Just Say No
What the agency business can learn from Nancy Reagan.
When you get right down to it, agencies are in the business of making things.
Latest and greatest things.
Clever, viral things.
Innovative technology things.
Award-winning things.
Cheap but effective things.
As you might expect, the shape and form of these things — be they print ads, radio spots, videos, logos, Facebook posts, brand strategies, apps, websites or whatever — is heavily influenced by the category of the agency (ad, media, digital, etc.).
But those categories don’t necessarily limit what sort of things that a given agency can potentially create.
That’s because agencies are basically collections of talented, creative, and resourceful people. And if they put their minds to it, they have the ability to create (or at least attempt to create) pretty much anything.
The true limiting factor, then, is not really the category of agency. It’s what clients are willing to pay for.
Demand drives supply. And in the agency world, demand drives many agencies to say YES first, and figure it out later.
Dentist or Mechanic?
For someone outside the agency business, this might sound like an odd situation. Imagine, for example, that you have a dental appointment but arrive late because your car has broken down. And as you explain this to your dentist, imagine that they try to “cross-sell” you by offering to fix your car as well as your teeth.
It’s not a likely scenario — unless your dentist secretly yearns to leave dentistry behind and flush radiators for a living. But the equivalent scenario happens every day in the agency world.
A concrete example: I haven’t met a single “traditional” or non-digital agency who hasn’t built at least one website for a client. The reason is simple: clients demand websites, so most agencies supply them.
A shaky client-agency dilemma
Over the past 5 years, in large part due to the shifting of dollars from traditional marketing budgets to digital, pretty much all agencies have adjusted their service offerings. And today:
- Clients are asking for more types of things.
- Agencies can now offer a wider range of things to create. And many of them tend to overstate their capabilities to capture more business, which makes it difficult for clients to evaluate what they’re actually good at.
And that’s the crux of the challenge in the the agency business today – agencies spend too much time (and waste too much money) just making things clients ask for, and not doing what they are actually good at doing.
Who’s To Blame: Client or agency?
Blame it on the Clients
If all of this starts with client demand, are clients to blame?
Not necessarily.
Clients hire agencies to do things they can’t do themselves.
But today, more than ever, clients want accountability and control over the process. Some client briefs are overly prescriptive. Budgets tend to be tightly locked. Features and tactics are often determined ahead of time. As a result, the “art” of marketing can end up feeling more like a request to color within the lines.
This puts agencies on the defensive. They do the work because it pays. And because they know that if they don’t, they can be easily replaced.
And in the face of this uncertainty, every new opportunity — no matter how ill-suited the agency may be to take it on — represents a potential new foothold on increasingly shaky ground. It’s a temptation that’s hard to resist.
Blame it on the Agencies
But, of course, agencies aren’t blameless either. And I happen to know, from personal experience, exactly where the issue lies.
It all starts in that first pitch…
The practice of going after everything truly starts in an agency’s approach to new business.
Most agencies will go out of their way, especially during a pitch, to tweak case studies or highlight employees with particular “industry expertise” in order to tick the percieved boxes.
I know this because I’ve been that guy before. I’ve written those case studies. I’ve sent out those all-staff emails asking for client names that can highlight the agency’s experience in a particular niche.
I’ve also been the account guy who has had to deliver a capability-stretching client brief to a team, which resulted in a room full of expressions like this:
Beyond Blame
So what have we established? The misalignment of clients and agencies of their expectations and fit, is very real. And the blame belongs on both sides of the client-agency divide.
But here’s the important thing: it doesn’t have to be this way.
I firmly believe that every client and agency still aspires to great work. And no one wants to be taken for a ride. In other words, it’s in everyone’s interest to fix this. So where do we start?
What Clients Can Do
1/Craft Better Briefs
If you ask any agency person, they’ll tell you this is a good place to start. Better briefs mean better work.
Some briefs have to be more prescriptive than others — that’s just the nature of our business. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be space for the agency to alter, sharpen and, ultimately, improve the brief.
To return to my earlier dental analogy, an overly prescriptive brief is kind of like a patient walking into a dentist’s office with a tooth ache and asking for a root canal. The patient might be right, but the dentist still reserves the right to poke around (with that little pointy thing they all use) and determine the best way forward. The result is better for everyone.
So, if you’re a marketer looking to improve the way you work with your agencies, allow me to point you to an excellent article that sums up nicely how marketers can better contribute to the creative process though stronger briefs and an open mind.
2/Invest in Setting the Stage
In this era of specialization and complexity, creating an environment in which good work is more likely to happen is absolutely crucial. My colleague, John. describes what this looks like in elegant detail here.
