The strange sensation of buying advice and ideas, rather than selling them.
I sell advice and ideas for a living. In fact I’ve worked in advertising and digital marketing agencies for a little over twenty five years.
But the death of my wife earlier this year turned this seller into a buyer. A buyer of advice. And a buyer of creativity and artisanship.
I am buying advice from my counsellor.
And I am buying art and craft from the mason who is going to carve my wife’s memorial stone.
The circumstances could hardly be worse but if I detach myself from the context these have been instructive experiences.
The two experiences have been very different but the underlying lesson from each is the same — don’t give your expertise away for nothing. This is a lesson that the advertising industry has never learned.
Buying advice by the hour.
The death of a spouse causes issues. Issues plural. And it is too simplistic to lump these all under the single, convenient heading of Grief. It is more complicated than that. I have engaged a counsellor to help me disentangle everything and hopefully, over time, gain some better sense of perspective on it all.
Successful counselling depends on trust and rapport as much as it does on the expertise and experience of the practitioner.
In this respect the counselling dynamic is similar to the client/agency relationships with which I am more familiar. Advertising agencies work hard to establish rapport with clients as a means to creating and sustaining productive, profitable, long term relationships. But often they (we) work too hard at this. We over-entertain. We mistake friendliness for friendship. We allow the provision of a valuable service to cross the line into servility.
My relationship with my counsellor is friendly but there is no pretense of friendship.There is rapport, it wouldn’t work if there weren’t, and I believe that she is genuinely concerned. But there is also a professional detachment that is palpable, particularly at the end of each session.
I expect and accept it now but the end of our first session came as a bit of a jolt. It was an introductory session in which I described my issues (plural) and in which she described the ways in which she might help. Time had flown by and I was just getting into my stride when my counsellor abruptly announced that my sixty minutes were up and deftly drew proceedings to a close. This included payment for the session.
The combined effect of precision time keeping and immediate payment is to leave you in no doubt as to the professional nature of the relationship. It also leaves you in no doubt as to the monetary value of the professional advice you have just been given.
In many respects that first meeting was not much different to taking a brief from one of my clients — them sharing their business issues and me making initial suggestions as to how these might be addressed. But, in stark contrast with my counselling experience, agencies rarely, if ever, bill so directly by the hour. We place great emphasis on recording the time spent on client business (too much emphasis in my opinion) but we don’t start a metaphorical chess clock at the beginning of each meeting. Maybe we should.
There are important differences, obviously, between the business of advertising and the business side of counselling.
With the best will in the world I don’t want my relationship with my counsellor to last any longer than it has to. Nor does she. I am a project. I am a one-off problem to be solved, hopefully. The better she is at her job the less chance she has of getting repeat business from me.
By contrast advertising business models tend to be built around ongoing retainer based relationships that hopefully last long enough to recoup the horrendous expense that is often incurred in pitching for and winning the client in the first place. There are greater incentives to “add value”.
We’re just not very good at distinguishing between added value and giving valuable expertise away for nothing.
Buying ideas on trust.
I recently bought a gorgeous, organic slab of green slate from a quarry in Cumbria.
About four months from now it will be in place in Aberdour cemetery as my wife’s memorial stone.
In the intervening period I need to settle on a design and get the stone carved. And I have commissioned a stone mason to undertake the work.
That commissioning process was interesting. Like a typical client appointing an advertising agency I was looking for a supplier that:
- Understands me and my requirements.
- Has the creativity and the empathy to add value to my brief in a way that pleasantly surprises me.
- Has the expertise to perfectly execute the finished product.
- I can trust to deliver on time and on a budget that I can afford.
However there were two respects in which I behaved completely unlike a typical client appointing an advertising agency:
- I only met with one potential supplier.
- I placed my commission based on credentials alone.
Maybe I was just lucky in my first meeting to find someone whose work I admire and with whom I got along straight away. But it was immediately apparent from a visit to her workshop, where she talked me through past commissions, showed me work in progress on current commissions and asked me intelligent questions about my own requirements, that here was someone whom I could trust to do a great job if the price were right.
Why is it that the vast majority of marketing communications clients can’t appoint on this basis? Why are evidence of great work for others, an intelligent discussion around their commercial issues, and good personal chemistry not sufficient basis on which to hire an agency?
A lack of confidence perhaps, not knowing what they want until they see it, and therefore demanding to see speculative creative ideas from multiple complicit agencies at great collective expense?
There is nothing complicit about my chosen stone mason. She was happy to talk in general terms about approaches to my brief but she was crystal clear about not getting into specifics until I had commissioned her.
Obviously I don’t get involved in the full design process until we are officially working together.
As with my counsellor, my stone mason sees me as a one-off project rather than a long term business relationship and so it is perhaps easier to adopt this principled stance. But there are plenty of agencies pitching speculative creative ideas to secure one off projects. They would do well to be more “masonic” in their approach.
Perhaps we in the advertising industry should remodel ourselves as idea masons and strategic counsellors and learn from advisers and artisans in other industries about how to value our expertise.
