Probably the most fun thing about the agency embracing social media has been the internal learning around the agency’s blog. Along with Jonathan, I play a central role in editing and administrating it.

Being a copywriter, you may think I’m going “yeah, it’s funny to see an AE struggle with the blank page.” (It’s not, because that means we’re going to miss a deadline if they don’t come up with something quickly.) Actually, what I love is that our internal dialog is reversed, spread out, and more democratic while blogging.

The way things usually work is with process. And process is great and  great process can create great work at an agency. But when that process is flipped on it’s head, with employees evaluating  the execution and content of articles written by people not with in our departments or that are higher up the pyramid, it forces everyone to engage in a thoughtful internal dialog. Here are a couple examples:

One of our senior account executives wrote a piece about a campaign we had both worked on. I had some very specific feedback on some of his content. It seems both of us had come away with different leanings from a significant job. And we may have never had that discussion with social media.

In another post, our Director of Account Service, describes the importance of monitoring and how it’s structured for our clients. Social Media is something I’m involved with on a daily basis but business end is something I’m not.

Working on articles with our agency president has been the most interesting. Not only am I learning a different perspective on the industry but I get to collaborate and learn from someone I rarely get to work with. This helps me to see the business through her eyes and hopefully she’s able to gain a wee bit of prospective from me.

If you don’t have an blog for your business, I encourage you to start one. It’s a great way for clients to learn about your business but it can also be a great tool for internal learning too.

Ever met someone who never takes sides. Never makes a clear decision. Always wants the group to decide so he doesn’t run the risk of making anyone upset. You probably called this person wishy washy, indecisive or maybe even weak. And never a leader.

Now imagine this person is your brand. A lot of marketers are scared to death that someone may call, email, write a letter to the editor or, God forbid, tweet their dissatisfaction. They would rather stand for nothing then have someone rant about their product on their Facebook wall.

Now think of a person with strong opinions maybe even famous people with strong opinions. Those people probably have a lot of lovers and haters. Most politicians are that way and many business leaders are that way too  –like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Yet their brands represent the two largest market capitalization in the world (Exxon is the only US company with a larger market cap than Apple).

People find their personalities both attracting and appalling as well as the products these companies offer. Sure, they are unique individuals and companies but that’s the point. So is Tony Heish and Zappos. Or Mark Cuban and his Dallas Mavericks and HDNet. And of course, Martha Stewart and Omnimedia.

A company doesn’t have to have a strong CEO to stand for something either. You probably don’t know who the CEO of Disney is now that Michael Eisner (or Walt) is gone but you understand what the brand represents (yes there are people who hate the mouse). And what about Porsche? Or say Burberry?

A brand can stand for something just through the products it makes or the service it offers. But is often communicated effectively through it’s marketing and advertising. I’m not going to dissect ad campaigns and say which ones run the risk of offending and which make a stand. It’s pretty obvoius when they do and when they don’t.

There’s a kind of deviant you can find in lurking in most ad agencies. Sometimes they’ve made it to the top, sometimes they’re just bottom dwellers but they rarely have a passion for what an agency actually produces – creative solutions to business problem. But they do aim to please the client and maybe even collect a tip along the way.

Here are the top 10 signs you are one of these enemies to the work:

1. You worry more about the presentation than the substance.
2. You think your job is to get creative to understand the client’s postion and not to solve the client’s underlying problem.
3. A brief is a “form” you fill out to get the creatives to do their damn job.
4. Your unique selling position is access to a skybox at the stadium.
5. The client is your “friend” and not a business partner or colleague.
6. You get the traffic manager to do your dirty work.
7. Your best comeback is “but this is what the client wants.”
8. Your job has more to do with managing projects than solving problems.
9. You feel you need to apologize if you come back to the client with a better solution than was asked for.
10. You expect everything you jot down on a pad from the customer’s mouth to come hot off the grill ASAP without any back talk.

David Ogilvy said 40 years ago “the consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife.” It seems not everyone listened because the industry continues to insult her.

Ogilvy’s quip may be one of the most quoted phrases in marketing and advertising but marketers often don’t think it applies to them. Somehow it’s their customers that are of below average intelligence.

In my 15-year career, often working as a hired gun, I can say I’ve heard “you don’t understand, our customers just aren’t that smart” from clients in just about every possible category (luxury brands excluded).

However, I’ve never heard after an ad ran from a client or consumer that it was too complicated, too sophisticated, or too clever.

I believe this thinking stems from two causes:

A) A lack of respect and understanding of your audience.

B) Expecting your audience to understand your marketing strategy and not your emotional benefit.

I’m not going to address A because if you don’t respect your customers you’re beyond hope. Sorry.

But I believe B is actually more common and worthy of discussion.

For the record this kind of thinking isn’t just related to clients. It also come from inside agencies, outside consultants, or just about anywhere people sit around thinking about product benefits too much.

As a copywriter, my job is to translate the client’s core benefit into a compelling message for their customer. And compelling rarely means dumbed down.

What it does mean is finding the core emotional benefit wrapped in all the analyzing that’s happened before a project hits my desk. There are often great nuggets of information in all the buzzwords and matrices. But reaching the consumer is rarely done using them.

