Successes and failures of an agency re-start

Why focus on value, not costs.

When things go bad, companies focus on cost. Fine, and often necessary for the short-term. The trick is to make the transition to understanding value. How it´s created, inside and outside, and how clients buy it. Read more (in Finnish) at:

http://www.marmai.fi/blogit/kaannoskukkanen/kommentti+katse+ulospain/a810358

Why Finns can be great at international advertising?

Today´s blog at marmai.fi suggests a simple, but perhaps a surprising truth. Those who grow up in the periphery, are probably more inclined to adapt and see other´s points of view. Read more at

http://www.marmai.fi/blogit/kaannoskukkanen/kommentti+kansainvalista+hapatusta/a808622

Do agencies need creative directors?

In todays marmai.fi  blog, I and a few friends take on the ever-interesting question. Do agencies need creative directors, and if so, for what? For the whole piece, see

 http://www.marmai.fi/blogit/kaannoskukkanen/kommentti+luovat+johtajat/a806513

The new creative MDs and what it means

My new blog at marmai.fi, from this morning. A few things about leadership, source of credibility and what it means for creatives to run creative agencies.

http://www.marmai.fi/blogit/kaannoskukkanen/kommentti+johtajan+kalenteri/a804687

Feel free to trash it, comment or just pass it forward.

My blog has moved. And it´s suomeksi.

At least for the time being, my blog is moving into marmai.fi, the daily source for anything called advertising and marketing, I will still blog about the same thing, that is, the ups and downs of turning around an agency brand. As always, I will try to keep the tone honest, open and real.

The blog can be found at

http://www.marmai.fi/blogit/kaannoskukkanen/kommentti+pakko+avautua/a802719

Please feel free to comment, trash, praise or start a conversation.

Saying goodbye to a client and one obvious lesson

In our profession, we lose clients. Reasons vary,  but it happens. I myself  have said goodbye to clients due to creative differences, a mismatch between agency resources and client´s needs, personnel changes and procurement-led statutory reviews. I have even lost a client after half a year, without ever producing anything that went out in the media.

Last week we as an agency said to client who in many ways embodied our commitment to outstanding client service in 2012, Opel.  As I have noted before, Opel loss  due to international agency re-allignment is not only a financial one, but a deeply emotional one.

We were rated the best of all Opel agencies in Europe in  a recent client appraisal, but as always with good stuff, that was a natural consequence of the relationship rather than an explicit end goal.

So what made it so special?

No surprise, it starts with some very basic human decencies and ways teams best work together. Being open, straightforward, have very little space for egos and sharing goals. This obviously lends itself to a situation where  great teams begin to outperform just good or ok teams.

Despite the grand terminology, outperforming  is not about some grand strikes of genius. It is mostly about the mundane, the routine and the daily. And of course, what happens when the deadlines are a bit too tight for everybody´s liking or the official office hours are long gone.

So, we did go and had an informal, relaxed dinner at Sikala with Opel. And while it was sad to say goodbye, the evening was all but gloomy. No big speeches, no big words. My only thank you note for the client was simple.  Thank you for your part in creating an incredible atmosphere of trust.

Trust is still the most undervalued, underfocused area of agency business. And what people don´t get  is that besides the possible honeymoon time in a newly established client-agency relationship, trust precedes any great creative.  Without trust, even the best, ground-breaking, business-transforming ideas just die.

So instead of mere customer satisfaction, instead of money, instead of awards, go ahead, measure trust, preferably person by person. Questions that put the spotlight on the team´s  ability to  think and act in client´s best interest are not only measures for agency-client relationship, but also a tool for agency  management to really laserzoom the organisation and it´s readiness as a professional service organisation. Because if you get service and trust right, money and awards will follow.

Measuring trust at personal, team and agency level is scary stuff, but if you end up with relationships we had with Opel, it´s well worth the effort.

 

Customer is God

In most western languages, the phrase “Customer is King” is widely used.  Mean it or not, it has entered corporate speak everywhere.  Now, this is put into a fresh perspective with Ad Age´s  feature with Tim Andree, who´s leading Dentsu´s re-energised charge in global markets, most notably in the US. Of course, Dentsu´s been extremely lucky with agencies like McGarryBowen, but in the heart of its success are two concepts that are often strangely overlooked.

First, in Japanese the above mentioned phrase is closer to “Customer is God”. Quite a difference.

