Client intimacy is bad for ideas; keep creative partners in the stranger zone.
“I’m sorry, but I’m letting you go.”
“What! Why? We’ve been together for ten years.”
“There’s someone new, someone who can make the big changes I want.”
“I didn’t know you wanted big changes. I can do big changes.”
“It’s too late, we’ve already hired a new agency.”
Any veteran marketing professional has had this breakup conversation with their agency; the separation is inevitable.
Why do long-term relationships between agencies and clients typically get worse and worse, rather than better and better? It’s because two incompatible agency offerings bash up against each other until one wins out, creating a Proximity Paradox. The first offering is creative ideas — novel, out-there advertising concepts and marketing campaigns. The second offering is client intimacy — the agency’s ability to understand the client’s business, challenges, opportunities, hopes, and fears.
Creative work is fundamentally uncomfortable, because it is new. Client intimacy is fundamentally comfortable, because it is familiar. These two opposing offerings are the source of much conflict between both you and your external partners (whether it’s an agency or any long-term consultant hired to inject innovation in the company). You both want to push and challenge new ideas, but you both want to find efficiencies in working together. The external partner wants to make a good margin, and you want to work with people who really understand your organization.
In my experience, the comfort of client intimacy eventually trumps the discomfort of creative work.
Getting closer to the client, establishing great working relationships, collaboration, really understanding your client’s challenges and opportunities — these are all ways an agency describes client intimacy. It’s usually one of the main goals for an advertising agency and many other service-based industries. In a pitch, it’s often one of the first things a client will say they value.
And, while client intimacy is extremely important — crucial to creating the most effective, needle-moving work — I want to address an important caveat that all too often gets forgotten: Stockholm syndrome. I’m not talking about legit Stockholm syndrome (hopefully client kidnapping isn’t happening), but rather the threat of identifying too closely with the client or vice versa.
Companies work with advertising agencies because they want someone to push their thinking.
The client has to manage internal budgets, politics, approval systems, and sales figures that can often impede creativity. These are the day-to-day operational realities that can sometimes get in the way. They rely on the agency to get away from some of those internal constraints, to “free think” on the brand.
But as the agency gets closer to the client, it may (to the detriment of the work) start to take on some of those internal restraints. Agency account planners will begin to say things like, “They would never go for that,” “The sales team won’t like this” or “We just need something quick and dirty.”
The agency’s deep knowledge of the client and their business forms a set of constraints for the advertising concepts and creative. To stay in the client’s good graces and work efficiently, they will narrow the creative spectrum of the ideas they present. It’s a great model for quickly producing marketing materials that keep internal stakeholders happy and comfortable, but it’s a bad model for uncovering the oddball ideas that might inspire a revolutionary customer engagement campaign or meaningful brand project.
When this happens, the agency essentially becomes the client’s internal marketing team. We call this transformation a Proximity Paradox because the people hired for their outsider’s perspective inevitably become insiders.
So what am I getting at? Am I saying that we should remove client intimacy from the mix? That we should get further away from our clients to create better, more meaningful work? That client and agency relationships need to change more frequently? Absolutely not.
Client intimacy and a deep understanding of our clients’ realities is crucial. The more complex the marketing mix and customer channels, the deeper the understanding required. The more established the agency/client relationship, the deeper this understanding grows. We just need to make sure we actively work to maintain some of that all-important distance.
Walk into any established advertising agency, and you’ll find a staple feature: old, boring clients. By old I mean that they’re legacy clients — companies that have chosen to work with the same agency partner for more than ten years. And by boring I mean that there are huge constraints on the type of concepts and tactics both the agency and client company will accept.
No one can remember the last time the old, boring client’s work was submitted to an awards show or celebrated at a staff meeting. The legacy client’s projects are often passed off to agency interns. No one has fun or is excited by the work. It’s simply work for the client and the agency.
Old, boring clients are created when there is too much client intimacy. The only way to turn an old, boring client into a fun, exciting client is to introduce a new player on the team — someone with the gumption to shake things up.
