By Rick Stanton
After reading the Ad Age article linked below, it got me wondering if anyone in our business is having fun these days. I still have agency friends, both locally and in other parts of the country and, in general, there seems to be only two answers—no and sometimes.
Some of the issues raised in the Kaplowitz article have plagued the industry since the invention of dirt. But, as many of you know and have experienced, the Great Recession changed the nature of agency-client relationships.
The biggest thing it changed, at least in my humble opinion, is the decline of agency courage to stand up for the value and importance of what we contribute to our clients. Instead, trying to keep a client by dropping our pants and doing more for less now has made the task akin to shoving the proverbial genie back into the lamp.
To be sure, there still are some good clients who want their agency to earn a fair profit and who value their work, but there seems to be an ever-increasing number of clients who want to treat agency services like grocery shopping.
Need some radio? We can get that loaf of bread cheaper down the street. Need a logo? That hamburger is on sale at another place we know about. Way to go advertising, you allowed yourself to become a commodity. And that’s after you allowed design firms to hijack the brand-building process and sneak in and sneak off with deliverables normally consigned to agency skill sets.
Even worse, the explosion in digital and social advertising (where agencies were slow to the party) has led to even more fracturing of the clients’ budgets (i.e., a smaller pie with fewer available pieces).
I remember with great fondness how much fun we had in the various iterations of my shops. We didn’t chase business that would make us miserable or wouldn’t allow us to make money. The most fun was when we were young and hungry and trying to get a toehold as one of the better places to work or do business.
I could have kept Stanton & Everybody going for a few more years, but by the beginning of 2015, I realized I just wasn’t having fun any more. And I always felt that the other “service providers,” like doctors, dentists, attorneys and CPAs, had the unfair advantages of fear and pain on their sides.
If a client’s doctor tells him to stop doing something or he’ll die, he’ll stop; if his creative director tells him an idea is off-brand (a nice way of saying it’s stupid), he’ll say, let’s do it anyway.
And, to my knowledge, no one ever has asked six law firms to do a spec defense to see which one they’ll hire. But even putting up with that insanity was fun—once upon a time.
https://adage.com/article/podcasts/podcast-marla-kaplowitz/316556/