Why Advertising Agencies Should Shut Up And Work

The Question: What Have You Done, And For Whom?

I often get questions about our new Stockholm based advertising agency, and about what work we have done for clients. The reason for asking varies. Some ask because they’re curious, some because they want to shoot us down, and some because they genuinely care. Whatever the reason, I figure it may be about time I answer the question here on the blog.

The Answer is This:

Yes, we do work. Yes, we do it for clients. Yes, there is work out there already that has created real results. No, we generally don’t talk about clients.

I say generally because we probably will at some point, and we generally don’t have any objections about clients talking about us, even if there are exceptions there as well.

Why Is This Our Policy?

There are reasons for this policy. Let’s break it down and start with why we are in the first place:

What’s the use of Honesty?

Honesty is useful precisely because we make our clients interesting, we make them make more money, and we increase their value. That’s it. How does talking about who we work for and precisely what we do for them help in doing the above? Simply put – it doesn’t. So we don’t.

We’re Brand Shrinks, And Shrinks Don’t Talk

Much of what we do is also more effective when we don’t run around bragging about it in the local advertising mags. Like I said in my last post, I see us as brand shrinks helping out in bringing out the best in our clients. Our work belongs in their bottom line, not in “campaign of the month”. Showing them off in “campaign of the month”-format is also difficult since the visible stuff is only one part of the package, and may not make sense if you don’t see the whole thing.

Example of a Bad Honesty Story For The Industry Gossip Magazines

If we want to, say, raise gross traffic and conversion rate multiplication of this traffic for a client, our top line communication (that you WILL perhaps see as a kick ass advertising concept) spikes gross traffic numbers, but also leads to discussion, sparking embeds and posts that build links, raising page rank, raising organic search traffic, creating more gross traffic long term.

To raise conversion rates on that traffic, we tweek landing pages, set up user tunnels, lead back systems for banners and drop-basket systems for email marketing, and so on, and so on, and so on for another three pages…

This is how we reach our goals and make ourselves useful. The forum for this stuff is, like I said, neither case movies nor business gossip sites, it’s the situation room and the result feedback loops.

Let’s watch the bottom line results instead of bragging, shall we?

How This Applies To Contests

Starting a couple of years back, contests surfaced as the big reason for going to ad school in Sweden. Schools like Berghs School of Communication won more awards than any other school in the world. They competed in everything and made GREAT-looking case movies for every submission. I used to think of this as the demise of ad schools, but now I’m not so sure.

I’ve switched my stance on ad school contests because it seems like they glue together new cross-disciplinary teams from different schools. Rather than competing school against school, ad hoc teams get together to make kickin’ submissions for One Show, D&AD and other contests. This is a good thing.

Sure, students then don’t see or care much about the entire system for boosting the client’s bottom line, but when weighing these things against each other, it seems to me that we can teach them this latter part when they get here. The incentives students get from competing is valuable enough to warrant this trade off.

In the real world however, it’s really not. Look at the case I described above. How would we compete using that?

This is what we would do if we had a contest hard-on (excuse my french) instead of a result focus: We would send in a highly polished case movie showing off the top line concept. Period.

The rest of the system would be too complicated to show. Not to mention incredibly stupid to give out the details on. When we work for a client, we compete for THEIR team, against THEIR competitors. Not for OUR team against OUR competitors.

Thus, I think that contests are fine while you’re in school, but really questionable out in real life.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that our work is NOT about being able to communicate what we’ve done in a compact, easy to digest, contest friendly 3-minute format. Industry bragging requires this format. Contests do too.

Instead, our work IS about coaching the client’s team, providing them with kick ass innovation, technology and gear, useful product- & service ideas, top-line story, ambient story, performance tracking, and continuously revised strategy and tactics. And that’s why we don’t talk much about clients or work.

What We WILL Talk About

This does not mean however that we close up like clams. We are in fact quite open when clients are not involved. We presently have 3 fairly large blogs about conversion and social media, about SEO & SEM, the one you’re reading now about strategy and philosophy; plus a couple of smaller ones. You can also follow me (@walternaeslund), Jesper Åström (@jesperastrom) and Simon Sundén (@joinsimon) quite closely in our Twitter feeds. The three of us are also frequent speakers at schools, corporations and conferences in Sweden and abroad.

You’re more than welcome to call us and ask us about whatever. We love discussion. Just not about clients. Perhaps you agree och disagree with me on what I’ve just written? Bring it on in the comments!