I was lucky to have joined
advertising in the days when people in agencies actually discussed briefs (no,
think again). I have spent hours discussing the nuances of the lines that will
describe the problem the brand was facing. The exact line that will form
“what’s the one thing we want to communicate”. That was the most important part of my job. Everyone in the agency
believed this and all of servicing was judged on one’s ability to distill the
client’s problems to the magical document called the brief.
Then once we had rigorously
finished each of the questions in the briefing document (after having survived
the boss’ sarcasm and multiple corrections), we had to get it approved by the
client. We then briefed creative and more often than not good, sometimes
brilliant, but never mediocre work happened.
I have been a client for close
to five years. The agency has created great work for us. That has moved markets
and won awards (amazing but true).
Have I seen a single briefing document? Nope. All the campaign briefings have
been done practically directly to the creative team and then work directly
presented by the creative team.
So, what’s the problem?
The problem is that most CEOs
haven’t been agency servicing people. They come from various backgrounds:
sales, finance, HR, marketing and today, a large portion of them are
entrepreneurs. Making sense of what their business is, what are the key
stumbling blocks, what is the role of communications in the business, and
figuring out the communication mix before starting on creating an ad is critical.
My guess is this is not happening very
well.
I sense that more and more
CEOs will be directly talking to creative. More and more creative people will
feel (rightly) that they can do this on their own. More and more boutique
agencies run by creative duos will spring up and walk away with big business.
And in most cases, bar a few exceptional creative people (who are great
instinctive planners), start producing great looking totally off strategy
work which will not move products. After the honeymoon period, the business of
pitches will start and the downward spiral will continue.
All for the agency stalwarts
lack of focus on what is truly the heart of the business: creating the perfect
brief. And their failing to back that person whose job it was to.
