IPA President Ian Priest discusses why it's time to get serious about relationships

That’s because we should be celebrating the length of our existing client-agency relationships rather than just focusing on the number of new pitches we are taking part in.

I’m convinced that this is one of the keys to my mission as President of the IPA, which is to drive and celebrate commercial creativity through my ADAPT agenda – covering alliances, diversification, agility, profit and talent.

Over the next 15 months we’re bringing the industry together – clients, intermediaries and agencies – to explore these areas, think about where we can do better, and then conduct live experiments to see what works and what doesn’t.

And if we’re talking headlines, here’s one I’d like to see in the Financial Times: ‘Client confidence in agencies soars as business results demonstrate value of creativity’.

What’s all this got to do with better relationships? Well, they are the starting point.

The FT headline is the end point.

Better for all

We all know that pitches are wasteful. Apart from the time and the money, clients can be distracted from their everyday business and it can take the winning agency six to nine months to bed in – during which time momentum can be lost.

Yet the average length of the client-agency relationship has fallen from 7.2 years in 1984 to just under three years now.

However, there’s plenty of evidence to show that good, healthy, long-term relationships feed into better, more effective work – commercial creativity, to put it in a nutshell.

From the feedback I’ve had, I know clients want better, longer, relationships, and we heard it last week from the likes of Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT, Dominic Grounsell of RSA, Tim Male of Lloyds Bank, and Craig Inglis of John Lewis.

Gavin Patterson said he wants his “agencies to thrive” while Craig Inglis said the relationship between John Lewis and adam&eveDDB was “happily dysfunctional”, which strikes me as a wonderful way to describe something that clearly works brilliantly.

They were speaking at the Alliances Adaptathon (that’s the A of my ADAPT agenda), where we had over 175 participants from clients, agencies and intermediaries get together for a day-long session.

We set up what good looks like by pairing senior clients with their agency opposite numbers and getting them to talk about how their relationships worked.

We got everyone thinking with stimulating presentations from Brainjuicer’s John Kearon and Professor Julie Hay, founder of Psychological Intelligence. In different ways, both made us think about the importance and psychology and emotion, not just in the work we produce but in how we interact.

And then we turned multiple brainstorming sessions, at which cross-industry groups hacked the future of relationships, into real action points.

Some of the clients who participated included: Virgin, Avis, Kopparberg, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Unilever.

Overall, we reflected on how we work together and how to make it better. That is not the sort of thing that usually happens at industry get-togethers.

You can read a longer summary of the day and find out some of the ideas developed by participants here.

Common goal

I’m really excited to see the industry working together.

It’s absolutely essential that this is not just driven by agencies – because it’s in everyone’s interests, not just the IPA’s – so it’s heartening to know that we not only have the support, but also the active participation of ISBA, the Marketing Society, and intermediaries like Oystercatchers and the AAR.

The ADAPT agenda is about changing behaviour, and you do that better by involving everyone.

Clearly there are a lot of different perspectives on how we can strengthen those alliances, but no-one has a monopoly on the best ideas, and it’s only by reflecting and incorporating input from all sides that we can really move forward as an industry.

In my view, it’s possible to distill all the ideas that emerged during the day into three broad themes.

So what happens now? The answer is we’ve set ourselves a 100-day deadline to come up with a more concrete set of experiments, and then report back on those.

To give you a flavour, here are some of the ideas that got real traction from the delegates on the day:

Next steps

We’ve asked senior industry figures to lead and co-ordinate our upcoming experiments, push the ongoing conversations, and then come back with a concrete set of best practice learnings, all of which will lead us in the direction of the desired outcomes of better, longer, client-agency relationships.

They will be working with others from the client and intermediary community to set up the experiments, see what works (and what doesn’t) and share their experiences.

Get involved

My message to those who couldn’t make the day is simple: get involved.

Pick an area where you think there is a need for change and have a go. Float an idea, run an experiment, feedback the results or share your findings. Think of yourself or your organisation as a test lab.

The sharing is critical, because the more we share, the wider the knowledge and the better the end result.

The best places to get involved are via the IPA’s ADAPT Hub and through our LinkedIn ADAPT group.