That’s a question agencies spend a lot of time thinking about. The answer is simple – trust. Do you have trust in your partners, trust in your business partners and trust in what you are doing? Trust is a key word in a world in which transparency, open relationships and working with all elements of the marketing function are increasingly important.
If you can’t trust your agency partners then what hope do you have? My philosophy as a client was that every partner needs to earn a fair reasonable rate of return. Business, at the end of the day, is about staying in business. And you can’t do that if you are grinding the cost of your suppliers and partners into the ground. No one wins in this area and I’m sure everyone reading this has had good and bad experiences.
Trust is also important when deciding on the creative concept and determining what a great idea is and what makes a great media strategy and execution. As a client you need to take a leap of faith here and that can only be achieved when you trust your partners.
I made 42 different campaigns at Fiat and I know some of those ads worked and some didn’t. That’s fine and I can honestly say I learnt more from the campaigns that didn’t work than those that did. It’s all about testing, learning and evolving.
However, I never once blamed the agency for the ads that failed to meet our objectives. In the end, you, the marketer, have to take the responsibility for the decision you made in approving them.
Along the way, through the minor failures and spectacular successes, I learnt a thing or two about what makes a great relationship between clients and agencies. It’s about listening more as a client as ultimately, marketers pay agencies for their opinion.
And so meeting with the creative directors more often and bringing the media and creative agencies together for regular meetings is invaluable for building trust.
Most marketers and agencies want the same thing – success. And by that I mean selling more stuff as this is the only true metric of success. I know a very wise, creative fellow in Ted Horton who famously only worries about the cash register ringing for his clients. As we all know, he has been successful at doing that.
For marketers, it has always been about proving to their management that the dollars spent on marketing and advertising have delivered a return – today there’s more pressure to do so than ever.
Clients have enough to worry about; it would make their lives a lot easier if they could trust their agency partners to invest their money wisely to deliver an outcome – sales.
And sometimes it’s not about how cheap you buy, produce or make marketing collateral, but the effect it has on your cash register.