The deep thinking in these planning and strategy documents is tough to explain even to copywriters at times – so, of course, they’d be tough to explain to a consumer that doesn’t read them on a daily basis. That’s why great copy and art direction reaches an audience on a base emotional level.

Now, if you were expecting a consumer to follow the logic train developed in your PowerPoint document,  you would need to “dumb it down.” But if you can trust your consumer to appreciate your brand on a gut level, you won’t ever feel the need to call your customers stupid or want to idiot proof your messaging again.

Each component of your brand story doesn’t need to be explained to a customer in every piece of communication, nor does each benefit need to be spelled out. Just the ones that resonate emotionally. And emotional arguments are much simpler and easier to communicate than rational ones. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Logically explaining product benefits straight out of a brand strategy. Our high-quality service, new fleet of aircraft, and on-time on time record makes  flying with our airline better than traveling with our competition.

The simpler example of re-framing the argument emotionally. We take the frustration out air travel.

Now it would be tough for your customer to follow the logic established in top example in each piece of communication or maybe even any — especially in a truly creative execution. Yet, many marketing executives believe that the customers need to understand things the same way they do and blunt their advertising to make it happen.

Good advertising usually requires simplifying your promise and using emotional triggers. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you saw a Nike spot where the benefit of the cushioning of the rubber was explained? Or when was the last time you saw an Apple ad that talked about how the silicon chips and software was engineered.

No, they stick with an emotional connection to sports and simplifying ones life. These are things that we, as human beings, resonate with on a deeper level and don’t need to have argued to us. We just get them. And so will your customers.

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.

One of the benefits of working as a creative freelancer for seven years is I got to see how different agencies brief their clients and creative teams on how they’re planning to achieve advertising goals. Ideally, all this information is boiled down in a magical document called the creative strategy. In it’s best form, everything the client needs to approve the work and everything the creative team needs to execute the advertising should be distilled into a succinct, one page document.

Many agencies struggle with getting this right and many do it brilliantly. And most certainly, there are a lot of brand managers, account executives and planners who don’t have a firm grasp on what a creative team needs to turn their insights into brilliant work. So I write this with the best of intentions and hope this helps someone out there. And in the least, it lets a few creatives know what they should be getting from their strategy team.

Each paragraph represents a heading that should be written in a sentence or two — any longer and it means the strategy isn’t tight enough yet. The thinking is based on an old Bill Bernbach document that was handed down to me and has been refined over the years — not that I have the right to refine master, but I have done it anyway.

Objective – This is not a litany of all the problems the marketing department, the sales department and the executives tell the account team they have. An advertising campaign, whether done in print, TV or the Web should be focused on one single-minded problem that is solvable with advertising.  If it is not, well advertising probably isn’t the best solution. The objective is one simple sentence without compound direct objects. Don’t confuse this with a marketing communications plan. KISS.

A lot of briefs start out with “why are we advertising? or “background.” That’s fine, but these topics/headings often digresses and can end up confusing the objective.

Target: Back in the day of Bernbach this was a pretty simple answer. You were advertising to either mom, dad, grandma or junior. These days, planners and researchers are getting well past demographics and psyhcographics to technographics and even some new fangled thing called socialgrahics. Keep this a simple as possible while still explaining who this person is. As complicated as people are, their motivations are still pretty simple.

Current perception: How does the target feel about the brand or product you are advertising? Don’t complicate this and the above topic with psycho babble. You can put the babble in a supporting document if you really think it’s necessary and will help the creative team.

Unique selling position or key benefit: Not every product has a unique selling position (a subject for another post) but every creative strategy should include a key benefit. This is the single, best reason why someone would want to buy your product. If there isn’t one, you haven’t thought hard enough. Again, this should be a clear singular statement of fact.

Supporting points or “reasons why”: This is why a customer should believe the the key benefit. If it doesn’t support the above statement it is irrelevant and only serves to muddy your logic.

Single Sentence: This is stated for the consumers perspective and describes what the consumer should say to themselves after reading or watching your advertising. “I should buy acme brand cornflakes because they have more fiber.” While it may seem like a simple restatement of the key benefit it actually servers two purposes. It helps the strategy writer see if their key benefit sounds smart or ridiculous stated from the consumer’s perspective and gives the creative team a different window on what the advertising is supposed to do.

Media: What media is the work going to run in, on, will be built for or be broadcast on. I know it’s a new age, but simply list it out here – create a supporting document if you must.

Mandatories: This is where you tell your team if there’s a legal reason you have to include an FHA logo on the work, a copyright line, a disclaimer or you can’t use certain word without being sued.

This formula is deceptively short and simple but it’s not always easy to execute. If the writer does a good job on this everything that follows has a better chance of succeeding.

Account people, you may not know it, but you need this document to be smartly developed as much as your creative teams does. The better this is written and discussed with your client, the better the process of getting the client to sign off on the brief will be, the easier executing the work will be, and the more fun the selling the product will be.

ed note: This isn’t exactly the way we do it at Kilgannon (but not way off) and reflects my opinion only.