The special relationship

The relationship between marketers and advertising agencies is an odd one. In their dealings with other agency suppliers – in media, data, digital, design, branding, trade marketing, research – marketers tend to be briskly practical and professional, taking care to be specific about what’s expected and responding with precision when it’s not delivered.

With ad agencies – or ‘creative agencies’ as they like to be called – it’s a different and more emotional kind of interaction. On the one hand, it’s admiring, with the recognition that this is where ‘talent’ resides made obvious in genuflecting commentary: “Thanks for bringing your big brain” as I heard recently from a senior marketer when an advertising planner turned up to spare half an hour in a meeting.

But there’s another note in there too, and one that feels uneasy. It’s not far short of fear, as marketers fret and lose sleep over how to get the best from the agency team. Some take inordinate care to frame requirements with polite circumspection, because they do not wish to demotivate or upset this particular agency supplier.

And even that term – supplier – feels awry, demeaning, not to be used openly unless you want to be on the receiving end of the advertising equivalent of the chef spitting in your soup.

What is it that propels this emotional arc from fawning to fearful in otherwise seasoned and savvy marketing professionals? Is it that the advertising discipline is known for its tantrums and expletives? Is it the inclusion in the mix of volatile creative types, who might react to sensible feedback as though they were the lead singer in a band? Is it the stripped-back offices with their intimidating walls of awards that puts marketers off their stride?

I think the truth is a bit more positive than that. Deep down, marketers recognise that the working partnership between brand owner and advertising agency constitutes a special relationship. While the outputs of other disciplines, if all goes right, will make incremental differences to results – a sharper insight, more precise targeting, a better position on shelf – there’s something about advertising that can power a breakthrough surge in market share and grab hold of a chunk of popular culture in the process.

It’s not that advertising achieves this very often – but still today, even with the fragmentation of the media environment, it retains the promise of that explosive power. Advertising is where the stakes are raised and marketers sense that.

And perhaps they are subconsciously aware of the great and enduring examples of this special relationship of the past, where teams on either side of the marketer-agency divide built mighty brands with massive shares across decades of mutual prosperity. Volkswagen and Doyle Dane Bernbach. Nike and Wieden+Kennedy. McDonald’s and Leo Burnett. Audi and Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Dove and Ogilvy. Compare the Market and VCCP.

What is the surest way for today’s marketers to earn a place on that list? There are multilayered answers to that but here is a place to start: recognise what makes advertising difficult and work back from there.

When you ask the question – ‘How can we create a great ad campaign?’ – what you have in front of you is what the psychologist Adam Mastroianni calls a “poorly defined problem” (sometimes also known as ‘ill-defined complex problem’, but I prefer Mastroianni’s terminology and description, here).

The problem with poorly defined problems is that they are much harder to solve than the well-defined kind, because there is fuzziness everywhere. In fact, you don’t really ‘solve’ them at all, because there is never just one right answer.

These problems belong alongside others in life like ‘How do you host a great party?’, or ‘How can we be better parents?’. And they are nothing like the other problems you might want to be solving in your marketing mix like ‘What is the size of prize if we use our bespoke econometrics data to target this discrete attitudinal segment?’. That problem may be hard, but it bears all the characteristics of a well-defined problem: clear boundaries, stable relationships between the variables and methodological replicability.

So, here’s the point. Given the fuzziness that already exists in the very act of striving to create great advertising, you really do not want to be adding to it. Briefs should be clear, mandatories few, and marketing teams tightknit and constant.

And those teams should be ready to play a part in confronting the chaos, not just sit there waiting for the ‘magic’ to happen. Perhaps more marketers should take a cue from the great former Unilever chief marketing officer Simon Clift, whose activist approach to advertising creation, with the invention of techniques like researching casting and music, made such a contribution to the work of BBH on Impulse and Lynx.

And on the agency side, too, there is a simple way to help unleash the latent power of the special relationship – one that comes down to semantics. Agency people tend to refer to ‘clients’ even when talking more generally, not just about their own, as in: “Clients need to be braver to achieve breakthrough growth.”

This is a transactional term that undervalues the input of the team on the other side, as though their defining role is to come across the threshold with the business and the fees. Far better to use the term ‘marketers’, with its respect, its accuracy and its recognition of complementary expertise.

A relationship of equals, bent on tilting at the conundrum of originating something amazing in this most fluid of creative disciplines, is a more promising foundation for success than one characterised by obsequious nervousness. Nobody needs a big brain to be clear about that.