Never tell anyone outside the agency what you’re thinking
It might not be the mafia, but agencies require a cone of silence about their internal workings to the outside world argues Eaon Pritchard.
At the beginning of ‘The Godfather’, Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone is in a clandestine meeting with Virgil ‘The Turk’ Sollozzo in which they discuss a potential partnership in Sollozzo’s nascent heroin business.
Sollozzo arrives in New York but has already ‘secretly’ allied with the rival Tattaglia family, but still needs the Corleone family for further financial backing and to ensure protection from the police and justice departments in the city, whom the Corleones have in their pocket.
During Vito’s polite refusal of Sollozzo’s offer, Sonny – inscensed by Sollozzo’s suggestion that the Tattaglia’s would guarantee the Corleone’s investment – breaks ranks and interrupts his father with an display of temper.
Vito calmly puts Sonny back in his box, and once their guests have departed expresses his disappointment with Sonny’s indiscretion.
‘Never tell anyone outside the family what you’re thinking again’.
But the damage has been done. Sollozzo, noticing that underboss Sonny is prepared to undermine the Don starts to think that a good strategy would be to take out Vito.
Sonny’s outburst not only undermined the Don but sowed the seeds for and undermining of the credibility of the entire Corleone family/organisation.
Many years ago, before my morphing into planner-ness, I was a designer in a small but emerging agency in London.
One Friday afternoon a not very senior client called up and asked the account person if we could make a small change to some element of an ad at the last minute before the thing was due out of the door.
Both the creative director and the planning director were out so the account person agreed, instructed me to make the change, the ad went off and that was that.
Later that evening I got a message from the planning director indicating we would be having a chat on the Monday morning.
By ‘chat’ it soon became clear that he meant getting the metaphorical shit kicked out of me by him and the CD.
By making a – what seemed to me to be minor – change to the ad on the request of a junior client, without consulting the CD I had undermined the credibility of the entire agency. I had made us look like we didn’t know what we were doing. I learned something that day.
Several years and several agencies later I sat in a presentation to a brand new client at an agency I had just joined. The ECD was presenting a campaign to this new client.
At the end of the show the client started making comments on the work and suggesting small changes to copy, edits and suchlike.
The ECD sat stony faced while receiving the feedback and then removed the work from the table explaining that if the client didn’t like the idea then we would take it away and come back with something else.
The client wouldn’t be put off, insisting that just a few of his changes and the work would be fine.
To which the ECD responded, ‘Thank you Mr [name], but we’ll come back with another idea. I don’t tell you how to make [product X] so please don’t tell me how to make advertising’.
That might look like arrogance to some, to me this was absolutely necessary. The creative credibility of the agency must be preserved, almost at all costs.
This is not about stroking creative egos., I have had many a stand-up fight with CDs over the years. It’s the planner’s job to make sure the advertising is ‘right’. For one’s own credibility that means being prepared to scrap.
However, those things happen behind closed doors.
It doesn’t matter how much I disagree with a creative director I would never voice that in a client situation or any other situation where his or her status could be undermined.
We all know that a huge amount of work goes into making the advertising ‘right’. But for the most part that work is behind the scenes. The focus and spotlight is on the creative output.
So when non-creatives undermine the creative product – by unquestioningly agreeing to client whims or making their own suggestions in the presence of anyone outside of the ‘family’ – it undermines the entire agency.
The popular notion of ‘ideas can come from anywhere’ is in part to blame for these incidents. Of course ideas can come from anywhere, however that does not make them good ideas.
Good commercial creative ideas tend to come from people who’s job it is to have them. When you devalue ideas, you capitulate. When you devalue ideas, you undermine the whole agency.
Before you know it you’ll become a chop shop and it’s a long long way back.
Never tell anyone outside the agency what you’re thinking, again.
Eaon Pritchard is planning director at Red Jelly
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Cone of silence?
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@Sam its a typo i reckon. should be ‘code’.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence
Cone still works.
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Definitely cone of silence… one of Get Smart’s greatest gags…. or not.
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You’re absolutely right in one of your points above Eaon, this absolutely does sound like arrogance from your old ECD. I can’t name any clients we have that would put up with an attitude like that for long.
In my own experience, the best work has come from great working relationships between clients and the agencies, where collaboration across the table is encouraged, and all parties respect one another and what they can bring to the mix.
In short, a good working relationship amplifies your creative capability and credibility.
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aha. Umbrella of silence is also good.
