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Canadian Agency Leaders Speak Out on Client Strengths & Weaknesses Study shows that the success of a project depends just as much on the quality of a communicator’s pre-project homework as the quality of the agency work. Whether you work at a corporation, organization or agency, you have clients. C-level executives and corporate clients often play the dominant role in the business relationship with their PR teams and agencies. In fact, they strongly influence the overall output of most public relations campaigns. AgencyLink Inc., in partnership with SCAN International, examined client performance with the study, A Global Voice for Marketing Agency Leaders; 620 agency leaders, including 106 from Canadian public relations and marketing agencies, completed the 2009 survey. Many of our clients admit they’re often the cause of problems with their agency or PR department relationships. However, the industry tends to focus on the perceived quality of agencies, whereas client performance is equally important to achieve effective marketing communications success. The results demonstrate that Canadian communicators need to invest more in market research, improve their integration efforts, and provide clearer agency briefs. Our national marketers, however, score higher than their counterparts in the U.S. and Europe in their ability to motivate and financially reward their agencies. Agency leaders rank Canadian client attitude and willingness to invest in market and communications research scores poorly compared to other nations. In Canada, 38 per cent of agencies classify Canadian marketers as weak, while only 16 per cent say they are excellent or good investors in research. Comparatively, in the U.S. and U.K., 24 per cent of clients are rated weak, while another 24 per cent are rated excellent/good. For integration, it was suggested that many companies are not structured to leverage integrated marketing communications. In an effort to become more customercentric, many companies have decentralized marketing to align with geographic business units or product sales. That works if you are in a multi-brand company, but firms that speak with one voice to multiple stakeholders need an integrated process. If a client is highly decentralized, they are going to have integration issues. In this instance, a multidisciplinary agency could act as the integrator. Conversely, if the business is highly integrated, it may benefit from best-of-breed agencies in multiple disciplines with the client acting as the integrator. Almost 30 per cent of Canadian marketing professionals were ranked as weak in integration. When asked to select the three most important areas for improvement of client performance in relation to their agencies, Canadian agency leaders rated: • Strategic direction and briefings (71 per cent and the highest of all participating countries); • Quality of decision-making process and streamlining approval levels (38 per cent); • Quality of judgement and ability to understand agency’s recommendations (34 per cent). Government and consumer products did not fare well when agency leaders selected client performance by sector in Canada. Outshining the field in Canada are B2B and financial services. Client sectors in Canada that are better than average in quality of performance are in business-tobusiness (66 per cent); services (65 per cent); and financial services (60 per cent). Client sectors rating highest in quality in the U.S. are consumer products (78 per cent); services (58 per cent); and consumer durables (52 per cent). Canadian client marketers rank the best among all the countries surveyed in their ability to inspire and motivate agencies. The survey showed that 27 per cent of Canadian agency leaders say their clients are excellent motivators. Only nine per cent of Canadian agency leaders say their clients are weak in motivating them, while in the U.S. (29 per cent) and France (34.5 per cent) agencies responded that their clients are weak motivators. Agency leaders participating in the survey are based in Canada, France, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States. What do you think about clientagency relationships? Join the conversation on client-agency relationships at www.client-agencyrelationships.com. It is important to continue productive relationship discussions to maximize budgets and, of course, results. Sheila Corriveau, Partner, AgencyLink Inc., (www.agencylink.ca). To request a full analysis report of the survey results, you can contact Sheila at sheila@agencylink.ca. 12 January – February 2010 Communicator http://toronto.iabc.com/
Tips for Working With Former Journalists Turned Communicators “A writer doesn’t want to be told what to do, and he doesn’t want to tell people what to do; so he tells it to a piece of paper. To make the choice of telling people what to do has real theological implications, and (if you are me) you must wrestle with that choice…” – Paddy Chayefsky, novelist and dramatist (1982) Sitting at your keyboard, telling words what to do and getting paid for it—a dream come true for many. Time was when you didn’t need to be a superstar novelist to make a living as a writer. Writing-intensive jobs with radio and TV stations, magazines and newspapers were plentiful and the money was steady. But times are changing. People who once happily wrote columns, features or scripts for a living see the economic writing on the wall. They are bolting in large numbers from media for a less precarious living in the world of communications. Plenty has already been written on the exodus of reporters and others from media to communications. One aspect of the shift that hasn’t been explored much is what to do if you are already in communications and find yourself working with a former journalist who is new to the communications field. Here are three basic points to keep in mind: 1. While nearly all former media people pitch themselves as expert writers, it’s important to qualify their experience as writers. Someone who has freelanced for magazines for years may be good at producing text for company collateral, but will need some time, for example, to learn how to write strong podcast scripts. Similarly, someone who wrote for radio can more than likely produce great podcast scripts, but may need help writing a news release that’s geared to trade magazine reporters. So get to know your new colleague and her specific areas of experience, so you know both her strengths and limitations. 2. Whether it is checking over financial data before sending out a news release, planning a product launch or revising a draft of your CEO’s keynote speech, communications is inherently a collaborative and teamoriented field. Your former journalist colleague has left an environment where collaboration and teamwork are typically not highly valued. Newsrooms, for example, can be very individualistic places. Reporters will try to keep scoops, sources and other valuable information to themselves, in order to land those prestigious front-page stories. It’s hard to practice collaboration and teamwork in such a setting. This individualistic mindset can be hard to overcome. One of its most noticeable consequences can be an inability to delegate. To return to the Paddy Chayefsky line at the top of this article, if you notice your new colleague is having trouble delegating (or “telling people what to do”), talk to them about it in private. Assure them that from time to time we all must be comfortable “telling people what to do” (just as at different times, we must be ready to receive instruction from others). 3. What about thinking strategically—how does your new colleague rank? Well, on one hand, there’s nothing like the discipline of regular daily deadlines to give someone an acute sense of the need to use time strategically. On the other, it means you can begin to think only in 24-hour chunks. In a communications context, that mindset can be very useful in a crisis situation and you are in survival mode. It will be helpful if your colleague can be introduced to the importance of thinking strategically about the longer term as well. Buying your colleague a copy of IABC’s Inside Organizational Communication and urging them read the chapter entitled “Strategic Management and Communication” is probably a good start. Neil Hrab worked for newspapers in Canada and the United Arab Emirates before making the transition to communications. Please send feedback to: neil.hrab@gmail.com. http://toronto.iabc.com/ Communicator January – February 2010 13
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