Mumbrella360 video: CMO Confidential
In the lead-up to Mumbrella360 on June 7-9, we revisit highlights from last year’s event.
In one of Mumbrella360’s most unusual sessions, four senior chief marketers reveal what they love and loathe about their creative agencies – while hidden behind a screen.
Among the observations covered off by the four – dubbed Mr Travel, Mr Retail, Miss Finance and Mr Alcohol – by session convenor and founder of New Business Methodology Julia Vargiu – were candid views and observations about dodgy practices, lazy work and supreme levels of services, leaving many in the audience wondering if it was them being talked about.
CMO Confidential
Moderator: Julia Vargiu, founder, New Business Methodologies
https://youtu.be/m2zjau-G4E0
Timeline:
- 0:00 Introduction
- 2:00 Meet the 4 panellists: Mr Travel, Mr Retail, Miss Finance and Mr Alcohol
- 4:00 Do all agencies sound the same and how can agencies stand out from the crowd?
- 6:50 What did an agency do to win a piece of your business without pitching?
- 11:30 Being understood makes relationships grow: how to make it work
- 13:30 Learn the language of the company you hope to work with
- 14:30 The best agency relationship I have ever had
- 16:00 Agencies need to offer more dialogue than just creative remit: less pictures, more data
- 18:00 What do you know about what your agencies are doing that they think you don’t know?
- 20:00 Agencies are prone to overcompensating
- 21:00 Adding ‘the purple duck’ to creative
- 22:00 What makes the relationship between you and an agency get stale?
- 23:00 The disappearance of senior staff from pitch to junior staff once the account is won
- 25:00 Stop sweating the small stuff; consider partner swapping or ‘the prisoner exchange’
- 27:00 What happened to cause you to fire your agency?
- 30:00 “If you want to pay peanuts you get monkeys and it all goes shitty”
- 31:50 “The only thing we charge an agency for is time and expertise”
- 33:00 Don’t lowball to win the business and then revise up – be honest about what you need
- 34:20 How many agencies have really understood your business?
- 35:09 Clients often need help with implementation
- 36:00 Clients need to pick the right agencies and give them what they need to succeed
- 41:30 Presentation concludes
Related: ‘If you pay peanuts you’ll get monkeys and it will get shitty’ says secret CMO
Mumbrella360 takes place between June 7-9. Early-bird tickets are on sale until April 15, offering savings of up to $700.
A few questions for the CMOs.
1. What’s with the obsession with hiring the most risk averse and terrified marketing departments?
2. What’s the point in hiring the agency most willing to do your bidding for the absolute lowest figure, and then moaning that the work isn’t any good.
3. Why hire marketing people who are incapable of making a decision without consulting research companies?
4. What’s the point in setting up multi-tiered layers of approvals? Each layer is terrified of the one above, so the work gets progressively worse until what eventually gets out bares little or no resemblance to the original concept.
5. We get that you don’t understand brand advertising anymore, but don’t moan when the brand tracking is at an all time low when you’ve paid a digital company millions to create a series of pointless games and content videos that absolutely nobody cared about.
6. Why have you enabled the media company to ‘come up with their own ideas’ when your team was barely capable of approving – or even understanding the work your creative agency did?
7. When your budgets have been slashed to the point where a team has a single day to crack a significant brief, again, don’t have a moan when it’s not up to your, already extremely low, standards.
8. Don’t move the entire business to the sexiest agency in town when your department are unchanged. They were incapable of approving work at the last place. It’ll be far scarier for them now.
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I’m with Yeah. Whatever. Couldn’t have put it better myself.
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