I experienced this shake-up firsthand. A new account representative joined the agency and was put on a legacy client’s account. She had no prior knowledge of the client, their industry, preferences, or constraints. She looked at the client’s marketing goals and budget, and she saw loads of potential. Then she got to work.
She picked some of the bigger-ticket items on the marketing calendar and scheduled blue-sky brainstorms. She brought different agency employees into the brainstorms to inject new energy and ideas. Whenever anyone said, “They’ll never go for that,” the account rep probed by asking, “Why?” She threw out the old excuses and elevated every idea for which she could make a business case.
The client responded to the fresh ideas and the strategic thinking the new account rep brought to the table. They started saying “yes” to more out-there ideas. Their appetite for risk increased. The agency creative team put new energy into the work, and the agency submitted the client’s campaigns to award shows. Within two years, the boring, old client disappeared. A fun, exciting client took its place.
As we discussed in the chapters in the first section, people outside your department or leadership team can create the distance your organization needs to break free from the Proximity Paradox. They aren’t burdened with the resourcing restrictions, the workloads, the politics, and the counter-creative culture that may exist in your organizations. The right outside help is helpful.
It’s for this reason that new agencies and consultants can be so effective in the first few months they work with your organization. It’s also the reason that, in the story above, the new account rep was able to transform a boring client into an exciting one.
Consultants have one thing that internal team members do not have: perspective (created by their distance). However, if you lean heavily on these partners for day-to-day support, they’ll sink into the same Proximity Paradox problems that you wrestled with yourself. Without some healthy ground rules, your revolutionary outsiders will eventually become complacent insiders.
Without some healthy ground rules, your revolutionary outsiders will eventually become complacent insiders.
In recent decades, many established organizations have turned to outside consultants to help them stimulate innovation. Their own organizational resources are often too stretched to effectively do this themselves, or they may want an outside perspective. So, they often pay consultancy firms to identify new opportunities and generate ideas for them via market research.
Depending on the extent of their brief, these innovation consultants may also get involved in helping organizations develop product prototypes and take them through to the commercialization phase. They often also provide advice on the inner workings of the organizations they work with, including restructuring.
One UK-based innovation consultancy that has taken a distinctive approach with the type of consultants and service they provide is OneLeap. This consultancy helps organizations to become more entrepreneurial by providing them with consultants who have been successful entrepreneurs themselves.
However, OneLeap evolved into offering their consultancy service, rather than it being their focus when the company was first founded. They found that there was a significant, unmet demand.
OneLeap began in 2011 as a platform to help aspiring entrepreneurs grow their start-up ventures. It was co-founded by current CEO Hamish Forsyth and advisor/entrepreneur Robyn Scott. Investors, partners and corporate leaders were profiled on OneLeap’s website, and budding entrepreneurs could be put in touch with them to pitch their idea for a fee.115 But OneLeap quickly identified that there was a much greater demand from large, established organizations wanting entrepreneurial advice and support, rather than the other way around (i.e., small start-up ventures wanting support from more established organizations or individuals).
That finding quickly turned their service offering on its head.
OneLeap quickly evolved from being a platform profiling investors, partners, and corporate leaders to one that featured successful entrepreneurs instead. It soon became apparent that this was a unique and valuable consultancy service offering. They now have a network of entrepreneurs spread across thirty-five countries who are available to provide consulting services to large organizations.116
OneLeap saw the potential in entrepreneur consultants, rather than the ex-corporate career types that are typically provided by consultancy services.
Large companies often mistakenly think they lack the resources to innovate, but it can be a matter of perspective. Entrepreneurs are used to not having resources and being forced to innovate to do more with less. They usually have firsthand experience doing that to get their own start-up venture off the ground.
Innovation requires focus. Successful entrepreneurs are usually highly focused on their core idea or product/service offering.
Innovation often means going away from the familiar. An entrepreneurial consultant isn’t constrained by having to maintain the familiar like an established organization usually is. They will tend to naturally bring this type of experimental thinking into an organization.
