That one incident had repercussions beyond the print ad. The client never again trusted us quite the way he once did. We had a harder time getting him to buy work. He became more risk adverse. That was a long time ago. These days, thanks to computer technology, agencies generally present initial creative concepts in such finished form they look like final ads.
So the lesson is, manage your client expectations from the outset. Make sure your clients understand how you and your colleagues approach a given assignment: What the steps are. What the agency will deliver at each step. When they will see the work, and in what form.
How to interpret the storyboard or comp. Who will present the work, and where you would like to conduct the meeting. Especially when they are not stated overtly. Ask questions. Probe for answers. Draw the client out. I missed a subtle signal that, in retrospect, was quite clear.
If you observe and listen to your client, you can do better than I did. The account guys wrote them there were no planners at this shop.
We were so proud of these briefs. They were so thorough, so exhaustive in their detail, so exhausting to read. The agency hired a new creative director, who tried working with these briefs for a few months. One day he appeared in the doorway of my office, my latest masterwork in hand actually in two hands; it was a two-fisted document.
His expression was a combination of exasperation and despair. He sat down and dropped the offending document on my desk. It landed with a solid thud. Key fact 2. Problem 3. Objective 4. Key benefit 5.
Support 6. Tone 7. Audience 8. Competition 9. Get the creatives in the room with you and figure it out together. I resisted at first, but ultimately did what he asked. To my astonishment, he was right. Our briefs became sharper, tighter, and more focused. The whole creative process became sharper, tighter, and more focused.
The creative work that came out of those briefs was sharper, 22 tighter, and more focused. Better still, instead of confining the work, the tighter briefs had the opposite impact. They had a liberating effect on our writers and art directors, who now felt free to explore widely in and around the direction provided in the brief. Initially, it was a struggle to get creative people to attend sessions where we would work on the brief together. But ultimately, the whole agency adopted the new format for the brief, and the collaborative process for writing it, as the basis for creating work.
In fact, the creative staff became so committed to the process that they would refuse to work on an assignment unless there was at least one session in which they participated in the development of the brief.
The version of the brief we actually adopted was not as clipped as the one the creative director wrote out in my office, but it remained very tight.
Using a form like the one on the next page, we created briefs that were always just one or two pages. It led to some consistently excellent advertising. There probably are as many different kinds of briefs as there are agencies. And with the rise of account planning, the development of creative briefs has taken on new dimensions since the days my agency first deployed the form below.
What I am suggesting is that you take the word brief seriously. What consumer problem must the advertising solve? A precise definition, written from the consumer perspective, not the client perspective. What is the objective of the advertising? This flows from the definition of the consumer problem. Must be strong enough to overcome the problem and meet the objective. Should be a simple listing; if additonal information is needed, provide as an attachment.
Who are we talking to? Provide psychographics, in addition to demographics, to the extent they are known or can be intuited. Who or what are we competing with? Products and services, as well as companies and internal competitors, if there are any. What should the tone of the advertising be? Describe with a series of adjectives. Be as specific, concrete, and evocative as possible. Are there any mandatories we must account for in the advertising?
The key to achieving it lies not in the initial writing, but in rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting, to distill the brief to its essence. There should be no wasted words. A good brief is critical to achieving great creative work. And a good brief is brief. Our client loved it. Another time, this same group of colleagues and I struggled to devise a name for a customer loyalty program we were developing for Polaroid. The reward for using Polaroid cameras and film was going to be frequent flyer mileage.
Recently I was sitting around at a conference room table, surrounded by a sea of paper, working with a col26 league on a brand positioning assignment for a client.
We took a break. While sitting there, three words came into my head. It was a creative leap, right past the positioning to a tagline. All our work to date validated those three words.
We would have to see if it held up. If it did, we knew what our positioning recommendation would be. You can spend weeks, even months, immersed in research, but insights often come in a flash of recognition.
One clear insight is worth a thousand data points. Of course, you need to do the heavy lifting in the marketplace—the customer research, the competitive analysis, the field visits—but there comes a time when you should put the research away and go with your instinct.
Sometimes too much data can interfere with understanding. The secret is to combine what you know with what you feel in order to push for new ideas and better solutions. If you can do that, you have a future in account management.
So how do you get the strategy right? Certainly not by sitting in your office alone, banging out the strategy brief in isolation. You get the strategy right by recognizing that developing the strategy is a team sport, and the creative crew— the writer and art director assigned to work on the ad or the campaign—are critical team members. There are three reasons to do this. It helps the creative team become immersed in the assignment and take ownership of it.
