Agencies, what does your brand really mean?

Anyone that has been watching developments in the industry over the last few months will know the angst that has come from the recent deletion of three of the most famous brands in creative and advertising. Many have quite rightly asked why a major company in an industry which has a central purpose of creating, developing, and maintaining the brands of its clients would treat its own crown jewels so lightly?

Perhaps the answer to why they could so easily be consigned to the recycling bin of history could be that at their heart, they ceased to exist as anything other than a brand name. Other than the logo in the beautifully designed receptions, what essence of the original 100+ year old brands remained? Was there a ‘Wunderman way’ of doing things? Was there some indelible fingerprint that would tell anyone they were dealing with JWT, even before they saw the branded pitch deck? The honest answer is probably no. The really honest answer is, like most other agencies, maybe even yours, they were merely companies of mostly good people, trying their best to make clients happy, in whatever way they could.

While that might sound not too bad, ironically it's a real problem.

A brand with no substance is a just logo.

Through a series of mergers and acquisitions many well-known brands in advertising have ceased to occupy their original spaces. The essence of the original brand didn’t live on in their services, nor did it live on in their processes.  Like many brands in the industry, it largely comes down to their people. And people, as we know are not consistent. Everyone does something differently, which is not great for maintaining a consistent brand experience. If it just comes down to people doing what they think is best, then a client experience is entirely dependent on getting the right people.

If it just comes down to people doing their best, no matter how good they are, you’ll have a real problem creating anything like a distinct experience. Even if you get things really bang on in one area, if a client suddenly needs something done in a new domain of expertise – say for example, they used an agency to design their customer experience and then asked them to build a new digital platform, the experience would often be completely different. Not necessarily wrong, but not consistent. For most big agencies this is often because they’ve gradually added new capabilities through acquisition. They’re not one company anymore, but an agglomeration of many companies. Each has their own way of working, their own standards and their own essence. This sort of variability is the enemy of a brand.

What clients end up with in this situation is a talent pool of skilled people, hired by the day, each with their own approaches, building often completely bespoke solutions for every client. When clients ask for something completely new, those people most often say “yes” without hesitation, regardless of whether they know how to do it or not. The motivation for this might be the account team’s desire for new revenue, or the desire to keep out the competition, but equally it could be out of well-meaning people not wanting to disappoint the client.  

The result however can be some very hit and miss work. On some briefs utter brilliance, on others, complete disaster. On the agency side this results in incredible overworking of the very best people, because either the client or the account teams know that only they could be relied upon to deliver a consistent result. The outcome is not guaranteed by a consistent process, nor a consistent set of services. Instead everyone is trying to achieve consistency by picking the same people to do the work.

In these circumstances a brand means nothing more than a reasonable chance that the people working for it are good (because they were hired by a well known brand), with little ability to distinguish between a hundred other agencies all selling how great their people are. This is a big problem for the creative and media industry.

Clients want results.

As someone who came from outside the advertising industry, this all seemed very random and more than a little risky. As a former product manager, I asked why nothing could be standardised. The answers were always the same: “Every client is different, they all want different things” or “Clients are looking for something that’s bespoke to them, you can’t standardise that”.

Having come from client side, I can confirm that this is indeed bollocks. As a client, I didn’t much care that the way I was being served was unique. What I cared about was that the agency had a means of delivering the results I wanted, consistently. If getting the right outcome meant I had to do things differently, I would have taken it. What I expected was my agency to tell me what that different way of working was, and to give me some confidence it would work. Instead, what I invariably got was something like “Trust me, Crispin is on your brief and he’s our best”.

It’s little wonder then that we have seen the quite meteoric rise in ‘in housing’ agencies, which cleverly recognised that clients wanted some certainty and control over their agency’s outputs. In-housing is one method of achieving that. By bringing the talent inside and applying their own governance, clients at least had some degree of control. Eventually however they’ll start looking at day rates and wondering if they couldn’t just to this all themselves.

Great people are not enough.

When I was at Cognifide, we conducted in-depth research into why clients chose us, and the main reason was that we gave clients confidence in the certainty of outcome. Basically, to steal the old IBM strap line, nobody in the client was going to get fired for choosing us. How did we give clients the confidence in that outcome? Having really, really, good people of course was a big part of it (no really, we had the very best), but we also had demonstrable methods and tools we had developed. Clients understood that our way of working was far more likely to produce the best outcome. THAT was the essence of our brand. Sure, some clients wanted to do things their way, but eventually, they’d realise that they got better value when we led the way. The very best clients asked us to teach them to work like we did, which we happily shared.

So, when you consider your brand, and what it means to your clients, does it just reside in having the ‘best people’ who will ‘figure things out’? Or is it more than that? Do you have a set of services you can demonstrate? Do you have a methodology that you can prove will deliver consistently good results? Do you have a way of charging that reflects the value you are offering? Do you have the confidence to tell the client that what they want to do will not work and suggest a better way, your way? If not, then perhaps it’s time to consider how Product Thinking might be able to help you change that.