How to brief an Advertising Agency

It’s inevitable that the paths of marketing and advertising agencies will cross. They’re twin industries, joined at the hip.

When briefing an advertising agency it’s good to bear in mind the following:

1. You have to go beyond the basics

2. What makes a good brief?

3. Creative freedom comes with restraints

This is why it’s so important to know how to properly brief an advertising agency.  Depending on what your role in marketing entails, you may have had a little or a lot of experience dealing with the Suits and the Creatives and the dreaded Ninjas that live in Adland. Regardless of your exposure, you’ll definitely know that they’re a strange bunch. So what does it take to get the most out of them when you brief in new work?

You have to go beyond the basics

I’m going to assume that you know the basics of briefing an advertising agency, such as defining your target audience, your strategy, your budget, your objectives and so forth. But to be honest, the basics just aren’t enough.

There must be thousands of basic examples of how to brief an ad agency available online. The Communications Agencies Association of New Zealand (CAANZ) has a cute, five-page, basic briefing guide on their site. I only refer to it here in a similar way to the United Nations placing “Danger! Minefield!” signs all over old battlefields. It’s truly average and any brief sheet that says the most important point of a brief is “to save money” needs to be rewritten.

On the other end of the scale, The New Zealand Transport Association, in all its bureaucratic glory, has a 60-page manual on how they brief their advertising partners. They cover almost everything from what font should be used on a billboard design, to how you should evaluate creative concepts. Amazingly, they devote 12 pages of their guide purely on how to avoid “common mistakes” in advertising. That means they’ve set aside 20% of their manual to cover possible negative outcomes of an advertising campaign. This means that either the other 80% of their guide is very badly written, or briefing an advertising agency isn’t as easy as it seems.

 So what makes a good brief?

The answer to that all-important question is very simple: one that delivers results! After all, advertising is all about results, whether it’s in the form of increased sales, higher profits or better conversions. Your advertising agency has to know exactly what you want them to deliver, and how they deliver it is up to you to decide. That’s why you need to give them a seriously tight brief.

The freedom of a tight brief.

It’s important to set up very strict parameters as early as possible when briefing an advertising agency, simply because you’re asking your advertising agency to be creative. Granted that this is part of their job, but the thing with creativity is that one man’s Picasso is another man’s piece of junk. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that the size of your target audience is one million people. This means the creative work being produced by your advertising agency has to appeal to a very wide range of folk, so there’s most likely no place for Picasso here. On top of this, there’s always the chance you might alienate your target audience if you’re creative just for the sake of creativity.

Creative freedom has to come with constraints.

You need to rein in your advertising agency and make it clear in the briefing process that this is a financial transaction, and that you expect them to deliver what you’ve all agreed to. If you invested a million dollars on building a new home, you’d expect the builder to build as per the approved plans. You’re not going to want the builder to put together your home with seven bathrooms and one bedroom just because he was feeling creative, so why should your advertising be any different?

Now many people will say you shouldn’t ever constrain creativity and that creative people should be free to do as they please but I disagree. When you enforce constraints, when you make the journey to find real creativity as challenging as possible, that’s when the magic really happens. Who wants to see a daredevil ramp his motorbike over a single car? It’s blasé and we know it. That’s why we demand that daredevils ramp their bikes across the Grand Canyon, over rows of hovering helicopters, through burning hoops of napalm while being chased by Stinger missiles. That’s where the glory is, that’s what the audience wants to see and that’s where you will find true creativity.

Advertising, and the associated creativity found within the industry, have to have restraints. Every creative person working in an advertising agency wants to break the rules and push the envelope right out of the box into some new, as yet undefined, realm. But seriously, let them do it with their hands tied behind their back.

Will advertising work for you?

Does the size of your advertising budget contribute to your advertising’s success?

One of my clients recently asked me, “Does advertising work?” I wasn’t sure why he asked me this. Our advertising had been extremely successful at raising his sales in recent months so I assumed he knew that it worked. So why the question? It turned out that he was wondering if there was a perfect way to measure the effectiveness of advertising. There’s no perfect way to measure anything but I thought I’d take a look at three key points that may help my client, and you, make more balanced decisions around your ad spend

View fullsize

Does money influence brand value through advertising?

No. Money isn’t a guarantee of success in any industry. In 2013, Microsoft spent $2.6 billion on advertising, while Apple spent $1.1 billion. Did Microsoft’s bigger budget make them a bigger brand?

