Specific tips and great advice for clients and ad agencies by Prateek Srivastav, Group President, O&M, South India

Let me start by summarizing what a client needs to do to get the best out of an advertisement agency. Remember the points that I am presenting now were valid 10 years back and I am sure that they will continue to be relevant 10 years from now.

Interacting with an Ad Agency

The first thing is that the client should choose their agency very carefully. The second thing is that clients are often wary of sharing their data and most of the time the agency is kept in the dark. This must be avoided and the client must share his business plans, research data, their thoughts and the sales figures with the advertising agency. Unless the creative person has a complete idea about the company, how can he visualize?

A client must trust the agency completely since they are partners and are working together and what ever an agency does is always for the benefit of the client.  Good creative stuff should be the demand of every client and they must accept nothing less than the best.

Respect must be given to the ideas, the agency and people behind it. Often I have noticed when a creative person is presenting a script; the client receives a call and talks on the phone thus interrupting the whole presentation. This shows how much of respect the client has for the presenter and his ideas.  Talking about presentations, in the earlier days briefs were given a lot of time, however today hardly a few hours are spent on them due to the paucity of the client's time.

Know your product and advertising limits

The client must understand how the advertising works. They must understand what it can do and what can it cannot. If the representative of the client likes the work, he should be prepared to sell it to others intentionally. Often what happens is that most marketing managers keep quite if a higher up dislikes the idea. This happens even if they like the idea and are more likely to be right about it than their superiors.

All products have their limitations and the client must be aware of it. Often products do not match the image portrayed by the advertisement. Hence marketing people should concentrate more on overcoming the limitations of the product instead of the advertising campaign. Agencies are always the first to be blamed when something goes wrong and it is not right to make them scapegoats all the time.

Embracing the New

Another thing is that companies need to de-layer the whole process when it comes to approving an idea. Often the whole the presentation loses its shape as it goes from the brand manager to the CEO and after four rounds of changes, people lose their interest.

One must also understand that we cannot depend entirely on research as it is not a substitute for decision-making. Clients have to be brave and trust their gut feelings when it comes to taking calls on a campaign. They shouldn't simply go with things that seem safer and risk free. Instead they should welcome new ideas and move with the times. visit your advertising agency regularly and don't keep them hanging when they visit your office.

Last but not the least; remember that all advertising agencies want their clients to win and only when the client wins, the agency will win.

These were excerpts from the event Brandate organized by brandcomm 

Sandesh Shenoy is a freelance journalist and content writer who's interest lies in business features, web content and news reporting.

Issue BG76 July07

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