We think we can all agree that 2024 has been a challenging year for BIMA members. Particularly, for those who work in client facing roles. Juggling the needs and objectives of our clients, alongside managing the expectations from stakeholders within our own agency is tough in any given year, let alone one where there have been widespread economic challenges that’s resulted in an industry with ever tightening budgets and greater competition.
Counter to that, the advancement in new technologies has only increased the clients desire to ensure their agencies are delivering cutting-edge solutions to meet their clients’ needs.
For the first part of the BIMA Client Services Council’s new ‘Voice of the Client’ initiative, CS Council member, Tom Kingham, has spoken to three important voices within the Client Services community, each of whom were awarded with a place on this year’s BIMA 100 list.
Chris Hall, Head of Digital: Client Services at DRPG;
Elise Bola, Senior Account Director at Brave Spark;
Jon Reeves, VP of Client Partnerships at VaynerMedia EMEA.
We were keen to get their views on a wide range of topics related to (amongst other things) the challenges their clients face, how they measure client satisfaction and what upcoming trends do they predict will impact their work?
Chris Hall: We all know every client is different and they have multiple reasons why they choose digital solutions to drive their desired outcome. Most clients know what they want to achieve but don’t necessarily know how to get there.
There is one common denominator across nearly all client’s challenges and that’s their own internal stakeholder management and expectations, and I see us, as partners, as integral to supporting them through this for the benefit of all.
At DRPG we take a 5-stage approach: We listen. We challenge. We communicate. We fix and We take pride. Our goal is Digital excellence and the whole team pushes us forward to get to where we want to be.
Jon Reeves: To grow, brands need to market at the speed of culture and the consumer. However, it is rare to see the appropriate investment of time or resources in social, and in particular organic creative, to achieve this.
As a consulting team, we always employ empathy when partnering with client teams to pursue transformation agendas, given the historical perspective of social media sitting with entry-level marketers and often thought of as free. Ironically, the massively underpriced nature of attention on social remains unmatched and continues to be the biggest missed opportunity for brands right now.
Part of the problem is that brands want the payoff of being embedded in culture but are shackled to boardroom-down subjective decisions, instead of acknowledging the truths of what people actually want to watch. Marketers often fall into the trap of dipping a toe in organic social but quickly decide it’s not working, without applying the same level of investment and patience received by entrenched traditional channels.
Conveying the art of the day-trading practitioner to our clients is the key. On a daily basis, identifying underpriced attention opportunities by knowing the pipes of attention (aka the platforms) and what is flowing through the pipes (aka culture). This combined with the ability to deliver relevant content at speed and scale simply cannot be the side gig it so often gets treated as. Mastering and maximising it requires committed effort over a meaningful period to build up the reps to achieve the desired result.
Elise Bola: We tend to find there are three key things keeping clients awake at night: Distinction, Consistency and Cost. As an agency, it’s our responsibility to bring unexpected ideas to the table and ensure they work right through the funnel. How can they live on beyond a single channel or campaign burst? As a client when you’re living and breathing your brand every day it’s easy to get restless and want to create something new every quarter, so it’s up to us to bring work to the table that can generate long-term value.
I find the best way to tackle this is to ensure you’re working as closely with your clients as possible. Make sure you have a clear grasp of the concerns they have and the opportunities on the table. Be their confidant every step of the way.
Jon Reeves: One of our guiding principles in consulting is that a client should always leave feeling they got more value than they paid for. We ensure open and honest communication throughout the process, being clear on expectations and making sure we start by listening.
An obvious measure of success is retaining or expanding our projects into longer standing strategic partnerships, as well as direct referrals from satisfied clients. For our longer standing partners, we operate an ongoing quarterly business review process.
We are also involving more standardised measures such a Net Promoter Score, which can be a good indicator of potential misalignments and help us catch things early, but ultimately nothing beats a human conversation.
