This year Bill and I will celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary. It was a big year for weddings among our friends and family, but not all of these marriages survived. So every time I hear of the relationship between a communications firm and a client referred to as a marriage, I have to agree. There are great days, good days and bad days in a marriage. But the relationships that endure are those built on mutual trust and respect.
That was a point in a discussion that I had yesterday with Roger Reierson, Flint Group CEO and fearless leader. He had handed me an article printed in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail that he had kept entitled “In praise of older relationships” by business columnist Simon Houpt. Houpt’s article was in reaction to the news that Chevrolet had dropped Detroit-based Campbell-Ewald as its ad agency after a 90-year relationship. Frankly, long term relationships of that magnitude are rare in our industry, but at the Flint Group we feel blessed that we have bucked those industry averages. Many clients have been with us for more than a decade and several go back to our beginnings in the 1940s.
Houpt interviewed multiple clients and agencies for his article. Like several agency heads he talked to, we’ve lost clients that focused on the next hot agency (he called them the shiny new object) or because we didn’t give them “what they want” without questioning the positioning, the strategy or the impact on the brand. But inevitably their new relationships seem to fail as well.
The article and our discussions internally focus on the same truth, that the best creative work – and the best results – come out of deep, earned trust between an agency and the client. That kind of partnership is about working together, day in and day out. Much like a marriage. Don’t you agree?
By granting your agency access to any and all information it needs to be successful, you will most likely achieve better results. Why? It allows them the ability to truly measure the effectiveness of their efforts, make tweaks and changes to marketing activities as they need, and most importantly, have a clear idea of how your marketing objectives relate to the long-term goals of your organization. All the while, building trust that you are going to let them do the job you hired them to do, and not treat them like a vendor.
Prior to WestmorelandFlint, I worked for fifteen years on the client side in marketing and public relations positions, utilizing several agencies and freelancers. One of the first things I did when joining WestmorelandFlint was to make a top 10 list of things I hated about agencies so I could keep the perspective of a client. After seven years here, and almost fifteen years on the client side, here is my advice on getting the most out of your agency partnership.
