I’ve been faced with this question a few times in my career, and it’s something that a number of my APG delegates have asked too. In some ways it’s an odd question, as one would have naively thought that in any professional services business, client success would inevitably lead to internal recognition. The logic goes that if you simply focus on doing the best job you can for your clients, the rewards will soon follow for your company and, by implication, you.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career in and around marketing services businesses and I can without a shadow of a doubt say that things are rarely that straightforward. I’m quite sure it’s the same in other professional disciplines too. The behaviours it takes to get noticed and rewarded within these organisations are often quite different from helping your clients prosper. Of course, there are times when things happily overlap, but this is usually more a coincidence than by any great plan.
Let’s take advertising agencies for example, an industry in which I had the undeniable pleasure of working for many years. Holding companies have grown lots of them into large scale, international businesses. Among other things, that means many mouths to feed. The implication is that you’d better make sure those client conversations you’re currently having lead to lots of your people being involved in the solution further down the line.
Back in the day, that was absolutely fine. Clients and their agencies knew that for all of their lofty ideals, most conversations were geared towards churning out yet more advertising. Marketing departments were incentivised by the quality of their advertising, and agencies became famous off the back of it.
At the turn of the century, things began to change. The digital revolution and the great media fragmentation that went with it meant that ‘advertising’ could now mean many more things than before. Often, these would be small scale and multiple in nature, as opposed to the big broadcast campaigns of the past. Marketing folk hailed this shift as a great opportunity. So too did their agencies, while largely keeping in place the same structures that had been there for decades before.
For agencies to prosper, they need clients that generate significant amounts of work. Even better if it’s work that gets noticed by the industry. As a planner or strategist, your role in this is to generate a series of strategies, briefs even, that allow the agency to show itself at its very best. That’s what gets you noticed, well thought of, and hopefully promoted quicker.
The danger of this is that it makes us, perhaps subconsciously, biased in our thinking towards solutions that our organisations want to see and prosper from. We’re sat there waiting to fill our proverbial vessel with advertising, while being less attuned to other opportunities.
It’s ironic that creative problem solvers have never been more valuable to our clients. Our ability to diagnose complicated business issues and use brand-led thinking to overcome them is more needed now than ever. That thinking can lead to all kinds of effective change, be it routes to market, customer experience, organisational design or even supply chain management. Communications and what now goes as ‘advertising’ is just one part of it, and probably an ever shrinking part too, yet it remains the core driver of our internal value.
The best planners have always understood this dichotomy, and as a result contribute as much to their client’s business as they do to their own. They can seamlessly switch between driving client business strategy and crafting communications planning, often seeing them as two sides of the same coin. They derive equal satisfaction from client growth as they do industry recognition.
Keeping those two forces in balance has always been a core component of successful planning careers, and will only become more so in the future.