Collaboration and Communication in an Increasingly Impersonal World Client-Agency Partnerships Joseph E. Kuchta, President We live in a world of urgency and immediacy. The electronics, gadgets, and whiz-bang technologies we all carry on our belts have created a society in which an individual is never out of touch, and never far from the instant gratification of communications. Case in point, how many of us scurry for our phones and BlackBerrys before the plane has even slowed to taxing speed? I’m guilty as charged. So one might argue that with 24/7 availability and accessibility that communications between agency and client teams has never been better. I propose that the opposite is actually true. While we are becoming very skilled at short bursts of messages and quick responses, trading e-mails, IMs, and text messages are poor — and dangerous — substitutes for true agency/client collaborations. What every agency brings to the table for every client is its thinking. This thinking should be strategic and creative and born from expertise, experiences, and commonsense approaches to marketing and communication. In the most successful client-agency relationships, this thinking results from collaboration, communications, and a cohesive mindset. The branding, creative, and messaging evolve in dozens of informal ways with significant team input and direction over a period of time. Collaborations: A Priority In today’s world of e-mail attachments, PDFs, and “just send it now, we’ll talk about it later” memos, true collaboration — the valuable discussion and examination of the thinking — is becoming a lost priority from both the agency and client perspectives. This is a shame given that the only way an agency can fulfill its end of the bargain is to listen, interpret, probe, challenge, and understand where the client brand team is coming from — and vice versa. As marketers, these days we are asked all the time to just “ship it,” be it strategy, positioning, branding, creative, or even tactical plans. Technologically, this is an easy request. PowerPoint files, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and so on can all be attached and zipped and sent around the world in an instant. The problem is that we haven’t found a way to capture all of the thinking that goes into said efforts. All of the homework, the debates, the questioning, the insights, the interpretation of solutions, the “why is it blue?” is lost when it is magically delivered to the laptop or BlackBerry on the other end. Tips for Successful Collaborations Are the above technology solutions, efficient, effective, or ideal? Well the answer is multidimensional; sure, sometimes, and not at all. There are several ways in which every agency/client team can improve their communications. • Meet in person, as much as possible. If a product team can’t afford the time to spend together to be sure the work on the brand is perfect, then it can’t be expected that the work or the thinking will be perfect. • Visit the client. Invite the agency team to your office. It’s important that both sides of the team make the time to meet in person. The team shouldn’t settle for the delivery and review of critical thinking — be it strategic, creative, or tactical — via electronic means. • Talk to each other, person-to-person, as much as possible. Don’t rely on lengthy e-mails or voice mail messages as the primary source of communication. It’s important to discuss, question, and probe to make sure that everyone understands the issues at hand without having to speculate or decipher messages. If the agency or the client doesn’t want to communicate, then there are bigger issues at stake. (That’s a VIEW for another time.) • Don’t be the person who hides behind e-mails or text messages to communicate. By employing good communications techniques, the team’s dynamics will never be better, the work will never be better, and subsequently, the brand will never be better. By employing good communications techniques, the team’s dynamics will never be better, the work will never be better, and subsequently, the brand will never be better. Goble & Associates Goble & Associates Inc., Chicago, is an independent, full-service agency that specializes in healthcare communications, providing expertise and support across the entire spectrum of communications. For more information, visit goble-assoc.com. March 2007 VIEW on Advertising

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