Know-How Exchange : Other

Two main issues: 1) Will they do what you want and 2) Do they know what it takes to produce results?

1) Requires a creative brief to define what you want, and you'll want quick turnaround of options to ensure they understand your goals (i.e., place a limit on how long they work until they produce some prototypes/sketches).

2) You want more than someone who can take your idea and bring it to fruition - you want someone who understands what works and doesn't. You want a partner who can make suggestions to your ideas, with concrete rationale for these ideas.

Marketing teams have different tasks to perform than advertising teams, and thus both of them need to be briefed accordingly.

Larger companies usually develop a protocol or even a process to ensure that these briefs are correctly and comprehensively given.

A marketing brief will consist or sales, penetration, market and brand share goals and targets with profitability, productivity, demographic, geographical and brand positioning parameters.

This is too broad for an advertising brief and can be easily be misinterpreted as the advertising team will not have the other end of the information required – the organisational history and the resources and limitations with which the marketing team will have to work.

A good marketing team will translate this into an advertising brief which will define communications goals, what behaviour they must influence, what changes they must bring about.

It will define the target audience and the marketing team’s interpretation of the utilitarian and emotional needs that must be addressed. Both demographics and psychographics will be defined.

It will define the brand proposition and the brand promise, and define the personality of the brand.

If possible it should also lay down clear, quantifiable success and failure criteria.

I hope this answers your question. Good luck!

The best thing to remember when you have an agency is after you've finished the plan and signed off on all the creative briefs is that they are living documents just as your business is a living business. You are living it everyday for 8 (or 10 or 12 hours) each day.

Your agency has only the luxury of whatever time and input you give them. So they learn of the changes only as you feed them. What you have grown to understand over a week or two is often dropped on them in a phone call.

Simply recognizing that we (I have always lived on the company side) live in the 'drink in the changes slowly world' and our agencies live in the 'catch up quick as the earth has shifted while you weren't looking' world, goes a long way to keeping us in check when the communications are breaking down.

I realize this is a bit subjective when working to put factors into a contract, but for me communcations and relationship success are inextricably linked and never have anything to do with a contract.

I hope this helps!
Terri Kennedy