Extraordinary Vocabulary, Word #5: Loyalty

“Brand X is out of Agency Y.”?― AdSomething

Campbell Soup out of BBDO?after 64 years.?Listerine out of JWT?after 57 years. Levi’s out of BBH London?after 28 years. John Lewis out of Adam&Eve/DDB?after 14 years. KFC out of W+K Portland?after 7 years. I could go on forever. When successful long-term client-agency relationships end, it’s easy to think that the “Agency of Record” model is dying.?That’s the current discourse.?Or as Greg Paull wrote on AdAge back in 2020 — “‘agency of record’ has become more like ‘flavor of the month’.”

Some say it’s because not every creative agency can become “a one-stop shop” for the vast amount of different marketing services a client needs. Others argue that short-termist marketing plays a bigger role in the mix, diminishing the value that a continuous full-service relationship with a creative agency can bring. A third bunch believes that the proliferation of shiny toys out there can enchant any Marketer — specialist agencies from ChatGPT-experts to well rounded consultants. If we’re all looking for greater creativity, shopping ideas around could seem to make sense.

My hypothesis is that there’s an underlying problem behind the decrease of AOR relationships in the industry. It’s called promiscuity. And in that promiscuous context, the power of Loyalty only increases. Here’s why.

The average tenure of a marketer is 2.6 years?— the shortest of any profession in the business world; as per 2021, the average CMO tenure in the US was?3.3 years, the lowest ever; a creative is likely to work at the same creative agency for about 2 years on average, and?that number goes down?to 1.3 if they’re aged 20 to 24. This short-termism goes beyond shrinking job tenures. According to?The CMO Survey, marketers reported that 18.9% of their compensation is a performance-related bonus, on average, and 8.2% in company equity. This imbalance can lead to a focus on short-term success in financial metrics, rather than on long-term objectives associated with building equity in the company they work for.

The same survey asked CMOs in the US “How much time do you spend managing the present versus preparing for the future of marketing in your company?”. Overall, they spend 68.5% of their time “managing the present” and 31.5% of it “preparing for the future”.

We’re yet to see the long-term impact of this short-termist mentality, but on the day to day of strategizing for a bunch of brands, one can start noticing some side effects:

• Change of logos so often you don’t even notice anymore.
• Desperation to jump into any social conversation without a real brand fit.
• Bigger focus on one-off stunt work over longer term programs, platforms, and campaigns.
• Brand Purpose seen as an advertising tactic versus a company ethos, which may make an impact in the short-term but only builds consumer skepticism in the long-term.
• Use of every new briefing as an opportunity to rediscuss deeper brand fundamentals “that are not working”.
• Change of brand strategy so often you don’t even recognize the brand anymore.
• Crisis of brand authenticity, as every other year a new “brand word” is trending and every brand wants to stand for it — “Joy”, “Progress” and “Individuality”, to name a few.
• Branding briefings that sound like performance marketing briefings.
• Continuous onboarding mode for new Marketers or agency talent joining the team.
• Continuous relationship crisis as not all advertising can be accurately measured in the short-term, generating instability.

The opposite of all points above would be the potential benefits of long-term thinking and loyal client-agency relationships. But let me unpack what I believe to be the 4 most powerful benefits of loyalty.

1. Loyalty creates the best work ever.?The most iconic, influential and consistent advertising work comes from long-standing relationships. Period. Think Nike and Wieden or Apple and TBWA/MAL, both 40+ years long relationships. BBH London’s relationships with Levi’s, Jonnie Walker and Axe, all lasting more than 20 years, marked an Era we still refer to. The Martin Agency and Geico changed advertising, and still do 15 years later. CP+B set the bar for fast-food advertising with their almost 10 years long relationship with Burger King in the early 2000s. Behind many of these relationships, there was a trustworthy personal relationship — Lee Clow and Steve Jobs, or Dan Wieden and Phil Knight. Another aspect worth noting is the loyalty of creatives towards some of those agencies. Lee Clow worked at only TBWA in his entire career; Alex Bogusky, despite breakups, only at CP+B.
2. Loyalty builds strong brands.?With loyalty you build brands and business as opposed to only one-off ideas and campaigns. There’s a reason why Nike and Apple are among the top 20 most valuable brands in the world over 20 years. Loyalty isn’t paying attention to trending topics, instead, it’s actively listening to brand fandoms. It’s not tweaking and retweaking the wording on that brand onion slide every other week, but rather reminding us all of the brand roots, and why they still matter today. Loyalty is making performance marketing less intrusive and disposable, and more like great reminders or gentle nudges.
3. Loyalty adds more efficiency and less drama.?Loyalty comes from trust. And trust is the base for everything. You trust your agency enough to make it accountable for whatever are the business results of the work. Just like the agency trusts you enough to make you accountable for whatever the work is. Every success is evenly shared. Every failure, too. Loyalty is okay with embracing failure because you make a daily conscious choice to stick together in happiness and sadness. It’s no biggie if the first presentation wasn’t great. You know your agency gets it and will nail it next time. No need for long feedback emails, alignment meetings and going in circles. It’s fail fast, learn faster, recover even faster. If the idea is risky, we bring lawyers onboard, we hold hands, and we trust. Everything feels safer when we all trust each other.
4. Loyalty is deeper than just doing business together.?At GUT’s 5-year anniversary event back in March, we talked about “the power of the second time”: relationships that take a temporary break-up to go back even stronger. In our case, people who had worked with GUT’s founders or partners in other agencies in the past, went to work somewhere else, and are now back with us for the second time. These are human bonds that have endured beyond agency names. Interestingly, when someone decides to depart GUT for whatever reason, we say: “Stay gutsy.” Loyalty runs deeper than pure business transactions at the C-level, too. There are CMOs that will trust individuals no matter in which agency they are. And there are agency suits who know they will do great work with certain CMOs no matter the brand they work for.

Loyalty needs to be both ways, indeed. The reason people are flocking companies is probably because employees are feeling companies are not loyal towards them, so why bother?

Now as usual, let me make a counterpoint.

It’s funny how loyalty sometimes also leads to mediocrity or just conformity. There are thousands of 50+ years agency/client relationships where nothing exciting happens. Both sides are comfortable and there’s a lack of ambition. As a result, nobody can remember even one single piece of work.

Sometimes being not loyal can end up being good. Think of Greg Hahn. The end of this long tenure at BBDO was the start of one of the hottest indie shops in our industry — Mischief. Same applies to so many other executives that left holding companies to found industry-changing independent agencies. Think of Burger King leaving CP+B, but years later joining DAVID for a “Season 2” of years of outstanding work. Think of consumers shifting their loyalty to more environmentally responsible brands.

Lack of loyalty can also be good when it comes to ideas. You don’t want to be loyal to them in the beginning of the creative process. You want to be as promiscuous as possible, meaning opening new doors and generating hypotheses. Loyalty to ideas at a brainstorming phase is not healthy, and it could be a sign of stubbornness and insecurity. But then, be loyal to a powerful idea that’s already identified and which matches the brand. Some ideas take years to be sold and bought. Until they happen one day.

The bottom line is — loyalty drives better relationships, which drive trust, which increases the probability of creating great work. For better work in our industry, we need to be less promiscuous and more loyal.