Are You Killing Great Marketing?

As an exhibit and event designer, many of my posts are written from an agency perspective. However, as creative director, a huge part of my job is getting inside clients’ heads and seeing the “big picture” from a multitude of perspectives.

One thing that has puzzled me for years is how, even with great research, planning and execution, great ideas very often get killed prematurely at the presentation stage, while mediocre creative seems to pervade the marketing world.

Well, I recently found an eye-opening explanation to this phenomenon in a series of old posts from one of my favourite blogs: The Ad Contrarian (written by Bob Hoffman, CEO of Hoffman/Lewis advertising). The three-part series is entitled How to Sell Great Creative and it offers great insight from both, an agency, as well as the client side. Bob’s background may be in advertising, but his points easily apply to exhibit & event design and all forms of face-to-face marketing as well.

Whether you are looking for great marketing or you are in the business of creating it, these three posts are a great read and I highly recommend them. You can check them out here:  The Big Show – Let’s Do It On The Floor – Ego and Failure

Bob makes two key statements that make up the foundation of his position. Firstly, “avoid the large boardroom pitch”,or the ”BIG SHOW” as he calls it. Here’s an excerpt from his first post:
 

  Large group presentations are the death of good advertising (marketing). Here’s why:

• When you gather so many people together, the importance of the meeting becomes exaggerated.

• When a meeting takes on exaggerated importance, participants become anxious.

• Clients can smell agency anxiety a mile away. It’s contagious and it causes fear. Fear is the enemy of an open mind.

• The meeting becomes a medium for the creation of subtle power relationships and a showcase for lower level people to demonstrate their analytic abilities (which is another way of saying ‘finding flaws.’)

• Every idea has weak points. Gone With The Wind has weak points. The Great Gatsby has weak points. People will be scrambling to show off by being the first to identify the weak points.

• Internal rivalries will be played out through the language of criticism.

• All comments will be equivocal until the highest ranking person speaks.

The biggest killer of good ideas is not research or clients or budgets. It’s The Big Show.

In order to sell great work, you must do everything in your power to avoid The Big Show. You must avoid the conference room. You must avoid pastries and agendas.

This leads into the second key point.  “If you are a client that wants really creative work…. let the real decision maker at your company work directly with the real creative leader on your account.”

Sounds simple right? Well, not always. Egos and layers of superfluous stakeholders tend to make these creative summits very rare. As Bob puts it:

“It is without question a better way to accomplish the primary goal of both agency and client — to produce better advertising (marketing).

And yet, because of the structure and politics of most client-agency relationships, this method of operation is almost impossible.”

Now, I can attest to the fact that, without a direct line to the primary decision maker, most projects just go in circles or die on the table. In most cases you will ether show up to a presentation with (a) third-hand information and creative that is way off target, or (b) a once-great concept that is no longer recognizable as a result of many levels of input from the wrong people. Either one is a recipe for disaster for agency and client, with neither party really getting what they want or need.

Bob’s posts were focused on how agencies can sell great ideas, but I think they’re just as much about how clients can nurture great creative marketing.

Personally, if I were a MarCom or event manager, I would prefer to take up a few minutes of my CMO’s time and get them involved with the agency at the onset of a project, rather than risk wasted weeks of work and having the project that I helped develop fail due to any or all of the above reasons. As difficult and impossible as it may seem at times, I have to agree with Bob; it is the single best way to achieve a truly outstanding campaign (or trade show exhibit, event, activation etc…).