Elise Bola: We send out client surveys every six months to give all our clients the opportunity to assess how we’re performing and how they’d like us to evolve to help them meet their future needs.
I’m a big advocate of having open and honest conversations to tackle problems as early as possible – how many times do you see issues get blown out of proportion simply due to a lack of communication?
The insight we get also allows us to stay proactive too. We always want to stay agile and on the front foot, providing added value to our clients whenever possible, and that’s so much easier when you have a clearer understanding of how their business works and the opportunities they have on the table.
Chris Hall: As Head of Client Services, I hold a frequency of status meetings with clients. This includes a scale of asking questions – How did we do? What could we improve? What went well? Etc. From this a score is created and the expectation is to continually improve this.
Loyalty is relatively simple to measure. Most clients stay with us for the long term (5 years+).
Having such longstanding relationships with our clients inevitably leads to increasing our revenues with them. This allows us to grow as team by providing a quality service, as well as look at areas of Digital we need to expand. This might be down to the number of people in the team or new areas of capability. This isn’t easy, as Digital changes by the day, but we have proven we are ahead of the curve with the ‘art-of-the-possible’.
Elise Bola: Having an intimate knowledge of your client’s business is crucial. No-one expects you to be an expert in their industry, but understanding the macro factors that affect your client on a day-to-day basis can be vital to help you stay one step ahead.
Take an interest in how your client operates. Understand not only how their business connects with customers, but how they work internally too. What needs to be aligned? What messages need to be dialled up and when?
If your client has confidence in you, they’ll have confidence to make the bigger and bolder decisions they need to truly succeed.
Chris Hall: At DRPG we are consistent with our pulse checks and unearthing what clients need, rather than want. We do not jump in with the newest shiny toy or concept, instead we look at what they are trying to achieve and match the deliverables with their objectives.
Obviously, we keep all clients abreast of what’s new and the art of the possible, but this is never used to move the client in the wrong strategic direction. Our innovation team is at the forefront of Digital capabilities so that we can adapt to any client objective, but this is not force fed without consideration of objectives and goals.
Jon Reeves: Our approach elevates social, and therefore the consumer, to the centre of marketing org. This is underlined by our core belief that brands are now primarily built in social, given the inarguable dominance it holds on consumer attention and the opportunity to achieve actual, not potential, reach.
Social platforms also offer more than just being heard when broadcasting, they are the world’s greatest insight engine for those brands who are prepared to listen. The availability of instant and untapped access to real people and their perceptions on brands and products is profound. In addition, their platform algorithms gift brands free AI-driven creative testing opportunities as a byproduct to the daily building of brand and sales.
If we can offer clients the framework for prioritising consumer-centric decisions and day-trading attention above all else, we will always set them up in the strongest possible way to leverage actualised reach and relevance as the gatekeepers to brand & business growth, regardless of the timeframe or changes in the market.
Jon Reeves: Typically, a combination of internal mindset and behaviour change alongside staying in touch to see the fruits of our projects, provide us with a clear picture of success from our engagements.
If a business adopts our principles in its go to market plans, considers greater investment in the opportunity around social (especially organic creative), or simply begins the journey by making a pledge to consumer-centric marketing decisions, positive growth and results will follow.
We have also had several projects A/B testing our recommended consumer-centricity vs boardroom subjectivity. The ability for consumer-up ads to eclipse any other approach should be no surprise, given the control audiences now must choose what they spend time with and what they actively consider based on relevance.
Chris Hall: There is no rule book here, or definitive approach, instead we match the KPI’s of our delivery and products with the clients’ expectations and needs. Multiple options are available for us to review success, and these include:
All of this is used in a project retrospective session where we combine these and other aspects to evaluate success. This alone cannot be the final view of success though, as the actual success can only be monitored and measured across long periods of time, and within the partnership with the client we continually amend/improve and shape the ongoing project outcomes.
