Nike, Apple and Google are Asian creative agencies' dream clients: The Talent Business

The survey, which included 79 Asian CEOs, managing directors, creative directors and planning directors of leading creative agencies, all of whom earn above US$250,000 in base salary, listed Adidas, Volkswagen and Coca-Cola as the next three most desirable brands to work with. The Asia results are a subset of a global study that surveyed nearly 400 such agency leaders.  

Respondents were asked to rate clients according to the attributes that are most important to agencies, including belief in the value of ideas, a reputation for working collaboratively, being open to the development of business solutions outside advertising, a progressive approach to digital marketing, producing award winning work and being able to work on campaigns with global impact. 

Agency leaders who responded to the survey were also asked to rate 27 global brand owners. 

According to the report, agencies in Asia care less about working on campaigns with global impact (19 per cent) but care most that their clients are ideas-driven (78 per cent), a figure consistent with results from the rest of the world.

Next, agency leaders in Asia wanted brand owners who had a reputation for working collaboratively with agencies (63 per cent). The study noted that this trait was more important for Asian leaders than it was anywhere else in the world. 

"In Asia the desire to work collaboratively with clients is key to a successful client/agency partnership, which is perhaps a reflection of the supplier mentality that some clients in Asia have at a local level with their agency partners," commented Charlie Thomas, Asia-Pacific managing director of The Talent Business.

Nike is a choice client because, as a senior Singapore creative put it, "They believe in the power of ideas and they take chances.”

Apple meanwhile is "clean, straightforward" and yet takes risks and is open to fresh ideas, commented a senior marketing professional based in China. 

Google on the other hand "starts from an entirely different place when it comes to driving brand value and engagement," said a top creative from Singapore. "Conventional solutions are not the first port of call. They are prepared to experiment, and appear to be unhindered by legacy models or approaches.”

Of the four least desirable clients in Asia, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, General Motors and L'Oréal, only GSK and L'Oréal were in the bottom four of the global list and are consistently the brand owners that agency leaders want least as clients. 

On the Asia league table, not one creative listed these four clients as "very desirable" with 48 deeming  L'Oréal as "quite undesirable" or "very undesirable" and 41 feeling likewise about GM. 

The global beauty conglomerate L'Oréal was criticised for being: “Formulaic, with no creativity in content or context.”

"This study is the first of its kind to empirically demonstrate how important brand owner reputation is in the agency world," Thomas said. "It directly impacts a client's ability to attract the best creative talent. I hope this will make some marketers sit up and think seriously about their reputations in the agency community."

While the six top brands on the Asian table mirror that of the global study, there are several marked differences. P&G, for example, ranked ninth in Asia compared with 13th globally. 

 

 

“Procter & Gamble were named as the Spikes Asia Advertiser of the Year, which is testament to the quality of its campaigns and innovative marketing initiatives produced by the collaborative agency partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region," observed Thomas. 

Unilever on the other hand ranked 15th in Asia, but 11th globally. 

Interestingly, Korean brand Samsung was much better favoured on the global league table (18th) than it was on the Asian table (23rd). Microsoft too was much preferred by non-Asian agencies, ranking 14th globally compared with 21st in Asia. 

“These results won’t come as a surprise to the agency community," Thomas said. "It’s the elephant in the room. Agencies know that a client’s reputation affects their ability to get great people to work on that client’s business, but now there’s a definitive study that provides the evidence to back this up.”