Part 1: 5 Reasons why Clients Are So Dysfunctional (From Mashable)

This is a very insightful article worth sharing. Pardon to my readers who are doing their best to help with the relief efforts related to typhoon Ondoy. This is not meant to divert focus on the more important things we are facing in the Philippines.

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5 reasons why clients are so dysfunctional

By Sean X Cummings

September 29, 2009

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The agency side rewards talent, the client side rewards safety
• Client-side entrenched mediocrity feeds on itself
• The way most people rise up on the client side is by being adverse to risk

Next in Media Planning & Buying

I have been a vocal critic of the way most agencies are structured. However, many of the structural problems agencies face are a direct result of clients. Agencies have struggled for years to change the agency/client dynamic. They have actively experimented with ways to bring the client what they need, while still producing work that serves a higher purpose.

Chiat/Day and Crispin Porter + Bogusky have been changing the agency landscape structure for years by innovating, experimenting, tinkering, and attempting to produce the best work in a flawed environment. Unfortunately, most agencies are not that bold, and many of those ideas and structural changes have failed. This failure isn't because they weren't innovative, but like the nimbleness of an oil tanker, the clients' inability to change -- or the glacial pace at which they do change -- has forced many agencies to survive in a structure that produces neither the best work nor the most profit.

Such is the issue with service-based industries; they are only as good as who they service. In the end, it is the clients' fault. Here's why. There is a fundamental, structural, endemic issue that clients have that creates a system that prohibits change, how employees are rewarded, and how they are valued.

It is a system that serves to entrench mediocrity.

What most ad agencies do not realize -- because they routinely promote talent over personality and politics -- is that the way most people rise up on the client side is by being adverse to risk. Now, some clients reading this will protest, but I have watched and personally experienced this fact. The client is the equivalent of a scared 10-year-old boy who is worried that no one likes him. Don't dare make fun of that child, don't pick on that child, and whatever you do, do not question that child. Debate must happen in a "child safe" environment organized by the company.

For the client, from a myopic perspective, this keeps the company safe, and in a world of investors and public companies, safety and predictability rule over nimbleness and experimentation. However, there has been a profound societal shift over the last 10 years. The financial markets didn't understand that shift and it nearly destroyed them, and the old rules of organizational structure -- valid for decades -- have broken down.

I would posit -- and a number of economists would support it -- that the internet was one of the key fundamental shifts that changed the corporate model. True globalization was enabled by technology, accelerated by it, and created the system whereby those old structural models could be put to their fullest test. The result? It shattered them.

Look at the financial industry. The strongest people still standing are the technologists, the algorithm makers, the electronic automated trade creators, with multimillion dollar salaries. The game now is technology.

The company and client structure, which served the previous model so well for close to a century, no longer applies. But like that oil tanker, how do you turn it around? Very, very slowly. In fact, most companies would benefit from a whole-scale dismantling and reassembling.

I was amazingly dismayed that we did not allow General Motors to perish under its own weight. It is a model that cannot survive in the new structure. I would have been giddy to see GM implode completely. The amount of innovation that its collapse would have spawned would have ushered in a new era of transportation. But alas, we did not have the fortitude to do it.

In the end, there are five fundamental employee archetypes, and the interplay among them dictates the structure and function of a company -- and the way that agencies are forced to interact with clients. Org charts just provide a framework for structure, but it's the way that any given corporate culture responds to the various archetypes that dictates how a company really works. All five archetypes are needed for a company to be dynamic and grow, but unfortunately, two of these major archetypes are eviscerated by most corporate structures on the client side -- to their detriment.

• The Leader
• The Acquiescer
• The Follower
• The Saboteur
• The Control Problem

Watch out for the next installment of this interesting article...

Part 2: 5 Client Archetypes (from iMedia)

Here's the 2nd installment from the previous article. Read on.

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5 reasons why clients are so dysfunctional (part 2)

By Sean X Cummings

September 25, 2009

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The Leader is the person whom employees follow. This is not "the boss" (although this often can be the case), but rather it's the person whom individuals rally behind. It's the person who holds the compass for the individual, who gives that employee something to believe in.

Unfortunately, many people are leaderless. In the lack of such leadership, a large number of employees view their "leader" in an entirely different light: their paycheck. In larger client structures, that attitude is often tolerated. Those employees become The Acquiescers. The acquiescer will just go along with whatever someone wants because their heart is not in it. They are leaderless, because they don't really care who their leader is. Their job is their job, and not much more. They are the shy kid who often lights up when you invite them out to lunch. They are just happy to be included in the group. They don't care where you are going to eat. They don't really care about the project they are working on, either. They are just happy to have a project. It doesn't matter if they don't believe in it, they'll just do it. It's either all about the money, or about being included. You know them in your company.

But remember, your company needs them. Like worker bees, you get to point them in a direction and tell them "go," and then tell them "go" again, and again, and again. The problem is that you have to know where to point them and constantly monitor and correct them. They are a time-suck and do not produce great work, but they eventually get stuff done.