The creative team will help unearth issues or gaps in knowledge, which gives you an early opportunity to address the issues or fill the knowledge gaps. The creative team will help uncover insights or help make connections that otherwise might be missed. Writers and art directors generally see things from a perspective different from yours.
You want to capture that perspective early on in the creative process, during the development of the brief that will drive the work. In fact, no one in your agency should know the client better than you do. You want to be the first person that agency staffers turn to when they want to know something about your client. Traveling with the salespeople who serve those customers gives you an opportunity to get their frontline perspective on the company, its customers, and its competitors.
If I have a meeting scheduled with an out-of-town client, I make it a point to arrive the evening before. I schedule a dinner for that evening with one of my key client contacts. I schedule a breakfast the following morning with a different client contact. I also use that time to uncover any issues and concerns with the agency and its work that might not be readily visible. Virtually every industry has publications that cover the field. You should become a subscriber and a regular reader.
At least twice a year, you should provide a synthesis and an analysis of the competitive landscape, for the benefit of both your client and your colleagues on the account. You should buy the products and services your client sells. The purchasing process can be telling. By using the product or service, by being a customer, you can better understand what other customers experience.
Doing these things gives you a perspective that can help sharpen and define the marketing and creative strategy the agency develops to drive creative work.
It also can help uncover the overlooked fact that may drive an insight that results in killer advertising. How did the agency discover that washing planes makes them more efficient in air?
That little-known fact became the basis of a smart, engaging, and memorable commercial that delivered big impact. I call it brief amnesia. You send a creative brief to your client for approval. The client, up to her eyeballs in work, gives the brief the once over. You and the creative team present them to the client. The client rejects the work.
You ask why. The client gives a reason that has nothing to do with the creative brief. You respond that the work is on strategy. The client barely remembers the strategy, let alone that she approved it. Instead, she uses the concepts in front of her to re-engineer the 33 strategy.
You and your colleagues return to the agency. You start over from the beginning, developing a new brief. So how do you inoculate your client against this dreadful disease? Ideally, this takes place in a face-to-face meeting, but schedules being what they are, if you have to do it in a conference call, so be it. Armed with this information, develop the brief. Take it to the client, and take him through it. Extract any additional input from him. Be alert to any concerns that arise.
Go back and revise the brief if necessary, but make sure that the client is completely clear and completely comfortable with the brief. Then make him sign it. You and your colleagues will use the brief to evaluate creative concepts before you show them to the client. You will make sure that each concept reflects the brief and is on strategy. The most important thing to remember is that to avoid brief amnesia, and to preempt clients from using the concept presentation to reinvent the strategy, make your client a partner in the development of the brief.
For your creative team, a detailed point memo after the big presentation is no substitute for a lukewarm quart of Szechuan noodles the night before. Many account people think the best way to help your colleagues is to be a resource to them. They go beyond being the expert on client wishes, requirements, and idiosyncrasies. They are a constant, contributing presence on every assignment.
If the creative team is working late, or working the weekend to make a deadline, great account people will be there with them. They are there to answer questions, to provide input, to offer feedback and encouragement, 36 and to order Chinese food or pizza.
Often it is the smallest gesture that makes the biggest impact. I remember a particularly stressful time preparing for a new business presentation. It was late on a Friday evening; most of the agency staff had called it a day. But one of my colleagues who was working on the pitch with me, a planner, was struggling to make the final revisions to the creative brief. I volunteered to help. We sat in my office and worked from her rough notes.
She dictated; I keyed. In an hour we had input the revisions and had the final version ready for distribution to the creative team. But I know it made a difference, because the planner thanked me more than once. To this day we are friends, and on occasion she will remind me of that Friday evening.
She was thanking me for my gesture of support. It was almost as good as that quart of lukewarm Szechuan noodles Tom Nelson talks about. By the way, I was at the agency early the following Saturday morning, to be available to the creative team. If I recall correctly, I brought bagels and coffee. It is not enough for the work to be on strategy; it has to engage consumers and make them want to pay attention.
To achieve those results requires advertising driven by a smart, honest, and emotionally true idea. We were, however, having trouble convincing our boss, the head of the agency. We must have argued for an hour. He wanted to kill the idea; we wanted to make it our recommendation. The boss and I had a little conversation on our own. It delivers perfectly on the strategy. And it will have legs. I know this client better than you do.
In the end, he backed off, grudgingly, reluctantly, fearfully. We could present the idea we were so in love with, but we also agreed to present four concepts instead of three, so the client would still have three ideas to choose from that my boss felt comfortable with. Why did we fight so hard for this one particular idea? We had three other perfectly good concepts to go with— and that was the problem. Good work is on strategy.
