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.

Nice blog post from Media Asia – http://bit.ly/cuN8GH rating the joint BriefLogic/Microsoft bit at the ANA “one of the most introspective and interesting presentations” of the event. Great response in general from a lot of corporations attending the event, including General Mills, 3M and American Express. Thanks and compliments to co-presenter Bruno Gralpois of Microsoft.

When Dr. Daniel Bonevac and I started Jones&Bonevac with Deon Lewis and a handful of other sharp marketing executives, we did so in response to a growing need for our specialized agency management consulting services. The solutions we developed soon became more than brains for hire. We developed specific products and services aimed at scaling our best thinking, and helping the corporation we serve maximize every marketing dollar. Yet while we have updated our company name to better reflect our DNA, our roots remain the same. We recognize that while the output of marketing agencies is often creative, the input cannot be. Assignment briefs, project briefs and RFPs must make sense. The direction corporations give marketing agencies must be rational, reasonable, sensible . . . in short, logical. Welcome to BriefLogic, and to the BriefLogic Blog.