Elise Bola: It goes back to honest and open dialogue – before, during and after the project. By working closely with your client, wider team and, crucially, their other agency partners, you can be clear on what you’re trying to achieve and work smarter in reaching those goals.
I try to make sure Brave Spark is as integrated and collaborative with all our client’s key agency partners as possible, because ultimately, we’re all striving for the same successful outcome.
Chris Hall: DRPG’s message to clients is simple: Anything’s possible. With this at the centre of how we approach everything we can continually bring innovation and creativity to everything we do. This will mean that clients are (pleasantly) surprised by our recommended approach as they themselves hadn’t considered, or knew, what was possible. This is a triple win.
This positions us all ahead of the curve within our respective sectors.
Elise Bola: Building diverse teams from different backgrounds gives you the opportunity to come to more unexpected solutions. I love that Brave Spark is a melting pot of different experiences and expertise.
But you then also need an environment that encourages these ideas to emerge. Admit you don’t know everything, and that ideas can come from anywhere. And be open with clients about when they need to make brave decisions.
We always try to present ideas on a bravery scale. Some clients don’t want to feel uncomfortable, so you must know when to surface ideas that challenge them and when to make them feel safe. I’d say that’s one of the trademarks of a good account manager – knowing what conversations to have and when.
Jon Reeves: Our industry’s superpower is putting either the golden age of the past or the potential age of the future on a pedestal, while ignoring the things that actually work today. Fortune 500 brands continue to sleep on the oversized opportunity in social, while plucky startups and creator-owned brands have stolen a march in the background by putting social first.
We also firmly believe in a return to the single agency partner, with creative and media fused together under one roof as a fully integrated and accountable offering. Showing up in this way as an agency with a clear vision and ethos means we attract clients seeking transformation for themselves and their business, from a partner they can trust.
Jon Reeves: The flux around in-housing will no doubt continue to ebb and flow as clients struggle with the pace at which sometimes hastily assembled internal teams are becoming outdated. This set against the backdrop of low industry trust, tied to a lack of accountability, means it’s harder than ever for brands to invest wisely.
You cannot move for AI conversation, and it will no doubt usher in the world’s next major technological era. Yet the simple fact eluding most is the AI that matters most right now are the algorithms with total control of the content reaching billions of users every day on social.
Established brands are also facing a creeping threat from startup ‘anklebiters’ who have been born via social media, with creators and celebrities monetising their incredible social reach to truly challenge the world’s most established brands.
On all of this and more, we believe we will be on the right side of history. Along that journey we’re linking arms with client partners to capitalise on the underpriced opportunities of today while imparting the skills needed to continue securing that advantage, whatever tomorrow brings.
Elise Bola: Speed and agility are the two buzzwords you can’t get away from – and you probably won’t get away from for a long while yet. We’re creating campaigns quicker than ever before – it helps when you have thinkers and makers under one roof to do that – and that means bringing in all influencers and decision makers into the project as early as possible.
Creative teams want to be involved in costing and timing conversations. Producers want to understand the context of an idea earlier than ever. It allows projects to move faster and, ultimately, avoid many of the speed bumps that waste time and money along the way.
Chris Hall: AI has the potential to change everything. From emails to creative,, copy, design and digital development. There are endless possibilities how clients may use it and how it impacts our business. As an industry Digital must be very careful how AI adoption filters into clients. At DRPG we will embrace it with them but focus on supporting and involving clients, it’s crucial to inform and educate around the good aspects but also the risks of AI.
Clients have also become more knowledgeable around Digital. This is a good thing but as an agency we must keep ourselves at the forefront of the technology so that our expertise retains its value.
KPI’s are key to Digital success, and we cannot get lost in the next cool thing or technical jargon. To keep our strong relationships, and proven track record intact, we must stay closer than ever to clients and their objectives to maintain our position as experts and producers of high-quality digital solutions and create partnerships for the long-term.
Our strategy is focused on, communication, quality, KPI’s, consistency and always growing our capabilities – never looking at a technical solution but always a business one.