Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

Finally Firming Up

We received the latest edition of AdAge today in our P.O. Box and I read with interest the article “Fed-Up Shops Pitch a Fit at Procurement.” A little while ago I wrote a post about how law firms were standing up for themselves and saying “if you want to pay less, that’s fine, then just don’t expect the top tier of our talent.” It appears that agencies are starting to do the same in negotiations with potential clients during the pitch phase. According to AdAge, The watch word between agencies after these budget sessions with procurement people is “don’t cave.” As the AdAge article mentions agencies (though, from the deals they sign to close a piece of business you’d never know it) are in this business to make a profits just as much as our clients are. We don’t expect them to sell their products at a loss, they should not expect us to do it either. If we don’t value our services and charge valuable rates, our clients won’t value them either.

We may not be saving lives here — though sometimes our work does, tangentially — but we are professionals who bring  know-how, years of experience and insight to issues, problems, trends and best practices around marketing and communications. We are not a commodity, nor are our services. If clients, large and small, want to regard advertising and marketing in a commodotized fashion, then I say let them — and let them work with folks who regard it the same way. Get back to me when you see the results.  In my experience the jobs that go worst are the jobs in which someone has decided to meet a potential client’s budget expectations rather than sell the best program for the client’s business needs. Stooping to make the sale is a recipe for disaster that sets the wrong tone from the get-go. It’s an incredible misjudgment on the part of the sales force. If you undersell yourself at the start in the hopes of raising your rates and gaining money back down the line, “fugghedaboutit,” as they used to say in Carroll Gardens.

Last week I was in a conversation  with a colleague and we were discussing this very topic. At the time, when I mentioned my hope that we — the ad industry — would begin to finally stand up for ourselves, he said “it’s tough, because there’s always someone willing to do a job for next-t0-nothing.” I didn’t, and still don’t disagree — though it pains me as a small agency owner. Perhaps this latest bit of news from the pitch wars is good news for the industry. Like the lawyers we need to stand up for ourselves. We can work for cheap rates if we put our B-teams on a job, if that’s what the client wants. We can scale back wish lists. Deliver fewer features and functionality. Do fewer rounds of review. Help our clients to understand the intricacies of the review process. As some commenters below the article state, some client side businesses are hurting, but agencies are in dire straits too. Somewhere, amidst the carnage, the two sides need to come together and find common ground. We do need one another, but the client/agency relationship has grown abusive and nasty over the past few years. Many of the agency-side issues come from agency’s general lack of a spine. It’s nice to see spines hardening. Kudos to the big shops. It’s high time, though maybe too late, that we tried to regain some ground.

Best to leave it to the pros

Lately, I’m hearing about many jobs and opportunities at various ad agencies. Surprisingly, there are jobs in the advertising business, despite the gloom and doom of the industry in particular and the economy in general. For those of us around Boston we have to be willing to relocate. For all of us, in the advertising biz, we apparently need to possess multiple skill-sets.

If you are an art director then you must now be able to concept, create great designs and help sell ideas to clients (standard job description) as well as know Flash with ActionScript and hopefully some HTML & CSS. I recently read a post by a young art director wondering whether she should learn HTML because some copy job descriptions now list coding knowledge as a requirement. I see jobs for my role, producer, that require knowledge of Flash with AS2 (not AS3, are you sure?), HTML/CSS & JavaScript, PhotoShop, Illustrator, copy writing, and great MS Office skills especially, Project and PowerPoint. A former colleague once complained that the designers on our job didn’t do front end development too, and wondered why not.

Whenever confronted with this attitude, or with job descriptions like the above I wonder in which year folks are living because it sounds like 1999. My next thought usually has to do with the evolution of societies. Back in the early days of web marketing many folks did many things like design and code and even write. An interesting thing happened, as it often does in evolving societies: things started to get complicated and division of labor within the (web marketing) tribes began to emerge. Granted, there are folks who have truly full tool sets, and the more that you can do, the better. Yet, I think it unrealistic to expect everybody to wear many disparate hats as par for the daily course. Sure it’s great from a bottom-line, head count perspective when you can hire one rather than two folks. In over a decade in this business I’ve met very few people who were conceptual thinkers, great designers, rocking Flash developers and good managers (in fact, I know one).

I do believe that everybody in an interactive agency who touches work that goes into the world needs to understand the medium, the platforms and the capabilities and limitations of same. Expecting a copy writer to write both the copy and the markup that holds the copy is asking quite a bit of that person and, frankly, not providing the level of service and work that we should provide to our clients. Many of us in advertising can do many things. We are gamers and are willing to tackle challenges. Perhaps the new business model –whatever it will be — will require us all to wear more hats (though, the old one did too) but I want to wave a caution flag. Unless that copy writer is very good at both markup and pithy marketing copy — and I mean very good at both — then she should not be writing both. There is a professional level of work that we marketers need to deliver to the people paying the bills. I’m not entirely convinced that hiring Jacks & Jills of all trades is the way to deliver that superior product. If an agency finds that multi-tool person, by all means, scoop them up, and pay them well. Otherwise, hire appropriately, let people do what they do well and deliver great work from within well built teams.