The answer is no. According to a 2013 report in Forbes, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, worth a staggering $105 billion, while the Microsoft brand is only valued at $57 billion. Proof then that having deeper pockets doesn’t make you more successful. Perhaps it’s far easier to advertise, and in turn sell, better brands that are worth more than the sum of their parts? Everyone knows Apple is an awesome brand that makes amazing products, while Microsoft is a lot less remarkable.

But what would happen if you had to advertise a more ordinary product, like cheese or cat food? Well there should be no difference as to how effective your budget is, regardless of whether you’re spending $150k a year or $2 billion a year. You have to ensure that the basics are done right, that your creative execution is smack bang on brief, and that your media buying is as effective as possible. While I’ve never worked for Apple, I’m sure their basic advertising processes are similar to Microsoft’s. The same can be said for Toyota and Ford.

Does the size of your advertising agency contribute to your success?

David Ogilvy wrote in his autobiography, “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, that size wasn’t necessarily relevant unless you wanted it to be. He wrote about the time the head of a mammoth advertising agency solicited the Camel Cigarette account and promised to assign 30 copywriters to it, but the head of R.J. Reynolds simply replied, “Why can’t you just give us one good one?” Makes sense to me.

However, if you’re the kind of person who needs to delegate everything, then 30 people working on your advertising is what you need. If you’d prefer to be more hands on and in touch, then perhaps you only need two people working on your advertising. In some cases the very business model that you’re trying to advertise might be so flawed that no amount of people can fix it. Take as an example the recent demise of The Good Guys. Could a huge number of advertising folk have saved them? No. The Good Guys were about being cheap and boring but in New Zealand, you don’t get anything cheaper or more boring than Harvey Norman. The boring slot was already taken and no amount of advertising or money could change that or save The Good Guys.

Caveat emptor - “Let the Buyer Beware”

What is the most important contributing factor to the success of your advertising? It’s you. Think of your advertising in the same way as if you were buying a new car. You can try out as many different brands and variations as you’d like until you’re happy, but how much you pay for it, what marque you buy, what colour it is, how many extras you get – these are all decisions that you make. Sure the salesman and the brochure may sway your thinking, but you, and only you, get to say yes or no to the final purchasing decision. This responsibility carries on throughout your ownership, as all the decisions you make as the owner are yours and yours alone.

Let’s face it – you’re the one making the decisions when it comes to your advertising. Whether you choose a campaign that’s going to challenge the status quo or whether you wimp out and go for something mundane that pleases the board of directors, you made those decisions, you gave the instructions and approved whatever it was that lead to the end result that the advertising delivered. The success of any advertising will always rest with the person who signed for it.

Is there truth in advertising?

Last night I was in front of the TV watching the news. During the advertising break the Mad Butcher’s advertisement popped up about his latest chicken offer.

He said he was having a special on Tegel Chicken, which he declared is “New Zealand’s Favourite Chicken”. That got me wondering how Tegel and Sir Peter came up with that claim.

I went onto both the Tegel and the Mad Butcher’s websites and couldn’t find much to substantiate their claim. Perhaps they got to this conclusion based on how much chicken they produce and sell but having a monopoly on chicken production doesn’t make you the country’s favourite. That’s like claiming that the Northern Motorway from Albany into Auckland is New Zealand’s most popular road just because of the huge volume of traffic on it every day. Highly illogical. 

Add into this that Tegel is not a New Zealand owned company (they are owned by an Asian-Pacific company called Affinity Equity Partners) and it seems highly dubious that they are indeed “New Zealand’s Favourite”, given how much fuss us Kiwis kick up when it comes to foreign ownership of our land and businesses.

View fullsize

Tegel’s advertising “claims” are nothing new. There are hordes of similar ones out there, from the biggest companies to the smallest. British Airways claims to be “The World’s Favourite Airline”.  Carlsberg Beer jokingly claims to be “probably the best beer in the world” (at least I think they’re joking). Quilton Toilet Paper claim to be "New Zealand's favourite toilet paper" which asks so many questions, especially " how does Quilton know?" Who honestly submits their bum to market research? Who would sit on a loo and test various grades of toilet paper for $15 an hour? Quilton's claim is the most empty of the all the brand promises you're likely to find from now until the end of the world.

