If you have an agency for your marketing, you’ll probably deal directly with an ‘account handler’ who services your account and manages your projects. Although there’s a creative and design team working directly on your business and actually coming up with the ideas, they’re usually hidden away in the office and are rarely involved in client briefings, strategy or debates.
This is the standard way that most advertising and marketing agencies operate. After all, you wouldn’t want to let loose those ‘crazy creatives’ on the clients, would you? The account handlers attend all the client meetings and pass notes back to the creatives. And they bill you for everything they do, right down to the PowerPoint presentations and long lunches. Which means that the people actually doing the work rarely (if ever) get to meet with the clients, understand the commercial objectives and ‘sell’ their ideas.
And if it ain’t broke why fix it, right?
The Other Agency doesn’t work this way. We believe that account handlers (or ‘suits’) are an unnecessary part of the process: middlemen who slow things down and cost clients unnecessary money.
Having suits means that there are a lot of Chinese whispers in an agency; the account handler talks to the client, then ‘translates’ back to the creative team. Inevitably things get lost in translation and the creative team can miss out on that golden nugget of information that could have led to a ground breaking idea. And if a client questions an aspect of the creative, they have to wait while the account handler ‘discusses it internally.’ Which generally means the account handler negotiating with the designer/copywriter to change something they don’t want to. It leads to bad feelings and bad process, and an ‘us’ and ‘them’ environment in many agencies. We know this because we used to work in them. Which is why we’ve set up our agency in a different way.
The Other Agency is staffed purely by creative people who have the desire and experience to handle their own accounts.
Because we don’t have suits, you don’t have to pay for them. It also means we work faster, make decisions more efficiently and work together more collaboratively. Simply put, your budget works harder. And you get better creative work because the creatives working on your account are directly involved in the strategy, planning and project meetings.
Like to know more about the benefits? Call Saul Peake on 01244 349337 for a free, confidential discussion or email him at saul@theotheradagency.com
The Other Agency will be debating the merits of ‘suits’ or ‘no suits’ at a Forum organised by The Marketing Industry Network in July. We’ll be joined by Unsuitable in the ‘against’ camp, with AND Partners and McCann Erickson in the ‘for’ camp. The forum will investigate which approach works best in today’s fast paced digital age and promises to be a hotly contested debate!
Find out more and book a place at http://www.marketingindustrynetwork.com
