Straight Talk

How to work with an advertising agency

You’ve hired an ad agency and there is much joy in the land. You’ve seen their book and it’s damned impressive. You’ve talked with your account team and by golly they know their stuff. You’ve met the creatives and, surprisingly, they seem to live in the same world you do. So God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world. Then they make a creative presentation and...

It’s not at all what you expected! Some of it seems just a little off but a lot of it’s downright scary. Who are these guys? Where did they get these crazy ideas? Sure, what you saw in their book was high-impact stuff but this is beyond the pale. The concept is over the top. The design is, well... strange. And the colors, so wrong, so wrong. Not your colors at all.

So what do you do now? Well first, calm down; this is no time to go postal. Second, consider the very real possibility that the agency’s presentation is right on and you’re overreacting. Would it help to know that probably half or more of the work you saw in their book elicited the same reaction from the clients involved? It’s very likely true. The best work tends to make even the bravest souls nervous at first blush. And only an agency’s best work goes into their book.

Sure, I hear you say, you’re an agency guy. We’d expect an agency guy to take the agency’s side. Fair enough. Let’s take a look at one client’s perspective on this exact situation.

When Avis tried harder*

In the early 1960s, when Robert Townsend was CEO of Avis Rent A Car, he knew one thing for certain. His biggest competitor, Hertz, was spending five dollars on advertising for every one dollar that Avis spent. So Avis’s advertising needed to have five times the impact of Hertz’s. Townsend called Bill Bernbach, creative director of the legendary Doyle, Dane, Bernbach.

Bernbach told him that most clients put their advertising through an approval process that destroys the work and kills the morale of the creatives. If you promise to run whatever we recommend, Bernbach offered, every creative in my shop will want to work on your account.

Townsend agreed. Ninety days later, Bernbach came back with a campaign that blithely admitted Avis was only the number two rental car company and promised: We Try Harder. Everybody at Avis disliked the campaign on sight and there was empirical evidence to indicate it was a horrible mistake. For one thing, it was received wisdom in the advertising biz at the time that you NEVER admitted you weren’t number one. Nobody at Avis had ever seen anything like this whacko campaign before and that alone should have been enough to kill it dead.

But Townsend had agreed to run whatever Bernbach recommended. And to make certain his executives lived up to his promise, Townsend wrote the following memo and had it framed in everyone’s office at both Avis and at DDB.

Avis Rent A Car
Advertising Philosophy

Avis will never know as much about advertising as DDB and DDB will never know as much about the rent a car business as Avis.
The purpose of the advertising is to persuade the frequent business renter to try Avis.
A serious attempt will be made to create advertising with 5 times the effectiveness of the competition's advertising.
To this end, Avis will approve or disapprove, not try to improve, ads which are submitted. Any changes suggested by Avis must be grounded on a material operating defect (a wrong uniform for example).
To this end, DDB will only submit for approval those ads which they truly as an agency recommend. They will not "see what Avis thinks of that one."

The memo seems pretty straightforward but look again at the simple elegance of Point 4. "Avis will approve or disapprove, not try to improve..." In other words, since Avis executives were constrained from becoming would-be creative directors, they had to focus solely on advertising strategy and factual information. Nothing else. Which was, in point of fact, their job.

Now check out Point 5. "DDB will only submit for approval those ads which they truly as an agency recommend." In other words, no trial balloons, folks. Don’t present anything you don’t truly believe in. If the campaign fails, you’re fired. You can’t blame it on Avis’s meddling because we’re not allowed to meddle. Total responsibility for the campaign resides with the agency. Which was, in point of fact, their job.

So everybody sticks to their own job description and they know in advance they’ll be held accountable. How cool is that? No finger pointing. No cover-your-butt hedging. Just put-up or shut-up. Any agency that doesn’t actively seek this kind of relationship is afraid of its own mediocrity. Me, I say bring it on; this agency/client relationship raises the bar for performance.

The Avis campaign ran just the way DDB presented it. Avis sales rose from a 10 percent annual increase to a 35 percent annual increase and "We Try Harder" became one of the most famous campaigns in advertising history. End of story. Now back to your situation.

*I borrowed this story wholesale from Townsend’s book, "Up the Organization," published in 1970 by Knopf. If you want to do a nice thing for yourself, find the book at your local library and read it cover to cover. You’ll be learning from a master and having a lot of fun doing it. I promise.

Bite the bullet

Avis is far from the only example of classic campaigns that when first presented gave clients the fantods. But it’s one of my favorites for two reasons. First, go to www.avis.com and one of the first things you’ll see is a button that says: We Try Harder. That campaign is 40 years old now. Most campaigns don’t see 40 in dog years, so clearly this was a very wonderful idea.

Second, the Avis campaign came out of the 60s Creative Revolution in advertising. That was the Renaissance for the ad industry. It’s never been equaled. We Try Harder, the Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant, Charlie the Tuna, I’d like to Teach the World to Sing, Please Don’t Squeeze the Charmin, Ring Around the Collar, the Pepsi Generation, the Maxwell House coffee pot, the gorilla and the American Tourister suitcase, Sony and Alka-Seltzer commercials too numerous to list and I’m just getting started. Sure, there’s been a lot of good advertising since 1970 but the best of it is still the 60’s legacy. You want to know what makes advertising work, study the 60s.

Which brings us back to you, your agency and the campaign that you know, just know, is wrong, wrong, wrong. Well, I feel bad for you and all but at this point you’ve got only two choices: fire the agency or run their campaign as is. Tough choices, sure. But if you decide to keep the agency and mess with their campaign, they’ll stop caring whether your company lives or dies before they even leave the room. An agency needs to love the work it creates or else it’s just about the money, which makes the agency, well... you know. And that makes you, well... you know. Sometimes a purely professional relationship isn’t the highest goal.

But hey, you’re paying a lot of money for this campaign so why shouldn’t you get what you want? Okay, let’s stop right there. It’s not about what you want; it’s about what will work in the marketplace. As soon as you make it about what you want, you’re paying your agency a boatload of money to abandon their expertise and pander to your personal preferences. Not good. So now, very calmly, look around the conference table and ask yourself this: Who in this room knows the most about advertising? Seriously. If you know more about advertising than your agency, what the hell are they doing there? But if they know more than you do (and it’s inconceivable that they don’t) why are you even thinking about telling them how to do their job?

Surely, I can’t be serious. Except that I am. "Avis will approve or disapprove, not try to improve..." Pure genius. Because Townsend had already made the really hard decision. He’d hired DDB. He’d asked the hard questions; he’d examined the work; he’d decided: these are the guys. And so should you. Before you hire them, not after they’ve developed creative. Make sure these are the people you want sitting across the table from you when the new campaign is presented and the icy cold fingers of doubt clutch at your heart. Then commit to them the same way you expect them to commit to you. Because that’s the only way you’ll get first-class work.

When an agency knows a client is committed, the agency team never rests until the work is as good as it can be. They eat, breathe and dream the campaign. They’re thinking about it during their kid’s school play, their home team’s playoff, their romantic fantasies. It’s never out of their minds or, indeed, their hearts. Because everyone wants a "We Try Harder" in their book. That’s the Holy Grail of advertising. I know this to be true and if I haven’t convinced you, save us both a lot of stress and aggravation: don’t hire my agency. We’ll both be a lot happier.

The Avis campaign was unquestionably brilliant. But equally brilliant was the relationship between client and agency that made such a campaign possible. It was courageous, too. Townsend had to be one bold hombre to do what he did. He deserved to win big and he did.

Turns out, it was also smart and visionary and just plain good business. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. Nothing worth achieving ever is.

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