The idea that creative advertising agencies should be experts in their client’s business and industry is not necessarily a good thing. Instead, agencies should be like students with a thirst for knowledge and a set of skills that will allow them to unlock hitherto unknown insights and identify what will really help move the dial for the client, writes Brónagh O’Donovan, Strategy Director at The Public House.
Becoming an expert in the brands you work on is one of the best things about the job. I love the fact that I can tell you why Samsung cameras are better than iPhones (I’m sorry they are), or how Henry Denny invented the rasher (it was to help export them) or how one seal on a colostomy bag is better than the other. These little areas of expertise are what makes the job so interesting, even if these facts are rarely any good in a table quiz.
But one thing I’ve noticed creeping in over the last while is the expectation that agencies should be the expert in a client’s business or industry straight out of the gate.
Recently, while presenting creds, a potential client told us to skip our case studies and get to the part where we demonstrated how we were experts in their category. Spoiler alert: we weren’t. We of course had a good background in their brand, their competitors and a sense of the challenges they faced but we were by no means an expert in their industry, that would be them.
I think it’s universally accepted that the number one advantage to hiring an agency is for an outside perspective on your business. We are experts in other disciplines, art direction, copywriting, strategy and the best thing we can do for any brand or business is to come in and look at things in a new light from our own areas of expertise. This fresh thinking is often invaluable to any business. Look at the $300M button. The famous story about how Best Buy (or Amazon depending on who you ask) couldn’t figure out why so many people were abandoning their online cart. It took one external UX consultant to look at the problem and suggest the ‘checkout as guest’ option.
The Non-Expert
One of the other great benefits of getting to be the non-expert in the room is the permission to ask stupid questions. How do you make it? Why do you do it that way? How do you get the fig in the fig rolls? It’s these questions that are able to strip a service or a question back to the most basic explanation and allow the outsider to identify information that could be interesting to consumers. Information that often is not considered all that interesting to people who have been exposed to it for years and years.
This type of ‘one step removed’ thinking is a fundamental part of the creative process. It takes a healthy dose of naivety to truly examine something – and the obvious questions, the ‘what ifs’ or ‘could we’, need to be given air and not be weighed down by the knowledge of why it can’t happen. An intimate knowledge of exactly how the Gordian knot had been tied would have pre-suggested untangling as an approach – impeding Alexander’s creative solution to ‘just cut the fucker open with a big sword’.
So in short, let us be naive if we think naivety will help. If we need knowledge, let us be students, consider us the karate kid and you the Mr. Miyagi of your industry. Please train us in your business, take us to the factory, let us meet the founders, interview the designers and sit in on internal meetings. Let us collaborate where you are the experts and we bring the invaluable beginners mindset, this is where magic can happen and we can unlock the unboring ideas, that sell.
Ultimately, we are more than happy to learn every detail about your business, but we need you to be our sensei.
Brónagh O’Donovan is Strategy Director at The Public House.
