I Didn't Have The Time So I Wrote You A Long Answer

Can you recommend any time management techniques?

There are lots of time management courses out there with their particular philosophy. When I was starting out there always seemed to be inserts in Marketing Week heralding the latest ones with other business courses with titles like – and I don’t think I am making this up – “How to Organise Your Handbag”.

Colleagues use a myriad of techniques including certain software like Microsoft OneNote, the email flagging method, a different ink system for their daily actions in the notebook, etc. I seem to use lots of post-it notes. I think you have to explore and use what works for you. However this can make you just focus on some very short term actions which will make you feel good for fulfilling them.

In terms of client services your best steer should be a combination of your account plan – which should give you clear direction on how to develop the long term relationship – and the campaign or project plan relating to things which will drive the day to day development of the work. What often happens though is the day to day to work takes over and you may end up having delivered a project on time and on budget yet you may not have moved the longer term relationship/business on with the client.

In projects, sometimes it is a matter of experience to foresee problems coming up and act accordingly. If a client is keen to use a customer testimonial route in a set of ads which need to run in a quick turnaround campaign and they have not identified the customers already, someone with more experience will know to steer the client away from that route - saving everybody a lot of time and money.

More difficult to explain is the experience and ensuing confidence that when unforeseen events happen which would make a more junior person spend a lot of time planning for the new scenario. A senior person however may anticipate that nothing needs to be done as things will revert to originally planned. For example, we had just sent out “save the date” emails for our client Christmas party – we love the logistics of client hospitality don’t we! This was after checking with all senior clients that they were available. Then somebody comes back to tell me that our main client – though knowing about our party – was organising a day’s internal conference with a social element afterwards for most of our invites. You could say I stuck my head firmly in the sand but I let it ride out without doing anything because I thought it highly unlikely he could organise something with so many people’s diaries in December. Maybe it was less related to saving time and it was a game of Blink I was playing with myself. Anyway I heard yesterday everything is going ahead as originally planned. So my advice relating to the last two points is have someone as your sounding board – if you are an account manager, then the account director is your obvious port of call. But if you are a group account director then don’t feel you should not share the burden of such problem solving with those more detached from the issue.

In a previous post I talked about Stephen Covey’s view on time management and relationships. He also cites a study of highly successful Harvard graduates who had similar success traits. One was their ability to tackle the things which some of us would shy away from – those things on our to do list that just seem to remain there but we guiltily know that they would actually change the game with the client – and the reason why they remain there is that they are not easy actions – they require difficult work.

In my days when I was meaning to sit down at my laptop trying to write a book but actually spending a lot of time exploring the contents of my fridge, I should have watched this portrayal of procrastination by Lev Yilmaz. It is spot on:

Putting Your Foot Down

I am in charge of a client team - a bunch of intelligent people - but I get hacked off with the way our processes (and those at our client's) get in the way of delivering really innovative thinking. We often use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut - people are not thinking creatively enough. And clients add to the slowness and inertia. What am I doing wrong?

I know what you mean. Sometimes you can get frustrated that things are just too slow on a project or with a client dynamic. That tired old linear thinking is driving the dynosauric pace of change. You want to move fast and take people, whether your team or clients, along with you. You want people to get it and not just say they get it.

My only real advice is to dramatise what they are missing out on and what a fast moving marketplace you are operating in. What you personally need to do is physically demonstrate to those people how innovative thinking can get you to a different space. Or what the downside of staying in the slow lane will mean.

When Amelia Torode quotes the Life Moves Pretty Fast line from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, she is not wrong. What you need to give your clients for a test drive is your equivalent of the 1961 Ferrari 250GT California. Then they may get your urgency for speed or different thinking.

That's why I like Gary Hayes' social media, mobile phone and games counters below. They really bring to life the pace of global "media" change; they make me realise we need to keep adapting ourselves or we will meet a dynosauric demise.

Clients With Clipboards

I am an account director at a small integrated agency. We were pitching for some work for a supermarket and I caught sight at the presentation of some "Finding an Agency" guidelines which the junior client had with her? What were these – any idea?

