Ask the experts (and then try really hard not to ignore them)
I am an expert. Ask me any question about legendary Newcastle United defender Philippe Albert and I will dazzle you with so much knowledge you’ll feel like you’ve been punched in the brain with a house brick.
Yes, expertise is a splendid thing. Admittedly, an intimate knowledge of a long forgotten Belgian footballer (signed for Newcastle in 1994 for £2.6m by perennial tantrum-thrower Kevin Keegan) is of little professional value.
But in the marketing business, expertise is the sole commodity in which we trade. Yes the modern marketing world comprises of a depth and breadth of skills that are continually evolving, but our overall offering to our clients is expertise.
Ideas, solutions and execution are why agencies exists and why our clients enlist our services.
But, as anyone in the profession realises, there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the industry model. Expertise is what clients need, expertise is what we provide. And yet the transaction occasionally does not bear out in quite so straightforward a way as one would expect.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to work with clients who value what we can offer and are receptive to our ideas. But the client horror stories amongst marketing professionals are legion – hilarious and horrifying in equal measure.
There are cases in which an agency, recruited undoubtedly for their demonstration of expertise, are then, in the plainest terms, ignored. One must assume that businesses turn to agencies to fill a skill requirement in their organisation. To then disregard and overrule the very expertise you have actively (and expensively) sourced is baffling.
Or is it? As frustrating as agencies find it to have their input diluted or marginalised, we must as an industry try to empathise. It is difficult to be within a business and then hand over any degree of control to an external provider, particularly a provider of ideas.
It is therefore an agency’s duty to alleviate this anxiety. Our job is not to burst through the doors and demand nothing but attention and obedience. Our job is to persuade, to convince and to demonstrate the very reasons why we will make a positive contribution.
A second obvious incongruity about the client/agency relationship is the dissolution of partnership. Agencies function because of close and cooperative internal partnerships. The same is invariably true of the clients we serve. Yet all too often this spirit of collaboration between the two is unsettled by feelings of apprehension, territorial anxiety and ultimately frustration.
Yes clients must attempt to be more accepting of what an agency does and delivers. But agencies must never attempt to impart their expertise without first establishing a relationship in which that expertise is recognised, valued and encouraged.
And if this happens, well then you’re set for a result so glorious one could easily compare it to the 37 career goals scored by Philippe Albert for club and country. Ah, ’tis good to be an expert.
Follow Andrew Boulton on Twitter @Boultini
Andrew Boulton is a copywriter at the Together Agency. Zero goals for club and country.