Really strong, insightful post by Steve Henry over at the Campaign site. I hate how it’s typeset though, so here it is in full:

7 impossible things before breakfast

I was talking to someone last week about setting up a new agency. And what this guy said was – “the last thing London needs is just another ad agency”. I couldn’t agree more. London is massively over-supplied with not very good ad agencies. Agencies which are just kind of ok. They win some business, they do an ok job on it, they lose business, they get by. They keep a tight eye on the finances, they survive. They lead lives of quiet desperation. The way out of that, as I see it, is to do some outstanding work. Lift yourself out of a peer group of 40 or more into a peer group of 2 or 3 – places which really care about the work. Of course it’s not that easy. Here are a few random tips.

1. Make it the entire management team’s responsibility to get out great work.

Agencies who put that responsibility solely on the creative director’s shoulders are pretty much doomed to fail. Bad agencies treat them as hired help – they hire them and fire them. It makes for dramatic head-lines, good copy for Campaign. But it very rarely works.

Look at football managers – not a bad analogy, actually. You’ve got Fergie who’s been given time and support – and look what he’s achieved. The other alternative is to treat them as hired help. And there aren’t that many Jose Mourinhos around. Dave Droga was one – but when you’re as good as that, you end up doing your own thing.

I’ve blogged before about how someone at WPP once did an exercise comparing various aspects of WPP with Omnicom, to see why the latter always did much better at creative awards shows.

The study showed that everything between the two networks was comparable – with one exception. WPP agencies were run far more often just by people from account-handling backgrounds, who treated CDs as hired help. Omnicom had far more partnerships between account-handling and creative at the top management levels.

2. Cherry-pick a few clients and concentrate on them.

If you try and do it on every account, you’ll be over-stretched and you’ll go mad. Truly great agencies have zero tolerance for compromise and try on everything. CDP did – HHCL did – Mother does. But it’s almost impossible to do that in an agency which has bad systems up and running. However, on those cherry-picked accounts, you should be ruthless. Have zero tolerance for crap on those accounts. This is how Dave Droga made his name at Saatchi’s in London.

3. Get to know those cherry-picked clients and work closely with them.

Great work comes out of one thing above all else – great relationships. Frank Lowe built deep relationships with his clients, so did Rupert Howell at HHCL. You’re not going to do great work without doing this. But if you can do it, good work comes out as easily as sliced bread.

4. Get to a stage where you can actually talk to clients about creative work.

Don’t just show them stuff and let them knock it down. Insist on having a dialogue.  And when you do this, one of the most important questions I think you need to ask clients is this.  ‘How are you judging this work ?  Are you judging it in terms of  “What do I want to make ?”  Or   “What do I want to see ?” Marketing directors who can think like their customers are the best ones around.

There’s a lot of stuff spoken about – “is this on brand ?” or  “does this reflect our core values ?” etc – questions which no consumer ever asked about any marketing in the history of time.

Of course you need that stuff upfront, and since marketing departments exist to ask those two questions, you’re not going to get rid of them as easily as all that, but persevere. Because the most important thing you can do is look at work as your consumers would. One of the most amazing things we ever did at HHCL was have a workshop with Pot Noodle in which we hypnotized everybody in the team (client and agency ) to being 15-years-old. We literally put everybody inside the head of the target market. That, believe me, is marketing gold-dust.

5. Let the ECD do his job.

Because you have to recognize that there is a skill in picking the right ideas. This feels horribly un-pc to say, in a world in which everybody and their Labrador has a view on which idea is best.  But it’s a skill, and the people who have a track record of doing it well, are probably gonna do it better than people who haven’t. In his book “The Case For Working With Your Hands”, Matthew Crawford talks about traditional master/apprentice relationships in areas like the building trade.

Then he compares that with most offices, where it’s considered politically incorrect to give orders – “authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something co-operative and friendly; as volunteerism”. That’s a tough one to get round. You don’t want to end up as Alan Sugar. But unless the ECD has real authority, you’re never gonna make it work.

6. Institute some processes to help.

I’m a huge fan of two particular types of meetings. Pre- presentation and pre-research. In the first one, the core team get together and discuss the work being presented and discuss what their goals are – which ideas do they really think are best ? What problems might the clients have with them ?  And pre-research does the same thing in relation to consumers.

They sound like small things but they’re not – they’re putting the agency and its ability to come up with great, market-changing ideas at the heart of the thing.

7. When you’re in the honeymoon period with a client, just after winning the pitch, agree how you want to work with them.

Set out how you want client approval to work. How you want to do research. How you want meetings to be run. Establish best practice, when it’s easy. Then, when things get tough, (as they will), you might – just might –  have a chance of getting through it.