By Andrew Mushing
Andrew Mushing is the senior manager, omnichannel media and marketing excellence at Hershey. His column is part of a new strategy series in collaboration with APG, as it prepares to launch Eat Your Beets, a book compiled of articles by strategists and marketers.
Suburban Toronto business parks have graveyards full of awesome ideas that died following a client presentation. Surely some of these moments of brilliance had legitimate reasons for being killed off, or at the very least, archived in a cryo chamber to be resurrected once the brand team has sufficiently turned over.
For many of these ideas, though, their only flaw was that they neglected to appreciate the behind-the-scenes chaos on the client’s side. That chaos isn’t anyone’s fault, and the messiness is often what makes working for a brand fun, challenging and rewarding. Agencies can’t avoid this entirely, but they can tilt the odds in their favour and give those awesome ideas a better chance at being bought.
Know the objective behind the objective: One of many great scenes in the movie Swingers depicts Vince Vaughn’s character telling Jon Favreau’s that he wants to see “the guy behind the guy behind the guy.” In our world, agencies need to understand the goal behind the goal behind the goal. Sure, the brief outlines a brand’s objectives (although not always), but there are also unspoken goals that are just as important to sell your ideas. Do they want to win an award? Do they want to get promoted? Do they need to urgently show business results? Maybe they just want to get something, anything out the door. This will be different for everyone, and it’s important that you understand the underlying motivations for everyone who has approval rights for your work.
Uncover the ick: Every so often, between TikTok’s of the North Sea, Ninja Creami recipes and sales cold calls, my social media algorithm will randomly spit out some college kid asking the other: “What’s your biggest ick?” Yes, this content is incredibly stupid, but there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Do you know your client’s biggest ick? Good agencies will know the work their client loves, but great agencies will know the work their client hates.
Be sure that even in the best agency/client relationships, at some point your client has taken work back and said, “I absolutely hate that idea” but never told you about it. Why? Perhaps it’s the natural inclination of Canadians to be polite and avoid confrontation. Maybe it’s the desire to focus the feedback on the work that they want to proceed with. Whatever the reason, it’s likely that despite your best efforts, you have produced something along the way that the client loathed. As difficult as it would be, wouldn’t you want to know what they thought was the ickiest idea, so you could avoid those pitfalls in the future and get to better work more easily? In your next feedback session, before you close the meeting, ask your client what they disliked and why.
Kill the fluff: Before the mixing process of a song is finished, the producer will play their song on a car stereo or Bluetooth speaker. They do this to hear the song in the worst possible environment; if they can make it sound amazing there, it’ll sound amazing anywhere.
Whether you know it or not, your creative ideas are often subjected to the client’s version of the “worst possible environment.” As your ideas are being sold up the food chain, imagine them being jammed into the last five minutes of a 1:1 with the CMO’s boss, hosted on Microsoft Teams, being presented by one of the CMO’s team members who is using this as a rare but crucial opportunity to build exposure with senior leadership. There are good reasons for all of this, but this scenario is certainly not conducive to translating the passion of the original presentation.
So, agencies, while I love your single-phrase slides and gifs, do yourself a favour and boil your great work down to a one-page leave-behind. Summarizing the objective, insight, idea, and tactics will set both you and your client up for success regardless of where and how that summary is shared during the alignment process.
If there’s a common theme here, it’s the importance of building transparent relationships over time. Like a marriage, it takes work and uncomfortable conversations, but in the end, it will yield a shared ambition and increase the chances of your work surviving the client gauntlet. Good luck!