OneLeap focuses on assembling unique “one-time” teams of entrepreneurs for any consultancy project. These entrepreneurs are handpicked from their international network on a case-by-case basis, based on the client’s requirements and the type of industry they are involved in. OneLeap seeks to match their clients with proven entrepreneurs who have experience that is compatible with their innovation needs.
Forsyth explains the reason why that approach works:
It works because it’s a collaborative process from day one. Another reason is that real entrepreneurs with a proven track record are credible with executives tired of trainers. We only select credible entrepreneurs with a practical mindset into our community.117
Their entrepreneurial consultancy teams begin any project by systematically and independently identifying their client company’s competitive advantages. This also helps to determine their client’s core competencies, which can be a useful starting point for generating potentially suitable innovation ideas.
Each team usually works intensively with a client for about six weeks. During this time, the OneLeap consultants facilitate internal hackathons (known as “venture sprints”) at the client organization.
At the beginning of these venture sprints, an innovation challenge facing the organization is clearly defined, along with the parameters for developing an innovative solution. The challenge could be oriented toward a product/service, process, or business model.
Organizational staff at these venture sprints are encouraged to develop and pitch innovative ideas and solutions to their colleagues. For product innovation challenges, they can also build quick prototypes in consultation with OneLeap’s entrepreneurial teams. This encourages creative competition and quick decision-making.
The OneLeap consultants carefully select organizational staff to participate in the venture sprints to help ensure maximum impact on the client’s organizational culture. Forsyth explains:
Aside from giving a lot of attention to the personalities and qualities of entrepreneurs we select, we are careful in selecting the participants from the organization as well. We don’t just invite the typical innovation champions (CMOs, innovation directors), but also the skeptics.
We also include people from compliance and general counsel. By engaging them in the process and giving them responsibility for making and pitching something, they see things differently. They see themselves differently, and get a sense of creating they did not have before. This helps prevent the corporate immune system from kicking in.118
At the end of the venture sprint, the entrepreneurs work with their client organization’s management to select the best ideas and/or product prototypes for further development and testing. Those chosen are put through intensive internal and external analysis.
For example, the internal analysis could include investigating the scalability of manufacturing a product innovation. Or it could include determining the feasibility of a service, process, or business model innovation via consultation with all relevant stakeholders.
The external analysis would include the innovation with the organization’s existing customers. All this information helps the client organization to get quick and meaningful data about whether or not to proceed with the idea.
OneLeap can return to their client organization after these intensive consultancy bursts to maintain the innovation momentum if necessary. This helps to ensure that innovative ideas don’t die a slow death due to the organization losing focus or not devoting the necessary time and resources to see them through to implementation. The consultancy teams can help their organizations to develop and systemize an entrepreneurial approach.
Like other external consultants, OneLeap’s teams can also avoid or help to identify any internal politics or structural issues that may hinder the client organization’s decision-making and performance.
Perhaps the greatest benefit that OneLeap provides to its clients is access to successful and experienced entrepreneurs who are used to producing fast results when working within limited budgets and time constraints. These entrepreneurs can mimic the environment and enthusiasm of a start-up when facilitating the venture sprint activities with organizational staff.
These entrepreneurs are used to identifying and exploiting opportunities quickly. Speed and spreading the risk are fundamental principles that the consultants try to impart, as Forsyth explains:
Get started on multiple smaller ventures quickly and spread the risk. Your speed has a serious impact on your organizational culture.
It’s important to take multiple ‘little bets,’ because even with the best people, most bets will probably fail — that’s the nature of entrepreneurship. If you bet on one grand project and it fails, your entire intrapreneurship strategy will be condemned. I’d rather have teams working on and learning from ten micro-resourced new products or services, than one very well resourced, rigidly defined project venture that has been over-thought.119
Essentially, OneLeap aims to create a legacy of successful intrapreneurship within an organization. According to Forsyth:
Successful intrapreneurship is partly about processes and tools, but mostly about behaviour and culture. You can’t change easily. But that change happens by getting people to do, rather than trying to get them to understand new models.
