City of Paris

In a discussion about getting more value for your budget with your agency, I suggested that one way to accomplish this is to become your agency’s favorite client. This, of course, is in addition to the process improvements I suggested, which are a given.

How do you become your agency’s favorite client? What I’m really talking about is making friends with your agency, developing a rapport and becoming a respected and accessible partner. What we want to do is to build a strong business relationship, and I believe it boils down to two interrelated factors: trust and communication. Many of the process issues I raised (e.g., meeting your own deadlines, providing timely input and respecting the agency’s expertise) go a long way toward building trust and require clear and direct communications. Here are a few other ways to strengthen a business partnership.

1. Be generous but sincere with your praise. We all like recognition. Agency teams like it when clients tell them they are doing a good job. They love it when you pass on compliments from your management, your team or your audience. And your praise is especially useful when it comes with a few words about the reasons, because it adds to the team’s learning about what works and what doesn’t, and because it focuses everything on the business and less on subjective, personal evaluation.

2. Take an interest in the agency’s success. Smart clients know that the more successful their agency is, the better the agency is able to build teams, add resources and become a powerhouse in the industry, which gives them leverage when they go about their work on behalf of clients. Just as important, the fact that the client cares about the agency’s success speaks volumes about the value put on the agency by the client.

3. Teamwork goes beyond client-agency meetings. Keep your agency team up to date about everything that may affect your marketing communications—changes and trends in the marketplace, new directions, people changes—so that they have the intelligence and insight to do the work for you and feel like a true partner and member of your team. Share outcomes of board meetings and other internal meetings not attended by your agency. Keep them in the loop and make them feel a part of your company.

4. Be businesslike in your business dealings. Be upfront about your budget and expectations. Negotiate hard but negotiate fairly on agency compensation. When you see a budget item, an estimate or an invoice you question, ask the questions and in turn listen carefully to the answers. Take care of paperwork expeditiously. That means getting the sign-off from your boss or finance or whomever rather than letting paperwork sit on your desk while your agency innocently proceeds with work without proper authorization. And for heaven’s sake pay the agency on time.

5. Be a good friend. Above all, remember your agency team members are people—humans with ups and downs and sometimes-fragile egos—whose job performance often depends on your evaluation and approval.

Last week, at the annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, Barack Obama beat venerable marketers such as Apple and Nike to become Ad Age’s Marketer of the Year. Whether you are an Obama supporter or detractor, and whether or not you have misgivings about a politician winning a marketing award, the rationale of the marketers, agency heads and marketing services professionals for their votes points to some good ideas as we plan our communication programs for next year.

In marketing parlance, Obama built a national and in fact a global brand in a relatively short amount of time. In terms of bottom-line results, well, the polls are looking very good for him. Obama was credited for creating a social network, building the tools for engaging people and, most important, getting them to take action. As part of the general public, we are also aware of his keen discipline and focus on a single central message (”McCain equals Bush”). Something to keep in mind the next time we think about adding another qualifier to the string of “high-quality, reliable, convenient, easy-to-use . . . ”

When the judges commented on the various runners-up, we heard the same themes, often repeated but not always followed, of good marketing and good communications. For Apple, the runner-up, the key is consistency—repeating the formula for success that combines innovation with service with a penchant for creating a great user experience. Likewise the consistency, and clarity, of Apple’s message and design. Most interesting to me was the second runner-up, online shoe seller Zappos. How did Zappos pull ahead of Nike and Coors? Advertising Age reports that Zappos plows some of the money allocated to advertising into customer service, leading to strong retention. Not a bad strategy, though perhaps not something ad agencies want to hear.

Now let’s see if being Marketer of the Year pays off on Election Day.

No matter what your marketing communication budget is, there never seems to be enough. And, since “caution” seems to be the catchword about the budget these days, now seems to be a good time to talk about what clients can do to get more value for their budget in working with agencies.

1. Review that brief. The creative brief is a road map, a contract and the critical link between you, your vision and what you want to accomplish and your agency team. It sets directions and, often with accompanying support information, arms your agency team with what they need to get the job done. If you review the creative brief thoroughly and in a timely manner, offering your point of view, correcting misinformation or misconceptions and building on it to give clear and crisp direction, you will have taken an important first step to reducing the number of iterations of creative development.

2. “Put your pen down!” In Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy famously quoted his client, the CEO of a major company, barking at one of his senior executives, who had poor enough judgment to start editing copy during a creative review. I used to tell clients that we charged more if you wrote your own copy. That was only half in jest. Imagine going into the kitchen and adjusting the flavor when the chef is at work. The reality is that when a client starts copywriting, the agency has to spend time consoling the copywriter (billable), who then tries to fix the copy (billable) or otherwise adjust it to his/her own preference.

