Clients must ‘step up to the plate’ on agency collaboration says UM’s Mat Baxter
Clients who do not delegate clear responsibilities to their roster of agencies are causing a “complete shitfight” amongst them according to UM CEO Mat Baxter.
Speaking on a panel about the battle between different types of agency in the owned and earned media space at Mumbrella360 today Baxter called on clients to “step up to the plate” to stop what fellow panelist Matthew Gain described as a “knife fight in a phone box”.
“Clients absolve themselves of a lot of responsibility that really they should be taking on and they should be a lot clearer on,” said Baxter.
“If you leave a bunch of companies in a competitive marketplace that have greyness in their remits and offer services that cross over, unsupervised, with no clear roles and responsibilities or agenda for management process for integration, then the whole thing becomes a complete shitfight.”
Any agency that says its agnostic around the source of a creative idea is telling fibs
Creative teams are as precious as ever and even more so when the idea comes from a client (therefore it must be shit)
Karalees blog post might describe social and owned content but it doesn’t describe the black voodoo of earned.
The magic of good pr is the massive operating leverage you derive from persuading a journo to carry your message on their story, with little to no heavy lifting compares with paid and owned channels
Half the problem is the ever increasing group of self anointed ‘full service’ agencies pretending they’re a leader of wider strategic significance than what clients actually hired them to do. (I.E buy media) That’s where the issue starts.
If you go out there and claim you can do it all, or have an opinion like a know it all, you deserve to get a tough time from your rostered competition.
Get some focus, it works wonders.
The fact is anyone cannot have a creative idea.
They cannot think it, produce, or care for it.
This grandstanding is faddish nonsense.
The sooner the industry takes itself seriously as a profession the better off we’ll be.
GPs are not surgeons.
Dentists are not vets.
Barristers are not conveyancers.
If someone really had a shred of credibility, they’d be trying to justify expertise not amateurish dabble.
The idea that a media agency can’t do PR is just dumb. It takes PR people to understand PR fully, but they can easily be hired.
Same goes for creative agencies doing media. Skills and expertise can be (and are often) bought.
can’t believe i read this quote “ But we’ve already got campaigns in market that have done more in the earned media space than they have in the paid media space.”
Sounds like something my kids would say in the schoolyard.
Why not be really truthful and say “our fee base will be severely impacted over the next few years and we have to change our business model from trading to creating to remain relevant. From that decision we will hire the best people and overtime have a business that not only becomes true communication partners but is skilled across all disciplines”???
@I want to share.
I’m worried for your children if they’re saying that sort of stuff in the schoolyard.
My kids just talk about TARPs.
the (earned) media just want a good story and those folks who don’t work with the media on a regular basis can get it wrong when they say ‘hey this is a top story’.
Wow, a whole article from an agency blaming clients for when their shit ideas don’t get off the ground. Never heard that one before.
For an agency that seems to have steadily lost a string of major clients to competitors, perhaps it is UM doing something wrong and not their clients?
This whole article is, like, duh!
Not rich coming from UM