I want to deconstruct my clients

Continued from Part I…

Now that we’ve discussed innovating on the agency side, the next logical step is to take a look at innovating the client side of the business. The main question being, how badly do your clients want to win?

Delivering positive business results for the upper level client-side managers is what matters most. If they didn’t deliver good results, frankly, they wouldn’t be around very long. To get their business units in the black, they set goals for their staff to achieve in order to stay on track. Increase ROI or reduce churn (telecom) or increase volume share (cpg) among others. In the past, clients have turned those business goals into “communication goals” via a communication brief.

The purpose of this brief is to translate the business talk into a communication goal that the agency can act on. Which makes sense as creative teams don’t talk 5% growth, they talk consumer insights.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if our clients passed their business objectives on to us to see what happened. If Bell Canada briefed Leo and said, we need you to reduce churn by 2% this year. No mandatories, no silly benefit statements. As long as Leo delivered on that 2% reduction, it wouldn’t really matter what they produced, nor would it matter much what it cost as long as it was less than what was invested.

I propose that clients start to brief their agencies with real business results as opposed to hokey communication objectives. Challenge their bright minds to wrap their head around real objectives. And challenge their wallets by linking results to their fees. Through this method, you might get some off the wall work, but you may also get some off the wall results.