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A recent post by Marc Brownstein in the Ad Age blog “Small Agency Diary” lamented client bad behavior as on the rise. He points to growing trends of: slow invoice payments, contentious fee negotiations, accounting trivia and breakneck turnaround w/out regard for quality or creativity, most tied to the pressures of difficult economic times.
Dark-side agency behavior is on the rise, as well.
I’ve worked both sides. Now, as a corporate marketing buyer of creative services in the high-tech segment, I see questionable agency behavior all the more remarkable at a time when client budgets are tight, project volume is being cut and new social media challenges are remaking the communications landscape. Four rants below that I hear most when I and my Client-Side friends share stories:
- Mismanaged conference calls. Nothing wrong with calls rather than F2F so long as the Agency team is prepared and the call mechanics work. More and more time is wasted as Agencies struggle to call logistics/mechanics right. Web-sharing tool glitches, bridge numbers wrong or over-lapping, documents not circulated prior to a call, etc. I figure for every 60 min call, 10-15 min is lost. Annualize this for 3 calls/week, “x” people at “y” billable, and quickly there’s $50K in lost Client/Agency time.
- Intentionally dumb bids. I expect Agencies to be smarter than I am, in their respective areas of core competency. A disturbing practice I’m noticing now is for Agencies to “bid the letter of the SOW” and stop. Used to be, project bids were a means to explore production alternatives to arrive at the best value solution. Worse, some firms seem to be excluding SOW elements to achieve artificially low pricing apparently hoping the client won’t catch it until the job is awarded.
- Contractors rather than experienced staff. I get the need to control staff costs. The freelance community has been/always should be a way Agencies can offer specialty talent and respond to unexpected project volume. But using revolving contract writers and designers in an on-going relationship results in lost content continuity, less opportunity for the trust and chemistry that can lead to real innovation.
- Bait and switch account teams. OK, so this isn’t a new problem. The best and brightest always pitch, and the day-to-day is then handed off to others. Execution teams these days, however, seem progressively more junior, much less experienced than ever before. Mistakes are caught later, clear disconnects w/previous campaigns/client projects, and workflows easily disrupted by a frequent need for management escalation. Another aspect of the bait/switch concerns pitching a set of capabilities outside the Agency’s core skill set (then scrambling to hire/freelance the resources).
Of course, there’s more. End game, Agencies need to be the professionals they purport to be. Clients, of course, need to do the same. It’s about respect, about building trust… about committing to getting quality work for a fair price under reasonable deadline. Do the right thing… listen, then dialogue. If one side or the other isn’t willing, move on and save the grief.
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06/18/2009 at 7:57 am
While on one point I would have to say “true dat” on another point, one has to consider the cause and effect.
As one of those pesky agency people (though over half of my career has been on the client side) I shamefully have to concur with your observations, and I think they are happening for three reasons:
• The primary reason is business immaturity. There are simply more inexperienced people in the mix. Like virtually every other business segment, the days of career “matriculation” are essentially gone. Consider the fact that small to medium businesses employ the largest number of workers (in the U.S.) today. No longer are most employees beginning their careers at a big agency or large industrial conglomerate that invest in professional and career development. It was not unusual for an employee to spend 10-15 years working their way up through an organization, honing their craft along the way. That is a distant memory. Pull a few job postings (if you can find any☺) and you will see that most senior positions still request 7-10 years experience on average. Now consider the actual experience many of those recruits have had in the last decade. Here in the valley, many of them worked for a small company (less than 200 employees), received no actual training, and a supervisor who was likely only 2-3 years their senior in terms of business experience. I could go on, but you get the point. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
• There are still far too many agencies today. Let’s face it; the barriers to entry are virtually non-existent. $50 gets you a url and website, and thanks to VoIP, as little as $40/year and you have a phone (yeah I know most only have a cell phone, just making a point). Certainly not all, or even most agencies germinate this way, but when the bottom starts that far down, the aggregate number of lower quality options will be larger. I can’t tell you how many times we pitch against “firms” that are really only 1 or 2 people and a cadre of contractors. LinkedIn becomes a nice research tool. In many cases, people are slow to update their profiles, so its not perfect, but I have found you can weed out the pretenders in some cases, by checking out their profiles there. We ran into one situation, where the entire staff a firm claimed (17 people) had left over two years ago and were contractors, moonlighting while working another job, and more. Just amazing.
• Lastly, I do think clients share much of the blame. By not accepting reasonable schedules, pushing their budgets to unrealistic levels and they too having inexperienced people in the center of the storm, it exacerbates the problem. Expecting A-level results and offering D-level resources just does not work. Any true relationship is a two-sided affair and one has to look at both sides of the equation. Smart client buyers tend to weed out the bad agencies and recognize that over a fairly short period of time a decent firm will cost less and work harder if treated fairly. Clearly, this is a topic itself…
06/18/2009 at 8:10 am
…reminds me of a decades-old lament (updated here for the digital generation): “Anyone w/a pencil is a copy writer, anyone with a set of crayons is a designer, anyone w/a Macbook is an agency…”. And I agree, clients must own their share of this disturbing trend. I do remain somewhat baffled that, at a time when business is down, Agencies are not spending time internally trying to educate, train-up their teams w/r/t the client approach. Old school, perhaps – but relationships/respect trump most everything else.
06/18/2009 at 4:06 pm
We are a web agency of 3, but we have been working with some of our clients for 8 years.
So I wouldn’t say that size of agency is the issue, I just think a major reason is basic service levels.
We care about our clients becuase we deal with them day in and day out, and ultimately if we dont care, they will walk and we will get no cash…so that is the key really.
Staff in larger agencies don’t really care or have the same passion as say an owner/director. They can walk and flick between agencies.
Here in the UK, we come across stories all the time from our potential clients of how badly they have been treated by the existing agency, and it still amazes me.
We all have our moans about clients, thats what keeps you on your toes, changing briefs, late content etc…its the clients prerogative, but clients are our bread and butter, so treat them with kid gloves and work on the relationship…Its just good business sense…
it is down to customer
06/20/2009 at 2:30 pm
Great post! I’ve seen both sides of the behavior. Both sides can get ugly. In tough times like this high efficiency is key. Positive behavior and excellent communication is key.
- Kevin