Perspective... Is your agency's culture built on effectiveness?

It’s a brutal world where good results equal rewards and bad results come with penalties. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, measurability has shot up the client and agency agenda like never before. It’s the safe bet the industry is clinging to in this bad economy. Marketers are no longer accepting measurement as a process added in at the end of an advertising campaign by an agency looking to justify its existence. They want constant measurement and evaluation of their marketing campaigns.

Agencies, driven by client demands, are creating an effectiveness culture internally to make measurability the bedrock of every marketing strategy.

There isn’t any shortage of metrics in the industry; you can set out to measure anything from brand awareness to recall and retention. And agencies have invested in the tools to make this data available.They measure the impact of work on their client’s brand as well as the tangible ‘effect’ — such as traffic, sales, and requests.

But for the vast majority of the region’s clients, overall business results remain the only real arbiter of the effectiveness of creative campaigns.

The trouble is tying any of the measurement results the industry is able to generate directly to business profit.

This is made more challenging by the fact that the horizons for achieving results are contracting - some targets stretch to the year ahead, but most appear to focus on the next quarter. Demonstrating any return on investment within a quarterly reporting period is difficult, even with the best tools.

We know clients value effectiveness. But we often hear from marketers how hard it is for them to understand what an agency is really effective at.

Clients, of course, look at the work that agencies produce. But it is sometimes difficult for them to see behind the creative and judge the quality of thinking that went into the advertising campaign, let alone see what real return on investment the work achieved.

They see the attraction of winning creative awards. They know these help agencies attract the best creative talent, and they provide a kind of ‘seal of approval’ of an agency’s likelihood to deliver in the fickle area of creativity.

But, for many clients working in Asia, creativity often represents a big risk. They take comfort in certainty, and they are much more interested in results.

High on the agenda of any client is having people around them that understand their business. Results underline the fact that agency partners are making it their business to know what purpose their creativity is setting out to achieve.

They strengthen creative reputation and acknowledge a company’s ability to grow brands and enhance business. They prove agencies are ready to be held more accountable for delivering work that gets results. Ultimately, this culture can only deepen client relationships and lead to shared methods of remuneration such as PBR (payment by results) which ensure that agency and client share a common agenda.

We know just how seriously agencies (and clients) are taking effectiveness through our own Asian Marketing Effectiveness (AME) awards.

At a time when many creative shows are feeling the pinch (just look at the Singapore’s decision to postpone the Creative Circle show), the effectiveness competition has attracted a record number of entries (more than 600 at press time) and its best jury line-up ever (see www.ame.asia). Recognition of effectiveness, whether it’s through award wins or metrics, provides clients with a unique insight into an agency’s ability to create work that works.

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