Agency-Client Teamwork: A Great Relationship

With these seven key elements for successful agency-client collaboration, talented people can bring market-moving ideas to the table.

By DAN BOBEAR

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a dramatic change that will have a tremendous impact on both agencies and clients. The increasing frequency of mergers, acquisitions, and co-marketing arrangements, combined with the continued emergence of smaller pharma and biotech companies, has meant that traditional commercialization approaches are quickly becoming obsolete. Today’s reality includes compressed timelines, stretched marketing staffs, and teams that regularly turn over as companies contract and employees move from one opportunity to another. These changes have resulted in very different demands on agency partners.

Today more than ever, pharma advertising agencies need to evaluate and determine what their real product is. Increasingly, it is much more than advertising. As clients come under increasing pressure, agencies need to be a true strategic partner and help clients face the tough challenges and realities of today’s marketplace. This can come in the form of advertising or strategic guidance on any aspect of a brand’s commercialization. This collaboration needs to go far beyond a successful advertising campaign. Today’s agency partner has to provide exceptional scientific and medical understanding, actionable customer and brand insights, creative strategy, and an in-depth understanding of the complexities of the marketplace. This trend will continue, and agencies will need to continually evolve their talent pool and business approach to ensure that they are well matched to meet the changing demands.

In an effort to adjust to the changing marketplace, everyone is looking for the best formula for success. For those of us with business training, we are accustomed to looking at best practices and models for success to determine how best to collaborate. However, the truth is that there is no magic formula to a successful agency-client relationship because an advertising agency’s real assets are its people, and people rely on human connections and relationships to thrive—not best practices.

At the most basic level, take care of your people, and they will take care of you almost every time. Create an atmosphere that values communication and mutual respect, and you will have an environment that is conducive to generating great ideas. Creative individuals from any discipline don’t typically follow standard business training models; they thrive by feeding their minds. Based on my experience, the following seven key elements help create this environment and help cultivate a great relationship.

Choose the Right Talent
There is no more of a team sport in the business world than the advertising business. To create great ideas and effective advertising in the pharmaceutical industry, you need a diverse collection of talent and personalities ranging from MDs to talented artists and everyone in between—all working toward a common goal. It is critical to ensure that the right people are assigned to the business. While it may be hard to believe, the often-eclectic collection of individuals at an agency rarely rate money as their primary motivator. Talk with any one of them, and you will find that money ranks very low on the list of what drives them to create great work. Most are in this business because they thrive on the creation of ideas and solving complex challenges. I generally recommend that clients take the time to meet their prospective team to ensure there is good chemistry and that individual skill sets are aligned with the needs of the brand. Different perspectives generate diverse insights that can propel a brand forward and more effectively deal with the inevitable barriers to success. It is diversity of perspective that generally drives great ideas. Leaders on both sides need to embrace this concept and ensure that they are mixing things up when coordinating a staffing plan. When you have the right mix, the agency team complements the skill sets of the marketing team. Diverse thinking yields amazing results.

Bring the Team Together
On any team, the key to success is harnessing the great talent from both sides of the aisle. Once again, it is all about diversity of perspective and ideas. Ensuring that there is true cross-functional integration will ensure that the ultimate work product will be as good as it can be.

You will get the best results through effective communication and careful management of the collective team. It is critically important to set mutual expectations from the beginning of the partnership. Set clear objectives, keep communication lines open, and provide direct and honest feedback. The more talented your team, the more challenging the task.

Set the Right Tone
We often say, “How it starts is a very strong indicator of how it will go.” People generate great market-moving ideas when they know they are valued and challenged. The leaders of the collective client-agency team set the tone for the relationship. I have seen many clients approach a relationship with an attitude of “I am paying them a lot of money, it better be good” or who feel that “keeping the agency in its place” is the path to the best work. This approach works as well in an agency-client relationship as it does in a marriage or in raising children. While it may seem like a suitable relationship on the surface, it generally lacks depth and meaning and invariably leads to a subpar work product. You may get decent work out of this type of relationship but rarely is it great work that can really move a brand. Set a collaborative tone that is inclusive and that creates an environment where people are comfortable putting ideas out there and openly challenging the thinking; this will help you to get the best thinking out of the team.

Another important part of setting the tone is to formally kick off the relationship. It is important that the agency have an “onboarding” meeting to allow the client to see what goes on behind the curtain. The agency needs to demonstrate to the client how it works, what is critical to generating great work, and the process by which work moves through the agency-client team. Conversely, the client provides a download on the priorities to the agency. Beyond the obvious exchange of information, one of the most important outcomes of these meetings is that the collective teams have the opportunity to get to know each other, share common interests, and form a human connection that will be the foundation of a great relationship.

