My investment house advisor tells me this is the worst time to see clients.
"We're at the mercy of the market", he says, pulling out a brochure for a Tibetan ostrich farm fund, "this should be a better bet against the extreme market fluctuations".
I tell him I don't need to be told to invest in more, better funds. I need to know whether to invest at all, and if there are investment vehicles other than funds that will get me a better return.
Now replace the word "investment with "marketing". Those funds are ads and media stocks. And we, the advertising industry, are the investment advisors.
All advertising agencies are good at making ads, and at recommending media strategies. But if you wanted advice on which make of car to choose, you wouldn't go to a BMW dealer. Likewise, if we in the advertising industry keep advising clients that the best way to spend their marketing budgets is always to advertise more, they'll stop coming to us for advice.
Because the big issue for clients is: should I be advertising at all?
They all report to CEOs who focus on growing earnings and want more hard-nosed numbers beyond awareness or branding. A client once told me he suspected that "branding was something Westerners had invented to sell award-winning ads.
Clients want more alternatives. Don't just sell them advertising - look at all the different marketing communication channels. Are we equipped to help our clients to spread their advertising risk into other avenues such as direct, event, PR, digital, trade marketing to reach out to customers.
If we're going to be able to tell clients, with credibility, to invest more, we need to be able to show them why they should. That doesn't mean that it all has to be about driving the bottomline immediately. Yes, promotional work can have a quick effect on sales, but every client will take a sustained improvement in marketing efficiency over a short-term sales boost.
Agency remuneration needs to be structured so that agencies earn as much money for recommending not to advertise as they do for recommending advertising.
Clients like Procter & Gamble pay its agencies a percentage of sales uplift. "We want to pay you more", they're saying. If we really believe that advertising has a more profound effect on long-term sales, then we need to be able to prove it. Again P&G is leading the way - they are sharing data with us and treating us as long-term partners to help them find better ways to grow their business.
In the end, the smart money is on increasing marketing return on investment.
In client speak, that means reducing the cost of selling.
