Stairwellblog

One of the most challenging aspects of working in an advertising or interactive agency is managing sensitive agency-client relations. Taking clients down the path to creating a successful marketing message or making a recommendation that they may not agree with can be fun and exciting or it can be an emotional, difficult and even scary process. It seems like it should be easy. Clients hire us for our expertise in creativity, strategic direction and user experience. You are paying for our service, so why not use us to our full potential?

There is definitely something to be said for letting an agency do its job. When was the last time you went in and mixed it up with your accountant on how she was preparing depreciating asset schedules? If you’re like us, probably never. We take it as a given that the accountant knows tax law, that’s why we hired her.

Advertising guru and founder of Ogilvy & Mather, David Ogilvy once said, “Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself.”

There is a certain wisdom in this statement. If you had the time or expertise to do it all on your own, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There needs to be a balance struck between doing it yourself and working to give an agency a vision of how you view the campaign’s direction.

Well, clients obviously have good ideas, which are many times well founded, in what will work best for their business, whether it is naming a new product, creating a unique selling proposition or understanding what kind of web experience their customers want.

Now, in rare circumstances, sometimes the ideas are not well founded. Maybe even just plain silly. And this is where walking the tightrope of the client-agency relationship begins. It is our responsibility as your agency to tell you if you are going down a wrong path. Not rudely or disrespectfully, but courageously. In a new client relationship or a slow economy, this can be down right scary, because if we push too hard to guide the client in the right direction, things can breakdown. We could be out of a client and you an agency if we don’t learn to stoke this relationship.

However, if we as an agency are not willing to pushback or tell a client the truth for fear of losing the account, then we are not serving the client in the highest sense. To serve our client’s best interests we have to be able to provide honest and objective feedback, and take some in return.

So, let’s learn to respect or even revere some well-intentioned push-back. This is the natural ebb and flow of a good agency-client relationship. In time, we can learn to use this edge to push and pull great ideas out of one another on a regular basis.

There is always room for some healthy and passionate collaboration in a client-agency relationship. Some of our best ideas have come out of differing viewpoints. While we excel in clear and concise communication, our clients are experts in their businesses. We both need to be heard, and out of this open collaboration can spring ideas that are greater than either of us may have arrived at on our own.

Of course, give us research and insights from previous campaigns. Arm us with all you know about your audience. Maybe we will decide to conduct research together to gain new intelligence into your customers’ current mind-set. At this point, turn us loose on the project. Don’t micro-manage in a way that unnecessarily slows projects down or drains account team morale. Trust in the quality of your input, our ability to interpret your direction and let us ‘work our magic’ for you.

Let’s talk about a real life client as an example of a success story in agency-client relations. We’ll call them “Super Client”. Ironically, everyone thinks they can write good web copy or create great design and user experiences. Recently, we were creating a name and a logo to brand a new process for “Super Client”. They literally had a 7 word name for the process that was self-admittedly thoroughly confusing and impossible to remember. We came up with 2 words that describe the process and allow for branding.

What was interesting was, despite being hired to do just this, the client requested to see into our creative process. To see hundreds of word associations and combinations we came up with in landing on this one magical combination, and then something funny happened. “Super Client” started to “bark” themselves. They wanted to come up with new names on their own, and modify our “also rans”. We had to respectfully stop them, explain how we had played out these variations in hypothetical marketing exercises and push this client toward the right decision.

The conversation was passionate but respectful. The owner’s blood was pumping. It was our job to guide “Super Client” to make the right call, but we listened to his rationales for why the name needed to be longer and not so focused, until it clicked. He actually argued himself into the right decision. “The name needs to do this, and put us in this category while being environmental” and then he stopped, laughed and said “this is the name isn’t it.”

And so it was. While we could have easily lost this new client, we didn’t. What we did was form a stronger relationship based on respecting each other’s ideas and taking the risk of engaging in a lively conversation with an unknown ending. The beauty of this unknown ending is the excitement of pursuing the best interests of our clients.

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