AMC’s The Pitch: The Hive stung by its own pricks

This week’s episode of the AMC series, The Pitch, reminded me why many advertising agencies have become obsolete.   Now in the spirit of full disclosure, as a former FKM shareholder and alumni, my loyalties for the competing agencies were clearly with my former colleagues in Houston who were competing against The Hive in Toronto for the Clockwork account.  Clockwork, despite the name and the, yes, orange corporate color, is a home services company (AC, plumbing, electrical) that’s less Stanley Kubrick and more Middle America.

Maybe that’s what threw off the guys from The Hive.

Despite clear direction from the client to retain the three brand ID’s for the three service companies, the first thing Hive recommended was to change it all.  While that might be the ultimate right answer (which I think it is), coming out of the box to ignore a client parameter is a mistake.  The Hive hadn’t earned the right to challenge the client, and stood on its bravado rather than common courtesy, or maybe common sense.  Strike one.

Their two subsequent creative pitches were 1) illegal in many states; and 2) incredibly self-indulgent.   Their first concept featured a cash truck which would give away money to that month’s customers—the only problem being that’s considered a lottery and therefore illegal.   Strike two.

The other concept was even more bothersome, as it revealed a blatant misunderstanding of the target audience in favor of a self-indulgent creative execution featuring a homeowner destroying her own toilet bowl so she could get a service call from Clockwork's plumbing division. The creative team Bobsey twins with matching-hats-to-make-a-statement were clearly more tickled about their own creation than what made sense for the client’s business or the consumer’s needs.  I now officially amend my previous statements that I’ve never met a Canadian I didn’t like to I’ve never met a Western Canadian I’ve never liked.   And you’re out.

The FKM team, on the other hand, demonstrated solid, consumer-centric thinking.  A Clockwork service call is necessary evil and a response to an interruption to one’s normal life.  The creative execution wasn’t fancy, or overly “CLEVER”, but was true and believable and spoke to the consumer need, rather than an art director’s caprice or an agency's ego.

Until agencies train more grown ups and fewer prima donnas worried only with their book or THE WORK, they won’t be able to satisfy clients’ real need to help create customers that deliver margin dollars over a long period of time.    To paraphrase Tom Monroe,  the “M” in FKM, clients don’t want ads, they want results.   If they could buy results, they wouldn’t need to buy an ad.   Maybe you had to be there. 

Doritos: The chip that crunches (ad agencies)

A USA Today article earlier this week announced the winners of the Ad Meter, that publication’s reader’s poll judging their favorite Super Bowl ads.  The baby in the sling ad, created by “amateur” Kevin Willson (http://www.compassfilms.com/) was judged the best among all the $3.5 million for 70 or so 30-second ditties on the Super Bowl XLVI broadcast.   Another amateur-produced Doritos spot featuring a felonious Great Dane with a penchant for cats and bribery won USA Today’s Super Sunday panel award.  The winners were rewarded with $1million and tons of publicity.  

This contest has termite-ed another leg of the stool of traditional ad agency relevancy.  

When I began in the agency business, the transition of “owning the strategy” was already shifting from agencies to client marketing group.  In years past the account director on Exxon or Shell was those brands’ keeper, since those companies shuffled ad directors every 3 years as part of the management training program.  Today most client companies mimic CPG companies by installing marketing professionals in marketing positions.

In the mid-1990’s, agencies began losing the 15% media commission cash cow to media buying services offering strategic planning and tough negotiations at significantly lower commission.  The effect was to reduce agency margins faster than M&M’s at a craft services table because clients viewed buying services as prescient alternative to media mavens who six months earlier likely were negotiating multiple choice college finals instead of multi-million dollar buys. 

The next leg of the stool was chopped during the 2000’s new media wave, which saw the rise of digital agencies.   My sense is that traditional agencies have only recently awakened to the fact that consumers are media agnostic.  It’s the same bias that bifurcated the PR and advertising functions in earlier eras.   Today digital agencies like New Haven based Caffeine are being appointed AOR for gorilla brands like Timex, which begs the question about how long the traditional agency will… (yes, you see it coming…) keep on ticking. 

The Doritos Super Bowl contest cracks the last leg of the stool of traditional agency relevance—the creative product.  While freelancers and independent producers have played greater roles since the agency downturn in the early 2000’s, Super Bowl ads have heretofore remained sacrosanct.   (Perhaps with the exception of whomever did the dog-crap Sketcher’s ad, the tired Go-Daddy spots, or the ironically boring-as-ever Camry work.)   On the other hand, Chrysler’s  Clint Eastwood spot was ballsy and moving at the same time—in the spirit of the 1984 Apple spot that shifted the Super Bowl broadcast from a football game with commercials to a media extravaganza.

In order to preserve relevance, agencies should consider their own value propositions with the same rigor the good ones put their clients through.  

• What do clients really want?  (More sales with greater margins) 
• How can the product deliver on that? (The business proposition, not the brand position).  
• How is the story differentiated in a compelling way (Advertising, PR, online, promotions, etc)

Without sounding like a Don Draper contemporary in today’s world, that’s the thought process from way back when that empowered agencies to own the strategy, and own the brand relationship.  Without that, in 10 years from now many agencies will have gone the way of the three martini lunch.   I’ll miss them both.