At a time when prospective clients are scarce, it’s easy to be lured into the belief that some new business is better than no new business. The self-talk among agency executives is that the account “will help keep the lights on” …
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What is the primary reason agencies don’t deliver more innovative solutions for their clients? Lack of talent? Lack of time? In my experience, the latter is much more of a factor than the former. Most successful agencies have some pretty smart people. What most agencies don’t have is a commitment to breakthrough work. They don’t have in place incentives that reward and encourage collaboration and innovative, interdisciplinary problem solving. In fact, most firms have clear disincentives for teamwork; which is a curious irony for an industry that sells “creativity” …
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You would like your employees – or team members – to work harder. To care more about the agency and its clients. To put in more time, show more effort, or do a better job. Agency managers reason that what’s needed is to motivate employees with the promise of more money – a chance to earn more if they’ll work more. Many agency CEOs embark on complicated bonus programs using formulas based on things like billable time and income targets …
Looking at agencies from the outside, a lot of business people presuppose that agencies must be hothouses of internal collaboration. Most of the time they’re not …
Because most agencies run their businesses based on hours and time, they have come to believe that what they’re selling – and what clients are buying – is efficiency. That’s nonsense. When you take your car to the shop, are you buying fast work or good work? You might answer both, but if you had to choose between one and the other, you would of necessity choose effectiveness. Efficiency without effectiveness is meaningless …
Two advertising professionals, Ken Starling and Julie Brighton, both worked 2,000 hours last year. Of those 2,000 hours, Ken billed 1,765 to client project work. Julie’s billable hours were 1,326. Which of these two executives was most productive?
There are two kinds of agencies: the Defenders and the Builders. The Defenders are the ones that are hunkering down, “taking care of business,” “getting the work done,” and “paying the bills.” They can’t be bothered by changes in business strategy because “now’s just not the time – don’t you know how hard we’re working just to survive?”
Because most agency leaders want to create an environment in which ideas can flourish, they go out of their way to grant as much freedom to their staff as possible. Most of the time this takes the form of a relaxed workplace, a relaxed dress code, and relaxed personnel policies …
Agencies, like most businesses in today’s economy, are going to great lengths to avoid risk. It’s easy to assume that the least risky path is to pull in your horns and keep plowing forward with your current business model. This is essentially the strategy of “just try harder.” But marketing communications firms are at the nexus of the Great Recession and the Great Upheaval of Mass Marketing. Continuing on the traditional agency path is by far the greatest risk you could possibly take …
Most of these financial reports are merely a summary of lagging indicators; they are like looking in the rear view mirror. They give you an understanding only of what has happened, but very little understanding of what is likely to happen in the months and years to come.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the use of these demeaning words is agency managers do not understand the worth of their people because they cannot be measured as exactly as accountants record assets and other tangible resources …
Your purpose is the agency’s reason for being. Don’t confuse purpose with the typical weak, soggy “mission statements” that hang unnoticed in the lobbies of countless companies across America. Most mission statements are a mélange of hyperbole that is neither unique nor motivating. How motivated would you be by meaningless “mission statements” like these?