These will have been the Finding an Agency guidelines originally created by CAF, DMA, IPA, ISBA, MCCA and PRCA. I think the DMA now has a different set and the others have teamed up with CIPS to produce theirs. They are all downloadable from the relevant trade body websites – found on the sidebar on this site under Useful Links. They are a set of very comprehensive best practice guidelines and if you are pitching you should know which boxes you need tick in the mind of the client. Cheekily I will say that you should check out Chapter 4 of Working with Agencies by a very promising author. I worked with the IPA and the AAR to build on those guidelines for writing the Selecting the Agency chapter . Also, if you are an agency person on new business I still maintain that everyone needs to read Jon Steel’s Perfect Pitch.

Principals Up In Smoke?

My agency partners and I are faced with a dilemma on some new business. Do we accept a tobacco account on the basis that some in our relatively young and small agency are happy to work on a tobacco client or stick to my (and others’) principles and decline it? Would members of the agency feel like they really have the choice of not working on the account? Do I have the right to deny others the financial rewards this could provide? Would we be hypocrites to take the cash and not publicise the relationship?

You are asking someone who helped develop the original NHS Together Programme which supports smokers in giving up. Yet being an ex-smoker I know the pull it has and I also understand the ethical conflict you have as a business. You are a young, small agency – no doubt finding the climate tough and wanting to generate income to secure everyone’s short term futures. It is a difficult dilemma.

You are in a formative stage in the development of your business. I could suggest a democratic way by having an agency vote and abiding by the decision but I think you will still come up against the problem later. Smoking is quite an emotive issue. Some people have lost relatives through cancer. Others do not get smoking at all and think it should be banned. A tobacco account is consequently a highly charged issue and the agency is not at a size where it can be hived off in a separate division. In fact, depending on how big you are, most of the agency will need to be involved in it – from creative teams to finance.

I would advise staying away from it – for the key reason that you mention the management team is also not in agreement. Considering you/they should provide clear leadership and conversely need a tight ship, I suspect this issue will create more dangerous rifts than it will help secure business.

How to Get to the Grosvenor House Hotel ...or not!

This last week I was judging the DMA awards. As ever really well organised and a good chance to catch up with people and debate what is pushing our industry forward. If you want to see what I said about the categories I was judging it’s to be read on the Marketing Direct section of Brand Republic - here.

I was judging ECRM, Campaign Websites, New Technology and just for good measure Door Drops. Now the last one you may think slightly old skool in comparison but actually there were really strong candidates in there and I am glad that I had it in the mix with the digital ones. However my message today goes out to those who put a lot of time in filling those darned entry forms – whether for on- or offline categories: you still have got a lot of work to do! Not a very motivational thought so maybe I should explain:

Having done them myself, I know that it is a thankless task and is another “cobblers’ shoes” activity along with the likes of the agency website and the client Christmas party. Nevertheless, if you are going spend £150 a shot on these things and a good deal of time putting them together, then you are throwing away a good deal of money if you get it wrong. As I saw a number of agencies this week still getting it wrong, I have some quick thoughts that may help you for the next batch:

1) Obvious stuff but put yourself in the shoes of the judges. They may have max. 5 minutes per entry including engaging with the work and therefore your succinctness is critical. Remember that yours might the first one they pick up in the first category they are judging and they might be just getting their heads around the whole process. If you can make it easier for them, the better the chances you have of gaining the right attention for your work.

2) A bit like in pitches, confident storytelling is a sign of a rigorously thought-out strategy. It is a bit “chicken and egg” but you have to really understand what the entry sections are asking for. I was surprised by some entries that did not go into the relevant depth of the targeting strategy or assumed that the judges would be bought off by some spurious big numbers in the results section. I know that a lot of agencies use their planners to write their entries which makes sense but that has its own time pressures and can lead to cut and paste jobs – which I saw across some category entries.