The problem is that companies and their advertisers are not obligated to be 100% honest with consumers and there are some that really go out of their way to be dishonest. Sure there are certain controls put in place by the advertising industry but in reality, it is you, the consumer, that has to be 100% certain you believe them. If you’re unhappy with advertising then you shouldn’t support that brand and you should definitely complain, it’s the only way your voice will be heard. However, make sure you complain at the highest level possible. The poor sod working behind the counter for $12 an hour most likely wont give a damn (after all, this isn't his real job) so you need to climb the ladder. Find the Muppet with the Land Rover and let him know what you think. The truth is he/she (if they care) should be happy for the feedback you give them, after all, you can learn so much more from the customers who complain than from those who don't.

Getting the perfect advertising agency.

Let’s face it, if you’re involved in the marketing of your business, it’s highly likely that you’ll have to deal with an advertising agency.

There are hordes of advertising agencies out there, and the truth is they’re all pretty much the same: clones with only the slightest imperfections differentiating one from the other. They all have access to the same computers, the same software, and the same media info. They even all have the same swanky offices and fast cars. What really differentiates an advertising agency is its people. So how do you know you’re getting the right people? Here’s some valuable insight to help you make what can be a difficult decision.

Ditch the “pitch”.

If you spend large sums of your money on advertising agencies, and if your profits are dependent on their efficiency, it is your duty to take great pains to find the best possible advertising agency. 

Amateurs do it by cajoling a group of advertising agencies into submitting free campaigns on speculation. This is called a "pitch", and it’s a complete waste of time.

Let’s put the “pitch” into another real-world example. You decide to go out for dinner. You head to the nearest mall and choose a restaurant at random. Once seated you tell the waiter you’d like a glass of water and some meat. The waiter is stunned and replies “What kind of meat, sir? We have a number of different dishes, all of them equally delicious.” To which you respond, “bring me something that I’ll like and if I don’t like it I’m leaving and I refuse to pay for it.”

Now that’s guaranteed to get you thrown out (and hopefully beaten to a pulp) and that’s why no one orders a meal like that. It’s rude and just plain stupid – how can you possibly get what you want? And that’s really the advertising agency “pitch” summed up quite nicely: a pack of hyenas chasing a slab of meat.

The “pitch” is perhaps the biggest misrepresentation of the capabilities of any advertising agency.

The advertising agencies that win these “pitches” are the ones that use their best brains for soliciting new accounts, which means they relegate their existing clients to their second-best brains.

This is because everyone (and I really do mean everyone) in advertising knows it’s way easier to keep a client than it is to get a new one. It’s a guarantee that the genius intellects you see at the pitch will rarely be seen once the agency gets your signature.

David Ogilvy was in complete agreement, and he said, “If I were a client, I would look for an advertising agency which had no new business department. The best agencies don’t need them; they get all the business they can handle without preparing speculative campaigns.”

The sensible way to pick an agency is to employ a marketing manager who knows enough about what is going on in the advertising world to make an informed decision. Ask him to show you the work from the three or four agencies he believes to be best qualified for your account. 

Once you have your shortlist it’s time to call some of their clients. This can be particularly revealing. Be completely honest when you call and see how these clients respond to your probing. Do they feel threatened that another (perhaps bigger) company might be coming onto the client roster? Ask them who they deal with on a daily basis, and what they’d change in the relationship if they could.

Go back to school.

Once you’ve done this, it’s time to break out some old school thinking. Invite the head honchos from each of the leading contenders to bring two of their key people to dinner at your house. Loosen their tongues. Find out if they’re discreet about the secrets of their present clients. Find out if they have the spine to disagree when you say something ridiculous.

Observe their relationship with each other; are they professional colleagues or quarrelsome politicians? Do they promise you results that are obviously exaggerated? Do they sound like extinct volcanoes always harking back to their glory days, or are they alive with possibility and endeavour?

Most importantly, are they good listeners and are they honest? The purpose of this exercise is to find out if you like them enough to give them your money to spend. The relationship between client and agency has to be an intimate one, and it can be hell if the personal chemistry is sour. 

So before you commit, ask any agencies that want your business to show you the five most surprising, challenging and innovative things they took to their existing clients over the past year. A blank look at this point is sufficient reason to usher them out of your home, but a fired up and enthusiastic response showing some really clever thinking – well, that’s a very strong reason to keep chatting.

Once you’re committed to an agency, and your expectations are clear to them, then they need to be delivering everything they promised right from the start. More importantly, they should be exceeding your expectations on a regular basis and they should be surprising you by pushing the boundaries and bringing you ideas that make you a little nervous, that break new ground, that you haven’t seen before.

If you only ever see executions and campaigns that you expect, then the agency isn’t really looking to grow your business as much as it should be.