Australian PR Managers – if you are committed to running your PR agency relationship to the highest standard then take note from your counterparts who manage advertising agency relationships.
Often comments emanating from the advertising world can be taken with a grain of salt. But I thought that those reported (albeit only briefly) from the latest Australian Association of National Advertisers (ANNA) ‘HotHouse’ forum on the future of client-agency relationships were worth repeating and commenting on.
Significantly, they came from the client, rather than the agency, side of the business. And from some of the biggest advertisers around e.g.- Nestle and Toyota.
Some of the comments reported from the “HotHouse’ in AdNews were:
- “most traditional pitch processes are a form of speed dating. They really tell you very little about the chemistry of working together,” – Suncorp Group marketing head, Mark Reinke.
- “we will do almost anything to preserve the agency relationship. Frankly, if the relationship fails, our management structure tends to believe it can’t be all their fault. It must partially be our fault, so what are we going to do to fix the relationship?” Toyota divisional manager for national marketing, Peter Webster.
- “it (agency relationship problems) is usually always a people problem. You also need to examine yourself because sometimes it’s on our side,” Nestle director of group marketing and communications, Ian Alwill.
The area of client-PR agency relationships is one where I’ve always held the view that the PR industry has a lot to learn from our advertising cousins.
Advertising has been around for lot longer than PR. Many protocols and processes exist – on both the client and agency sides.
From the agency side being a ‘suit’ is a role in itself – dedicated to managing the relationship, whereas in PR generally managing the relationship is just part of the team that does the ‘doing’.
In my experience there’s often not been the robustness – and might I say the professionalism – in the PR relationship as one sees down the corridor in the marketing-advertising aegis.
Both sides are to blame, but as I’ve written recently, I believe that the client has the ultimate responsibility to set the guidelines, tone and processes. That’s because they are paying the bill and they should be running the relationship.
However, with that comes the responsibility for having the ability, if problems arise, to look at both sides to pinpoint issues – something that the major advertisers reported from the ‘HotHouse’ forum appear to be willing (somewhat surprisingly to me ) to do.
As for pitching, that’s more fraught with difficulty on the PR side than it is for the advertisers. Because PR is so much more intangible than advertising there’s so much more room for subjective judgments to come into play (“making a decision between choosing another blonde or another brunette” as Ian Alwill is quoted as having said at the “HotHouse”).
As a consequence the PR industry in Australian is a long way behind our advertising cousins in having transparent processes that meet the standards that Procurement Departments internationally are demanding.
This is evidenced by estimates I have seen that suggest that as much as 40% of Australian advertising pitching is being handled by third-party facilitators who run the process to ensure there is robustness and transparency.
While the key objective from involving an independent party is obviously to make the best choice, another of the key objectives of this is to ensure that the losing agencies at least exit the process having felt that the process has been fair, that’s there’s been a level playing field and as result there are no (or few) grounds for them to have any ‘sour grapes’.
In my experience ‘sour grapes’ is still too prevalent on the PR side when pitches are lost. I think that given the subjective nature of PR it’s much more difficult to avoid this. However, being more professional in preparing PR briefs, and running competitive PR pitches would help alleviate some of this (but I suppose you might argue that I would say that given that helping run pitch and tender processes is part of my business!).
It’s a shame that AANA keeps what’s discussed at its forum’s strictly for members. Perhaps the PRIA , the IABC or the Registered Consultants Group within the PRIA could consider tapping into the experience AANA members have in managing agencies. Based on the limited reporting from the AANA HotHouse I’m sure PR Managers – and PR agencies – would get great value from their experience and insights.
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