He isn’t Martin Luther King, but Ian Priest has a vision

Last week, led by new president Ian Priest, the IPA launched its first ‘Adaptathon’ – an ambitious 18 month programme to try and improve client agency relationships. Dominic Mills reports on some of the surprising outcomes.

Despite his plethora of grand job titles, Ian Priest, president of the IPA, the P in VCCP and now a big cheese at VCCP’s parent company Chime, is a very down-to-earth fellow.

So I doubt very much that he would even dream of comparing himself to Martin Luther King.

Nevertheless, he does have a vision, and he’d definitely like to lead his people to the promised land.

His vision, as he put it at the IPA’s ‘Adaptathon‘ conference last week, is quite simply articulated: a headline in the trade press that says ‘We need to rethink the pitch process‘.

And this promised land, which may even flow over with metaphorical milk and honey too, is a place where better agency-client relationships mean longer relationships and fewer pitches.

In turn, those extended relationships lead to better commercial creativity – i.e. more effective work.

This outcome, Priest summarises, could also be envisioned in a headline, this time in the Financial Times: ‘Client confidence in agencies soars as business results demonstrate value of creativity.’

So how do you get there? As Paul Bainsfair, director general of the IPA, says: “If it sounds so simple, why is it so damn complicated?”

It’s complicated for a number of reasons, structural and cultural. For one thing, clients themselves prize change in pursuit of improvement (and sometimes change for its own sake), whether it’s the speed with which the board changes, or with which a marketing director is shipped out and a new one installed.

This leads to what you might call NMDS, or New Marketing Director Syndrome, in which the incomer knows they are under pressure to get results fast, decides it’s not worth taking the time to get to know the incumbent agencies, and calls an immediate review. Even if the results are no better, they still look as though they are shaking things up.

Agencies must take their share of the blame too, often making the pursuit of new-business high priority and high profile.

To this some might also add the intermediaries who run pitches. After all, from the outside it looks as though their business model is based on stimulating maximum churn.

In fact this is to misread their role. They are rebalancing their offering to focus as much on retention as pitch. And as one said to me: “We look pretty stupid if we recommend Agency A and it all falls apart. So we have a vested interest too in long relationships.”

Then there are what you might call cultural factors to which I, as an ex-editor of Campaign, must plead guilty. The trade press lives on a diet of headlines which must include the words ‘pitch’, ‘review’, ‘fired’ and ‘axed’. (In our defence, I’d say that a headline to the effect that Agency X was heading into its 10^th year working on Client Y’s business is a dull as they come).

Marketing directors who hire new agencies are lionised and profiled, hot agency new-business directors are hero figures, and agencies are judged more on their-new business record than on their client retention record.

We don’t focus on the longevity of relationships, and long-standing relationships are rarely, if ever, celebrated. Mea culpa, Mr Priest.

Yet they exist: think of AMV and Sainsbury’s and BT (30-plus years for the former, 19.5 for the latter), VW and DDB (more than 50), even VCCP and O2 (11 years), or BBH and Audi (30 years).

They’re all successful businesses, their advertising is terrific, and if you check the IPA Effectiveness Awards database, you’ll see they are consistent winners.

So it’s not difficult to see the logic of Priest’s vision.

I discovered a couple of things at the conference that surprised me. One is that many clients hate the pitching process, and find it deeply stressful. The process itself can take between three and six months, then the same again for the new agency to get up to speed. So that can be as much as 12 months out of a brand’s life. Someone has to take responsibility for that.

Another is how the stress factor pivots during the courtship and honeymoon period: from the agency during the pitch and until the result is known; and then to the client once the new agency is announced. At this point the client is worried that they have made the right decision, whether the work will be good enough, and whether their colleagues will buy into it.

What this means is that the first 100 days in any client-agency relationship are the most important. It’s the equivalent, in people terms, of finding out whether your new partner leaves the bathroom filthy, farts a lot and only washes up when there’s no clean cutlery or crockery.

On such seemingly trivial things do relationships stand or fall, which is why getting it right in the first 100 days is therefore vital.

So the delegates produced a number of practical suggestions to improve client-agency relationships.

One that grabbed everyone’s attention was that of a 100-day relationship contract – not legal or financial but behavioural – which sets out in reasonable detail what each side can expect from the other during this time.

It could cover anything from approval procedures (I once heard of a client whose approval process required more than 70 steps) to briefing processes, aligning client updates with their own internal reporting time-lines, or simply whether the client prefers to be phoned first thing in the morning or after 5.30pm.

I particularly like this old compact between Avis and DDB, whose ‘We try harder’ work put the client on the map.

In it, Avis says it will never know more about advertising than DDB, and DDB will never know more about renting cars than Avis; and Avis will approve or disapprove an ad, but it won’t try to improve it. The compact may be 60 years old, but it is timeless.

Another was that agencies should appoint a director or retention, whose job it is to cultivate those long-term relationships.

And by the way, for those feel their relationship needs immediate remedial work, the IPA is laying on free counselling sessions between now and December with Alison Bone, a trained and experienced relationship counsellor.

Disclosure: I attended the conference as an IPA guest, and will be producing content for the IPA based on the actions and outcomes. You can track their development, comment or contribute your own suggestions here or via the IPA Adapt LinkedIn group.