The secrets of award-winning client/agency relationships

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Generally it’s not hard to see why award-winning campaigns end up collecting the silverware. They’re arresting. They’re unique. They’re hilarious. They’re shocking. And if things really went well, they’re all of the above.

What’s not so easy to understand is what made it all come together in the first place. Was there something special about the brief? Maybe the client brought something different to the mix. Was the agency just having a good day?

You could muse over this until the cows come home. Or you could do a bit of digging to find out. Recently, we did the latter when we presented ‘Winspiration’, a survey of last year’s international direct marketing awards show winners to members of the Marketing Institute of Ireland.

Different countries – similar opinions

To begin with, we tracked down and talked to clients and agencies in countries as diverse as New Zealand, Spain, the UK and Belgium. While each had produced radically different creative ideas, there was a distinct convergence in their views on what needs to happen before great work can emerge. A random selection of quotes bears this out:

“When there is passion behind an idea at both ends and belief that it is a strong strategy, the commitment comes” says Andy DiLallio, Executive Creative Director of Leo Burnett in Sydney. It’s a view that’s remarkably similar to that of DDB’s Brett Colliver in New Zealand: “…the other crucial factor was getting everyone involved excited about the possibilities. Not always easy, but everyone was right behind it which meant a lot of stuff was done for free (or cost) on weekends and after hours.”

So successful projects need passion and excitement. But what else? This time, a client, Christine Haru of the New Zealand Coastguard, got to the heart of it when she identified a requirement for open minds: “Sometimes as the client we have an idea on which we brief the agency, but we can be constrained in our thinking. At the end of the day we use agencies because they are a pool of incredibly talented and creative people who can think outside the box and come up with a different solution than you had imagined.”

And that’s pretty much what Spanish multi award-winning agency Shackleton also think. Creative Director Juan Nonzioli’s view is “If I was a client I’d say to my agency ‘I have this need and I need an idea. Maybe it’s a TV ad, maybe it’s something else. Twist your brains around it, that’s what we’re paying you for.”

His client, Montse Balas Lara of the charity FSA Inserta, agreed: “They (clients) should place themselves in the hands of professionals like the Shackleton team, and be prepared to truly empathise with them.”

Fortune favours the brave

Back in New Zealand, Charlotte Speed, the Head of Customer Engagement for Orcon Broadband, threw in another humdinger when she said ‘Be brave. Let the experts be the experts and brief agencies well.’ And the need for bravery was also being flagged on the other side of the world by Nick Moffat of Proximity London. Nick was one of the team that won the DMA Grand Prix for their groundbreaking RNLI campaign, ‘Mystery Packages’. He summed it up by saying “Internal client politics does scupper a lot of creative work, but having someone who’s prepared to crusade on your behalf is invaluable.”

So what have we found after a quick spin around the winners of the world’s most respected direct marketing awards? The secret of knock-out creative work appears to lie in everyone involved being brave, empathetic, passionate, excited and open-minded. But before any of this is possible, one other factor needs to be in place. I’ll leave the final word to the NZ Coastguard’s Christine Haru: “…it comes down to trust also – trust of the agency that they have your brand’s best interests at heart too and if you succeed – they succeed (and win awards too).”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Like to see the Winspiration presentation in full? Email us at winspiration@dialogue.ie

Clients’ key role in creating world-class work

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Ultimately, who deserves the credit for successful and highly creative marketing campaigns?

Sure, the agency’s fingerprints will be all over them. But experience tells me that work that genuinely stands out is characterised by one common denominator: an ambitious, brave and open-minded client.

Taking the plunge

So why are some clients willing to sign-off radical work while others play it safe? Is it due to individual personalities? Is it a matter of corporate culture? Does it depend on where in the company pecking-order the client sits and how worried they are about the boss’s reaction?

It’s a crunch question for anyone who wants to produce outstanding advertising. So it prompted me to ask a number of individuals, both in Ireland and internationally, how they ducked the bullets and produced award-winning campaigns.

One of these was Brett Colliver of DDB New Zealand, a prime mover in the New Zealand Coastguard’s ‘Live Rescue’ campaign last January.

Winner of a Gold Lion at this year’s Cannes Direct Awards, this campaign aim was to shake New Zealand’s community of ‘boaties’ out of their complacency that, even if they got in trouble at sea, the Coastguard would inevitably rescue them.

Rather than producing the traditional series of press/TV/radio ads, DDB took a far more radical approach in actually dumping four ‘victims’ into the sea. They then challenged New Zealand to direct – via the internet – a Coastguard search plane to find these people in time. Only approximately 1% of participants succeeded, a statistic that matched the real chances of being located.

It was a great idea. But it was also a highly risky one, not least because the simulated danger could become very real. Brett Colliver explained that this potential obstacle was overcome by the client’s combination of vision and realism: ‘The client totally understands how valuable media coverage is, so they weren’t worried about having people in the water – provided we took the necessary precautions.’

