After a 4 days back to back meetings in London I had some time to digest some of the stuff I did, what people told me, so took some time on my favorite Eurostar seat to contemplate. So actually a thursday evening thought really.
CMOs are heading for tough times, “pulled by many forces, many more than have been experienced before.” (read the great thoughts of Valeria Maltoni on this in the Marketing conversation). CMOs have to change their strategy and they want to do it with new teams that support them. Their decision is highlighted in a survey conducted of the Chief Marketing Officer Council : 45% marketers forecast to change one of their current advertising agencies - coming at the top of the list: web design and development agencies, direct marketing agencies, general ad agencies and PR companies. Griefs leading to this decision? “A ‘lack of innovation,’ ‘no value-added thinking,’ and ‘poor creative and/or poor quality’ are their biggest complaints.” The main reason to prone change? To better integrate online media in their overall strategy.
Who am I to disagree with their main objective. Still, they might be wrong. For a couple of reasons:
- Online services are not anymore the privilege of one of those pre-mentioned agencies but do affect all of them. Once provided by interactive agencies and later by traditional ones they’re now being offered by media agencies and more and more by PR agencies - with Social Media offering them the biggest opportunity to do so. The line between marketing and communication has never been so blurred, and so is the portfolio of services offered by all these ‘agencies’. The opposite - traditional services being developed by once interactive only ones- is of course also true. Tribal DDB - which began as a digital agency before covering the full pallet of services - has just been. As a CMO, are you clear yourself on who of your ‘agencies’ is leading your digital brand strategy?
- Successful agencies/brands relationships are long term involvement. It takes time to work a brand out, even more to keep it aligned and alive. Every week, when talking to CMOs, I am amazed at how much time is lost in starting new relations with new partners over and over again.
- Talking about longevity… most CMOs are not the most faithful of managers themselves - not faithful to their service providers, nor to the brands which employ them… Driven by higher career goals, they tend to change jobs every 2 or 3 years. If every CMO’s transition implies some agency being dismissed and some new one being welcomed as the new favourite, the constant change will dramatically affect the dynamics of the relationship. Expect high loss of brand identity and low partners’ involvement. Traditional story telling survived thru generations and generations, but the constant theme was grandparents - parents - kids. It was a never ending circle. Stories don’t survive when there is no notion of longevity, and “constant gardening”. Nor can Brand stories.
Maybe there are some basics to apply
- on the CMO side:
- First assign clear objectives for your overall - brand - strategy (we all know its obvious, yet its still so often bypass).
- Try and understand how online media benefit this strategy (don’t do online’ for the sake of it - even today our teams are working on proposals where the brief is ‘to do something special online, whatever it takes to make me famous’).
- Hire in-house specialists or freelance consultants to get an expert point of view before and while briefing your agencies (you - and your agencies- can’t be specialized in every marketing niche. SEO marketing and Social Media tools to start with require very specific skills- don’t be afraid to acknowledge you don’t know it all). I see both trends within big companies (like my own…). Ask them to help you do your homework.
- Choose one of your current agencies to be the leader of your digital brand strategy. Then softly but firmly push some pressure so they’ll feel the urge to keep educating themselves (its human nature to need a ‘have to’ before getting a ‘ can do’. ). Your strategy leader doesn’t have to know how to implement it but they do at least have to know why they should implement it.
- And lastly don’t hide behind ONLY behind the good - but old and limiting - ROI and work on a new more daring - or testing- mindset.
- on the Agency side:
- Help your client define clear objectives and assign for all of them precise success metrics (so they won’t be able to tell you’re not delivering),
- Before thinking technologies and media, focus on the brand DNA (then again, you’re not expected to perform 100% of the implementation yourself. Clients can take that you’re not the most qualified to do it if you can bring on board an expert to take care of it. Fragmentation of media and fast evolving technologies does not allow to have in house experts to cover all the disciplines.)
- Think beyond billeable hours… give your staff free time to explore and innovate. They need to get energized by non budget related issues to be creative. See it as the opportunity to keep ahead on the learning curve and share knowledge -internally and- with your clients by organizing seminars, workshops, academies.
- Work on your clients’ relationships everyday, court them as if they could be leaving anytime, because they will.
Before changing partners take a step back and have a look in the mirror. See if there’s anything you can change yourself to improve the relationship. Or if some external element can spice it up and keep it alive.
Enjoy the weekend…
Marc,
Thank you for picking up the continuing conversation on the roles of agencies and clients. You have an impressive background (might you consider adding your name to the bio?). You make a great point about a brand taking time. Writing and expression get better over time. Because they both need to be informed by the personality of the people and business they represent - and those are fluid.
To the defense of the marketer on the client side, sometimes the organization is not willing to do what it takes… yet as you point out, successful relationships are about longevity. To extend your point about billable hours - the old “account services” fee model is broken. Figure out a new one. What is the client getting for that money? Maybe that’s where free thinking and client-based service come in.
Marketing and communications have been evolving with participation - Conversation Agent is the current expression of that intersection. Thank you for providing good food for thought.
Marc - this post should be required reading for all marketing executives and agencies! I think the another huge issue between CMOs and their agencies is that they both approach a marketing/branding effort with “list worship”; where they get caught up in the to-do list of the campaign. I think this creates a big risk of forgetting the original brand core - similar to your comments on “longevity”. In turn, this leads to two problems - 1) whimsical marketing tactics, and 2) marketing for the sake of marketing. I don’t really fault CMOs, though, as “the list” is very often how they are measured by CEOs - “what did you get done” v. “what did we accomplish”. CEOs don’t treat their CFOs this way, so neither should they treat their CMOs this way.
[...] is a great blog post from Marc Bresseel about the issues facing CMOs and their agencies. As I mentioned in my comment to Marc, this is [...]
@ Valeria
Thanks for your feedback. Isn’t that indeed the dilemma of today’s ‘rushed’ society with ‘rushed’ economics behind it. Good wine takes the time to mature – no scientific process whatever could speed up that process. It simply takes time. Stories get better when they are talked thru by different generations and complemented over time. I agree with you on the new marketing services models and it’s probably one of the exciting things to happen as we speak. We know for sure it’s not billable hours nor a % business. It’s not a big surprise that employment in advertizing & marketing (consulting) services seems to break records while Media deployment falls to historical lows.
And thanks for the tip on my name in the About Me section - I changed that
@ Justin
Thanks Justin – but too much honor. Just observations really of what I see & hear every week. The list worship would be interesting topic for a post. We have customers that want to “go digital” coming with their tick box ‘Nice micro-site, viral video, some SEM & SEO, banner’. In a truly diversified world with over possible 50 different digital marketing techniques they get tempted by ticking too many boxes & budgets get totally spread thin before they even started.
[...] Changing agencies like underwear [...]