Agencies must accept their clients want open relationships, too
Relationships between clients and their agencies are getting shorter, but becoming more possessive isn't the answer, says Matt Jackson, collaboration and openness is.
I’ve been in a relationship when my partner and I weren’t growing at the same rate. It was horrible. Then it was fatal.
When a partner starts looking outside of the relationship for what they need it gets competitive, then destructive until both parties admit that what they offer and need has changed and the relationship can’t exist the way it was anymore.
What makes this process most painful is when one party clings to what was.
Clients are now entering into relationships with multiple agencies per campaign. The nature of experiential marketing is that it is highly experimental, risky and thrives on novelty.
Relationships between clients and their advertising and media agencies are getting shorter and shorter with an increasing number of clients and agencies unable to last beyond the length of a project.
Clients have started looking at younger agency breeds with exotic names and speciality skills in specific niches such as ‘storytellers’, ‘content creators’, ‘digital agencies’ and ‘content and connections agencies’.
These younger breeds offer clients an open approach to commercial creativity.
Titles are discarded and sharing is encouraged so that creativity can thrive through multidisciplinary collaboration.
If this means inviting new partners into the collaboration, they not only accept it but they get excited by the prospect of someone new to play with. Here are three ways that agencies can embrace open relationships with their clients.
Open your minds
Attend any event with ‘creativity’ in the title and an outspoken advertising person in the audience and watch how fast the theme gets redefined into ‘making ads’.
I’ve witnessed this occur when there was a neuroscientist, who had consulted to Cirque du Soleil, on stage with a virtual reality engineer who created environments to enable audiences to empathise with people suffering from dementia.
This narrowing of the definition of ‘creativity’ is robbing agencies of their curiosity and consequently their ability to learn and adapt.
It’s not your idea
The new breed of commercial creatives are continuously innovating their process by sharing their ideas with each other internally and with external partners. This includes the client.
They are able to do this because they have moved away from the tradition of highlighting individual genius and instead they celebrate their workplace culture and ability to collaborate.
They admit that no idea belongs to an individual and that every idea is inspired by the efforts of others.
Once the ownership of an idea is given up people can start working together rather than competing against each other.
Open the relationship
Consumer insight is now an increasingly competitive market. Adobe, Oracle, CBA and Salesforce all offer consumer data analytics to clients and online media platforms offer media insights.
This year, GE collaborated with legendary hot sauce maker High River and lifestyle content maker Thrillist to make a hot sauce from the hottest peppers on record.
GE and High River created hot sauce 10^32 Kelvin, made from habanero pepper, ghost pepper and the two hottest chili peppers in the world — the Trinidad moruga scorpion and the Carolina Reaper
The sauce, named 10^32 Kelvin, was bottled in a container made by GE engineers to show off their ceramic matrix composites that are designed to function at 2,400 degrees.
The creative idea was sparked from data that Thrillist pulled from their lifestyle websites suggesting that if GE could find a way to promote its product alongside the popular subject matter of hot sauce then they would arrest the attention of a millennial target audience.
The campaign is a powerful example of client, media and specialist creative openly collaborating to realise a highly experimental and novel idea that belongs to everyone.
Matt Jackson is the founder of affectors.com, a business that affects creativity and team performance in the workplace. He is the author of The Age of Affect
How many people wrote your book?
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My Lord! so much marital or partnership advice.
Creativity is a very special, very select process. The production process is collaborative and there should be openness and honesty and sharing etc, but the creative process, which may from time to time work out to be a two or even three handed exercise, will, at the highly successful end, much more frequently be a solo and deeply personally driven process.
The less the client knows about the deeper driving processes the better, clients always think they know the product better than anyone else, and from one or two angles they do, but they generally know nothing about the creativity of advertising production, and that is as it should be. Many hands make light work, but this is creativity and creativity was never meant to be light work, on the other hand, Too many cooks……………
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Good article, and very insightful. ‘Incumbency” is passé.
Why would a global brand tolerate the same experiential solutions, with minor tweaks, year after year? Yet this happens, mainly though laziness, and this counter-creative idea called “incumbency”.
Like a stale relationship, with no sizzle, and no compensating factors except for the agency that’s being compensated for blandness.
ICT industry brands and automotive brands are the laziest, and their events show it. If their agency relationship is more then 2 years old, it’s time to go back to the market.
It’s time tor procurement executives to step in and break up the party, and trigger better bang for bucks. The big old school experiential agencies are having a laugh at their client’s expense.
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16 people wrote it including the foreword. Then I’d like to mention the editor as she directly affected the writing. So 17.
– M.J.H.Jackson
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Thank you for the comment Richard,
I agree that some creative endeavours are best pursued by an individual in isolation in order to achieve the depth of insight required; philosophy or physics are examples. Others that are intended for a wider public audience would arguably be best pursued in collaboration with others in an environment of continuous experimentation and feedback.
A question worth asking of the advertising industry is whether their intent when presenting an idea to the client is for feedback in order to improve the idea or if it is merely for approval…
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