the massooleh commblog

The client side-agency side disconnect is a famous one in the world of marketing. While ad agency creatives strive to create new, smart, and bold ideas, they often find it difficult to convince their clients to follow through with their vision. After all, these clients can sometimes have brand images worth millions of dollars, so naturally, they are concerned about altering it, but in doing so can play things too safe, and suck all the creative energy out of a campaign idea.

In his blog, Luke Sullivan, a well renown advertising executive, recounts a “horror story,” where it took a creative team 68 meetings to fully please their clients (who were evidently a big fortune 500 company) and settle on the right storyboard for a commercial. It took so long in fact, that the 40-story office outside their building was completed before the commercial was.

While this may be a drastic example, it represents a very real problem in the marketing world, especially now, during the new age of transparency and consumer interactivity in advertising. It takes a lot for a company like McDonald’s to sign off on an idea like this, because once you lift the curtain on your company and let people in, it’s impossible to go back, and your brand changes forever.

In Mcdonald’s case, the campaign ended up working exactly as planned, raising the brand perception significantly from where it was before, but there are many companies that don’t have to guts to do what they did, which may turn out to be a riskier move in the long run; companies that fail to take notice of rising trends and go deliberately against them can go bust overnight [see Blackberry].