3) Then the presentation of the work – some agencies were brilliant at this, others not. I saw incomplete creative and was really frustrated by one entry which featured some quite interesting technology that all the judges tried to access through various methods – but to no avail. I think once again before you react to this and start doing your Oscar-winning demo film , you just need to bear in mind the principle of what the judges are looking for and how you can put over the right message in a pressured timeframe.

Hope this helps with the entries and ultimately winning the awards. See you at the awards bash. In the meantime, I would like to thank the DMA, Brand Republic, all my fellow judges, all my colleagues, Sony Laptops, my family, my friends, my hairdresser, my.....

Pig Ignorant Metacognition

I came across your blog .... saw your last posting and it just made me think that I struggle just to get through my client work, let alone keep up with all these blogs and articles. Tell me, how do other people find time to read them? .... do they really get that much out of them?

I don’t think this view is uncommon. A number of my acquaintances are very complimentary about the content here but represent the view that life is too short to fill up on too much blog reading. I started this blog for the very reasons that Seth Godin mentions in the extract below:



Yeah, right. It's all about metacognition! I just learnt a new word.

As to why I read other blogs and recommend this habit become a regular thing for those in client services and frontline client relationships, I would say the following to those acquaintances and the questioner above:

An agency is dead in the water if it does not keep its thinking fresh with its clients. More than ever with increasing time and budget pressures, clients expect more from agencies. Even if you just create the artwork rather than do the strategic thinking, you should be showing the clients that you know about their business and are thinking about ways to enhance your offering to them. With the other agencies on the client roster snapping at your heels, you are being forced to either drop your prices or show more added value. The way you can do the latter is by keeping yourself informed and making that knowledge relevant to your clients. I am not saying it has to be blogs but they are useful in giving you information or discussion in bite-size chunks. It then allows you for example to talk about using Brands in Public for your clients' brands, understand what's going on with consumers globally through Did You Know? or debate the latest development on the back of a TEDTalk podcast.

Stephen Covey talks about prioritising your workload in another way and that the focus should be on the High Importance, non-Urgent quadrant activities. This is because they deal with building relationships, long-term planning, prevention and maintenance and these activities deliver high impact, long term results. The way you can do this is keeping your mind open to new ways of looking at old problems. Also if you, as a client services person, rely on your planning or strategy department to have the ideas, you start to become just a project manager. You have the opportunity of keeping up with new developments and re-packaging them with an added relevance to the client situation. Consequently, if you feel that this information monitoring (whether it is through blogs or elsewhere) is just not intrinsic to your client relationship and is too much for your workload, I would strongly recommend sitting down and doing a radical review of where you are spending your time. If you can carve out 20% of your time to spend on things that really develop the client relationship, the 80:20 success rule will follow.

Also this goes for agency management who rely solely on their strategists to come up with the ideas. Or more critically, those who treat certain subjects as a “black boxes” and feel they need to get unnecessary specialist consultants in to advise them. They run the risk of getting generic recommendations as knowledge of a client context takes time and money. Better that you see new developments through the lens of knowing what is right for the client’s organisation and customers. Then you may avoid kneejerk reactions like the one below:

PS: Live Young

Another question: how do you keep up with what's going on?

OK, I shall follow your theme of brevity as I think you can see some of how I keep up to speed in my other postings.

Apart from reading various publications, I subscribe to a number of blogs which give me an overview of what’s going on. Some of them are listed on the right. You need to tap into what people are currently thinking and saying. I know Passive-Aggressive Notes is a little left of field (really here only for entertainment) but is a good example of real people doing real, unedited things - for example in the office space; hence the photo above. The industry blogs are great for other reasons but you cannot beat raw behaviour and thought – not filtered through clinical analysis or industry-speak. Make sure you grasp what motivates your people. If you need to really understand what’s going on, talk to them - go to the source. Talking of the source, Adverblog recently showed the Paul Smith Evian vid. For somebody from the North who went frequently to Nottingham and always made his way to one particular shop, I have admired Paul Smith and looked to him for inspiration. His mantra at the end of the short film and his “yesterday’s papers” comment in the middle are spot-on for those looking for new ideas: