Common factors that sour Client Agency Relationships....
Creativity
Agencies say that many a times,Clients brief is not clear, undue importance is given to media plans and media planning agencies and hence forced to compromise on creativity....
clients on the otherhand accuse that agencies lack creativity/many confuse between cute and creative, could not symbolize our USP / agency thought too small or awards is the soul motive
Account people
Not every client can be given the top people to work on the account, according to the agency.....Some clients will get exclusive teams some will have to share a team. After all size does matter.
Poor account people /lack of knowledge and experience / at least at the frontlines, client service professional are ‘legs’ and not ‘brains’as per the clients lamenting....
Client servicing and follow up
They keep us hanging / never responding properly and violate the pre-decided communications map. Too much of red tapism also is what ails the relation as per the agencies....
Clients feel that their job is left to juniors who are legs and who lacks basic marketing knowledge and many times are mere postmen. Follow up is virtually non-existent.
Senior management participation
No strategy / big or small the client, is finalized without key people approving it. However, their physical presence may not be possible always( that is how the agency justifies itself).
The key people working on the account is the right of every client, big or small. Agencies are biased in favor of rich /big clients( that obviously is a grouse that clients have against agencies...
Special skills
Most agencies seem to agree to an extent about their lack of expertise in special skills like virals but what about advertising which is the main element of Integrated Marketing Communication? Are the so-called small shops able to do it? Is it not true that almost all main agencies today cater to almost all the clients’ communication needs?
Clients but say "We want PR/ direct marketing and other 360 communication elements but many agencies aren’t equipped to cater"....
Agency size
It is the business of creativity, and here only the talent matters(agency version of course) ...
Size does matter.
Clients say that they,especially the smaller ones, get scant attention due to lack of enough talents.
Greed
For many clients late payment is an art, and blocks cash flow ....
Agencies squeeze every rupee possible out of the account and are greedy to the core...
Strategic thinking
On the clients side, either the marketing personnel who is in charge of advertising are ignorant, or if they are good gets promoted and vanish thereby resulting in discontinuity .
Agencies on the other hand according to clients,talk big things in the name of strategy, jargonising unnecessarily with a motto ‘convince, if not possible -confuse’......
the list seems to be endless, but from a mere relation of sorts, for the sake of good advertising,it should move into a"a state where both the partners enjoy the relation, and simply feel incomplete in the absence of the other and are in a state of bliss being together”.....
Sounds Utopian ?
Well if it does.., that it is because few people, even those who profess the need for good CAR, believe that a state like that is simply impossible inspite of a parade of bold and longlasting examples from the past..... !!!
2 comments:
Great sir! long time since have been expecting something on CAS from your side. Finally it finds place in your blog
good going but why this gaps in between the parts.. it should come like a continuous stream and not like a balaji serial.
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