While the outcome involved a real rescue, it didn’t start out like that. But when the agency and Coastguard both realised the idea’s potential, they collaborated in its development: Colliver explains: ‘The idea was an evolving beast once it got rolling which made the budget issues interesting. Initially the idea was just the website. People would go there and experience how difficult the Coastguard’s job is’.

‘There was also a TV idea that was going to be produced, but it wasn’t directly linked to the website. Then we realised that we could make it so much more engaging and the idea of running first person TV and radio spots to drive people to the site was born.’

Brett summed up the experience by saying: ‘Basically I guess the secret to getting the campaign up was simply a willingness from everyone involved to make it happen.’

Speaking to Brett, it was obvious that he regarded Live Rescue’s success as the result of a team effort. And another of this year’s big winners at Cannes echoed this insight.

Passion and commitment

In 2009, Leo Burnett in Sydney, Australia was responsible for ‘Photochains’, a campaign for Canon EOS cameras that integrated old and new media in a stunning and seamless blend.

Stimulating thousands of photographers worldwide to create endless chains of photographs, one after another, has won it a number of awards, including a Gold Lion at Cannes Direct.

Alissa Breit of ?Leo Burnett Australia made it obvious to me that commitment from both client and agency was a crucial factor: ‘When there is passion behind an idea at both ends and belief that it is a strong strategy the commitment comes – that’s not to say the process was easy, there were many, many meetings and iterations of the broader strategy and idea structure.’

Pressing her on this, Alissa elaborated: ‘Overall, the clients at Canon are really passionate about the work they do and the work we produce. They are a very hands-on client and like to be taken on the whole journey.’

Home grown goodies

Nearer to home, a project that also reeked of a perceptive and brave client was the campaign that launched Rabodirect in Ireland. Produced by the now-defunct Pulse and written by Gai Griffin, Rabo ran a series of genuinely funny ads based on the line: ‘Life’s more interesting when you’re direct’.

Gai recognised that although understandably nervous, Rabo clearly foresaw a dividend in being brave: ‘They were all behind the challenger brand strategy. They knew it was the only way they could establish a presence in the Irish market’.

While the Dutch half of the team sometimes didn’t fully understand the Irish sense of humour, they were smart enough to recognise and accept that, in Gai’s words, ‘when it came to funny stuff we really were coming from different places.’

‘Be bold’

That was the brief of Amie Peters, An Post’s Head of Direct Mail. And it recently inspired Dialogue to promote direct mail by creating a mailing that featured a cut-out, life-size torso wearing a real mankini – with an invitation for the recipient to try on the garment for themselves. (If you’ve a strong stomach, you can see the results at www.madmankini.com)

Unfortunately, requests like this are as rare as hens’ teeth.

However in looking at some extraordinary campaigns, it quickly becomes obvious that without a client’s desire to produce work that’s out of the ordinary and trust the agency to deliver it, it simply won’t happen.

Many are reluctant to push for this. Yet the campaigns touched on in this article do prove one thing: a passion for the highest standards, a commitment to partnership and a desire to create bold, groundbreaking work can pay real dividends.

But unless this is shared – indeed demanded – by clients, the very best ideas will continue to have a very small audience: the cleaner who empties the agency bins each evening.

Des Columb, Dialogue

Crystal Balls?

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Welcome to the future – but is it all the marketing gurus said it would be?…

Silver suits. Jet packs. Holidays on the moon. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the future was looking good. Sadly, it’s not quite worked out to be the Buck Rogers utopia we were promised. OK, the internet and mobile phones might have wowed my grandparents if they’d lived to see them. But it’s just as likely they would have just have been utterly confused by the information overload.

Books reviewed:

Beyond 2000: the future of Direct Marketing. Ed. Jerry Reitman 1994

The One-to-One Future. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers 1994

The Advertising Book. Hugh Oram 1986

Saints & Spinners. Ed David McWilliams 2005

For some reason, the marketing sector has always been awash with gurus ready to predict (for a fee) what the world of tomorrow will look like.

For any marketer looking to make a name for themselves, it’s an easy bet: lay out a vision of the future with conviction, preferably in a book. Give it a title that echoes the daddy of them all, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Then wait for the lucrative invitations to conferences and consultancy sessions to roll in.

That’s all well and good. But what happens when the years pass and some smartarse decides to see if the gurus really knew something the rest of us didn’t? Well, I’m that smartarse – and here’s what I found…

Recently I picked my way through a number of books, published between 1986 and 1995, to see what their authors thought lay ahead.

One whose title reeked of conviction was 1993’s ‘The One-to-One Future’ by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. A key theme centred on the word ‘discontinuity’ which Peppers and Rogers used to describe a leap from one way of doing things to a completely different approach. Technology, they argued, would change things completely and we could say goodbye to ‘mass production, mass media and mass marketing.’

