By Rick Stanton
With the links I most always append to these columns, you’ve probably figured out that I get a daily email called the 4A’s SmartBrief.
They purport, at times, to be about the latest and greatest trends in advertising and marketing. In fact, the articles often are about the oldest, most tried-and-true trends in our business.
Take the link below for example. It’s about transparency in media buying. The latest and greatest part (I suppose) is that it deals with digital-media transparency.
For me—through the various iterations of my advertising shops—transparency in all matters was rule Number One. It didn’t matter if it was a bid for creative time, outside production costs and any mark-ups associated with them, strategic planning or media buys—our clients were 100% in the loop.
No secrets. No funny business. No hidden anything.
We always did bids in advance that were fixed, unless the client changed the project. I figured that, if we weren’t smart enough to accurately estimate something we were supposed to be professionals at doing, we deserved to lose money.
And, for the record, we never lost money. This probably explains, to some extent, why we kept clients for so long. They trusted us. However, this was not the case with some other shops that shall remain nameless.
There were plenty of people, media people, who did stuff like blanking out the costs to them of specific billable items and putting their own take on gross costs at the bottom. And there were others who just flat lied. You know who you are.
My favorite story about transparency was getting the call from a contact at a certain Washington agricultural account asking me if we’d be interested in working with them. The answer was, ‘Of course”, but I pressed him on why he was leaving his current agency.
He said he knew they were getting screwed, but the last-straw example was a bill they received for radio production that had five hours of art direction included.
Now, as someone who loved radio more than anything else I did, I get “I saw it on the radio” and the whole theater-of-the-mind thing. But for all you cheating bastards out there, if you’re going to pad a bid, add an element that actually has something roughly to do with the work involved.
Don’t be a stupid cheating bastard on top of it.
https://digiday.com/podcast/crossmedias-ali-plonchak-agencies-welcome-transparency-audits/