I’m four pages into this week’s Advertising Age (billed as “The Agency Issue”) and the cover story, How to save the troubled agency-marketer relationship, has a sidebar from Kimberly-Clark CMO Tony Palmer. Second in his list of the “five pain points in the marketer-agency bond” is the fact that agencies and marketers have not found a meaningful way to use measurement to elevate and empower creativity and commercial ideas. He laments: “Today it seems that research and analytics, most notably in creative agencies, is seen as the enemy designed to kill the opportunity for creativity.”
Such great points. Any account exec with access to a raft of measurement tools can produce numbers, stats and charts that show the number of visitors are up or down, display traffic sources and ad clicks, or display a map overlay that shows more people in Texas watched a video than people in Oregon. They can tinker with ad copy and landing pages to increase a clickthrough rate and decrease cost-per-conversion, and they can plug a list of email addresses into any number of applications and tell a client how many of those addresses have active social media accounts.
But all the tools and applications are worthless without proper analysis that helps your client make business decisions. Information that helps the account team and creatives come up with recommendations and programs that actually DRIVE business.
At Imagination, we have a long-standing client that demands this kind of analysis and recommendation, and we are better for it. Believe me, I’d rather have a client that demands that we understand his business in such a way that we can take all those numbers and stats and use them to propose changes to creative, strategic media buys and new ideas that actually help his company. As an account team, our job is not to present five pages of data every week about a website or a media buy or a social media program; our job is to come to the table with recommendations based upon that data.
No one on our team or at the client, believes that this analysis stifles creativity; rather, it spurs creativity. Sometimes the data reinforces our creative choices; sometimes it forces us to acknowledge that something isn’t working. Either way: we learn, the client learns and the entire creative program gets better and better over time.
The satisfaction of knowing that your recommendations have helped your client make better business decisions should be a reward in itself. But in case it isn’t, consider this: Creative agencies need to understand–really understand–that the time (and personnel) it takes to analyze your client’s data should not be seen as a “non-revenue generating” activity. In fact, proper analysis of your clients’ program-data is the only way clients will be able to justify the spend, thereby justifying their relationships with you, their agency.