Their future was dominated by tailored individualised messaging delivered – and this is the crucial angle – by cutting edge technologies such as ‘Video Plus’ (which could record an infomercial broadcast on a cheap obscure TV channel at 3.45am) and software that would allow computers to read faxes. In fact, fifteen pages of book are spent exploring the potential of the fax machine and ‘fax-based dialog programs’.

Seventeen years later, this reads like a recommendation to use Morse Code as marketing medium. Sure, the principles that Peppers and Rogers promoted – innovation and tailoring a message to its most receptive audience – have stood the test of time. But if you had sunk your money into the types of technology they recommended, you’d probably now be blowing your harmonica under a bridge somewhere these days.

Let’s turn our attention to another confidently-titled tome, ‘Beyond 2000 – the future of Direct Marketing’ edited by Jerry Reitman published in 1995. To me, 1995 seems like last Wednesday. Surely then, Jerry and his co-contributors to this books had a fair inkling of what lay ahead?

To be fair, there is a sense that technology was opening up an exciting new future for marketers. But this wasn’t a future we would fully recognise today. Contributor Donald R. Libey* described ‘Virtual Reality Marketing’ as ‘…perhaps the most significant marketing advance ever.’ Libey conjured up a future where house purchasers wearing a fetching helmet-and-glove combination could wander through virtual versions of houses for sale, looking left and right, up and down, interacting with an environment without actually being there.

Of course, we know that this has happened, albeit in a far simpler form. Every estate agent showcases their properties online on property websites – but without the predicted whizz-bang 3D helmets.

The future has turned out to be just as technologically complex as was predicted – but not in the way predicted. Mobile phones, the devices now central to everyone’s life simply did not figure in cutting-edge marketing thinking of the early ’90s. Some pundits got close; but most missed the real pot of gold that mobile communications created.

Another contributor – James R. Rosenfield – got tantalisingly close to describing what smartphones have achieved:

‘Financial services firms should closely monitor the new interactive media, where computers, telephones and video will ultimately converge into a single household unit (the fiber-optic based “information superhighway”).’ Note the word ‘household’. Despite mobile phones already being in widespread use, there was absolutely no sense of their power and potential.

*In the same chapter, Donald Libey went on to pen one of the most spectacular pieces of marketing prose I’ve ever come across:

“Turning from the near-certain choice of a techno-narcissism by society for the transient fantasy pleasures of virtual reality, are there potentially revolutionary marketing outcomes associated with the ultimate cyber-pseudoreality?”

Explanations on a 3D virtual postcard please.

But perhaps the biggest shock lies in the indexes of the books reviewed. Amazingly, words like ‘internet’, ‘digital’, ‘online’, ‘website’ or ‘mobile phone’ don’t receive a single mention even as late as the mid ’90s.

So the tools that actually became the essential links between consumers and corporations of every size were completely ignored.

So what can we learn from smugly looking back?

For me, the key lesson is that hype around today’s funky technology should always be taken with a pinch of salt. At the same time, we should be very cautious about dismissing what seems unpromising at first sight.

When digital cameras and mobile phones first appeared, they were more expensive and utterly inferior to standard cameras and landlines. But they didn’t stay that way. Conversely, Virtual Reality was seen as the way of the future; before long however, it was rotting on the gizmo scrapheap alongside Citizens Band radio and 8-track tape recorders.

Interestingly, while VR and CB didn’t make it to the promised land, they did drop significant hints at what lay ahead: for example, the world’s appetite for individual broadcasting (hello Twitter and blogging) plus on-the-move communication with friends and strangers alike (take a bow mobile phones and social networking).

So while specific technologies can fall short, general instincts can be right. The pattern seems to be this: a radically new technology appears and pushes the world in a direction that couldn’t have been predicted; conventional thinking initially dismisses it as just a novelty for kids (texting, online gaming and Facebook all spring to mind) before finally waking up to the possibilities.

Before beating ourselves up too badly for marketers’ inability to predict the shape of things to come with 100% accuracy, take a look at this article from 1968 outlining what the world of 2008 would be like.

Alternatively, marketers desperately try to keep ahead of the curve and bet the farm on a dead-end technology like WAP.

Ultimately the real future is impossible to know and luck is as important as insight. Maybe the best bet is simply to hedge one’s bets as Hugh Oram did in 1986’s The Advertising Book, when he said: ‘Will the written word be banished in less than a century….Or will the present vehicles for the printed word be transmuted into new variations not as yet invented?’

250mph cars and undersea holidays anyone?…

Back to the future?

The world doesn’t go backwards. After steam, we never went back to wind and horses. Calculators killed off abacuses.

So one well-known Dublin marketing professional* may have been a little off the mark in 2005 when he stated (in print): ‘I do believe that SMS and Internet will become boring to young people in the not too distant future. In ten years’ time I think people will probably go back to writing handwritten letters.’

There’s still five years to go before the deadline for this prediction. Perhaps Facebook’s 500,000,000 users will actually change their status radically in that time.

But I doubt it – and with that, I put down my quill…

*Get in touch and we might name names…

Des Columb, Creative Director, Dialogue