Clients and agencies: mutual and ongoing ‘Weltschmerz’

Client-agency relationships are still troubled by the same issues as 20 years ago, yet the angst persists, writes Dominic Mills.

I like the German word ‘weltschmerz‘, which describes a sort of existential angst or world-weariness. It helps explain that feeling you have when nothing is quite as it should, or could, be. Or, to put it another way, the world is going to hell in a handcart.

I bet Angela Merkel, despite the apparent resolution of the Greek crisis, is feeling a lot more ‘weltschmerz’ than she is fist-bumping her fellow EU leaders.

Anyway, my ‘weltschmerz’ has been brought on by the publication last week on an IPA report into the state of client-agency relationships entitled Mad Men to Sad Men, and no prizes for guessing the gist of the message contained therein.

My reaction: FFS, they’re not still agonising about this, are they?

The findings are based on interviews with top-level marketers including from the likes of Unilever, Samsung, Diageo, Aviva and Barclays, and agency CEO-level figures from A&E DDB, AMV BBDO, MediaCom, Havas, Rapp and VCCP (24 and 25 from each side respectively).

The good bit is that a) it’s very honest and pulls no punches and b) the participants are brave enough to put their organisation’s names (if not their own, although you could probably work them out without too much trouble) to the study.

The bad bit is that it contains the usual litany of misery, to wit:

– Widespread breakdown of agency-client communication
– Frustration and mutual finger-pointing
– Both sides are drifting downstream together (i.e. getting further away from the top table, sidelined from the major issues of the business in question)
– Both sides struggle to deliver better, faster, cheaper

If I was a shrink, I might wonder if this was a case of both sides projecting their self-loathing and unhappiness on to the other – i.e. each side blames the other for its own failings, and neither is willing to look into the mirror.

Here are two verbatims from the report.

Agency respondent: “We’re no longer connected at CEO level. We now work with mid-level marketers who lack accountability and sight of the top-table agenda”

Client respondent: “Shoreditch microcosm. People all coming out of the same world, with no idea about the real world.”

This is depressing because, even when I first started on Campaign 20-odd years ago, I’d hear the same sentiments.

It makes me think that, like unhappy couples, the two sides are bound together by mutual need – unable to move on, unable to disentwine themselves. Or as Pink Floyd put it in Dark Side of the Moon, “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”.

Of course, it is not hard to understand why we are where we are. Both sides are struggling to deal with the unparalleled level of change brought by digitisation. This affects every aspect of the client’s business, and the agency’s attempts to service it, as well as its own business model.

In a nutshell, such is the added complexity caused by digitisation, that clients need help a) to set a strategy for, organise, manage and orchestrate all their customer-facing activities and b) communicate with them. These are such enormous, and different, tasks that no single ‘agency’ or ‘adviser’ can do both.

There is clearly no immediate, or easy, answer. But the report raises some useful points to consider that could address some of the fundamental issues and help the industry get to the root of the problem, namely: what do clients want their agencies to do?

The report poses these as either/or choices:
1. Customer experience management or communications
2. Long-term strategist/partner or short-term, executional specialist
3. Agent (ie managing or orchestrating the marketing mix ) or agency (ie creating and delivering the solutions).

[advert position=”left”]

Those who have been in the business for a while will know that this is not new. Even in the mid-90s agencies were wrestling strategy-led management consultancies who wanted a bite of their lunch.

Agencies being agencies, they thought they could do it all; the strategy and the execution. They fell down on the strategy piece because, to put it bluntly, they framed the answer to every question as “it’s an ad/website/paid-media campaign, luv.”

Which of course is what you do when you have large creative departments to keep busy. As the saying goes, “to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail.” But the price is, long-term, a loss of credibility and, eventually, trust.

It didn’t wash then, and it certainly won’t now. If agencies couldn’t credibly do ‘big strategy’ and ‘execution’ then, they certainly can’t now in an infinitely more complex world.

Thus, if the choices laid out by this report have any use, it will be to focus minds – on both sides.

It’s only a start, a long time away from the endgame, but I can feel the ‘weltschmerz’ lifting already.

An example of why it’s all so screwed up

EE’s decision last year to charge customers 50p to jump the helpline queue was news to me until last week, but it’s a perfect example of why clients and agencies are in this impasse. Have some fun by reading the 300-plus comments underneath.

What genius, no doubt inspired by Ryanair, thought this was a good idea? The difference, of course, is that we know this is how Ryanair operates, and we accept it as part of the deal for low fares. Ryanair is a discretionary purchase.

Ringing the EE helpline, however, is not discretionary; in fact, it’s a distress purchase. You ring it because something’s wrong, and it’s more likely to be EE’s fault, not yours.

EE is already Ofcom’s most complained about company – and if everyone is calling to hate on you, you may was well make some money out of it.

Aaargh: I’ve got my ‘weltschmerz’ back.

Of course, adding a paid-for queue jumping option may, perversely, help EE’s customer service department meet its KPIs. This is not a decision it will have taken lightly: customer service is a vital tool in EE’s armoury and thus, looking holistically at its business, inextricably tied in to everything it does.

But it does nothing for the brand, and nothing to reinforce EE’s status as a utility (definition: something functional that helps you with your life). Imagine if you are EE’s ad or digital agency, targeted on (and perhaps remunerated too) on a positive Net Promoter Score (NPS). Indeed, the same might apply to its CMO. This isn’t going to help then, is it?

I dare say that, in this age, EE is making complex operational decisions like this in many parts of this business, decisions that require skills not in abundant supply amongst its agencies.

It’s clear then that EE needs someone, or some entity, to orchestrate this activity across the spectrum of its customer-facing activities, and then assess the impact of those decisions on its communications.

Is an agency really likely to be able to both? No.

That’s why the IPA’s report, and the questions it raises, are so timely.