When I see problems occur in a relationship, it is almost always because communication has broken down or the relationship never really started the right way. For the most part, the client-agency teams are composed of smart, well-intentioned, hardworking people. It is important to take the time to ensure that the lines of communication are open and that people are comfortable asking the tough questions and putting those crazy ideas in play.

Focus on Thinking and Ideas
While every brand is different, the most common challenge most clients face is delivering more with less. I frequently hear, “I wish I had more time to just think.” As marketing teams get leaner and timelines are compressed, clients struggle to find time to do strategic planning and bring fresh, new ideas to help drive their brands in the marketplace. As a result, they increasingly look to their strategic partners to help shape and drive brand strategy. It is quite common to see teams that focus exclusively on creating selling materials for the next sales meeting or that have a list of commitments for their annual objectives. While these realities are important deliverables of the agency-client relationship, they are the least important output of the relationship. The most important output of any team is great ideas. It is likely that many of you have been part of a team that generated an exceptional marketing or advertising idea that drove a brand to a new level. Great ideas bring people together. Whether it is a brilliant marketing strategy or amazing creative work, it is critical to not lose track of what really matters. Focus on great thinking and ideas and everyone wins.

Once you have determined that brilliant idea based on insight and the hard work of the team, it is really important to “close ranks” around it. This is your baby, and the team needs to protect it. A great idea has to run the gauntlet of assault in our industry. The idea generally comes out of the agency-client team and then goes into the cross-functional teams, market research, legal-regulatory review, senior management, and ultimately falls under the scrutiny of DDMAC. This is a pretty challenging journey for even the greatest of ideas. It is essential for the client-agency team to develop a strategy to see it through and fight the good fight to protect the idea at all costs. Don’t let incremental hits or the smartest-guy-in-the-room syndrome diminish that idea. It is important to fight for the integrity of an idea and to keep it sharp.

In times of turmoil or change, the most effective approach is to stay focused on what is right for the brand. The brand becomes the client in an odd sort of way, and it becomes a way to stay connected to what really matters. Serve it, and everyone wins. When people become distracted or when priorities are constantly changing, thinking this way about the situation can help to keep the agency team grounded and focused on what really matters.

Put Process in Its Place
So often we hear about the role of agency process or the intense and widely touted big pharma work processes. What I often see in the real world is that process becomes a crutch and can actually inhibit progress. The real purpose of any process should be to enable teams to efficiently achieve a goal or to complete a job. When used the right way, a process can enable talented people to do great things. However, quite often an overreliance on process leads to unimaginative approaches and uninteresting “vanilla” work products. The work may test well and all the boxes are checked, but the thinking is flat. A client-agency team definitely needs process, but more important, the team needs to think about what is best for the brand and use process to enhance communication, not as a replacement for imaginative thinking.

Lead
In today’s uncertain environment, it is all too common for really talented people to put their heads down and go with the flow. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t drive a brand. Real success is generally driven by passionate people who take chances and are passionate about their brands. It is those exceptional people who can push through the politics and bureaucracy and really shine in this increasingly competitive marketplace. Agency talent will naturally be attracted to these leaders and will go to great lengths to help them achieve success.

Value What’s Important
At our agency, we do monthly “dashboards” that essentially report the sales and key metrics around a brand. After reviewing these reports for some time now, it is quite clear that our best relationships tend to be with accounts in which the brand is doing well financially. If sales are rolling along, then things seem to be good all around. So now the chicken or the egg question, “What came first?” Based on my experience, the answer always comes back to the idea. Brilliant market-moving ideas drive sales, and hitting sales objectives drives the success of the brand and the careers of those marketers responsible for the brand. If you value great ideas, then sales will follow and all will be well in the world.

As we move forward in a dramatically changing healthcare environment, the role of any client-agency relationship will grow increasingly more important. The traditional sales-driven pharma model will evolve significantly into a more balanced and efficient marketing mix in which success will be driven by strong marketing and advertising ideas. True strategic partnerships will become more important than ever as we move into uncharted waters. However, with change comes opportunity and one thing that never changes is the role that talented people and the ideas they bring to the table will play in creating the future. It will be an interesting ride.

Dan Bobear is Executive Vice President, Managing Director of Client Service at Palio, a full-spectrum global pharmaceutical and consumer advertising, marketing, and communications agency in Saratoga Springs, NY, that specializes in brand creation, brand strategy, product launches, global marketing, and interactive and integrated media. He can be reached at dbobear@palio.com.

Have a question or a comment, send it to us here: Comments