Rules of Engagement

We used to be like all other agencies out there. With the narcissistic, ‘we know best’ attitude, wearing the trousers in the relationship and skipping along Shoreditch high street with feathers in our caps and balls bigger than Titus the Silverback.

But this was toxic, and deep down we knew it. Changes had to be made, and they had to be drastic. We weren’t making the best work for our clients, and there was a reason why.

That’s when our Rules of Engagement began.

No, not the 2000 film. (Although, Tommy Lee Jones’s performance is severely underrated, but that’s for another discussion.)

Tommy being a badass. Image credit.

We’re referring to the way in which we work with clients, and how we came to set out our guide to our agency/client relationships, inspired by the work of one of the great agencies, DDB.

If it’s passed you by (unbelievably!) then here’s a synopsis. After working for advertising firms in NYC, Bill Bernbach, Ned Doyle and Mac Dane created agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in Manhattan in 1949.

Think small

They became known for their approach to advertising with catchy slogans and humour, often winning business for clients with small budgets. Their campaigns for Volkswagen through the 1950s and 1960s were revolutionary. Most famously their Think Small VW Beetle campaign.

Clients then flocked to them. In 1960, DDB won the Avis account, which was then the number-two car rental company. The agency launched the infamous “We try harder because we’re number 2” which was a huge. Lesser known, was Avis’ agreement with the agency, their 6-point Rules of Engagement. Setting out the rules of the relationship between agency and client.

Short, punchy and grrrrrreat. Image credit Richard Shotton.

I read that about 7 years ago. It had a huge impact on me, and it had a profound effect on the relationships we had with our clients from that moment onwards.

Up until that point, it had been us and them, master and slave, or dominatrix and submissive. (sometimes).

We had an epiphany at Mellor&Smith’s mega-globo headquarters. We got rid of about 75% of our clients and only kept those clients that we felt could follow a DDB inspired relationship. Those with whom we felt we could share mutual respect.

Angels and arseholes

Now don’t think we were angels and they were arseholes – we’d also been guilty of not demonstrating mutual respect with clients up until that point. So few of the relationships we had were meaningful, so much so, that the relationships weren’t very pleasant.

From that moment on we took the approach of being really clear about our advice, strategy, ideas, and what we thought works best for a client’s brand.

So we developed our Rules of Engagement. It's worked for us, and we believe it could help other agencies and brands out there now. Feel free to steal. Just know though – this ain’t anything new. No new theorem here. A lot of its common sense, which unfortunately isn’t that common these days.

Our Rules of Engagement are based on the life of the magpie. We’ve picked things up here and there from different clients. If we have a client that does something that we really like, we’ll steal it. If they have a framework or ethos or technique we think works, we’ll borrow it. Some clever bugger said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so go on and borrow from us. Pay it forward.

Mellor&Smith’s Rules of Engagement.

Rule 1. Small teams are best.

You don’t need a boardroom. There should be a maximum of four people on the client side, and one of those four has to be the ultimate decision maker. If you’re signing the cheques, then you need to be involved throughout. And if that decision maker can’t be arsed to be in that group of four, wants all the power but doesn’t want to do all the legwork, is too busy, can’t commit, whatever, then two things have to happen:

A/ They relinquish their decision-making power (think Iron Man gives everything to Spiderman), or

B/ We don’t work with that brand.

It’s absolute red line. An unbreakable rule. Because last-minute Charlie’s, or Seagulls as they’re also known, make terrible advertising.

Regardless of what the Topdog / Big Cheese / Head Boy might say; “Oh I’ll just have a light touch on this” “I’ll leave you guys to it, I just need to approve it”… no, you’re either in or you’re out.

There will always be two from Mellor&Smith’s side. And contrary to popular belief, agencies don’t need to stack a clients account with a bazzilion people. We work with some of the biggest brands in the world and we do it with two people managing that account.

In my experience, clients don't want fluffing, they want banging advertising.

Two pizza rule.

One jewel we’ve stolen as magpies is from Amazon. They have a 2-pizza rule. If there's a team working on a project, and it takes more than 2 pizzas to feed that team, then that team is too big.

If someone knows how to run small meetings within a giant enterprise, it’s that 1 million employees at Amazon. With so many mini-meetings running within a huge business, they worked out a simple way to give that small group a sense of autonomy for their projects; so that they could own them.

Amazon have their own internal principles. We really liked the pizza-rule. 6 people, 2 slices each, 2 pizzas. Done.

Rule 2. Leave your ego at the door.

Oh yes, one sure-fire way to ruin good work is to bring your ego along for the ride. Creating good work takes humility. You need to be humble and curious with an appetite for knowledge and creativity. If you can accept you don’t know it all and still strive for the best outcome, if you feel comfortable enough to say that you don’t know it all and will have to research and ask others for help, you have a greater chance of success.

