In our work over the last two years with large corporations managing highly complex communications efforts, it has become abundantly clear to us that regardless of economic conditions and the desire reduce costs, what marketers most want is help driving higher returns on their marketing spend. There are very difficult ways and means of doing this. Here, we talk about the simplest way to approach it.

In our presentation with Microsoft to the ANA Agency Financial Management Conference earlier this year, we made a compelling case for corporations to focus on eliminating the more than $300 billion in wasted marketing efforts associated with poorly conceived and poorly directed marketing projects.

Not a single executive of the 300+ we met at that conference missed the point. None of the ANA members we met disagreed that waste due to poor agency input is a problem. This has also been true of meetings since then. Marketers from Land O’Lakes, Kao Brands, Advance Auto Parts, Dell, and Microsoft all concur. Yet much more pressing, in all of their minds, is the subject of what could be DONE with the repurposed spend.

Marketers all know that eliminating waste is beneficial, yet they are unified in their belief that dropping that savings directly to the bottom line is not their first priority. What they want is simple: more ROI. Travelport’s CMO Jon Hall put it crisply: “We spend marketing dollars to achieve business objectives. Smartly reinvesting savings translates directly into higher ROI across all programs. A marketer’s job is to grow the company.”

This is absolutely true. Every marketer sets out with the same objective—regardless of strategy or tactic, the mission is the same—every marketing strategy and tactic should drive revenue, share, margin, brand equity, or a combination of these. Yet in our experience, they do so at differing levels of impact, or “return on marketing investment.”
As with any dynamic system, marketing efforts have a bell-curve of effectiveness. Your company’s marketing efforts have a measurable return. No matter how difficult it is to accurately measure the impact of any one marketing effort, the total efforts, year after year, are quantifiable. If you don’t already know it, determine as closely as you can your total revenue, margin, and brand equity directly attributable to total marketing operating expense.

At that point, the benefits of improving the inputs to the marketing communications process become clear. Increase the quality of the direction to your agencies before you and they begin spending the enormous resources required to develop and execute creative, then get it into the marketplace via paid or even earned media. This is not extremely difficult, or expensive to do. And the results can be dramatic. The chart at the bottom of this post makes the point clearly. Better input yields higher ROI.

If you would like assistance determining your overall ROI, and figuring out how to dramatically improve all your marketing efforts, contact us at info@brieflogic.com for a 30 minute conversation.

How Better Briefs Impact Marketing ROI

Casey Jones. CEO – BriefLogic.

Highly approve of this recent AdAge article outlining five “best practices” for improving the client-agency relationships. Only one thought I’d like to add. It isn’t just the “creative brief,” but rather ALL briefs that need attention. Original article at: http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=144550

Advertising Compensation and Benchmarking, Contract Compliance and Risk Assessments are vital services for large corporations with tens of millions, if not billions of dollars of marketing spend. Advertising Audit International (AAI) provides exactly these services to a broad range of Fortune 500 brands. Adding BriefLogic’s new “agency input audit” to the mix gives corporations a first-ever 360 degree view of their agency engagements.

In the complex and often confusing world of client-agency transactions, AAI’s standard review techniques are cost-effective methods to ensure the accurate and timely review of advertising costs and expenses. While most financial review firms, auditors and CPA firms typically use sampling techniques, AAI examines each individual invoice and its related line item costs for accuracy and contract compliance.

However, as AAI CEO Michael Lay states, “all of the costs we help recover for our clients, and it is a staggering figure, may be just the tip of the iceberg as we go to market with our new BriefLogic partnership.”

According to some industry analysts, total communications spend worldwide, across all marketing disciplines will exceed one trillion dollars in 2010. Currently, the corporate side of the industry is focused on the outcomes of that spend. Marketers are constantly interrogating the output of their agencies, their creative ideas, or the “stuff that sells.” According to co-founder and CEO, Casey Jones, BriefLogic has proved conclusively that someone has to think more deeply about the quality of the direction that sets these billions of dollars in motion. In a recent survey conducted by Greenberg Brand Strategies, it was determined that 30 percent of all agency time and energy is wasted or made inefficient due to poor input from marketing and brand managers.

