Collaboration: why do we make it so hard?
As creatives find themselves producing more work than ever before, a Mumbrella360 panel led by Admation asks why so many agencies are living in the dark ages when it comes to working with their clients.
In recent times, digital transformation has frequently made its way onto creative agencies’ ever-increasing list of services as they fight for relevance in a rapidly changing market.
It’s hardly surprising of course: as consultancies like Accenture and Deloitte increase their investments in marketing services, traditional creative agencies are facing an uphill task to keep pace.
However, what may come as surprising to many is that, despite agencies best efforts to transform business for their clients, many are still behind when it comes to their own.
That was the view put forward by Darin Lloyd, the founder of marketing project management technology company Admation, during the recent Mumbrella360 conference.
According to Lloyd, 24% of marketers claim their biggest challenge is doing more with fewer people and small budgets. In addition, 92% claimed approval delays were the primary reason for missed deadlines, while more than half agreed that poor collaboration between agencies and clients was primarily responsible for delivery delays.
“Collaboration – why do we make it so hard?” says Lloyd. “There are options out there, but we’re still doing things the hard way.”
By the hard way, Lloyd means that, despite all the digital technology available, agencies still insist on using an age-old production line of creative work, involving job bags, email and spreadsheets. Hardly the expected setup of a company expected to radically overhaul multi-million dollar businesses.
Meanwhile, according to Mike Crabtree, production operations director at DDB Sydney, the additional effort to track work, revisions and approvals added no end of extra burden to his already overworked agencies.
Reliving his experience in London, he tells the audience: “Behind the scenes, we’re the ones scuttling around. Working the late nights, copping the flak, having to spend lots of effort and energy in creating all these revisions, and backwards and forwards, and wait for client feedback – and not having, not knowing one source of truth. I recognised there was a better and more efficient way to work. And there’s systems in place that will illicit more freedom to focus on the higher value tasks.”
If it ain’t broke
While the idea of using job bags and spreadsheets may sound like something belonging to the bygone days of typewriters and copy-runners, some organisations’ resistance to change will come as a surprise.
As Jo Giles, the director of delivery and operations at creative agency Edge points out, humans simply don’t like change. Although her agency has made significant steps towards going completely paper-free, she admits the process was not without challenges.
“It’s kind of hard to change an agency’s viewpoint in a culture,” she says. “So as soon as you start actually trying to put something in place, people rally against it. They don’t like change. So that’s kind of a big thing. That’s why you really need to engage senior staff and make sure that you have champions within the business to actually put it in place. But I do think it is hard still.”
She adds: “If you’re working in a creative space, and you’re putting things out in print, we still wanna be able to see it and print it out. So there’s realities to that. So not using big brush stroke technology statements like ‘We’re going paper-free’ that scares people. Instead, suggest that you are reducing paper where reasonable.”
Crabtree also concurs: “Telling people that we were shifting towards, taking the first steps towards a paperless office was a scary thought. There was resistance and a sort of reluctance to buy into that. We get our campaigns out to market. It happens. We get it done. That was always the case. There was half of a notion, I guess, that if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
Complete transparency
One thing is certain for Crabtree, and that is moving away from a physical project management system to online isn’t something you can achieve in a week. As he says: “You’ve got to look at it as not something you just dip your toe in.”
In addition, some teamwork within the organisation is paramount, as Giles explains: “You have to communicate with each other internally in the organisation and have everyone’s buy-in upfront. Ask people what their concerns are before you implement a system. And find solutions before you actually launch it. Or find a way around it, and answer their questions.
“Once you’ve got your champions within the business, get the management team on board, and then discuss it individually with the people that are actually gonna be using it. That’s the key to implementing a system.”
While speed and efficiency are the most obvious benefits of any kind of digital transformation, for Crabtree the change helped bring a new level of client-agency accountability. He explains: “The clients knew that there was an audit trail. They knew that their managers could see the revisions that they were making. They were organically driven to create more accurate feedback.
“So the revision count dropped pretty much overnight as soon as we introduced Admation. Once people got into and understood the system, it was a very quick shift into that world of automated approvals. And I think if you ask anyone if they wanted to go back to working outside of that, absolutely not. It’s been a seismic shift in the speed and the velocity in which we can deliver our campaigns through to market.”
Meanwhile, as Giles notes, automation technology does not mean the end of those ever-important discussions between clients and their agencies. Different conversations will naturally ensue, but ones that will ultimately help, rather than hinder trust and results.
She says: “Rather than worrying about some of the basics, you’re focused on productivity, and you talk about the ideas, the creative and what you want to do. The conversations I have with people centre around creative production solutions for their ideas rather than filing and wondering where are the briefs. You can actually have more interesting conversations and really help them.”