The Weekly Wrap: Danny Turnbull, Gyro International
The Weekly Wrap, Danny Turnbull, General Manager of the Manchester office of Gyro International
On the one hand we have Shearings awarding some brochure work to a Chester agency following a five-way pitch, and on the other, PepsiCo investing $1.2bn in a global overhaul of its marketing strategy and the NHS in the North West putting £30m worth of business out to tender. I wonder how many global network agencies PepsiCo will interview as a part of this process.
I suspect, relatively speaking, it may not rival Shearings’ five-way pitch for some brochures.
Last month Innocent was admonished for conducting a 3-way pitch only to award the business to the in-house team, and in the past week a story hit the media concerning a company that held a 12-month pitch process while the incumbent battled wearily on.
It is a buyers market at the moment, though having picked up three multi-national pieces of work over the past week the picture isn’t as black as some are keen to paint it. However, some businesses are choosing to wield this power irresponsibly. Pitching has always been an emotive process and one that, as championed by Martin Anderson, is intrinsically open to abuse. After all, if you asked three architects to design your dream home so you could decide which you liked best, you’d end up with a
fat bill.
My sense is that, as we near the close of the year amidst an economy entering into recession, marketing directors are turning off marketing spend; waiting for the fiscal or calendar year to re-set, and sitting tight. And what better way to pass the time, than to review the agency roster.
This doesn’t apply across the board of course, but when re-hashing the week at the pub on a Friday night with peers and colleagues, it is definitely a more common tale.
The frustrating thing for agencies is that really good work demands an open, honest client-agency relationship. A long, drawn-out pitch process that involves the agency giving away thousands of pounds worth of intellectual property for free and eventually comes down to who’s prepared to bend over the most when it comes to cost, is not the way to go about getting it.
Those companies that travel down this ill-advised route, should remember that making it through a tough trading period means sticking to customers and engendering absolute loyalty; very difficult to do if there is no clearly defined brand or promoted point of differentiation. No longer buoyed up on easily available credit and a boom economy, customers, whether consumers or businesses, are becoming far choosier when it comes to spending money. For products and services competing for the same small slice of spend, it is increasingly difficult to convey a compelling message amongst the general noise.
Really good work, whatever the channel, will deliver against the bottom line and never has that been more important. It is perhaps then a good time for companies to embrace the concept of partnership when working with their agencies and throw out the “supplier” mentality that stifles so many creative relationships. Maybe we should change this week’s title from Weekly Wrap to Weekly Rant….