should we get special treatment?” Have you ever watched a tenure battle in academia, or a turf battle in a multibillion-dollar corporation? How about the Democratic primary? It gets nasty.

The more interesting question may be: “Is there anything unique about agency people that attracts a specific flavor of ire from clients?”

I’ve got two theories. First, a large percentage of the business world thinks that advertising and all of its assorted cousins are a pseudo profession, something anyone can choose to pursue if he wants. It’s the opposite of plumbing, or medicine, where people understand that there is a set of skills that they don’t possess but need. (Hey, I didn’t say it was true.) Second, large corporate structures breed and allow a level of bad behavior that would be unacceptable in almost any other social environment. That’s a toxic combination.

Here’s how I summarize my approach to the dilemma: There are nice people and there are mean people in the world. Stay away from the mean ones. I confess to a spotty record, but I can also say that with some good fortune I’ve stumbled into a collection of clients that I love.

He makes lots of good points.

But one he leaves out, or maybe it’s just me. I’d work much harder on behalf of a nicer, respectful client than for an abusive, condescending one. Would you?

Or try this: Have you ever had a demanding client who acted that way in order to make the work truly better?