You can produce it on time and on budget. Your client can green light it. It makes you comfortable. Good work is the enemy of great work. If you are satisfied with work that is merely good, you will never deliver great work for your clients.
Something rare and special. Great work might make you uncomfortable. It might be something startlingly new. It might take risks. You might not be able to produce it on time or within budget, and your client might not readily say yes to it. If the work is truly great, and right for your client, your job is to support it and to help your client see its potential and choose to buy it. The idea my colleagues and I were fighting for was great, not merely good.
It was visually stunning. It spoke the language of the target audience. More than anything else, it was hilariously funny, and humor was the right way to go in this instance. You might be wondering what happened in the client presentation. The client laughed when we showed the idea to her. She got it, she knew the target would get it. The very thing that made the work great—the humor— is the thing that worried her. So she went with a safer choice. The fault was ours, not hers. We knew the idea was right.
We did our best to be persuasive, without applying undue pressure. We wanted her to own the idea with us. We wound up executing a different concept, which made perfectly good advertising.
We liked it, and so did the client. Work like this can be insidious; it masquerades as great advertising, but it is not. Okay, I admit the metaphor is a little overwrought, but you get the picture.
This kind of advertising is bad, and to see it for what it is requires judgment, dispassion, and discipline. Always bring your client more than one concept.
It depends on the client. Some clients love to see the conference room walls papered with a dozen or more ideas. But that takes time and costs money. With many clients, showing more than five concepts can be confusing. It also can imply you are surrounding the strategic challenge, rather than solving it. What do you do if your creative team only comes up with one or two ideas? Do you go to the client with just that one or two? With rare exceptions, I would say no. Less talented creative people often have just a single idea to offer, so they will fight fiercely for that idea, regardless of its merit, because they are not confident they can produce more.
If you know it will fall short in generating ideas, you need to encourage the creative director to add a second or even a third team to the creative development process. If you do that, you usually wind up going back to the agency anyway to develop more ideas, which costs you time and client goodwill.
Here are three other things to keep in mind when deciding which work to present to the client. Before you present to the client, agree among your- selves what the agency recommendation is among the options, why it is the recommendation, and why the others are not. Decide who will speak for the agency on the recom- mendation. Make sure you would be proud to execute any of the concepts you show. Eliminate any straw men before the presentation. Mel was a very senior, veteran guy.
It was a day or two before we were scheduled to present to the client, and he was walking me through the concepts he was going to show. Mel was the type of writer who liked to crowd the walls with ideas. It was typical of him to show a dozen or more approaches. For some clients, that many choices would be paralyzing. Not this client. This client loved the theater of it.
He loved to debate the ads. He really took ownership of the work, and that was great for us. He welcomed a room full of ideas. So there I was, looking with Mel at maybe 15 ideas slapped up on the walls of the agency conference room.
I liked maybe five of them. Another five or six were serviceable. The rest, I thought, were losers. I made some suggestions on a couple of the executions. In two instances, Mel agreed, and decided to kill the ideas. We disagreed about two or three others. I made my case: The weaker executions would dilute the whole presentation. So we went back and forth for a while. Two days later we met with the client. Mel took the client through the work.
The client liked much of it, but there were two ideas he gravitated to. One was a favorite of mine, the other was one of the ads I wanted to kill, but Mel kept in. Easy, but wrong. You owe your colleagues an insightful, expert, candid, and sensitive assessment of their work. You will argue; this often is part of arriving at the right solution.
When you are in front of the client, never throw the work, or your colleagues, under the bus. I supported it, and I also supported my choice. But the client wanted a definitive recommendation. Of course, Mel and I were prepared to make one.
Prior to the meeting we agreed which one we would go with. You probably want to know which one we recommended. What I do remember is that I fought about the work with my colleague, but fought for it with my client. David Vining, the former director of U. Account people often are tempted to be salespeople. But you do much more damage than good if you take this approach. Great work almost always entails an element of risk, because there inevitably is something new or unexpected about it.
Clients generally will take risks with people they trust. An account person who is busy selling a client is not likely to build trust with that client. That kind of account person is in a much better position to credibly recommend that the client take the risk on great work.
Quite the opposite is true. Great account people do not sell. Instead, they serve as partners to both their colleagues and to their clients, with a responsibility to facilitate the creation of great work, and a goal of helping clients make the right decisions about that work. We need you to be actively involved. Having this kind of client input helps avoid false starts.