3. Leave it to the pros. Copywriters used to moan about clients dabbling in copywriting. Now, with desktop publishing, they are designing too. Clients sometimes forget that it costs more to fix a layout than to create one. Sometimes the software application is not current or compatible with what the agency and production houses use. Sometimes there are errors simply because marketing departments do not have the same types of resources as agencies–such as copyeditors and proofreaders–to review the work properly. Lastly, dare I say that many of the product-managers-cum-aspiring-designers simply don’t have the training or the eye to get the job done.

4. Keep the agency out of internal politics. This time drainer manifests itself in many different ways: bringing people into meetings and creative reviews who have no knowledge or expertise to contribute, creative work getting nixed by someone who was not part of the process and never even saw the brief, getting input from people not for substance but solely for goodwill (okay, I’d say this is often worth the time spent), and of course the obvious such as spending time with the agency team whining about internal issues.

5. Don’t be a layout addict. Another byproduct of desktop publishing is that clients become overly dependent on layouts during the review process. I know clients who seem unable or unwilling to review copy as text documents; instead, they demand to see everything in layout. And of course this means getting the studio involved earlier in the process, while a more efficient way would be to keep the copy review within the copy and editorial teams. Reviewing copy in layout is inefficient also because it is much easier to make and track changes in Word, since it has been designed for the task.

6. Give them what they need. Make good on agreed-upon deliveries to the agency. Guess who ends up paying for the time spent expediting, reminding and cajoling the client for critical information. Just as important, the enthusiasm generated at a productive meeting slowly wanes as the agency team waits and waits and waits for what they need to get started with the assignment. Restarting the engine costs more fuel than keeping it humming at a steady pace. When the agency is finally ready to get going again, much more (billable) time has to be spent to dig out the files, refresh memories and have another meeting.

7. Champion the process. The thing is, clients hire agencies for their creativity not their process, so it is up to the client to drive the internal process to make the workflow efficient. We’ve all experienced last-minute changes in direction because a critical reviewer is not available when the input is needed but is not willing to delegate the review to someone else. And then there is the reviewer list that grows when creative development is well under way. Or the errant sales rep who shows up at a photography session–he doesn’t know anything about the campaign but happens to be the only one around who knows how to demo the product. There is nothing more expensive than agency time spent dealing with unnecessary surprises and reworks due to delayed input.

8. Be your agency’s favorite client. I know for a fact that agency teams perform better for clients they like because they work harder for them, listen more attentively, engage in more dialogues with them, feel more comfortable asking questions and challenging ideas, and often go out of their way to exceed expectations. How do you become a favorite client? Well, following the first seven tips here is a great start, but there’s more to it. Look for my blog next week. Meantime, tell us what you think. All ideas will be acknowledged unless you tell me otherwise.

One indisputable effect of the Internet on healthcare is that it has lowered the bar for direct-to-patient communications. All reports point to health information being a top reason for people going on the Internet. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Eighty percent of American Internet users, or some 113 million adults, have searched for information on at least one of seventeen health topics.” With a fairly modest budget (compared to other mass media), healthcare marketers can reach or try to reach targeted patient populations directly using a variety of Internet-enabled tools, from the basic website to sponsored links to more subtle but inherently powerful participation in relevant blogs. Thus begins a proliferation of information of uneven quality, accuracy, validity and usefulness, some of which is downright untrue and harmful. The Pew Report further notes that a good 75 percent of these seekers of health information do not check the credibility of the source, leaving themselves vulnerable to misinformation when, ironically, they are looking to improve their health status. It is no wonder that organizations such as the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute post tutorials to help consumers separate the wheat from the chaff. The New York Times devoted its entire Science Times section on September 30 to helping consumers sort out the explosion of health information, not just on the Internet but also from other sources.

Last week’s poll on our website (”The Empowered Patient?”) tried to get a sense of the level of discretion healthcare marketers use in communicating directly with patients. It is gratifying to find that the majority of participants of the poll consider getting physician buy-in a prerequisite to launching a direct-to-patient initiative. Close to 50 percent would launch direct-to-patient communications only after the relevant product has gone through FDA approval or clearance. A smaller group wants to see reimbursement in place first. I have had some rather provocative discussions with companies that believe that driving demand from patients is a legitimate starting point, even for products that must be ordered by a physician (e.g., a prescription drug, interventional device or laboratory-based diagnostic test).

But, back to the trusting patient and family who, in their hour of need, are looking for guidance, reassurance or just clarification. I would like to invite you, our reader, to comment or write me personally about your experience with patient communications and, specifically, what you as the healthcare marketer do to make sure that you are delivering the type of information that is deserving of the trust of these health-seeking consumers and patients.