On the agency side, fewer people willingly work the crazy hours, cope with the insane work pressure, or put up with the abuse they get constantly without believing in someone they are following. Those who do survive the furnace of agency work are usually The Followers. The follower is actively engaged in the leader's direction, helps support their goals, helps reign in other employees, and moves the company forward. This is one of the reasons why agencies churn through new people who have this "idea" of what it's like to work in advertising: glamourous and fun. They quickly become disillusioned and drop out of the system. But the follower sticks with it. In this way, the agency system is vastly superior to that of the client. Agencies keep the top talent, and the detritus gets discarded. But it also means that there is a high turnover required to keep the ship moving. The disillusioned acquiescers need to constantly be replaced. Thank god for interns.

The client has an entirely different issue. On the client side, many of the systems are designed to support the employee, keep the employee, understand their concerns, help them grow. That's all nice and good, but when the employee views their leader as just the source of a paycheck, all the company is doing is keeping dead weight, and many companies over the years have been so stripped of actual talent that they are left with employees who are still there simply because they can't get a job at another company. On the client side, the follower is a more dangerous type, the "yes-man." The danger with "yes-man" followers is that they will often follow blindly.

The first three archetypes, Leader, Acquiescer, and Follower are easy to deal with. They are predictable, and clients love predictable. The client tends to tolerate the acquiescer, and promote the "yes-man" followers, while not fully understanding the interpersonal dynamics of their true leaders. What happens in that system is that the company becomes entrenched in "group-think" behavior. The reason for this is the evisceration of the other two archetypes.

The Saboteur attempts to co-opt the leader's position and take their followers in a new direction -- but change is often seen as a violent process within companies. If the saboteur is successful, he/she become the leader, but it is often this type of conflict that pushes companies to adapt to a new paradigm. The leader's ego is threatened, and the ego is a very powerful force that will do anything to ensure its own survival. Hence, saboteurs are usually the most vilified and celebrated people in the business world -- who often rescue companies from the brink. But if understood correctly, your saboteurs are also those who provide your safety net. They prevent waste and inefficiency from driving you down the wrong path for too long. Unfortunately, the saboteur is seen as a disruptive influence and dangerous in the workplace.

And then there is The Control Problem. The control problem is one of your most valuable assets, but clients rarely understand how to utilize them correctly. The agency world is filled with control problems -- those individuals who are not afraid to speak their mind. In truth, what they are actually doing -- and often don't realize it -- is they are speaking the thing that is on the top of everyone else's mind, but that others do not have the courage to voice. Most clients do not understand this, and they view their control problems as malcontents or rogue agents. But they are the people who point out the elephant in the room that everyone can see. They look at it, look at the group, look at the elephant again, and are confused as to why no one is saying anything.

The control problem is your ideation source. Sometimes their ideation makes them believe that all the ideas are theirs, and it feeds their ego. But if you can work with the control problems, and find a home for them, they become your barometer for good work, good business, and good deals. The control problems are those who envisioned the internet and left corporate America for start-ups because the system wasn't structured to handle them.

The control problem rarely gets promoted at the client side for one simple reason: negativity during reviews. And hence, this is why the promotion process on the client side is at the core of the issue.

Let me explain why.

Your control problem has often had several successful projects, and a few problematic ones, as well. Or they have issues that "upset" some people. When managers and directors get together during reviews, and they put forward a promotion for an employee, most employees believe they get the promotion for all the great work they did. What actually transpires is that unless someone in the meeting has an objection, the promotion goes through. Some of your best and brightest on the client side get sidelined due to a manager's personal ego. So what happens is that the "yes-man" followers -- who are not as bright or as skilled -- rise up through the corporate ranks. This is client politics at its finest. It is not about the positive aspects of someone's work, just the lack of anything negative. Thus, client-side entrenched mediocrity feeds on itself.

On the agency side, it is often the employee who develops the best ideas and creates the most value, regardless of how much of a colossal pain in the ass they are to deal with. And those of us who have worked on both the client and agency side understand the scope of that difference.

So that's the structural problem of why your client is broken and not able to adapt to the new mode of business that agencies are trying to push forward. The agency side rewards talent, the client-side rewards safety. So for the clients out there who believe they would love to work on the agency side, just ask yourselves: "When was the last time I was willing to risk losing my job to fix something that was wrong?"

That's OK, the world needs "yes-men" too. But try and give your agencies a break. The reason they push back is not because they don't respect you, but because the agency world is filled with control problems who are honestly only trying to create the best work they can for you.

Sean X Cummings runs his own marketing consultancy, sxc marketing.

Bad Client Briefs = Bad Marketing or Low ROI

I got this from Jake who got this from Rock. It's so telling about the state of agency-client relationships nowadays. It's like a SONA for marketing. Read on.

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Want More Out of Your Agencies? Write Better Briefs
Execs at Top Shops Say Clients Are Unclear About What's Expected, Leading to Lots of Wasted Time

Posted by Rupal Parekh on 08.17.09 @ 08:00 AM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Marketers trying to wring the most out of their ad budgets will find massive waste in a place they might not think to look: their own request-for-proposal and briefing process to agencies.