Early involvement also gives the client a sense of ownership of the work. The work will be better for it, as will the process of creating it. He was a very senior, very veteran, very smart guy. Whenever we would present, he would listen with great concentration. He would rarely interrupt; instead, he would let us go through all the concepts and options we had prepared for his review. When we were done, he would stand up to address us. And there are some terrific ads on the table.
No 55 one ever complained; creative people loved this client and would do anything for him. We did work for this client that was the best the agency could do. It was simple. No matter what we presented, no matter how great, how good, or how average it was, this client invariably expressed respect for the work and the people who made it. That was a great lesson for me. In my early days as an account person, I usually ran roughshod over creative people and their work.
If I had made that one small adjustment in language and attitude, it would have made a big difference in the way I looked at creative work. What it takes is enormous emotional commitment. When writers or art directors show their work, they are sharing a piece of themselves. They have sweated those ideas to life, and they know they are only as good as their last idea.
While it takes emotional commitment to make creative work, it takes emotional detachment to make it better. Some- 56 times they mistake good work for great work. On occasion, they might even mistake bad work for great work. Who can blame them, given what it takes to produce work in the first place? They can provide the necessary emotional detachment to make the work better, or to prevent bad work from seeing the light of day. Acknowledge them, praise them, and explain what you love about them and why.
Suggest how these ideas can be made better. Tackle the ideas that deserve early death last. Even here, with ideas you think are marginal at best, there probably is something you like about each of them. Find that one thing and acknowledge it before explaining why you think the ideas should be abandoned in favor of the stronger ones. If there are lots of good and even great ideas on the table, this should be relatively painless, unless there is sharp disagreement between you and the creative team.
Perhaps you can 57 be persuaded. Perhaps you can persuade them. Keep your personal preferences out of the discussion. You are not there to render judgment on whether or not periwinkle is the right color. I remember being in a preproduction meeting where we were going over the casting for a photo shoot.
We were looking at headshots of kids. Everyone liked this adorable redheaded boy. I explained that this had come up before, on another assignment for this client, when I was working with a different creative team. We went with another kid. There is careful consideration given to casting the presenters. There is heavy investment in staging and props. Every word of the script is thought through.
The pitch team rehearses. Then it rehearses some more. But with existing clients, everyone at the agency is so busy making the work that they often neglect the presenting part. With clients demanding faster and faster turn around, and with agency staffs sliced to the bone due to financial pressures, the problem has grown acute. Almost every account person I know can tell stories of flying out the door to make a client meeting while jamming work completed just minutes before into a presentation case.
The stakes are just as high, if not higher. The only thing worse than losing a new business pitch is losing a client. Client presentations, like new business presentations, are about theater. A bad presentation, like bad theater, often leads to a bad ending, with the client unhappy and the agency scrambling to regroup. A good presentation usually leads to a happy ending, with the client satisfied and the work approved. A good presentation is no accident. It requires proper casting, with an eye to who can best deliver the material.
It requires thoughtful preparation, with particular attention paid to anticipating client concerns and how best to address them. Above all, it requires sufficient time to rehearse, to ensure everyone understands his or her role and how to play it. Agencies that understand the importance of rehearsing for new business presentations often forget that rehearsing for client presentations is equally important.
Part of the problem is that many agency people hate rehearsing and will do everything to avoid it, no matter how much time there is in the schedule. They find rehearsing awkward, embarrassing, or even a little intimidating. They have a point.
It can be harder to stand up in front of colleagues than clients. It helps you anticipate the questions and concerns the client might raise. It polishes your delivery. It allows you to work out the hand-offs among the team members. It can build your confidence.
For all these reasons, you should remind your colleagues that, no matter how pressed for time all of you are, no matter how tight the schedule, rehearsal might make the difference between success and failure. Then you should take ownership of the rehearsal process. The more time you spend, the better you will be. My agency team and I were presenting a new campaign to the client. It was a big day, a big room, and a big group of clients. The presentation started well enough.
I had done the set-up for the writer, taking the audience through a restatement of the assignment and a quick recap of the creative brief. I turned to the copywriter. He could barely speak. A look of fear came over his face. It quickly became apparent that everything he wanted to say had fled from his head.
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To my astonishment, he was right. Our briefs became sharper, tighter, and more focused. The whole creative process became sharper, tighter, and more focused. The creative work that came out of those briefs was sharper, 22 tighter, and more focused. Ignore this book at your peril. It's a gem that every agency person, and every client should read. Robert Solomon gets that. Download ». Get BOOK. Skip to content Ignore this book at your peril.
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