-Good sir welcome. What will you order?
-Thank you very much, I can’t make up my mind, please bring me the entries that appear on the menu, I want to try them all, and in the end the one I like the most is the one I’m going to cancel. –
This incoherent, absurd, and why not, stupid two-line situation actually happens when a few companies set out to find a creative service provider.
It happens in real life, sometime in a meeting with a client everything was going very well, I was presenting the agency, there was a lot of empathy and we were sure that we would execute the project, in that surprisingly the guy’s father came in and sat down to listen, the I really had no idea who it was, my appointment had not been agreed with him.
After listening for a long time, he joined the conversation and sentenced everything with the most rugged Santander accent- Let’s do one thing, do the job, if I like it I’ll pay for it-.
How about the daring one, I got out of there so I stopped and left.
Gentlemen, creative services offer talents that are often intangible, advertising agencies and design studios manage that talent almost always with the only real variable of time, and the time of any person has value. Not for being designers, publicists, photographers, illustrators etc. You can live on simple passion. We also eat, go to the movies, buy gifts in December, travel to the sea, have children at school, etc.
Fortunately every day these types of circumstances are seen less, but they happen.
I remember another similar situation, a major shopping center called us to participate in a contest that would end up choosing its agency. Everything within the normal until they sent the brief, the participating agencies had to send campaigns of the months of February, March, April, May, June and October, fully executed, and as if that were not enough they had to be accompanied by the media plan of every month, all in 5 days for the board to see.
What they wanted was not to work and they wanted the agencies to do the work for them on account of a “contest”. What conch and mediocre people.
However, on many of these occasions it is not the fault of the companies, which could be excused for simple ignorance. The responsibility is shared with the agencies that agree to compete with those conditions.
Speculation and abuse believing that ideas are available and worthless at hand is simply despicable.
Of course there are also very good experiences, fortunately they are the majority, from one of them I precisely rescued his protocol to choose the agency and I summarized it just in case someone wanted to take it into account:
Surprised first to the client, to the audience and last to the publicity jury. With the different work teams that I have been in charge of, I have achieved 18 awards of the 21 that the agency has today, participating in national and international festivals such as EL DORADO, MARIPOSA BTL, FICE, CLAP, and WINA.
1- It turns out to be very important to know the company well, what it does, what its business lines are, what its products are.
2- Who are the brand’s consumers, most important characteristics, profile, among other data that add value.
3- Fundamental to be able to describe the style and / or tone of the brand’s communication, how it is expressed, what lines they have developed.
4- Define your challenge, what are you waiting for from your communications partner.
5- Invite to surprise, good agencies will dare to do it without forgetting the essentials.
6- The agency must support: Time of experience, help in cases of success, organizational structure, services, clients, historical clients of the category requested and strengths of the agency.
7- What does the agency imagine working with the brand? It seems subjective but this is where the agencies can make a greater waste of creativity.
8- Proposal fee, let the agency imagine a fee for your brand-: Main characteristics, number of people attending the account, number of pieces to be executed monthly, work process and value.
The sum of these indicators will give a very accurate image to the agency that can be a true strategic ally, leaving much of this data out of context is the most common, believe it, agencies can be dazzling competing, in my opinion the issue It goes more for affinity, objectivity and strategy.
Juan Guillermo Vargas Harker
Planner PVS Agency
DECEMBER 6, 2016