Casey Jones
That's the sobering takeaway from a survey last month of more than 250 senior executives at a variety of top marketing agencies. Agency executives reported that at least 30% of their staffs' time is ineffective or wasted due to poor communication from their clients. For large marketers, that could mean millions of dollars in needless agency fees and misguided ad campaigns.

It's an insight also gleaned from the experience of the person who commissioned survey: Casey Jones, former VP-global marketing at Dell, who now runs Jones & Bonevac, a marketing consultancy that counts among its clients Microsoft and Walmart. Mr. Jones left Dell in late 2008 after an eventful two-year tenure in which he drove the creation of Enfatico, an agency intended to be a stand-alone Dell shop that became the target of widespread industry criticism. Enfatico was folded into WPP's Y&R Brands division this year.

Mr. Jones said his firm's first study was spurred by observations from his time at the computer maker. "A lack of commitment to tight and coherent input to the agency was a major contributing factor to the struggles between Dell and WPP," he said, adding that that some of his marketing peers at Dell assumed having a single agency partner made it less important to provide formal instruction to the agency.

The study was fielded by Emeryville, Calif.-based Greenberg Brand Strategy, and included feedback from shop such as JWT, Razorfish, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Martin Agency, MediaVest, BBDO, Publicis, Deutsch, Carat, Interbrand and Wunderman. More than half (54%) of respondents said fewer than 40% of client briefs give them clear indication of what's expected from their agencies. Of that number, 30% said only 1% to 10% of briefs provide clear performance expectations.

Where agencies ranked the quality of client input highest was in identifying budget parameters and communicating the desired image and brand positioning. Client briefs were ranked poorest when it came to providing competitive information and describing how a client's offering ranked in the competitive landscape.

Another problem agency execs cited is that the briefs are constantly changing: 75% of respondents reported that client briefs go through an average of up to five significant revisions after a project has begun. Eight percent of respondents said they've seen briefs go through a whopping 45 or more iterations.

The changes might have something to do with agencies' belief that there are too many cooks stirring the marketing pot. They said ideally fewer than three client decision makers should provide an agency with direction during the course of a project, compared with a current average of more than five.

Without clear direction, many agencies say they wind up devising much of their clients' briefs themselves. Wrote one agency exec who responded to the survey: "The client rarely has a fleshed-out brief when we first begin to discuss a project. At [name withheld] the routine has been for the agency to actually write the client input or project input brief for them. I am not kidding!"

According to Mr. Jones, agencies' view that clients provide them with inadequate success metrics could lead to lackluster work and questionable payment practices -- particularly as giant marketers such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola lead the way to performance-based compensation agreements. "How can the corporation fairly compensate an agency for the impact of work on an assignment for which they were poorly briefed?" he asked.

For copies of the survey, contact Jones & Bonevac .

Why Do Clients Think This Way?

The Client-Agency relationship has always baffled me. When I started in advertising, I was taught that the best relationship between Client and Agency is one of partnership -- The Agency cares about hte Client's business so he helps it to grow, at the same time, the Client helps the Agency to grow as a business. Mutually-beneficial. And so, we at the Agency always strive to bring out the best in this relationship, protect it to death and make some concessions along the way.

But it doesn't work out that way a lot of times. Despite the value the Agency brings to the Client, some Clients take the relationship and turn it around to pull a fast one on the Agency. All because they're the ones holding the money and will get away with it if they can.

Check this video out, purportedly created by Leo Burnett according to Nadja, and see the similarities with how clients negotiate payment for services they've already received or are about to receive:

Why do some clients think this way? Is it because they don't have scrupules to begin with? Is it because they're stupid enough to think this way? Or is it because we let them get away with it?

I'd like to know what you think. Meanwhile, I need to rush to another client meeting. :P

How Very Familiar...

It's interesting how work conversations can be so similar even across the other side of the globe.  Take this quote from my latest newsletter from AdAge Digital (full article here):

CMO: We want you to get bloggers to write about our site and generate 250K monthly visits through their posts.

Agency: What is your demographic? What is your goal for that traffic?

CMO: We want them to spend money on the site, and we want to see how much traffic social media can generate.

Agency: What support will you give to your "experiment"? Does your budget include search engine optimization? PR? Google advertising? Company blog? Advertising on targeted blogs? A forum? An interactive website? Content sponsorship? Sponsored blog posts? Videos? Print advertising? Email campaign?

CMO: Those cost money. We don't have budget available for any of those.

Agency: Who on your staff has this campaign as his/her full-time responsibility?

CMO: Nobody.

Agency: What other marketing tools can we employ? Can we create a blog? Facebook page? Flickr group? YouTube videos? Twitter? Can we participate in social networks including Friend Feed and other online communities?

CMO: Our legal department says we cannot allow people to write on the wall on our Facebook pages. We can't participate in Twitter because everything we say has to pass through legal first and approval can take several days. So any site where we are expected to engage in public conversation would be out.

I get that a lot not only from clients, but sometimes from the people I work with in the agency. It's sad how everybody's talking digital, but only a few want to step up and put their budgets and their guts on the line. These are the times I'd love to say, "Look, if you don't want to risk it, then this conversation is over." Sometime I do.