Top tips on how to run marketing and communications for agencies

Here are some of the main insights that panel came back with:

Why are so many marketing and advertising agencies so bad at promoting themselves?

Austin: "We have to be honest with our clients when they have done a bad piece of work in order to sell in that story rather than blow smoke up their arses. That's why a lot of them do it quite badly."

Jones: "Everyone is so busy doing work for their clients that they forget to do the same work for themselves. The simple way to do good marketing for an agency is to do good marketing for your clients. Often you see agencies who do amazing work and when it comes to marketing themselves it's awful. A lot of that is hiring the wrong people into the job and confidence.

Where do you start the process with an agency to ensure their external communications are effective?

Bloch: "Make sure you understand the proposition of your own business. You have to do that for your clients, so make sure you know what you are saying about yourself and what are you offering and don't lie. Tell the truth. Plan what you have got by looking at your resources and be realistic. Then look at what the brand is about and be consistent."

Jones: "Ruthless oversimplification. There are so many smart people within agencies and all of them, particularly the digital ones, can overcomplicate things. Start from scratch by simplifying the proposition and make sure from the top-down you focus on a single core."

Bloch: "Don't let marketing be detached from the business objectives. Before you do anything be sure it is clear what the business plans to achieve. Unless you are connecting back up to what the business does you become very isolated and devalued."

Austin: "It's about stories and capturing interesting and captivating information. Whatever the agency, whoever you are working with, it has to be somebody you are going to enjoy talking to who has real insights and what we are specialising a lot at the moment in is ghostwriting. While journalism is suffering, there is so much room for tweets, blogs, analysis and insight and a real growth area for us is opinions. Every day we go through the papers and see if there is anything relevant for our clients and then we have a team of writers who will write an opinion piece with one of our clients and put it out there. It's about being lively and having exciting ideas."

Mistry: "There is a balance between doing the tactical press release stuff and then delivering the overlay which really gets noticed and shared, which is the strategic thought pieces about what their positioning is because those are the key messages for your agencies and the vehicles that will work. So you can highlight the new 30 second spot but you need to overlay that with thinking because that's what marketers are looking for, strategy that makes their lives easier."

Jones: "Comms is as much about what you do don't say as what you do say and knowing the machinations of behind the scenes. Talk to the account teams on a daily basis and discover the stories within the agency to get out to market on. It may well be that the CEO doesn't know everything that is going on. Get into the executive board and talk to the account teams."

Mistry: "It's not just about knowing what is going on in the agencies. It's about knowing what is going on across every discipline so you can create the stories and start setting an agenda. Journalists are looking for where news fits into the bigger picture."

Bloch: "Have a crisis management plan in place within your agency. These calls always make you feel a little bit sick but you can very quickly respond to it with a team of people you are pulling together. You might get a call on something you knew was coming and it may action a response, but if not then I would recommend you get a team of people in a room who can action that crisis and determine how to respond. If you can't get all of those people in a room then document what is agreed and do not walk out of that room thinking that a verbal agreement was enough. Write it down because tracking it means you are ensuring those agreements are there. And don't be afraid to get the lawyers in quickly."

Jones: "Make it abundantly clear that there is one point of contact and that is you. It only takes on person to say something stupid. So make that clear."

Austin: "Within several of my agencies the CEO will inform me, then I work out the plan and then there is an internal briefing within the agency and the ECD and other staff are all leaking stuff to publications which is when you have to walk in a close it down. Get them in a room and write it down."

How do you run communications across different geographies?

Jones: "I come up with a global plan about how we are going to talk about ourselves and the key things we are going to say across every single market. We have also worked hard to put an infrastructure in place across each region and each market. They have to be empowered to adapt that for the market and as long as it doesn't detract from the single vision of the company, you have to let that go otherwise everyone will be competing and there will be a whole slew of different messages. You have to get someone locally to be your voice in the market."

Bloch: "Hire someone with good experience. It's easy to think that head office will hire the grown ups and everyone else will have the juniors. Don't fall into that trap, particularly Asia, everything is so different there."

Jones: "You need to move from being a support function to being a strategic leadership function. If you have a mindset of strategic leadership then that will give you the confidence to do anything."

What do you do when you are working for a client who thinks they know how to handle PR better than you?

Bloch: "Don't work for them. Life is too short!"

Mistry: "Stand your ground, you know how to do your jobs."

What advice would you have for new start up agencies?

Austin: "Don't bother journalists. In one of my previous agencies we had someone who had been trained to call a journalist up every 15 minutes until they gave her an answer. If a woman says 'no' then they mean no and the same for a journalist. Give them an exclusive or let them have it half an hour before anybody else. Work with people. Start following all key journalists in your area and comment on the stories that are being covered in your area, but not in a self serving way."

What is the best way to make a first approach to a journalist?

Austin: "There needs to be more respect from clients and less spin. Be honest about the story and don't lie to them."

Mistry: "You have a reputation to protect and you are having a conversation with someone you want to speak to in the future. Develop that relationship from there. It's about knowing what they like, what they don't like, knowing when you are not going to be a hassle to them. It's also about an exchange. You judge which journalist to tell and creating trust. All the daily courtesies that you afford you extend to journalists too."

Bloch: "Go to industry events and meet people. The first time you want to speak to them face to face as if it's over the phone then it's not ideal. The ideal is that you have said hello to them somewhere along the lines so you are not just another person."

Jones: "Be interesting. Be a human being first and a Comms person second."

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