I read an article the other day in Market Leader that basically had a go at communications in general and ad agencies specifically for falling far short of their claims to be 'partners' with their clients and generally having little commercial acumen or real world business experience.The article also has a go at planners, for example the quote, "Most agency planners don't understand the dynamics of business – they are about communications'.
On the face of it, I can't disagree with much of that. On the other hand, I'm not sure this is the problem.
Sometimes I do wonder if the problem with agencies on a macro level is trying to be commercial at all. Agency people are different to client people and this is a good thing. We can do what they can't and to be honest, they can do what we can't too.
I'm lucky enough to own a house. There are things I can do to it to keep it looking okay and even repair the odd thing. I can just about paint, I can fix a shelf. Can do plumbing? Can do the wiring? Can I draw the plans to my extension? No.I hire people who devoted considerable time to learn their craft and do nothing else for a living.
It's no different with agencies and agency people and their clients. I have tremendous respect for most cleints and all the things they do I,to be honest would rather slit my wrists than do all day.
The article implied that agencies having no MBA's in them was a bad thing. Why the hell do I need an MBA? Do clients need to done the APG Network to have a reasonable conversation about comms strategy?
But I and my colleagues in departments can do things they cannot. If they give us genuine business issues, we can apply understanding their customers and what they care about, leaps of imagination, technology ideas, empathy whole brain thinking to solving them.
We fill each others gaps. Just as planning suits and creatives should do the same (with a healthy blur).
The mistake agencies made wasn't being commercial enough it was trying to convince clients they were just like them and sell them linear, reliable, professional process. When great stuff really comes from chaos and serendipity.
The bit that's fair in my view is that bit about planners wanting to just talk about communications. I'd apply that to agencies too. Communications solutions, brand solutions (is there such a thing? Really?) start with business issues. At some point, mostly before I started in this business (but not entirely) agencies started having conversations about how to solve a pre-defined communications problem, rather than using creativity to solve a genuine business problem.
Somehow we colluded with the madness of only measuring brand health and other softm namby pamby targets.
I don't know who started this.Was it clients? Was it agencies? But as things stand, it's not entirely fair to just point the finger at agencies. So many briefs these days have much of the big strategy done, by peopl without the creative skill to do it well – clients and reduce planners to 'execution tweakers'. Some planners are complicit in this of course and become 'shrills for the work' but to be honest, many clients don't want to have a conversation about anything else.
That doesn't mean of course that we should give in.We'll only get 'upstream' if we start adding value, asked for or not and going beyond the tight briefs we tend to get. Asked for or not, taking to understand where the profits are, where revenue tends to come from and what the board cares about.
But that doesn't mean beautiful lies about being business partners. It means doing what the other cannot and fully appreciating the other.
Yes, agencies need to grow up and want to have business conversations, but then if clients only want talk about communications there seems little point.
NORTHERN PLANNER 
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