Looking at data covering approximately 8,000 client-agency relationships over the past 11 years, Aprais has shown that the scores the two sides give to each other correlate to 99.9999 per cent of statistical confidence. Or put another way, as David Ogilvy was suggesting 50 years ago when he quipped that "Clients get the advertising they deserve", good performing clients get good agency output—and bad performing ones don’t.
So, what are the characteristics of a good client?
Good agency performance arises when a client performs well in four areas: approval, briefing, timing and behaviour. This means that if a client has a good approval process and sticks to it, briefs well, behaves well in the sense of being open and responsive to agency needs and information requests, and agrees on and sticks to appropriate timings for work, then this client will be seen as 'high quality' in the eyes of its agency.
And what is the size of the prize?
Good performing clients judge agency output to be 37 per cent better than it is for agencies with poorly performing clients. That's a 37 per cent increase in marcomm ROI, just from clients being open to finding out their own capabilities in four key areas and taking steps to address any shortcomings.
What’s the alternative?
A client without the humility to reflect on its own capabilities and limitations or ‘blind spots’ will be more likely to kick off a time-consuming agency pitch. But on what basis does that client expect to achieve more success with the new agency, when none of the basic problems in its own performance has been fixed?
Surely it is better to try to openly assess where things are and then work together to improve them as much as possible to the ultimate benefit of both parties—a massive ROI improvement for the client and greater motivation and chance of retention for the agency—than to begin the merry-go-round of agency churn?
So, what is needed?
- Clients should commit to the fact that a client-agency relationship is a partnership, as opposed to a master-servant interaction.
- A willingness (humility?) on the part of clients to accept that the best way to get the most out of their agency partner is to find out more about themselves via a genuine two-way evaluation.
- Relationship evaluation should use statistically robust large-scale data with external benchmarks. This is the only way to provide for actionable insight as to what 'good' looks like for client, agency, industry and geography and thus lead to confidence in decision making.
- Both parties must commit to acting on the findings and investing the necessary resources in terms of time, people and /or money to ensure meaningful progress is made.
It’s not often that a client gets the chance to make its hard-challenged marcomm budget work up to 37 per cent better. Add to this the fact that this gain is so directly under the client’s own control, and surely it is an opportunity too big to ignore.
Jeremy Caplin has 20+ years of client-side experience with P&G, ReckittBenckiser, Nestlé and Monster. He currently serves as CEO of Aprais, which uses proprietary software to provide relationship evaluations for individuals, departments, and companies and their professional partners.
