It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written a Friday mail, although that’s more a reflection of how busy we have been than a failure to keep an interested eye on the web. (If you’re ever interested in checking the sites that we deem as interesting, without having to read my diatribe there is a Hodes delicious site that we use to store them all.)
Anyway, given yesterday’s Boo! session, I thought that I’d use this as an opportunity to comment on the themes that continuously cropped up. I’ve chosen four, but if anyone has any thoughts around this (or disagrees) please respond. I’d love to know your thoughts. Oh, and as the World Cup starts today, I’ve attached a link to a lovely wall chart discovered by one of our digital team. Great stuff.
Enjoy
1. Our clients are disconnected. By connecting the dots, we can deliver a much more compelling proposition.
One of the things that surprised me was how many of the agencies were already working with our clients in some way shape or form: Mars, KPMG, Royal Mail, Novartis, the Ministry of Justice, ABB and GSK were mentioned amongst others. We saw from Martin at the Edge some great examples of work that was delivered for an internal audience, at not insignificant sums, which could so easily be re-used for RecAd. And we saw from Louis and Shaun at Skive how an open and intelligent sense of collaboration amongst agencies led to a much more engaging and long lasting campaign.
As the business environment is forcing firms to become more intelligent in the way they structure and manage themselves, we will see a much greater degree of intra-department collaboration (or even mergers) and I think it is incumbent on us, as a client’s agency, to look at the work that is being done by other divisions within our clients and to try to bring them together. Not only will it lead to a better proposition, but it will also help us get access to larger budgets, whilst reducing the overall cost to the client’s business. A win-win all round…
2. Storytelling is the new black
All the examples of great, award-winning work told a story, reflecting truisms in a way that was realistic, unpatronising and unashamedly emotive. I know that we won’t always have the budget that the agencies who talked to us managed to procure, but in each case the client bought into an ideal that they absolutely believed in and because of that, worked hard to find the additional budget. It was a shared journey and the most rewarding journeys are always difficult (ask Helen to talk to you about Ernest Shackleton…)
For those of you who tell me that “simply isn’t possible in RecAd” I’ll push back with Herts Police. Or STA. Or BNY Mellon. Or KPMG. Yes, it puts a lot of pressure on the creative teams to inspire, but got me to thinking that sometimes we should unleash our creatives a little bit more. For example, when answering a brief, why not have a couple of routes that sit within the brand guidelines and then one that is pure creative vision? OK, sometimes it can come unstuck, or be a bit weird, but I’ve sat in meetings where the agency has had to present some very off the wall concepts – try thinking about Rigden explaining to Barclays how the Futtockmeister would help them procure more candidates, or an incredibly senior suit in advertising trying to explain how urinating rock star puppets would increase the sales of Opel Corsas throughout Europe. Clients buy creativity and when you get it right, they have come away enthused and inspired about what we are trying to do.
3. There is no compromise for craftsmanship
There is a lot of talk about UGC (user-generated content) and the impact it is having on design agencies and we are already seeing the advent of user-generated advertising (think of the Doritos King of Ads, for example). However, one of the things that came across yesterday was the chasm of difference between work done by individuals and work done by skilled agencies. In some cases the nuances were subtle, in other cases they were extraordinary. In all cases you could tell the difference.
And I think that in this world of constant cost reduction, clients often opt for the easy option and try to short-cut or compromise the craftsmanship for short term gain. And agencies often compromise. How often have you sent out a document which contains typos, looks like it was rushed, is unclear or messy? We’ve all done it. (yes, Mr Burton, that’s an absolute admission that I’m not perfect…) But I think that we should be more critical about the work we give to clients – whether it be an email, a scope of work, a creative rationale or a website. It’s strange how doing the right thing is often the harder sell and I just think we ought to push back more. To ourselves as well as clients.
4. There is no substitute for experimentation
One of the things I try to do with Friday mails is to get you to try different things. We talked this morning about Yammer. We talked yesterday about Augmented Reality. Some of these are fads. Some won’t go anywhere. And some will be used in ways that are completely different from the way they were intended. But until you try them properly, and think about them for yourself, rather than subscribing to populist opinion, you’ll never know.
One of the most interesting examples of this recently was someone I talk to on the train. We were arguing about Twitter – his view was that it was “utter cr@p.” Despite this, he was signed up and used it every day. Why? He found the Twitter sites and of the clients he was working for and used them to get a deeper insight into the client’s psyche – what they liked and disliked, how they were feeling on a particular day and so on. A little bit subversive, but an intelligent use of freely available information. In these uber competitive time, every little helps…