If you’re narcissistic, if you feel that you have the biggest balls in the room, and that you sure as hell know way more than anyone else – then you ain’t gonna create effective work, Mr Dominator.

This is how we should all think:?

“If I had an hour to solve a problem,?I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

Einstein, proper geezer. Image credit.

If that man was humble enough to realise that he wouldn’t solve the problem straight away, then we should really take heed.

This is also linked to our first rule, if you have a small team, and in that team there is one huge ego, it will kill everything.

Rule 3. The art of feedback.

When we present work, we don’t want feedback. It shouldn’t even be considered. The client’s job is to say yes or no. We’re not looking for the client to improve our work or to make it better; just to say YES Paul, I fooking love it or no.

The art of feedback (or not to give feedback) is to make sure the smart, strong decision makers that are in that small team, are given the power to say no. This will create really good work. When you give the autonomy, the power, the authority to make decisions to that team, then you give them the choice to simply say yes or no. They don’t have to worry that their arse is on the line when they accept or disregard an idea, and things are clear between client and agency.

A strong ‘NO’ saves time, makes for great work and a better outcome.

Ergh, we've all been there... Image credit.

Rule 4. A clearly defined objective.

There actually needs to be a question or problem to solve. The client is unlikely to know how to resolve it, but they do need to know what the question is. If they haven’t got that far, then why would they be commissioning us. How can we make them the most famous brand in their category, if they can’t put their finger on the problem.

A tightly defined objective needs to include a minimum of three components:

Time. An element of time. “We need to do X in the next 12 months”.

Value. It absolutely needs to have a commercial value applied to it… “we need to grow revenue by 20%”, “increase basket value by 10%”.

Competition. It needs to do something to the competition… “we need to increase market share by 20%”, “increase trialists by 25%”.

It can contain more of these points. But if the objective doesn’t include those three things as a minimum, then it’s not a clear objective.

We can’t create effective work if we don’t know what we are trying to answer!

Microsoft are a very famous example of this. Their objective in the 1980s was have a PC in every home across the world. Simple. Everyone across Microsoft knew the objective.

And one of my favourite briefs is Bob Hoffman's 3 word brief; make me famous.

5. Get comfortable with a tight brief.

There’s a misconception that the client actually has to write the creative brief. They don’t, instead they just have to set the objective.

So I tend ignore client briefs. Shock horror ??.

I just want them to tell me their aim in simple terms (see rule 4). Unfortunately, people feel if they complicate things (especially with language) it makes them sound smarter. Because people hate the idea of looking stupid. Often people associate simplicity with stupidity. They think that if they make the brief/explanation too simplistic, they’ll sound stupid.

So rather than expecting clients to write the creative brief, they need to be comfortable approving a tight brief.

Tight briefs

The late, great David Ogilvy once said: “I love the freedom of a tight brief”. He loved it (and so do we at Mellor&Smith). If it can be written in one sentence, even better.

That’s exactly what we want. Not a 20-30 slide brief, bullet points, brain dump. Not where a brand comes to us with the mindset of: “I’ll tell them everything”. Because telling us everything means they’ve covered their arse.

Also sending us everything is almost the very definition of somebody not understanding their objective.

Another framework we’ve stolen is the Get/Who/To/By creative brief, brazenly stolen from Unilever. Julian Cole also talks about extensively. If you’ve not seen Julian’s stuff, get into it here. I thoroughly recommend it.

Essentially, we boil our Ad strategy down into 4 simple sentences for the creative brief.

Brands often get nervous when the brief is stripped back to 4 sentences, thinking “holy moly my ass is on the line here mate, and you’re asking me to approve a six-figure sum based on 4 sentences”.

And I empathise with the internal pressures on the client’s side. Corporate politics suck. Susan cannot wait to stick the knife in, she fancies the corner office for herself. And Hugo will definitely try to throw my client under the bus at the earliest opportunity.

But unfortunately none of that changes the simple fact; the public couldn’t give a monkeys about your brand, so you’ve got to work damn hard to get their attention. And getting noticed is a helluva lot more likely if a client is comfortable with a tight brief.

Just 5 simple rules.

Our clients now sign up to our rules of engagement. They didn’t use to. Pre-2014 we were like all other agencies. The relationships were toxic and there was no respect. All we seemed to do was juggle everything that was thrown at us and we jumped from lily pad to lily pad.

That was until our epiphany (which is a big word for advertising). I genuinely think the marketing and advertising industries would be in much better shape if more client/agency relationships were based on rules like these.

You might have read this and be thinking, “those guys sound like know-it-knobheads, it’s got to be really difficult to work with them”.

In fact, the opposite is true. Because we spell out exactly how we work, it's actually incredibly easy to work with us.

So now we appreciate the freedom of a tight brief. All while wearing them. And now that I've shown you mine. Show me yours. Your rules, not briefs.

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Header image credit. Created by Gyyp.