Sonia Le Louarn, chief strategy officer at Mindshare LatAm, and a judge at the forthcoming M&M Global Awards 2015, examines how the concept of ‘good work’ for international clients is evolving.
When asked recently whether the concept of good work according to international clients had evolved, I came to the conclusion that once you strip away all the buzz, what you get is a decades old game. Not much has changed when it comes to their media agency expectations. We are in the same game as ever, only the rules have evolved.
Clients always demanded and still demand that a media agency network provides world-class consistency across all countries and delivers verifiable value. They expect consistency on product offer be it talent, systems, tools and processes.
On talent, over the past few years we have seen an increase in clients seeking more guarantees to secure top class talent on their accounts.
By their very nature, international clients are more demanding because they have worked in more advanced markets and often been exposed to the crème de la crème agency side. So they are accustomed to certain agency people profiles. This is especially true in emerging markets, where we are experiencing a shortage of T-shaped professionals.
There is a huge demand for people who have transdisciplinary knowledge with specialist depth in one channel or practice. We often compete with the likes of Google, Netflix or Facebook, who have deeper pockets to attract such talent.
It is incumbent upon agencies to attract and motivate such smart professionals. At Mindshare, you might not become a billionaire selling your app to the highest bidder (although who knows ), but at least we can guarantee you will work on a number of categories, brands and projects.
We will always push our people to come up with original solutions that break category conventions by providing them with the right level of network support, ongoing capability building and tools so that they end up doing their best work ever whilst at Mindshare. Clients increasingly seek to understand how you are nurturing this talent as good work starts with our people.
Providing consistency
International clients have always been curious to see how agencies can provide consistency on tools, systems and processes making sure that the lower hanging fruit is still as good as what they would expect from the best market around the network.
We have made significant investments in technology and spent a considerable amount of time in securing the right partnerships and alliances to provide world-class services in most countries. There isnt a single international media pitch going nowadays without asking us to detail our tools, processes and systems.
Clients want to make sure their account teams will be equally equipped to deliver their best work no matter their location. On processes, clients are asking for more sharing of best practice and open collaboration too.
They show particular interest in understanding how agencies have codified their planning and buying process, always seeking a reassurance that it is democratic enough to be used everywhere, especially in less developed markets, whilst still guaranteeing fast but smart and creative solutions elsewhere.
Coming back to the notion of the lowest hanging fruit, there is also an increased interest in understanding the agency innovation pipeline especially the latest tools, tech and innovations that could be rolled out rapidly in their key markets. Hence the notion of being able to tap into incubation hubs is growing in interest.
Value unlock
On the subject of value unlock, clients have always been seeking guarantees that they are receiving the best value from their agency.
For instance, on the planning side, what has changed is our ability to unlock value in the entire decision path in a world where every consumer experience begins and ends in media. And we are able more than ever to demonstrate this value at speed, sometimes real time thanks to our access to more granular consumer behavior data than ever.
In fact, speed is one of the main changes that is affecting our industry. Delivering insights at speed to take more informed decisions is what separates the winners from the losers.
Most international clients have all their media data captured in local, regional and global dashboards. However, we are increasingly moving from just reporting spend to central or regional functions to business intelligence tools that facilitate decision making on media investments and allocation across and within countries.
The most sophisticated clients are pushing their agencies to create repeatable models using a combination of marketing and media data in order to quickly apply value and unlock learnings from one market to another or within clusters of similar markets.
More data-rich clients are also asking us to find more actionable insights and execute faster, as we are seeing a shift in the balance between global and regional strategy and local implementation. They are increasingly interested in working with agencies that are certainly capable of recommending the right strategy and designing the right solution but more importantly in executing it locally and consolidating results.
Strategy is king, but execution is King Kong. Today, everything gravitates towards speedy executions and being adaptive. From execution you will garner the necessary insights to unlock value at a strategic level and through the same execution, will you be able to adapt and unlock further value. So there is definitely a growing interest in seeing how agencies are tackling the data tsunami to always deliver not only good work but rather, better work each day.
We see that international clients are after consistency of the offer and value unlock. Only some of the rules of the game have evolved mainly due to speed, connectivity and data access.
What about the emotions of the game? Here is one last thought: the best preparation to do good work tomorrow is to do good work today. We are seeing that there are no fundamental changes to what international clients deem as good work.
But why stop at good work; why not aspire to great work? Steve Jobs once said, The only way to do great work is to love what you do. The ability of a client-agency dynamic to generate great work will always be fuelled by emotions.
So my advice to all agency people entering case studies at the M&M Global Awards is to let their emotions loose so that the greatness of the work prevails.
The final deadline for entries for the M&M Global Awards on 12 June. For any further details please contact our awards director Danielle Redwood at Danielle.Redwood@csquared.cc, or visit our new awards website.
