Being in sync with client expectations

Ad agencies need to reimagine their role to be able to add value to clients

Clients live by business performance matrixes: growth in secondary sales off takes, number of bills , occupancy rate, et al. The client’s ‘partner-in-growth’, the advertising agency ignores most of the above and comes to the table with solutions that promise awareness, affinity and awesome-ness!
 
With the clients’ need for solutions for growth remaining unfulfilled she starts reaching out to business consulting agencies. For their rational, rigor driven, objective solutions that will ‘move-the-needle’ and pays them top dollar for it. Business consulting agencies seeing the slide in the business value chain, ad agencies are now promising creative as well. Claiming that since they know the problem the best and having arrived at the strategy that ‘works’, it is but natural that they would be able to create the best consumer stimulus as well! All this leading to a devaluation of the ad agency making them into creative vendors and elevating the business consultants into ‘true’ partners.

 
Ad agencies were not this ‘soft’ always: “If you haven’t done 100 hours of consumer work and or market visits you can’t speak in the meeting”. This ‘threat’ ensured that the agency strove to get a primary understanding of the nuts and bolts that drives sales: be it the trade, the margins, the promotions or the product itself.
 

Somewhere along the way, the ad agency got comfortable and complacent in its ability to arrive at emotional, instinct driven, subjective solutions. Worse still, these creative flashes did a great job of hiding the absence of business understanding.
 
To arrive at a common motivator consumers started being painted with broad homogenic strokes, geographic differences were ignored, cultural nuances glossed over with impunity and deadline and revenues become the only Gods the ad agency paid obeisance to!

 
The ad agency started believing that it deserved the platitudes when the brand sold well and none of the blame when the brand tanked. The latter was explained away with trade issues, competitive stress and wrong decisions made by the client!
 
With an ever reducing lack of talent at all levels, with three pitches and two briefs every 10 days, no one in the ad agency has the time to go out into the dirt and grime and understand what is going right or left? And when time is made available, inclination falters. In all this darkness and abysmal-ness there are flickers of light. Few agencies still strive to go into the small towns, the smaller lanes to the smallest houses to meet and understand the real consumer motivators and barriers. Some who insist in attending the trade launch programs to gauge the mood of the people who will close the loop on the sale. Some who on meeting the client first enquire, discuss and understand the market matrixes: the issues beyond the symptoms before positing a solution to fix it.

 
Unfortunately, these true-blue-ers are the minority and they can do only so much to deflect the baying and hungry-for-more business consultant agencies. We in the advertising business need to up our game and be where the action is, question the actual impact of the solutions we promote, add a business task slide in our pretty decks and not rest content in just tinkering around with the communication task slide!