That’s why we pair up would-be intrapreneurs and senior executives with proven entrepreneurs to work together to build a prototype venture. Instead of being lectured, it’s a hands-on learning experience that delivers ongoing feedback and, crucially, a joint achievement.120
OneLeap now works with clients in a broad range of industries, including retail, e-commerce, FMCG, finance, government, energy, travel, and media.
In Part One (Create Distance for People), we shared a number of exercises you can use to create distance with your own internal team. If a vendor or consulting partner is open to shaking things up, we encourage you to try the same exercises with them. Here are a few more strategies you can use to create or restore the healthy distance that should exist between your company and its outside partners.
Be on the lookout for “client would never” statements. Make a mental note of how often you catch your partner making assumptions about what you would or would not accept. On the flip side, when it comes to your own communication with your outside partner, make a note of how often you say the following statements: “Our team would never go for that” or “I won’t be able to get this past my board or management team.” These kinds of statements tend to kill an entire creative direction — not just the particular idea up for discussion.
Before shutting down an idea, evaluate it honestly. People can be caught off guard by unexpected recommendations that would require a big change in the team or organization. You may need to check your biases, as we discussed in Chapter Seven. Acknowledge what you like about the idea. Then, ask to set it aside temporarily so you can properly explore its feasibility or merit outside of the meeting. Once you’ve had a chance to sit with the idea for a few days, circle back with the outside partner to discuss it further.
In Chapter One, we discussed the Proximity Paradox created by execution ceilings, and we advised you to be conscious of whether you’re wearing your innovation hat or execution hat. There are a couple of more names for those hats: outsider’s hat and insider’s hat.
When you’re in a brainstorm with an outside partner, always put on an outsider’s hat (a.k.a., the innovation hat). The brainstorm is not the time to talk about internal approvals and creative constraints. Protect the hour of time you have to think freely and push the bounds of your innovation ceiling. Once you’ve explored as many creative avenues as possible, you can don your insider’s (or execution) hat to evaluate the feasibility of the ideas.
In Chapter Three, we shared the brand and vision champion strategy. Bring this exercise into your next meet with your outside partner. Take turns playing the brand champion and the vision champion. Have the partner act as the brand champion, acting practically, and you act as the vision champion, pushing for better ideas and solutions. Talk it out.
One of the primary functions of a consultant is to collaborate with you to solve the challenges facing your team, process, or product. However, an effective consultant takes over the innovation responsibility, so you can focus on the execution responsibility. They should complement — not mirror — what you are doing internally.
For example, the coffee chain Starbucks has an in-house marketing team that handles the execution of all marketing initiatives. They hire an idea agency to generate innovation ideas and strategies. The idea-agency model has gained prevalence in Toronto, Denver, San Diego, New York and other large cities. The high concentration of marketing and advertising professionals means teams must pick a focus area and recruit outside partners to help with tasks that fall outside that focus area.
The next time your outside partner schedules a meeting to present ideas or solutions, bring a new colleague to the meeting (someone who has not yet met with the outside partner). Get your outside partner to pitch their ideas to the new face in the room. Get your colleague to provide feedback, ask questions, and analyze the ideas presented. If you can, just sit back and watch — see if you can pick up any limitations either team is placing on the other.
Every quarter, ask your outside partners to pitch you one wild-ass idea just for the sake of pitching the idea. It doesn’t need to be well researched or fully fleshed out; it simply needs to challenge the way you currently operate. The more “out there” the better. Make sure you caveat the request by letting your partner know that there is no pressure to produce a workable idea — you just want to see what they are capable of coming up with.
The ultimate goal of this exercise is to kill any assumptions your partner has around your openness to unconventional ideas. Be conscious of how you respond to their ideas. Make sure your outside partner knows the pitch me session is a safe space for creative risk-taking.
It’s important to note that these exercises cannot fix all struggling partnerships. You have to be honest with yourself about what your outside partner is producing. Some consultants or agency partners are great at execution and some are great at ideation. It is harder to find a gem who can juggle both responsibilities and do it well. You may be better served by working with a couple of different partners who have perfected their respective processes.