Ad Agencies or Saree Shops?

"Bhaiyya, show me that yellow one with red border." Surely, we would have come across something like this at some point in our lives - be it while shopping with our mother, sister, wife, or in some cases with our girl friends. I am not being sexist, but typically women do this when they go out shopping. It is not uncommon for them to go out and spend an entire day rather fruitfully doing just window-shopping!

So what am I saying? I am saying that those in agencies have another set of women in their lives - their clients. A similar refrain happens while the agency blokes are interfacing with their clients. "Guys, can you pass me the option with larger logo and the woman in pink? No...no...not the one with hammock, but the one with the traffic light."

Isn't there a rather uncanny similarity between the two situations?

Let's take the case of these women. The only thing they are clear about when they go shopping is that they may want to buy... say... a saree. They wouldn't know which shop they want it from. They are not clear about why do they want to buy it. Nor are they sure about the colour they want. Ask them whether they want a Kanchipuram (Kanjivaram), Chanderi, or a Banarasi, and they are likely to be mostly clueless. If you check the occasion for which they are wanting it, they just might know the answer to this one. And budget? Well... just forget it. They just might say Rs.1000, and end up spending Rs.10,000, or vice-versa.

Now let's check out the traits demonstrated by a typical client. They may brief all their agencies about some communication they wish to do. The objective of this communication may vary in vagueness from 'building awareness' to 'coutering some aggression of the competition'. Do they want a TVC or a press ad - well, go figure ("Whatever is likely to work the best, please suggest. We'll internally discuss and finalise!"). And the budget? The typical answer will be "Budget will be need-based."

So, what does this lead to?

In case of these women on a shopping spree, it might lead to a huge amount of frustration for the people manning the saree counter. Women might leave a trail of opened sarees of various hues in their wake. They may even critique the wares shown to them. And a common refrain you might hear is - "You don't have a lime green saree with olive green border. I was only looking for that combination."

And the clients...? More often than not, they are likely to be parroting similar sentiment - "Your approach doesn't address the issue;" "The competitive move is aggressive and we don't want to come across as reactionaries;" "Why haven't you shown us the option with waterfalls;". In short, agencies don't seem to be able to deliver to their 'brief'.

Frustrations galore!

Creative and servicing alike, get absolutely frustrated with such repeated window shopping sprees by these women in their lives called clients, and start to drift away to other, more attractive women, or get a sex-change done and become women (clients) themselves.

It is a fact that clients get the advertising they deserve. With every such shopping spree, they make their chances of getting a path-breaking communication solution even more remote. Not only do they end up doing disservice to their own company or brand, they also add to the brain drain in communication industry.

It is time they realised that ad agencies are not saree shops, and actually started to think before they ask their agencies to show them the wares. Or else, they will be the ones who will be left standing holding the lemon.

And as far as agencies are concerned, they also need to put their foot down and resist such exploitation which is continually leading to exodus of talented folks from the industry. They need to strongly raise their collective voice against such adhoc behaviour of their clients and stop any further erosion of their value. It is commonly known that no one can insult you till you choose to feel insulted. It is time the agencies chose the path of building self-respect by refusing to be treated as Saree shops!

APAC Regional Offices or APAC Marginal Offices?

Possibly I am a sucker for brickbats. This is one Pandora's Box, which once opened is likely to lead to lots of gall flow! This slightly acerbic piece is dedicated to all those affected by their very own APAC Regional Offices.

In our corporate lives, we would surely and invariably have come up against APAC Regional Offices. These could be located variously at Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE, Australia, and in some rare cases, even in India. These offices are separate from the local office in that market. Their ostensible role is facilitating coordination between local country offices and the global office.

There is a set of 10 rules they operate by:

1. Local country offices are babes-in-the-woods, and cannot even blow their own noses without barrels of help from these Regional Offices;
2. If someone points out that things are going wrong (whether or not they actually are), then surely the Local Office/s would have goofed up;
3. The key to acting as a flawless conduit between Local Offices and Global Office is to bury the Local Office under reams of reporting. Such reporting has only one parallel - a Country's Bureaucracy and the red tape that results there from;
4. Huge amounts of meaningless data must be sent in response to any request for help from the Local Office/s - in fact, the effort the Local Office/s must put in to get any meaningful stuff out of this should be approximately similar to that of getting 10 gms of gold from almost a ton of ore mined in South Africa;
5. The clients are always right;
6. Corollary to that - the Local Office/s are always wrong;
7. Global Office is always right;
8. When Global Office or client asketh, you are not to reason why;
9. Activity and work are not necessarily co-related (almost no work may get done while the activity generated by them may fill many a 150 hours-a-month time sheets for multiple resources at Local Office/s);
10. And last but not the least, processes and SLAs take precedence over deliverables.

With such clear set of rules, they naturally generate the same level of frustration amongst the Local Office/s as is experienced by a typical gamer while he's trying to master the newest version of his/her favourite game just after its release.

If Global Office crowd is 'Gods', the Regional Office crowd is no less than 'Demi Gods'. Their visits lead to hurried purchases and gifting of books/DVDs on the Local Office location. Many a times, ATG happens (those in Hotel Industry must be familiar with this TLA - for the lesser mortals, it means 'Aarti-Tika-Garland', and while we are at it, TLA means 'Three Lettered Acronym).

