Ideas Made Well

When Thomas Cook demanded a £1m upfront fee for the right to buy their media, it was a sign that at least one client had become fed up with the lack of transparency in how media agencies got remunerated for their services. Media agencies were strangely quiet in the ensuing debate, keen to keep their covert agency deals under wraps. But many others leapt in to chastise Thomas Cook for their approach, which admittedly is not a brilliant long-term solution. Rather like the Indian restaurants that double their prices and then offer a 50% discount, this type of arrangement does little to enhance trust.

Many other agencies then resurrected the condemnation of the payment by time methodology and sought to push the contribution of their agency to the overall success of the business. In theory this appears like a fairer way to establish a correlation between input and output. Yet few agencies want a basic fee that doesn’t even cover its costs and hence the potential for payment by results is normally only ever applied to the ‘profit element’ of an agency’s fee.

Putting aside the complexity of working out the specific extra contribution delivered by the agency in terms of isolating it verses any other factors, there are a whole host of questions that are begged. Why is the contribution of one agency greater than the marketing people, who briefed, oversaw and sold the campaign internally ?
Why is an agency’s contribution better than another agency, who didn’t get the job (and the fees) – if the agency managed to help lift sales by 10%, who is to say that another agency might have lifted them by 20%?

If an agency is genuinely part of a team of agencies, who worked in an integrated fashion, this makes isolating the contribution of one agency over the others even harder and probably not in a client’s interests.
The chances are that you would spend more time arguing the toss over who did what and quantifying the effect than you would ‘doing the doing‘.

A better approach is for clients to ask what they want out of an agency. What motivates an agency? What is the best way to achieve getting the most out of an agency? An accurate analysis of this is unlikely to result in a strong correlation between money and performance. True, agencies hate getting ripped off … just like clients. So avoiding any mutual ripping off is important. The way that agencies grow is by getting more and more business – by doing great work that works. That is a far more satisfying way to make money rather than fleecing a client.

Two key principles shine out.
1. Transparency. Only with an open approach to remuneration, will both sides trust each other.

2. Fairness. It is in the client’s interests to motivate agencies and it is in agencies’ interests to do great work. This is only really possible if agencies are allowed to make a reasonable margin.

The way that you obtain the best insights about an age group is rarely through research – it is often through experience. A stag do is sort of a mixture of the two. Research groups are never that much fun for the participants – whereas stag dos (like one in Antwerp) clearly are fun. A lot of fun. As well as being highly instructive… So here are the insights gleaned from a bunch of 35-55 year olds after a two-night celebration of Damian Schnabel’s forthcoming nuptials.

1. Travel arrangements go wrong , even if the train booking is handled by an experienced travel booker. When travelling in a group of 20 though, any mistake on the ticket (like the wrong date) means that any chance of catching the scheduled train disappears.

2. This age group can turn on the charm however, meaning that it is possible to rectify things with a very nice Eurostar booking clerk (or customer interface manager or whatever they are called).

3. 35-55 year olds also don’t panic very much, as there was a remarkable absence of stress caused by the news that we had the wrong tickets. Instead, plan B was quietly hatched for a night in London. One reason for the lack of panic was probably more to do with the fact that there were no other halves there as much as age and maturity.

4. The conversational breadth of 35-55 year old men is extremely broad, ranging from the obvious (cars, women, beer) to the much less obvious. Apparently the UK eats far more pork (proportionately at least) than any other nation on earth. According to one stag , pork is in everything from rissoles to beefburgers (which he rapidly corrected to hamburgers) and you would need every digit on your body to count the number of everyday foodstuffs containing a bit of pig. Gardening is not a big topic of conversation for this age group, but for people outside London who have access to an allotment, there is a macho pride in the size of the vegetables grown. Such is the productivity of courgette plants, that courgettes may one day rival pork as a constituent of food products if allotments continue to increase in popularity.

5. People in Newcastle are different from normal human beings. They will talk to absolutely anyone, have no concept of the word ‘embarrassing’ and their ‘How to survive a day’s drinking from breakfast to the wee small hours’ guide involves not eating anything until dinner.

6. It is harder to herd 20 mature males than it is to herd 20 of any other demographic, except perhaps for cats.

7. Many people have karaoke skills in advance of their own perception. Many also have skills below their perception ……

8. The mankini is not a great invention, but it does create an incredible amount of interest, whether it be on a Eurostar train, a bar, a club or outside a club – when having just been ejected from the club.

As to insights pertainto Antwerp:
• The Belgians eat a lot of waffles and there isn’t a supply shortage of waffle shops or McDonald’s
• In the north of Belgium, including Antwerp, their loathing of the French is surprising extreme
• Their musical taste is 20 years out of date, just like it was many years ago – it’s just a different 20 years.
• The chips in McDonald’s over there are far more potatoey than the chips you get over here
• Hotels are cheap in Antwerp, but a ‘£25 a night in the middle of summer deal’ genuinely IS too good to be true
• Hiring an Antwerpian belly-dancer over the internet is very high risk and may end up in disappointment

So, if anyone out there has any briefs with a male 35-55 target (or that are based in Antwerp) then you know where to come.