Where AAI has experience in making sure that every single dollar that a marketer’s agency spends is accounted for, BriefLogic makes sure that it is directed properly at the front end of the process. AAI provides comprehensive audits of agency spend after-the-fact, and BriefLogic provides briefing tools, audit services, and agency input training to give marketers and agencies confidence that waste and inefficiency don’t occur on the input end.

Not that long ago, when agencies invested enough in themselves to have a point of view about account management, the 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 entire team may be young or inexperienced enough—that you’ve never seen one or even heard about them. Yet this seemingly innocuous account management communications task of writing down the direction that a marketer is providing appears to be lost from the scene. Its loss creates enormous waste 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 that your client-facing teams produce timely, comprehensive and accurate Contact Reports. If you do, your clients will respect everything else you do all the 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. If you don’t hold them accountable, then this much is certain – every communications failure about the work will guarantee that the work will either suffer or be more expensive. In an age of communications chaos, let’s not forget the fundamentals.

The following comments are in response to the AdAge Article titled, “Fed Up Shops Pitch a Fit at Procurement”

Procurement departments vary, and talent within those departments varies,
just like it does with clients and agency staff in general. Some procurement
execs we’ve worked with truly understand that people are not parts. You pay
less for parts, you get the same parts. You pay less for people, and you get
fewer of them, or less of their time, or less creative and experienced ones.

The single most challenging issue on the table is that neither procurement,
nor most clients, nor most agency pitch teams can deal well with the issue
of causality. Many things outside of an agency’s control impact market
success, making it nearly impossible to isolate the value of their
contribution from the rest of the players on the field.

The ROI on agency cost is impacted drastically by:

1. Product quality: It’s easier to sell superior product, tougher to sell a
commodity product, and damn difficult to drive up ROI for a brand that is
struggling. Procurement must make sure where the brand or product stands
relative to demands on agency performance.

2. Competitive and environmental changes: Will procurement track competitive
pressure, or changes in the marketplace? Will the company cut agencies slack
if, for instance, a major competitor comes out with a breakthrough product
that gets massive press and run-away sales? What happens if the the national
economy takes off and all boats are rising? Should the agency be compensated
for being lucky enough to be on board when the entire sector is growing in
the double digits?

Lastly, and this is the tough one for procurement departments and client
leaders: GIGO. Garbage In = Garbage Out. How solid is the client-side of the
relationship? How high is turnover there? How experienced are the clients
managing the work? How consistent is their direction? These are the areas
that Agencies can legitimately push back on. Agencies can be stubborn and
“not cave.” It might be much more productive to ask for client-side
assurances that they will do their part well. If they commit, perhaps
agencies CAN do it for less, and without complaint.

We are client-input analysts, and we see vast difference in the quality of
RFPs and briefs agencies receive. As one of our clients remarked recently,
“Agencies lose money on badly briefed projects and make money on
well-briefed projects. It is in everyone’s interest for us (clients) to take
responsibility for improving our input.” If you’ve got that kind of client,
you can have more faith in your ability to meet procurement’s demands.

The answer for procurement is NOT to expect that agencies can be fully
accountable for outcomes in a vacuum. The FIRST place to look for efficiency
is on the input side. You can expect more from your agency; more success,
more accountability, more creativity, more support, better service. You can
expect the work to be more effective, but not if you focus only on the
agency-side of the equation.

Negotiate hard, but only when you know you have your act together.

There have been many requests for the 2009 Client Input study referenced in the AdAge article written by Rupal Parekh titled, “Want More Out of Your Agencies? Write Better Briefs.” The report is now available here and will soon be available on our website at jonesandbonevac.com. Feel free to contribute to the conversation regarding the report in the comments section.

The State of Creative Briefs: Improving the way assignments are initiated in a $310 billion industry