You probably agree that most advertising isn’t creatively great or even good. From the outside, one might think it’s a business filled with dumb, untalented people serving marketing departments filled with bean counters who couldn’t care less if their dollars are producing a fetid mess.

Truth is, too many advertising agencies are filled with brilliant people producing well-designed, absolute crap day in and day out. And marketing departments are run by smart and talented MBAs wondering why they’re always disappointed with what gets made. Why is it this way?

Unfortunately, there are a multitude of reasons. When in business for myself, I wrote a white paper describing to potential clients why their marketing wasn’t any good. Besides being kind of insulting, the paper got to be so long that it got shelved. So I’m going to rehash the content in a series of blog posts. The first topic is trust.

It’s a cliche but like many other cliches, it’s true. Good agency/client relationships are like marriages. And a marriage without trust is just a series of arguments.

There are a lot of reasons people (I say people because it’s a people business) enter into agency/client relationships but I’m going to highlight what I think are the top ones.

1. Attraction – The client thinks agency is a hip and sexy shop that will imbue her business with this hipness and make them more popular.
2. Financial – Client selects shop for monetary reasons.
3. Friendship – Client chooses agency based on relationships. So and so knows so and so. People often select lawyers this way too rather than reviewing credentials, experience, and track record.
4. Agency search – A bunch of stakeholders get in a room and decide what criteria are most important to them in an ad agency (ROI measurement, LEED certification, diversity, what school the president went to and what experience the account executive has with chartering fishing boats). They then hire a firm to help them find the perfect agency to meet their diverse criteria.  Then the only agency that all parties agree doesn’t suck at their metric, which may or may not have anything to do with actual advertising, is hired.
5. Bureaucratic vendor selection – An agency wanting to work with a really big corporation or government agency fills out a bunch of forms to get on an approved vendor list. Client randomly selects agency from this list. This is actually more common than you might think for lower profile assignments.

Notice not a single one of these criteria have anything to do with respect. And without respect there’s never trust, especially on decisions that matter.

Clients usually choose the agency partner but agencies are equally to blame for lack of trust in relationships. After all, it does take two to tango. Here are a few ways agencies blow it.

1. No more charm – The principals or senior management are on the charm offensive with the client for the first six months and then hire a junior to service the account. They then wonder why the relationship sucks a year later.
2. Give up – After a few setbacks, the agency gives up on producing quality work and treats an account like ATM.
3. Cash cow – The agency pursues certain clients purely for the monetary reasons. Sooner or later, even the dumbest sugar daddy catches on.
4. No investment – Some agencies aren’t willing to invest the time required for building trust.

For many industries, advertising and marketing are the key driver for their business. So you’d think the most important factor for a business relationship would be trust. But I guess that’s easier said then done.

The best work I created in my career has always been with clients who I trust and they trust me back. They trust me with information and respect my opinion and creativity. And when they critique my work, I listen and take their criticisms seriously because I trust and respect them. For most agency and clients, this kind of relationship is possible if you’re willing to work at it. And yes, it’s worth the effort for both parties.

But for all this high-minded talk, some people are just not trust worthy. That’s why we have this thing called divorce – I mean that’s why people fire their ad agency and ad agencies fire clients.

Posted on: May 3, 2010, by : Jimmy Gilmore