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Wakey, wakey, rise and shine - we’re running out of time

Posted in General, Advertising, Marketing January 17th, 2008 by admin

If you asked your client what would they like more of to do their job better, what do you think they would request? Cash? Red Bull? Faster car? New PA? No, I doubt it.

They will ask for more time.

Today’s clients are desperate to get time to think, to be able to consider and plan for the future, rather than get sucked into the day-to-day reactive business. It’s tough. Their life is performance driven more than ever; tangible and ROI driven measures that must be justified. In effect every hour on the business…but how do you evaluate thinking time?

And frankly, I don’t think agencies are helping either. Our models are not flexible enough, too linear. We work in a mature sector now. We have processes. We have models. We manage critical paths extremely well. But we don’t manage thinking time either. Any half decent agency has these but still plods along in the same linear fashion.

Suit gets brief from client. Planner then finds insight and writes brief. Suit back to client for approval. Planner briefs creative. See you in 2 weeks with idea…etc. Lots of hands, shuttling back and forth. Wrong people talking to the client at the right time. It’s an old model, where very few of the hands are very close to the business.

With solutions today needing to be ever more integrated to match the changing and ever more diversified behaviour of consumers, agencies need to get rid of the traditional boundaries and invite all the experts around the client with the client. Yes, that includes creative and digital, from the beginning, discussing and listening to what the client aspires to, their ideas and needs.

It doesn’t take more time, it takes less. All the right people round the table at the right time. One integrated team, all focused on the client business because we understand it. They told us so.

Andy Snuggs is the managing director of Geronimo