Live Issue... Cultural clashes cloud agency transparency in Asia

Last week at Engage, Contagious magazine editor Peter Kemp-Robertson might have caused a few eyes to roll when he casually told agencies that they needed to become ‘radically transparent’.

He was borrowing a phrase from a recent article in Wired magazine, which advised multinationals to adopt an open, interactive communications approach, most often used by start-ups. In the corporate world, this typically translates to a blog ‘from the CEO’ or even allowing employees to blog about work, as Microsoft did recently. In the agency world, Wieden & Kennedy was one of the first to take this approach - in its office blog, senior management describes their experiences presenting to Nokia during the global review (before going on to win the account).

“Transparency will affect how you do your advertising,” says Kemp-Robertson, a former Leo Burnett creative. “It will raise creative standards by forcing people to be more adventurous. You’ll get more ideas - some awful, some brilliant.”

But perhaps it is easier for Kemp-Robertson to preach this, given that he is based in a Western culture where transparency is cherished and demanded by consumers. Asia, on the other hand, is a lot more unforgiving. When mistakes are made, people quickly get the boot, only to resurface - more often than not - at competing agencies. Hence, there is a tendency to keep all bad news behind soundproofed boardroom walls.

“Agencies have been in the business of talking things up,” says Matthew Godfrey, CEO of Publicis Asia-Pacific. “There hasn’t been a corporate revelation as big as Enron here. But clients often know what’s happening in an agency before management does. They don’t want to hear there are no issues. They know there are.”

Ogilvy PR China president Scott Kronick believes transparency is the only way to retain long-term clients and staff.

“If you’re not transparent with your clients, there will be misunderstanding and scepticism. You will always get questions about how long it takes to do a job and how much you can bill, but as long as you have an open conversation, it shouldn’t be an issue.”

But Philip Lu, marketing and sales manager of Mazda Singapore, says agencies should be more transparent in their cost estimates.

“They need to work on quantifying the costs of a job. It’s common for them to complain that they’re not making money, but when the costs cannot be made known, how do we really know they’re not making money?”

Perhaps the radical transparency that Kemp-Robertson prescribes must start within the agency. BBH Asia-Pacific did this after moving into new premises last summer, when physical walls between management and staff were knocked down. The spirit of open communication also carried through into a viral, ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary about the making of a recent Levi’s campaign.

Godfrey says that he and vice-chairman and ECD Calvin Soh are trying to break traditional agency barriers. They have begun a Facebook group, ‘Calvin & Matt’, where employees can take a more indirect approach to communicating with the agency chiefs.

The two also maintain a mini-bar for those roaming the halls. “In Asia, there’s a staff mentality that management will always fix things,” says Godfrey. “I think what’s important is to erase that distinction between management and staff. We’re in this together.”

Kronick claims that despite Ogilvy’s enormous infrastructure, salary information is one of the only secrets at the office. “There’s too much going on to worry about how much info can and can’t be shared.”