Let’s stop blaming clients for not giving more money and power to digital agencies and start making it easier for them to do so.
Imagine what you could do for a brand, online, with £37m. (That’s the average marketing budget of a UK top 100 company). For a start, you’d have enough to make the brand’s very own versions of not just YouTube, but also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and eBay – including all the marketing and advertising needed to make them famous worldwide.
So, can digital agencies convince clients to stump up more dosh and invite them to be top-table partners? How can they get to deal with the big bucks, the big decisions and infect the totality of a client’s brand strategy? In a nutshell: demystify, humanise and support.
Step 1: Demystify digital.
Because the digital space is changing so fast, and the possibilities are so vast, it’s understandable clients can be frozen in the headlights. For some clients, digital activity that isn’t a mere translation of offline thinking, is often no more than a hopeful and controlled experiment.
To help clients embrace the full opportunities of the digital world, agencies would do well to agree upon the enduring strategic principles for digital branded relationships. To accompany the 4Ps of classical marketing, should we launch the 4Cs: Conversation, Culture, Collaboration, Compensation. Perhaps that would provide large companies with the strategic framework they need to consistently invest large amounts of money into digital.
Digital agencies need to demystify their worlds. Without this, digital may remain intimidating and the budgets nominal. By showing clients the cool stuff and making it seem more accessible, they can get excited about it too. It’s our responsibility as people who live it, to explain it.
It’s easier to sell in traditional ways of the advertising because they make obvious, everyday emotional connections. Speak the same language when presenting digital. Don’t blind clients with science. Keep it short and simple. And talking of being human…
Step 2: Get emotional.
Clients find it easier to buy big expensive TV campaigns than big digital ones because traditionally they’ve been taught the alchemy and emotional value of TV (with the bonus of guaranteed reach and frequency). In stark contrast, what marketers get up to digitally is scrutinised to death via hard metrics like click-through, leaving clients more addicted and excited by return on investment than the huge emotional opportunities for a brand that can come out of a truly involving digital experience. As a consequence, the cooler, softer stuff that brands do invest in digitally is smaller and more experimental.
So, it’s TV business as usual and despite the media-neutral rhetoric of the last 10 years – there are still very few clients and agencies who do big ideas in the true through-the-line sense. Too often they say that there’s no idea until there’s a TV idea. In this world, too much time is wasted using digital as a new media channel where above-the-line messages are forced into standardised banners.
The fact that TV ads needs to be single-minded means they are easier for the client to understand whereas online ideas are more complicated by their very nature and thus sometimes more difficult for them to get their head around.
To have the chance of being taken more seriously, digital agencies should be less concerned with gimmicky technological firsts and more concerned with forging a closer emotional tie between the brand and its consumer. Clients could help too by granting agencies more artistic license and by showing willing to take a creative leap of faith – just as they do when a film director makes a script their own.
If agencies were more clearly able to describe the emotional ambitions of their ideas (as well as the commercial value of them), they might be able to earn a larger slice of the pie. It’s time to get emotional online. When was the last time a piece of digital brand content brought a lump to your throat?
Step 3: Help clients let go.
Digital agencies ask their clients to relinquish their brand control when control is what a client’s culture is all about. Most companies are still genetically engineered to manage risk i.e. to try to predict and control the outcome of all their activities. It’s like telling a climber to let go of his rope because you’ve switched off the gravity button. Clients need to know it might hurt a bit, but we need to prove that the pain of the fall is worth the gain. So, we can’t force clients to abdicate control, but we can help them to influence their consumers in a new way.
There’s no such thing as control on the web, people are talking about brands online regardless. So if clients don’t get involved, it’ll solely be those views that represent them on the internet.
The beauty of online is that you can ‘fail’ quickly and cheaply. You can instantly learn from those mistakes and turn them into valuable knowledge. Testing and collaboration are ingrained in the online culture. By showing you are listening and acting, the very people who criticise you can become your biggest advocates.
The opportunity is there for digital agencies to help clients deal with real life one-to-one conversations, to harness the groundswell and respond to every single tweet or blog post.
So there we have it. That’s how the digital industry will accelerate its journey up the food chain. Either way, it shouldn’t be too long til we have a permanent place at the top table. And of course one day we’ll own the bloody restaurant.
But hell, that’s just what we think. What about you? Let us know here on the blog
Adam Graham & Zaid Al-Zaidy