Second, according to Andree “there are people in business that think leadership is power and control, and people who think leadership is service”. Quite a difference, again.

Now, picture yourself on your daily job.  Are these the qualities you see around? Because I myself, as somebody who works for a professional service organisation, believe that these are make or break qualities for a successful service job.  And no, I´m not advocating forgoing profit and work-life balance in the name of customer service. What I am saying, however, is that professional service is about relentless commitment to customer satisfaction. Day in, day out.

We as agencies keep telling our clients to focus around customers, and with service design being the current hot ticket, try to enlarge our pie of the marketing investments to areas outside communication. In service design, in particular, we tell our clients how service should be simple, fast, easy and really built around customer needs.

To me, very few agencies are like that. We are not Goldman Sachs either, but we are far from the best service organisations out there.  I´ll give you a telling example.  A client of mine had her materials translated into 9 or so different languages over one weekend, with only minor corrections. The translations agency in question had the scale, the speed and the people in place to deliver the job. If you don´t, better start re-thinking now.

Customer service is of course not always about these heroic efforts. Its about demonstrating what Dan Rubinstein once termed “excellence in customer care”, or better put, caring about customers. We at McCann, have outlined the year 2012 as the Year of Outstanding Client Service. Over the year, I hope, it will demonstrate itself in all areas of agency life, including compensation and individual assessment.

The easiest - and sometimes most difficult -  of all is speed. I strongly believe that reaction, response, lead time – whatever you want to call it – is critical to all relationships. Response does not always have to a structured bullet point essay. It can be just a little text and one liner sent from iPhone. As long as the customer knows that we respond, tackle the issues and take care of them and have the spirit of we get it done right now. Silence and inaction kills relationships. There are no excuses not respond to your client within the same day. Absolutely no excuse. The faster the better.

The same applies to leadership. Yes, leaders are there to lead and manage. But even more importantly, leaders are in place to service. To service the people there and ensure they have the means and tools to produce their best work ever right now, and not in the next job. 

Why small goals matter?

So far this year, Creativity-Online has featured our work three times, once a month. In fact, our initial goal was to get just something there, knowing that the all biggest brands and the best agencies submit work on a daily basis.

Now we feel that a more appropriate measure is to get featured every month. This tells you about the real nature of goals. Yes, we are not shy about the end-game. To be one of the few regionally recognized agencies in the market. An agency the industry would know of in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, you name it.

To get there is not going to happen overnight. And you need lots of small goals to track your progress. This year, we´ve set, is a year when McCann is back on the awards circuit, with focus on the bigger international festivals. For us, Creativity-Online is a simple monthly temperature check whether we are producing work that cuts it across the borders.

I am inherently conservative. This means I tend to gravitate towards evolution rather than revolution. Not because I would not believe that there are companies and brands out there whose only hope of survival is to be completely blown apart and starting from scratch.

But in a people-based, service-driven industry overnight revolutions rarely work. For the outsider, they might sound lofty and right-on-the-spot. For the people inside, however, revolutions rarely offer the tools, the time and the resources needed to deal with change.

Change requires time. It´s probably given less time now than ever before but it still needs it. An evolution sounds a lot less sexy than a high-minded revolution, but a lot stuff that actually works does. 

To us, Creativity-Online is part of the agency evolution. A small, trackable goal every month. Not impossible, but not too easy either. And I´m pretty sure should we make it regularly this year, you´ll be looking at a very different agency at the end of the year.

Should you be interested in the work that has made the grade so far, here are the links:

http://creativity-online.com/work/area-spreadsheet-the-love/26864

http://creativity-online.com/work/hiv-foundationaids-council-finland-places-woman/26225

http://creativity-online.com/work/alcoholics-anonymous-if-you-see-that-double/25729

How to fail spectacularly at things chimpanzees are really good at?

I do not claim to be a chimp expert, but a quick search reveals a few things about these fellow primates. Besides beating fund managers in stock market, chimpanzees are known to quickly adapt to using tools, live in small stable groups with members changing over time and spend large amounts of time grooming each other.

For an agency re-start, all these skills are pretty important. For chimps – I assume – using tools is an evolutionary answer to getting to food faster and with a higher success rate than using mere hands.  Not just convenient, but crucial to survival. Start-ups are often about starting from the scratch, deliberately forgoing past systems and beliefs. Re-starts do not have that luxury.  And it would be foolish to assume they have.