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Couldn’t agree more @Mark Livings. We aren’t talking about painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, here, we’re talking about selling ice cream, beer and car insurance. Nor is advertising a technical discipline like law, accounting or finance, where a professional’s viewpoint is going to be either right or wrong. Personally, i would have responded to the ECD: “You don’t have to sell my widget, defend my marketing budget or meet the profit expectations of my shareholders – so take your precious work, and shove it. If you want to be an artist, get out of advertising. Besides, a true artist would be quite happy to have the art marketplace value their work rather than a nasty corporation. Just as the fact that ‘ideas can come from anywhere’ doesn’t make them good ideas, the fact that creatives are paid to come up with ideas doesn’t mean they always come up with good ideas. If Eaon truly believes what he is suggesting, then all agency-created advertising ideas must be good ones, right? Clearly this is not true, so the whole pretzel logic of the ‘argument’ collapses under its own arrogant weight.
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The full team was gathered around the boardroom table for presentation of the finished work to Senior Client.
It had been a tough assignment, taken probably six full months since the brief was first discussed until now.
ECD said his bit, Account Man said his. Junior Client felt he should get credit for what some might think was somewhat risky work, even though Senior Client had known this and signed off on it some time ago, and he chipped in a few words too.
The ad was played. There was a hush in the room as Senior Client seemed to have a thought. He asked that it be played again and Account Man did the needful.
Junior Client couldn’t contain himself. It had been a bee in his bonnet for weeks and ECD had overruled him every time he asked. “We don’t need the comeback bit after the logo”, he said to his boss. “It’s our media money after all. We should leave viewers with our logo and selling line.”
“Interesting thought,” said Senior Client and he turned to Account Man. “What do you think?”
When Account Man said “I suspect you’re probably right.” there were muted gasps around the room. All the agency team,, to a man (or woman) thought “What a f*&king weasel! He sold out the idea, our hard work AND the team!”
ECD was about to comment when Account Man looked at Senior Client and said “Let’s look at it one more time.” And they did.
“D’you know what?” said Account Man. “We were both wrong. Let’s go have lunch!”
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And this is where the problem lies. The client knows their brand, and they are paying the bill.. Sometimes creativity can take the brand into territory that isn’t right for the brand. Sometimes a few weeks are required to keep it in the right tone. Regardless of your creative genius your role is to deliver for the client, not win yourself creative awards. So let’s put ego back in its box and focus on delivering on the clients KPIs.
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Wow, without a doubt, one of the best and most persuasively written articles I’ve read all day. Unlike normal, I’m left with no comment at all, at the end of it, except that when a point of view is expressed so clearly and thoroughly, one must be very careful about critique, even on points as minor as what the writer meant by ‘code of silence’ or ‘cone of it. That ‘cone’ is no typo (as one suspected all along) is evident from the Wiki (and Adam’s post) which expains the ‘cone’ to be a device in Get Smart designed to protect the most secret of conversations – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence . These days, of course, the way Governments plan to achieve the fairly critical to success goal of secrecy, is by going ‘analog’ instead of digita,l as this Australian report on the ‘comeback kid’ (the type writer) suggests! http://bit.ly/14NagSh
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‘I don’t tell you how to make cars, you don’t tell me how to do ads’ was fine in the good old days when clients weren’t professional marketers and looked to their agency to do everything for them; but, those days are gone my friend – long gone.
I’d love to see you brief an architect to design your new home, only for the architect to tell you ‘not to tell him/her how to design a house’ after you’d politely suggested a change, or a disliking for a certain part of the design.
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Brilliantly written article. Should ideas have greater value? Yup. Should creatives be respected for possessing unique skills and trusted to have used their expertise to consider all angles? Sure. Is this realistic today? No frikken way.
I agree with “11.Really?”. If the past few years have shown us anything, it’s that reduced margins force us to work across too many clients to be real experts in marketing all their businesses. And if the heady days of early social media showed us anything, it was that the money goes to the human who sounds like they know what they’re talking about, reality or not.
Clients know this. We’d be unrealistic to expect them to treat our product as sacred. They’re the ones with their job on the line if it fails. We just get a sick feeling and slink onto another client.
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Although I disagree with the ECD petulance, where a more polite resistance would have sufficed, the principle remains. What’s more, some of the comments about marketer smarts might be true for some of the high end brands – but I’ve found the transience and lack of true marketing communications skills in clients to be a real problem over the last ten years or so.
Previously, almost every client I worked with had a range of people with different skills. There were those who had varying levels of experience in sales, advertising, consumer research, etc. – but you always had one or two key clients in the company who had thorough knowledge and perspective, such that silly junior client input could be tempered.
I find increasingly that junior clients are able to push their own agenda – sometimes insightful, often misguided, but rarely with the senior guidance or polishing that an experienced senior client used to be available for. This creates more conflict and bland or ill-directed communications than necessary, and the brand suffers.
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“It doesn’t matter how much I disagree with a creative director I would never voice that in a client situation or any other situation where his or her status could be undermined…
So when non-creatives undermine the creative product – by unquestioningly agreeing to client whims or making their own suggestions in the presence of anyone outside of the ‘family’ – it undermines the entire agency.”
Clapping. Violently.
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