– Preamble –
The word sounds good, doesn’t it? I mean, my following article needs this touch of an intellectual opening if only to make myself heard by the key decision-makers and doers in our economy, which is so successful across all industries. You can’t just get straight to the point, no—you need a bit of prose and pathos in the mix if you want to capture the attention of potential clients. That certainly calls for accompanying effects like lightning and thunder—preferably with sound, ideally in the style of Hans Zimmer, “our” multiple Oscar-winning film composer, to whose music gladiators, King Arthur, the last of the Mohicans and Braveheart ultimately died, and who made it clear just how precisely music can fascinate and move.
Are you with me now? Do I have your full attention? That is very important to me, because what I want to get off my chest affects not only me personally, but an entire industry, including its periphery.
I would like to pick you up by giving you a very simple task. To understand my point, please imagine the following: you personally have to launch a new product—say, a pizza delivery drone—on the German market. You don’t know much more than that. The “briefing” is (as so often) very vague, the budget is not yet known (“let’s wait and see your ideas first!”), and the market figures suggest that whoever collected them didn’t really go into depth.
Easy task, one might say. We sit down for “a couple of hours” (a diminutive to play down the effort), and then we’ll have enough ideas to build a 360° campaign on. At this point, I’d like to take you aside and give you a “quick” additional task, because time is pressing! “Find a name for this pizza delivery drone and come up with a few suitable messages for it. Just briefly! But of course witty! Punchy! Something like ‘Couriers used to come on a white horse—today they come from the sky’ … or … um … ‘No matter where I live, my pizza comes by drone…’”
It’s easy, isn’t it? What, nothing comes to mind right away? Are you serious? Well, when I picture my normal agency day-to-day and the tasks that come with it, I’m honestly quite irritated now. I hear more than ever: “Just think about it quickly, nothing major—you know, just a rough cross-section to see where it could go … and whatever you do, don’t generate any unnecessary costs!”
At the latest now—when you have completely exasperatedly abandoned your attempt at copywriting—you should take a hard look at yourself again and rethink your idea of advertising agencies and their work—assuming, of course, you had one at all up to that point.
And suddenly, as I write these lines, I can feel that rising restlessness again, that increase in my pulse—and the growing irritation that comes with it. Irritation at the apparently complete lack of any understanding of how we repeatedly manage to turn a blank sheet of paper into meaningful, good-sounding/good-looking, effective, smart, spot-on, funny, thoughtful, provocative and honest messages—writing them, designing them, and implementing them in a wide variety of forms.
Against this backdrop, do we seriously have to consider whether a successful agency model could work along the lines of “Flyer Alarm”: with a keyword-based price list, ideally even illustrated like the wonderful colourful ice-cream menus found in cafés, bars and gelaterias up and down the country? ONE problem among many is that I can’t spontaneously think of an image for the menu item “brand process”. Nor can I think of a matching discount price—along the lines of “Brand development—on offer today!”.
When I picture this scenario, I immediately pull the mental emergency brake and throw a loud NO into the fictional room! It is simply not possible—even with the very best will in the world—to standardise creative processes and thereby create the impression that you can deliver an optimal result within predefined time windows.
The worst ideas are the ones that come to you immediately. They are always mediocre, because with a bit of thought they could occur to ANYONE—even you yourself, the client. You should expect more from an agency. Provided you let it do its job.
Perhaps you have had—or still have—the good fortune of having a strong head of marketing or advertising in your company. Someone who can actually brief. Someone who values agency work. Someone who can understand the creation process behind an advertising measure or campaign. If that is the case, we don’t need to think any further about discount models. All we have to do is acknowledge that creativity doesn’t fall from the sky, isn’t something you can buy off the shelf or get from an assembly line, but is hard, time-consuming, draining work. And besides the factor of time, that also costs money. Money that is, however, extremely well invested when client and agency see themselves as partners and work together accordingly.
If that is the case, your agency will feel comfortable working with you, see itself as an equal colleague on your team—and, highly motivated, produce the best results.
If that is not the case, you should take a hard look at yourself again and consider how quickly you can change this unsatisfactory situation for both parties—the company and the agency.
Best of all, start by arranging to meet us for a cup of coffee…
