The Kaiser Edition

This is Shy Guy. He belongs to Nintendo.

The final list of agencies had been drawn up. Four in total – three of which you will all know and one you may of heard of, especially if you live and work in Canada. Four agencies that specialised in digital – which is useful when you’re planning to do something really rather special on the interent.

On a bright cold day, and one after, the other representatives of the agencies came to our offices and we took them through the brief. They all asked some questions, nodded in the right places and all agreed that the brief was robust and that they understood what we wanted to do.

And the brief was robust. It gave then enough insight into our business, set out goals and gave them enough room to think. We made it very clear that we were open, would support an agency and that this project had the support of the whole organisation. But more importantly we made it very clear what we were expectiting from them at pitch. We explained that we did not want to see any creative work, were not interested in the technology but that we really wanted to get an understanding for how the agency would develop ideas that would benefit the people who bought our products and have a positive impact an our business. We wanted them to excite us with ideas.

It’s interesting to see what happens when you deny a digital agency access to pretty pictures and talk of all things technical. Firstly it saves you having to listen to stuff like this:

1. This is what it could look like …
2. …and if you don’t like the look of that then here’s version 2
3. If you roll over this button this happens!
4. We’d design the front end in flash, use action scripts, java applicants etc to link up the the back end.
5. This is how the server configuration would look

You get the picture. But what is more interesting (and this is what sparked then series off) is that by taking this stuff away from them (and let’s face it, we’ve only taken away the executional side) three out of the four world class agencies had nothing to say. When faced with a client that says you have our support, be active, come to us and tell us what you would do – tell us what we should do – they had nothing to say at all. So they did what they did best and told us that “this is version 1 and if we didn’t like it we could look at version 2” and one agency talk for an 30 minutes about servers.

Only one agency (and it was the agency that went on to win the business and as far as I’m concerned they did a fantastic job) was able to pick up the brief, and run with it. They had loads of ideas each of which had both a business and a communication component. They were excited by what they had come up with. “Some of it”, they told us “may not even be possible” but most of it, as it turned out, was.

I was hugely disappointed with the three other agencies. I’d expected more. I’d hoped for the level of professionality, creativity and interestingness that you would expect from agencies with their kind of credentials. They had been good at being good at the briefing but when we had asked them to excite us, pull out all of the stops and come up with the best ideas possible they couldn’t because we had taken away a crucial frame of reference for them. We’d allowed them to be good at being good at the briefing but we’d taken away the formality of being good at being good at pitching.

If I were a client today I’d probably be disapointed and in the final post tomorrow, the final post of this series, I’ll tell you what I’d do about it.

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

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