by Charl Thom, MD, FoxP2 Being appointed as the agency of record for a brand can be a process taking place in various guises ranging from straight-forward appointments by clients that you’ve known for years to fully fledged pitches by clients you’ve never worked with before.
The Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA) has made great strides towards improving pitch processes and protecting agencies to ensure that valuable intellectual property is not given away for free. The basic rules (warning: link contains PDF file) that both agencies and clients must adhere to when participating in a pitch are:
1) The number of agencies shortlisted should not exceed five.
2) At least fifteen working days is required to prepare submissions.
3) Ideally, only credentials and case studies should be submitted. Providing creative and strategic work is costly and it places agencies’ intellectual property at risk. When strategic and creative work is asked of the shortlisted agencies, the agencies may only proceed with the pitch if:
– There is absolute confirmation that the agencies’ intellectual property is protected and retained by the agencies during and after the pitch process; and
– A pitch fee of at least R50,000 is paid to each unsuccessful agency. This pitch fee does not entitle clients to intellectual property.
There is no doubt that these guidelines have improved new business pitch processes for both clients and agencies in South Africa when compared to the relative free for all that took place historically. There is no industry body that acts in this regard in the United States for instance, and our New York based sister agency has to go through round after unpaid round when participating in pitch processes.
The guidelines from the ACA offer clients an option to appoint an agency based on a credentials and case studies only pitch, or a fully-fledged creative and strategic pitch. However, in between these two extremes there is much that can be done to ensure that the best match is created between brand and agency, and doing this is a two way street.
Homework
Do as much homework on each other as possible. It goes much deeper than understanding the agency’s client list and historical work. It’s about understanding the agency culture and the people under its roof. During a recent pitch process, a prospective client requested a visit to the agency. They specifically asked not be shown around by the CEO or MD, but by an agency staffer instead. This meant they could have genuine conversations with both staff and management during their walkabout.
Likewise for the agency, it’s important to find out and understand as much as possible about the prospective brand, its people and its culture before the pitch process has even begun. We try not to take on new business unless one of the partners feels a genuine connection with the brand and its culture, as that internal brand ambassador is imperative to ignite a passion for the brand within the agency that ensures everyone goes above and beyond to deliver world class work.
Quality time
The cultural match between client and agency will often make or break the success of the relationship. Pitches are like speed-dating. Between the briefing process and the final pitch, the client and agency will sometimes spend no more than a total of three to four hours together, which makes it impossible to establish a cultural match, or to determine what the chemistry of a future working relationship will be like.
Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric said “Never hire people (or acquire other companies) whose corporate culture doesn’t match your own. No matter how good the numbers look, culture matters as much as financial profile”. Given the nature of relationship between clients and their agencies, I believe this is good advice. He also never hired someone without playing a round of golf with them first…
A series of quality time sessions should form a part of the process to ensure that the prospective partners spend a decent amount of quality time together inside and outside their respective working environments which will allow them to determine whether there is a cultural fit, and if the potential for good chemistry exists.
Project work
Nothing beats the experience of actually working together. Wherever possible, the client and prospective agency should work together on a paid-for real live project with real objectives and deliverables. Some of the most successful client and agency relationships have been borne out of clients giving an agency a once-off project to work on. In some cases it has led to an entire piece of business shifting to the “project agency” as a result of them delivering better work than the incumbent.
Through doing the homework and spending quality time together, the brand team should be able to narrow the shortlist of prospective agencies to two or maximum three agencies. Working with this shortlist of agencies on projects will provide an in-depth working experience, which will provide the basis for a far better informed decision on agency partner.
Two way interviewing
Something we’ve done from time to time is to request an opportunity to visit clients’ premises, and to interview them and their staff. It allows the agency an opportunity to ensure that the genuine cultural fit is in place from both sides. Whilst the agency may run the risk of appearing “arrogant” it’s a risk worth taking as a prospective client that is not open to a sincere request for something like this as a matter of principle, probably has something to hide, and will more often than not end up treating the agency as a supplier, rather than a partner.
Going through some or all of these processes should ensure a solid foundation exists for a successful long-term agency and brand partnership.
Reprinted from the blog of Charl Thom.