Font page article in January 9, 2012 issue of AdAge lists better briefs as #1 tip on how to be a better client. We couldn’t agree more.

AdAge says clearer briefs are number 1 tip

If you are an entrepreneur, or if you know an entrepreneur or two (or a dozen) do not miss this article about what defines them in Inc Magazine.

It is as though a brilliant Account Planner wrote a psychographic profile of entrepreneurs.

Wish I’d had room to use more Intel examples in today’s AdAge piece, not to mention the dozens of right and wrong ways to do this from work with Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, etc. . . .

One of the reasons the field of professional communication, or “mass persuasion” is so challenging is the fact that the audience, any audience, knows instinctively that the marketer is selling something. Think of it as the Source Credibility Conundrum. Any new company, any new idea, faces it. At BriefLogic, the evidence that we can make an enormous impact on the entire field of marketing is unimpeachable . . . but only if you had been looking over our shoulders as we reviewed $3B in briefs, or listened to hundreds of hours of agencies’ POV on how bad the problem is at all levels.

Understanding the source credibility issue is more than just a challenge that new brands or companies face. It’s essential to understanding brand development in the first place. In the spirit of making a case for opening our professional minds to be less resistant to breakthroughs, consider this. Lack of source credibility often creates extraordinary resistance to breakthroughs in many fields if the ideas originate outside of the “club” of their profession. A number of examples come to mind; the two most extraordinary are probably the stories of John Harrison, Alfred Wegener.

The story of John Harrison, so brilliantly told in the 1995 book “Longitude” by Dava Sobel chronicles the epic quest to solve the thorniest scientific problem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the great age of exploration, sailors attempted to navigate the oceans without any means of measuring their longitude: All too often, voyages ended in total disaster when both crew and cargo were captured or lost upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of seafaring nations hung on a resolution.

To encourage a solution, governments of Europe established major prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful. The largest reward in history, a reward of £20,000 — truly a king’s ransom — was offered by the British Parliament in 1714. The scientific establishment — from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton — had been certain that a celestial answer would be found and invested untold effort in this pursuit. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, imagined and built the unimaginable: a clock that solved the problem by keeping precise time at sea, called today the chronometer. His trials and tribulations to win the prize throughout a forty-year obsession are the culmination of this remarkable story. His greatest opposition came from the great minds of his day, including Sir Edmund Halley, who comprised the jury upon whom the award of the prize was dependent. Convinced that the answer lay within their own fields of expertise, they shunned Harrison’s assertion that an accurate clock, and not the stars, provided the solution. They shunned it, to a great extent, because he was neither nobleman, not astronomer. It was a source credibility, or ethos problem. He was a carpenter, who turned to making wood clocks for churches and eventually, refined and miniaturized the making of world’s first timepiece, accurate enough to save lives at sea, dominate the shipping lanes and help build an empire.

Shortly before his death in 1955, one of the greatest minds of our age wrote a glowing foreword to a book by the eminent geologist Charles Hapgood, who had written a book renouncing the entire idea of continental drift, or what is now known as plate tectonics. As late as our own years in public schools, long after overwhelming evidence existed in support of continental drift, text books were still being printed and high-school science teachers continued to “teach” that the idea was folly.

What accounted for decades of opposition to the idea? It was likely the fact that the scientist who wrote the first work in support of the idea shortly before WWI, Alfred Wegener, lacked source credibility. In the words of Bill Bryson, from his sensational 2003 book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything:” “Clearly the time was ripe for a new theory. Unfortunately, Alfred Wegener was not the man that geologists wished to provide it. Wegener had no background in geology. He as a meteorologist, for goodness sake. A weatherman-a German weatherman. These were not remediable deficiencies.”

As a result of a lack of source credibility, it took a half-century, a modern scientific dark-age of geology, for serious consideration to be granted to one of the fundamental truths of our scientific age. How long will it take until marketers consider the quality of agency input to be as essential as the agencies they select? Stay tuned . . .

Attention Agencies – What The Heck Happened To Contact Reports?

Not that long ago, when agencies invested enough in themselves to have a point of view about account management, training to make sure it was understood, and the management focus to make sure teams adhered to agency principles, there was this simple tool called a Contact Report. You may be young enough, in fact your team may be young or inexperienced enough, that you’ve never seen one, or heard about them. Yet this seemingly innocuous account management communications task of writing down the direction a marketer is providing, appears lost from the scene. It’s loss creates enormous waste heat in the marketer-agency relationship.

It was simple. Contact Reports were the one essential agency tool for managing expectations on any project. They were mandatory. As an account manager, all you had to include were these five items:
1. Subjects discussed (a list of items covered in the meeting or call)
2. Decisions reached
3. Next steps (including when due)
4. Person responsible for each item in next steps
5. Note at the end of the document asking all meeting attendees to respond with corrections, if their notes or memory of the meeting does not correspond with what has been documented.

Contact Reports used to be an industry standard. Failure to produce one after a client meeting could be a mortal sin for an agency account or project manager, especially if that failure led to a miscommunication that cost the marketer money. Contact Reports tracked all the inevitable changes in the work. They settled disputes over what the agency was or was not asked to do. They helped resolve billing issues. Not a single marketer, of the dozens and dozens I’ve talked to this last year, can remember getting a contact report from an agency of any kind after a meeting. Agency account managers have become lax on this issue, perhaps due to the mistaken assumption that email communication alone provides an accurate summary of decisions and expectations. Nothing could be less true.