Re-starts are not start-ups. With re-starts new ways compete with much established old ways, some good, but some probably directly responsible for the initial need to pivot the enterprise. What chimps seem to be good at is collectively passing, sharing importantly skills that make old habits redundant. Even in smallest of corporations, this is remarkably difficult. And we have been far from perfect. Often in organisations – and I am not only referring to ours here – best practices are treated as individual secret weapons, not to be shared with the rest. Reasons vary from pure cynicism to not having a platform or tools to share stuff.

Organisational change is cleanspeak for people change. With chimps change is probably gradual, but often also violent and traumatic in the spirit of “only the strongest can have a say”. As for people change, two schools seem be at odds. One is in tune with re-engineering, shedding staff in favour of radical change and re-think. The other stresses the need for continuity and building learning, trust and opportunities for personal growth.

As such both approaches maybe wrong or right.  In many cases they are pieces of the same puzzle.  However, what´s interesting is that while chimps probably have a clear set of expectations as to how to the community shapes up and as to what criteria is used, we as companies are again not great at it. For a re-start, I feel, the question is just not about re-claiming a new status. It´s about clearly stating the reasons for a re-start, things that need to be stopped and things that need to be started. Again, a management task.

The little I know about chimp grooming tells me that besides affinity it is about social hierarchy. Interestingly, it seems that the smaller male chimps  - ie those who are naturally disadvantageous to bigger and more aggressive males – use it as a political tool to climb up the ladder.

I´m not 100% sure what´s the right analogy here, but one could be about consistency about management  and personal style. Studies show that what the community really expects from its leadership is a consistency of actions and thoughts.  So,  good or bad, it´s hard for a leader to be both the macho arm twister and the smooth operator. You can succeed of course with both, but others needs to know your syle and preferred mode of operation. Unpredictability is toxic.

So, I guess many chimps would make excellent ad agency leaders. But that´s not really a surprise, or is it?

Cold calls and selling projects. What do they really teach us?

When we began the Project Re-Start  we recognized that despite the media visibility,real legwork would play a make or break role. We would not overnight be on short-lists for top pitches, but rather would have to make the investment in getting hold of the right people, get meetings booked and tell our story convincingly.

And after doing that for half a year, now is a good time for some reflection.

Cold calling is test of organisational self-confidence, and perhaps evern more so, a real test of endurance and brand value. Because after 10 or so calls, the answer can still be a resounding ”no”.  And while in fact we have been quite good at setting up these meetings, it´s the process that may in fact have the greatest value.

Cold calling is pretty much the opposite to agency reviews. Prospects rarely have a ” I-want-this-right-now” need, and even if meeting as such go well, clients quite rightly do not hand over their budgets to someone they´ve just met.

With good timing, these meetings land you a place in review, bigger or smaller, in some hopefully not-too-distant future. But most importantly, cold calling becomes a form of organized project sales. And in my experience, the biggest mistake you can do is to believe that just getting your PR story out there will result in next steps.

Because selling a project  - be it a piece of research, small mobile development project or an alternative idea for product communication – requires exactly the skills we often preach but not practice. Listening, not pushing  the one product we have down the client throat and understanding where we can add real value. These are key to gaining any sort of short-term returns.

In cold calling, success is often seen as a numbers game. And yes, the funnel needs to be there. But the funnel is of no use, if the the organisation is not geared up to writing proper quotes, follow up meetings and have platform for ongoing communication that is not spam. And understand that projects will probably require an updated look at how an advertising agency works.

My view is that we as agencies – including ours – are heritage-built for a model where a majority of business flows from client who spends time and money with us everyday. That still exists and yes, it often leads to real, shared partnership. But it is becoming less and less common.

If the heritage model believes in stability, the project model recognizes the opposite. Projects, their scope and the needed talent changes from one project to another. What you did last month is no guarantee to what you might do this month. This is obviously bad news to predictability and to the overall ideal that business somewhow consists of pre-determined costs and fixed, guarenteed revenue.

At best, cold calling helps to create a sales-positive culture where gathering around client needs with tailored expertise becomes paramount instead of just pushing currently under-utilized resources. At worst, it becomes a panic-tool to cover organisation´s montly fixed costs.

The question is then, which one to fix?