I recently wrote the opening lines of my agency’s new positioning statement:
We’re an ideas agency
It’s been a long and difficult journey to get to this point, full of recriminations and fear of the future. Or rather, fear of the client of the future, and the shift towards taking ever-increasing swathes of creative work in-house.
Within five years my agency has morphed from a full-service, integrated, media-agnostic creative agency to a delivery agency with creative support.
It happened gradually – without anyone really spotting it. Our product, processes and creative rigour haven’t changed, but because agency creativity has slipped down the priority list for many of our clients, the way our work is received has.
Dramatic changes
The role of a client-side marketer has changed dramatically over a very short time frame. Many are no longer conductors of an orchestra of finely-tuned media communications, but instead are faced with a wall of noise. Speed and agility of thinking along with great attention to detail are now key attributes for successful marketers. Creative agencies, with their long lead times and insistence on getting it right for a big reveal, are counter to the needs of their own clients.
Just a few short years ago, our craft was to truly understand the market, audience and company needs, develop an engaging proposition with the power to meet those needs. We’d build a big idea, extrapolate that idea into effective communication across touch points and reveal the complete campaign to an impressed and eager client-side audience. Test, tweak and deliver. Job done.
While we have watched the changing circumstances and skills of our clients, we’ve doggedly stuck to what always worked, while secretly believing the fault lies elsewhere. We’ve told ourselves: “They’ve changed, not us” – convinced we’re the same suave, intelligent raconteurs we’ve always been. Meanwhile, our creative star fizzles and fades. It’s time we changed.
In with the new
Clients don’t want a creative agency that pulls a curtain around them and reappears some weeks later with a big reveal. They are creative, so they should be at the centre of the process: creating, adding, affecting, directing and controlling. They should be bringing their unique knowledge and big-picture view.
Putting clients at the heart of idea development has not been easy. For one thing, they don’t expect it, and uninitiated creatives can feel undermined. Mistakes have been made but we’ve learnt quickly, recognising that there are three core pillars underpinning this approach:
1. Positivity. Here’s the important rule: anyone – clients, consumers, influencers, agency – can have the idea or add to an existing one. But no one can take anything away. There are no borders, walls or confines to block a route. This way, early shoots are nurtured and nothing is culled too soon, even the seemingly impossible.
2. Idea generation. This has to be a combination of co-creation, corroboration, curation and isolation – in the right order. Understanding when to adopt which approach is a new skill. There has to be open access for all stakeholders, but equally there has to be times when the agency is immersed in the task. The skill lies in knowing when to open doors to all sorts of influences and when to close them to ensure the lead creatives have a safe space in which to curate and develop work unencumbered.
3. Discover and do. Despite the close co-operation with the client and, ideally, consumers, there are no shortcuts. Agencies must still deliver relentless hard work that mines knowledge, insight and inspiration. Uncovering genius is far too important to ever be left to chance.
Value for all
In return for this inclusivity, the agency gets a far better and smoother outcome and, importantly, it is paid for everything it does but no more. Clients get the same outcome, the same cost benefits, but their added value comes with developing the creative skills of their internal teams.
The client of the future is here. Embracing this approach means that this is nothing to be feared because, finally, agencies are catching up.
Jacolyn Daly is planning director at Pepper Corporation
This advertisement feature is brought to you by the Marketing Agencies Association, sponsors of the Guardian Media Network’s Agencies hub