What Agencies Can Do
1/ABQ: Always Be Qualifying
One of my strongest skills (I hope), is figuring out whether there is a fit between a client and our agency. I work hard to determine if a potential relationship will be mutually beneficial, right up front, in the new business process.
Specifically, I try to determine:
- How urgent is the need? — Why are they doing this now?
- How open are they in receiving help to solve the root challenge? — What has lead them to write the brief and how open are they to attacking the core challenge with outside help?
- Who else has received the brief? — What types of agencies have they included in the process?
- How does this work fit into their world? — How do they see the project fitting into their teams and other agency relationships?
- How important is this initiative to the organization? — Who is the project owner and what’s their level of involvement?
- How are they funding this initiative? — How far are they willing to invest in a solution to their challenge? And, yes, do they actually have enough budget to make a difference?
Sometimes, potential clients issue RFP’s through a regimented procurement system which limits your ability to ask questions to a single email before a specific deadline. So I ask a lot of questions. ^-^
I would caution clients to be wary of the opposite. When the agency asks very few questions, it likely means they believe they have the exact solution in mind already. Coincidentally, it’s exactly the service they provide.
2/Learn to Say “NO”
Every agency has an opportunity to evaluate whether a project is right for them. Many employ a criteria that considers “brand”, “coolness-factor”, and of course “budget”.
All these things matter. But there is another factor — the “business” — that weighs heavily into the discussion, often raising questions like:
“What about our quarterly growth targets?”
“What about all the resources we have on bench?”
“If we don’t go for this, what if our competitor wins it and steals our client?”
These factors, driven down from our bosses or bosses’ bosses, make it hard to say NO. In fact, when the giant spreadsheet in the sky drops a heavy boot on your throat, it can feel like there isn’t really an opportunity to say anything but YES.
These decisions aren’t easy. In theory, you can use your discretion. But the commanding voice of the business tends to win out. And so you compromise. You chase after the pitch and you take the project anyway.
I’ve been there. It looks a lot like this:
But let’s be honest. This road often leads to mediocre work. Or worse yet, the work satisfies the client and actually ends up being quite profitable. So you do it again. And again. Ignoring the fact that nobody in the office is excited about it or interested in doing it. And soon, your agency changes. It becomes what it is paid to be.
When this happens, those smart, talented, resourceful teams that actually make up the business usually wind up spending way too much time doing the stuff that pays the bills:
- The banner ads no one clicks on
- The video no one views
- The app that never gets downloaded
- The pointless Facebook page
If they do enough of these projects during the course of the year, they’re bound to question their career choice.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Take a moment to listen to the wise words of Nancy Reagan and Just Say NO.
And this brings me to my final piece of advice.
3/Don’t Think Like a Hammer
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow
The flip-side of trying to stretch your agency’s capabilities too far is just as troublesome and just as common. I’m referring to the tendency to see the solution to every problem as (what a coincidence!) an exact match for the thing your agency does best of all.
This impulse comes from the same fear and bottom-line focus that leads agencies to swing too wide. And it almost never leads to good things.
A better approach (though difficult, I admit) is to put yourself in the client’s shoes and be ruthlessly honest about what they really, truly need. And then to be open to referring others who have the right hammer for the right problem.
When we started Modern Craft, we promised ourselves we would choose idealism over pragmatism as much as possible. This is a hard thing to strive for. Especially as a young company.
This past year alone, potential clients have come to us with opportunities to help them with all kinds of things: websites, research projects, mobile app development, ecommerce builds, logo design and branding, campaigns, social media playbooks, community management, and (thankfully) sometimes even some of the strategic, stage-setting work we’re designed to do. We look for opportunities that we will enjoy solving and are uniquely qualified to solve. And we remind ourselves constantly that what we do is not the right solution to every problem.
Our policy is to focus on our core competency and try to resist the temptation to go after the rest — unless “the rest” stems from and extends our core and there’s real value in our team getting involved.
We have not been perfect in our pursuit of focus, but we’re trying. We debate each new business opportunity as a team. Sometimes we’re all aligned, sometimes we disagree. But it’s important that if we do decide to go for it the work sits somewhere in the middle of those two concentric circles, even if it’s a little more towards the edges.
This means turning away opportunities. This means saying “NO”.
From Policy To Practice
So what does this look like in the real world? During initial meetings with potential clients, I’ve been asked a specific question more than once:
THEM: “How do you see us working with you”?
Having learned from those Jerry Maguire moments, my response is always the same.
ME: “I’m not sure. I’m not here to sell you something. Let’s just talk about what you’re trying to solve and we can figure out if we might be the right fit for each other.”
I have to say — regardless of whether they hire us or not, that moment always feels great.
