The Kaiser Edition

This is Waluigi. He belongs to Nintendo.

This is the second post in the series “if I were a client today”. Yesterday I told you what we were like as a client, and how we set up the Internet department. As I mentioned yesterday the internet department at the company where I used to work us in the Product Research and Development department and that both the company and the core team were focused, excited and knew exactly what they wanted to do. If you haven’t read it (and the comments) you should, otherwise the stuff that follows makes little sense.

This series was sparked by a little story I heard and by this post by Ben. The basic premise of the series is that regardless of all the things we’ve learnt over the last six years and regardless of the advances in technology nothing has changed and that agencies still pay lip service to all things “digital”.

Ben doesn’t work for an agency, he’s a founding partner of a design company called “The Design Conspiracy” and his post helps us move on from where we left off yesterday. In it he says:

There’s a lot of talk about Web 2.0, to the extent that companies ring up and say, “Hello, can we have some Web 2.0 please?” We get asked a lot for “X, Y and Z and can it have a social networking element?”

Because of the way we set up our department, with a core team of who really knew what they were doing, we could never have made a call like that. This may surprise you but we did actually feel obliged to be the best client we possibly could. When we finally went to market to find an agency we wanted to be ready.

But what we didn’t know was that it would protect us during a two months phase where I slowly but surely lost my faith and my respect for an industry that had previously been my professional home. You see, Ben quotes a client, but you could take that query, turn it on its head and it would have been pretty much the kind of call we, as the client would get, from agencies.

As soon as the news broke that we were planning something and looking for an agency that’s when the trouble started.

Now Paul Colman used to be a client too, and way back in May 2006, whilst still at Yakult he covered this and put together a rather useful list for hopeless Business Development Directors. Read it.

If you’ve set up your department as I outlined yesterday and you’re completely clear about what you want to do than you probably have a pretty idea of the kind of agency you want to work for. We’d drawn up a list of about 10 possible agencies which we reduced to 4 before finally approaching them. That’s the kind of stuff clients do. Getting on that list is hard and if you’re going to cold call a client (have you read Paul’s list – no? read it) then you should at least be interesting and use language that the client can understand.

I think if we had not taken the time to sort ourselves out before looking at agencies, the “cold call period” would have become hell. It would have confused us, caused distraction within the team and probably bloated the agency list. As it was, we were, independent if each other, in a position to field the calls.

Not one agency asked the simple question, “is there a list and how do we get on it?” and when we asked the caller why we should consider working with them (it’s a simple question – differentiate yourself from the competition please) we received the following responses:

1. We have global reach – we are a member of network X, Y or Z
2. We’ve got the best technical team in the business (we’re good at programming stuff)
3. We did campaign X,Y or Z (99% of which was above the line)
4. We’re cool, bright, young smart and fast.
5. We’re good at flash (I’m not lying – 2 of the industry’s biggest names actually said this to me).
6. We have Mr (add name, rank and knighthood) on our board of directors.
7. Digital now makes up x% of are annual turnover – so you can see how seriously we take the online world
8. We can make your brand “top of mind”, with “sticky” components that will encourage “sneezers” to spread “idea viruses” thus creating “communication ripples” throughout a community that we would manage and control (you know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourself).
9. What’s your media spend?

There was more, but I’m sure you get the picture. Sound familiar? Not happening today? Well have a look at this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG-6ebJc93o&eurl=http://verge.ogilvy.co.uk/frontPage.do?nextDiaryId=1]

Nothing has changed. Web 2.0 is nothing more than an upgrade in terminology. You see, what was apparent back in 2001 was that most (in fact nearly all agencies) weren’t sure what they were going to do with digital. They didn’t understand what it was, what you could do with it, how you excite and engage people with it and, more importantly for them, they didn’t know how to make money out of it.

Now, if you’re a client and you’re not sure about these things, and you’re agency isn’t really sure about these things then you’re doomed.

We eventually invited 4 agencies to a pitch briefing (I should point out that the agency that eventually won the business was excellent) and I’ll cover what happened there tomorrow.

But…

If I were a client today I would, in terms of strategic services, completely negate an agency. I wouldn’t use one. Knowing what I know now, I would battle for an increase in headcount for my department pulling in some of the smarter people from the agency world. There are smart people out there working in agencies (both big and small) but the agencies they work for aren’t smart. If my department is focused, has clear goals and a team of extremely smart people that have access to fantastic content, and understand the medium then the only thing I need an agency for is execute how our customers interact with us visually. So I don’t really need an agency at all. I need a design consultancy.

Tomorrow, you’ll see why.

If you think that others might been interested in this would you be so kind as to Stumble it?

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