Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

You prob­a­bly agree that most adver­tis­ing isn’t cre­atively great or even good. From the out­side, one might think it’s a busi­ness filled with dumb, untal­ented peo­ple serv­ing mar­ket­ing depart­ments filled with bean coun­ters who couldn’t care less if their dol­lars are pro­duc­ing a fetid mess.

Truth is, too many adver­tis­ing agen­cies are filled with bril­liant peo­ple pro­duc­ing well-designed, absolute crap day in and day out. And mar­ket­ing depart­ments are run by smart and tal­ented MBAs won­der­ing why they’re always dis­ap­pointed with what gets made. Why is it this way?

Unfor­tu­nately, there are a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons. When in busi­ness for myself, I wrote a white paper describ­ing to poten­tial clients why their mar­ket­ing wasn’t any good. Besides being kind of insult­ing, the paper got to be so long that it got shelved. So I’m going to rehash the con­tent in a series of blog posts. The first topic is trust.

It’s a cliche but like many other cliches, it’s true. Good agency/client rela­tion­ships are like mar­riages. And a mar­riage with­out trust is just a series of arguments.

There are a lot of rea­sons peo­ple (I say peo­ple because it’s a peo­ple busi­ness) enter into agency/client rela­tion­ships but I’m going to high­light what I think are the top ones.

1. Attrac­tion — The client thinks agency is a hip and sexy shop that will imbue her busi­ness with this hip­ness and make them more popular.
2. Finan­cial — Client selects shop for mon­e­tary reasons.
3. Friend­ship — Client chooses agency based on rela­tion­ships. So and so knows so and so. Peo­ple often select lawyers this way too rather than review­ing cre­den­tials, expe­ri­ence, and track record.
4. Agency search — A bunch of stake­hold­ers get in a room and decide what cri­te­ria are most impor­tant to them in an ad agency (ROI mea­sure­ment, LEED cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, diver­sity, what school the pres­i­dent went to and what expe­ri­ence the account exec­u­tive has with char­ter­ing fish­ing boats). They then hire a firm to help them find the per­fect agency to meet their diverse cri­te­ria.  Then the only agency that all par­ties agree doesn’t suck at their met­ric, which may or may not have any­thing to do with actual adver­tis­ing, is hired.
5. Bureau­cratic ven­dor selec­tion — An agency want­ing to work with a really big cor­po­ra­tion or gov­ern­ment agency fills out a bunch of forms to get on an approved ven­dor list. Client ran­domly selects agency from this list. This is actu­ally more com­mon than you might think for lower pro­file assignments.

Notice not a sin­gle one of these cri­te­ria have any­thing to do with respect. And with­out respect there’s never trust, espe­cially on deci­sions that matter.

Clients usu­ally choose the agency part­ner but agen­cies are equally to blame for lack of trust in rela­tion­ships. After all, it does take two to tango. Here are a few ways agen­cies blow it.

1. No more charm — The prin­ci­pals or senior man­age­ment are on the charm offen­sive with the client for the first six months and then hire a junior to ser­vice the account. They then won­der why the rela­tion­ship sucks a year later.
2. Give up — After a few set­backs, the agency gives up on pro­duc­ing qual­ity work and treats an account like ATM.
3. Cash cow — The agency pur­sues cer­tain clients purely for the mon­e­tary rea­sons. Sooner or later, even the dumb­est sugar daddy catches on.
4. No invest­ment — Some agen­cies aren’t will­ing to invest the time required for build­ing trust.

For many indus­tries, adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing are the key dri­ver for their busi­ness. So you’d think the most impor­tant fac­tor for a busi­ness rela­tion­ship would be trust. But I guess that’s eas­ier said then done.

The best work I cre­ated in my career has always been with clients who I trust and they trust me back. They trust me with infor­ma­tion and respect my opin­ion and cre­ativ­ity. And when they cri­tique my work, I lis­ten and take their crit­i­cisms seri­ously because I trust and respect them. For most agency and clients, this kind of rela­tion­ship is pos­si­ble if you’re will­ing to work at it. And yes, it’s worth the effort for both parties.

But for all this high-minded talk, some peo­ple are just not trust wor­thy. That’s why we have this thing called divorce – I mean that’s why peo­ple fire their ad agency and ad agen­cies fire clients.