Hasta La Creative!

If you’re an agency still putzing around with the very idea of PR for your agency brand; if you still think an overworked AE can handle the agency’s “publicity;” if you pride yourself on never having tweeted a tweet or think it’s not your job to worry about social media, then I’m here to take you out of your comfort zone. Because agency reputation matters.

Recently, McKinney’s Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Cude told me, “Only two things matter: The work and the people who do it. It’s that simple and it’s that hard.” He and I know that an agency’s work and the people who do it are the very definition of reputation. How we care for it, protect it, nurture it and share it with our stakeholder audiences is what makes each agency brand different from one another and uniquely valuable to client partners.

Nationwide’s CMO Matt Jauchius said as much when he told the audience at the Ad Age CMO Summit, “Stop treating your agency like a vendor.” John Hayes of American Express said this at last year’s 4A’s Transformation Conference: “I love it when one of my valued agency partners tells me I’m wrong.” And Allstate’s Lisa Cochrane gets downright teary when she talks about her relationship with Burnett. I’ll never forget her running off the ANA stage like a blushing bride on the arm of Mayhem (the character played by Dean Winters in Allstate’s ad campaign).

Continue reading at AdAge.com