No one searches through email correspondence to track decisions in a complex and expensive process. Directors of Client Services, senior account leadership and agency CEOs have become dropped the ball. Their defense? “Clients don’t expect them anymore.” They should. Corporations pay the price that is always due when communication between two groups is not precise and documented. These simple guidelines, built into every SLA (service level agreement) or agency contract, will save both the client and the agency time, reduce churn, improve the work, and prevent mishaps in the essential partnership necessary to accomplish vital marketing goals. Marketers should make sure their agency commits to the following process:
1. If you have a client call, a contact report must be sent via email to all participants within 24 hours
2. If you have a client meeting, a contact report must be sent via email to all participants within 24 hours
3. If you exchange a series of emails about the work, and as a result, a larger group must be notified, a summary contact report must be sent via email to all participants within 24 hours

As AdAge reported in the article, Want More Out of Your Agencies? Write Better Briefs, up to 30% of all agency time is made inefficient or wasted due to poor input. Some of this may, in fact, be the agency’s fault. The input may have been spot on for a given project, yet it may have been delivered in an unstructured manner. The agency’s failure to capture that input in a simple contact report precipitated the project’s collapse into chaos. Stop. Let’s rethink that last statement. If you, the marketer, haven’t required that your agency maintain best-practices in documenting changes in the work, you own the primary responsibility for the breakdown in communications. Most agencies will provide the level of service that marketers require of them. Our advice to agencies? Step back up to the standards that were common in the days of the Mad Men, and mandate your client-facing teams produce timely, comprehensive and accurate Contact Reports. If you do, you clients will respect everything else you do, just that much more. Our counsel to marketers? If your agency managers don’t provide this level of service (and it is highly likely they don’t) then require it of them. This much is certain – every communications failure about the work, guarantees the work will suffer, or it will be more expensive. In an age of communications chaos, let’s not forget the fundamentals.

Two of the top ten most hated jobs are in Marketing. “Lack of direction” cited as a primary issue. Cue BriefLogic. Think Your Job Is Bad? Try One Of These!

The title quote here is from a recent article in Time called “The Optimism Bias.” BriefLogic is inherently optimistic about the communications industry. We believe in the capacity of marketing and agency executives to care about the quality of their planning and to become more proficient at it. Eventually, those who are not sufficiently motivated to make this an essential personal and corporate skill set likely will be made obsolete by those who do.

Important article from MarketingWeek. With 60% of all marketer’s assignments to agencies lacking a success metric, this is not surprising. At BriefLogic, we continue to encourage CMOs to evaluate total marketing OPEX in comparison to the business results directly attributable to marketing. All-up success is easier to analyze than adding up the sum of proxy tactics.

What is BriefLogic.com software? Why is it hot news for marketers and agencies both? How could it change our industry? The short answer is right here. Spend 21 minutes with us as John Battelle introduces CEO Casey Jones following the morning keynote address by BriefLogic’s first client, Microsoft SVP Mich Mathews, at this year’s Conversational Marketing Summit in New York.

Number one story on AdAge.com is high bar. Number one story on both AdAge.com and AdWeek.com inside of 30 days is pretty remarkable for a subject as basic as agency input. Yet it seems to be the case:

On Monday of this week, AdWeek covered our launch of BriefLogic.com, an ROI-driving interface software for marketers and agencies, at the 2011 CM Summit in NY. The story appeared first on page 15 of the print issue. A few days later it hit the web on AdWeek.com and shot straight to the top of the “most popular” rankings. As of this post, it is still in the top three.

Just a few weeks ago, AdAge published two articles on briefing, one about BriefLogic and another in response to the first. “Marketers, Quit Blaming Your Agency — It’s Your Brief at Fault” had 89 comments posted and 339 Facebook “likes” so far, and “Agencies Should Demand Better Briefs From Their Clients” earned another 15 comments and an additional 109 “likes.”

In comparison, last year AdAge published an article titled “Top 10 Stories on AdAge.com in 2010.” In preparing for the launch last week of BriefLogic.com, we took a look at how much commentary those top stories generated. The most engaging story in the AdAge top 10 of 2010 list received 55 comments. The 2010 story with the most Facebook likes received 28. Why did we look this up? We wanted a way to measure of how compelling the agency briefing issue was as news. Unless AdAge recently changed it’s policy on how long the comment window is open, the message appears to be clear. Agency briefing and it’s impact on the marketing industry is a press-worthy topic for marketers.

After review and analysis of over $2.5B in agency briefs, we are not surprised. Our favorite quote so far from the AdWeek story is _AdMax: “I receive so many creative briefs that are pages and pages of repetitive and meaningless corporate speak. It’s so simple … spending an extra hour or so now to deliver a buttoned-up and relevant brief will save days and days of revisions and lost money down the road.”

Well said. And with Brieflogic.com as a brief or SOW writing platform, it may not require that extra hour. Writing a great brief is a challenge. Yet much of the difficulty comes from not having the right data at your fingertips. A vexing issue that our software addresses.

If you are a marketer, or an account manager that wants to be brilliant at briefs, let us know here, or by emailing us at info@brieflogic.com.

The teams doing the work (creative or strategic) will thank you for it, and drive better results. After all, quality in equals quality out. It’s logic. BriefLogic.