Whoever mentioned that corporates don't have any sense of humour, just need to take one quick look at the modus operandi of these 'Regional Offices', and I can bet my last dime, their view will hurriedly change.

Since this is supposed to be an objective viewpoint, let's take a look at why these Regional Offices behave the way they do.

These Regional Offices do not handle any clients on their own. More often than not, they get somewhat euphemistic job roles, and even more nebulous appraisal criteria. They are required to visit and be helpful to the Local Offices in their region. When they do, chances are they may end up impinging upon the Local Office/s' time. Lest it is seen as an unwelcome infringement, they need to invent ways to make their visits come across as important. While they are not travelling, they need to come across as busy and delivering to the larger organisational vision and objective.

These are no small challenges - and hats off to the smart guy or guys who contributed to creating this robust list of rules which all these Regional Offices live and die by.

These rules have led to assignation of such lovely descriptors for these Regional Offices as 'Watch Dogs', 'Dogs in the Manger', 'Wet Blankets', 'Stooges', 'the set that doesn't know its a** from its elbow'.

But let me remind you - these Regional Offices are a necessary evil. We, by now, have deliberated enough over the 'evil' part. But what makes them 'necessary'?

Surely, those of you you who have come across these 'Regional Offices', also have their Global Offices tucked away in some remote (or not-so-remote) corner of Europe or USA. All such sufferers would have also faced a perennial phenomenon called ConCalls (wonder why they have stopped calling these 'conference calls'). Typically, these calls happen with a blatant disregard to the time gap between the Global Office market and these Local Office markets. Willy-nilly, the Local Offices end up holding on to the short end of the stick. This is where these Regional Offices play a crucial role. Enough and more times, you can depend on them to attend and debrief you about what happened (or didn't happen) during these calls. You don't have to be on these calls at all kinds of odd hours. This is ONE important role they play for the Local Office/s which justifies their existence.

Another smaller, but still significant role they play is that of being the first punching bag for the Global Office. As everything else, even these punches get diluted by the time they travel from the Regional Office to the Local Office/s.

I am positive that the readers of this little piece will have a thing or two to add to this. For doing so, kindly do write to me and I will definitely make an attempt to incorporate as much of that feedback as possible.

Whither Great Client Servicing Professionals?

I was perplexed when a prospective account management candidate asked me what his key result areas would be. It set me thinking about a role I have been performing for the last over 2 decades (As the saying goes, no matter which level of agency management you get into, you can't wish away being an account executive).

We have all heard of postmen in account management, and we have also heard of mavericks who go beyond the call of duty and almost perform the role of the marketing head at the client organization. Since both are extremes, and since both are not the mandated roles that an account management professional is supposed to perform, surely the answer lies somewhere in between.

So I started to look into the repository of homilies shared by some of the who's who of Indian advertising. One of the first was a teaser shared by R Sridhar, a Partner with Ideas-RS, a consultancy specializing in opening creative windows of the mind. He had posed a question to all the fresh, green-behind-their-ears recruits - 'what in their view was the role of an account management person?' Many chickened out and didn't answer, and many fell back on their management school learning and came out with witty, text book jargon. And as expected, they were all wrong. The simple one line answer was - 'The role of an account management person in any agency is to get his client promoted'.

Cynicism apart, the above role definition actually sums up the reason-for-existence of an account management person. It is all about understanding what keeps the client awake at nights, finding simple solutions to all such tricky issues, and ensuring these are implemented flawlessly. Once done, the client gets promoted, and so does the account management person.

The next key role that an account management person must perform is to get his client to recommend his agency to his friends/acquaintances/wife/husband/dog… and get their business for the agency. And this, as we can see, flows from the first key result area. After all, the account management person also has a business development hat to wear. Net-net, he is the bread winner of the agency.


While he does the above, the account management person also needs to wear his creative hat and point his client towards newer ways of using their services. Though there's a famous saying that everyone knows 2 things well - one's own job and advertising, we all know that this statement has been made in jest. The account management person needs to either have or needs to develop the ability to see beyond the obvious. Naturally, this does good - both for the client and also the agency that employs these people.

It is not for nothing that they say - "advertising is people's business". This brings us to yet another role that the account management person needs to perform with panache. He needs to get his team to love him. For these are the people who in good times or bad, will make him come out on top.

Believe it or not, getting your team to love you, also helps them do justice to their next important role - getting the best ideas out of their creative partners. Creative people are known to be emotional, and if they see their account management partner as an ally who prepares well to present their creative ideas, and has a reputation for getting the creative ideas through unscathed, they go that extra step and deliver their best ideas to such people.

This by no means is a comprehensive list of desirable traits in an account management person, but these certainly are a good start. I welcome you to add to/critique this list. All such efforts will only go towards fine-tuning this ready-reckoner.

This isn't just an exercise at listing some idealistic traits. But an attempt at driving a bigger point. All of the above seems simple, and yet, unless you look around at some old-school advertising professionals, these traits are hard to come by. It is not that such people don't exist any more, but just that they don't find it worthwhile to come to this industry. As an industry, not only we have let our value proposition get diluted in the eyes of the clients, but we have done the same amongst prospective bright recruits who, in an earlier day and time would have given an arm and a leg to join our industry. It just might help if we take a fresh guard and make a new start, and begin by making a strong attempt at getting the industry's self respect and desirability back. And there's no better time to start, than NOW!