There was a time when becoming a client was seen as a sideways
move.
It meant waving goodbye to your company sportscar and feeling out of
place in your Armani suit. It meant spending less time planning that TV
campaign and more fretting about coupon redemption. But, most of all, it
meant leaving the glamour of Soho for an industrial estate in
Slough.
Advertising used to be an ’us and them’ business, where clients were a
slightly dull but necessary evil and agency folk were the real
stars.
But in the past couple of years, this view has begun to change as some
of the top people in advertising have swapped to the client side.
Not only is the talent exchange challenging an industry that is already
having trouble attracting the very best candidates at graduate level,
but it is also applying the pressure in a more unexpected way. While
agency staff in the past took client jobs primarily to sit tight and
gain experience to take back to agencies, the latest movers are
committed to it. Sholto Douglas-Home, head of advertising for BT’s
residential division and previously business director at Still Price
Lintas, says: ’I originally moved to gain a stronger position when
dealing with clients at an agency. Now I wouldn’t want to go back.’
The new generation of poachers-turned-gamekeepers are under 35,
entrepreneurial, buzzing with ideas and eager to recruit their former
colleagues. They are the generation who probably never had a sportscar
anyway, thanks to the recession of the early 90s, and inevitably spent
as much time discussing sampling as TV advertising thanks to
integration. And although they probably liked working in Soho, many of
them secretly think the Berkshire countryside sounds attractive now that
they are thinking of starting a family.
They include Justin Francis, worldwide marketing manager for values at
the Body Shop, who was an account director at J. Walter Thompson until
1996; Marc Sands, who left HHCL & Partners in March to become marketing
director of Granada UK Broadcasting; and Jo Barnett, advertising and
media controller of Virgin Direct,who left Manning Gottlieb Media
earlier this year.
What many have in common is the desire to innovate. Having seen the
agency business from the inside, they understand its tricks and its
weaknesses and are more prepared to challenge its accepted wisdom than
non-agency colleagues. At one end of the scale, David Wheldon, president
of BBDO Europe and previously managing director of Lowe Howard-Spink,
admits that he ’banned wining and dining’ as Coca-Cola’s worldwide
director of advertising from 1993-1996. At the other, Polly Cochrane,
marketing manager of Channel 5 and formerly an account director at Cowan
Kemsley Taylor, shunned traditional agencies altogether in favour of a
start-up creative shop, Mother. ’We structured our activities after
seeing the account system and its shortcomings.
You have to know the rules to innovate,’ she says.
Debra van Gene, a director at the advertising headhunter, Kendall
Tarrant, says she has seen an increasing trend in the past couple of
years for agency staff to move to jobs at sexier client companies. She
explains: ’There is a ground-swell of good people at good agencies
moving out of the industry. Agencies don’t lose staff at board level to
other agencies as much but to media owners, new-media companies and
’icon’ clients, such as Nike.’ Martin Jones, managing director of the
Advertising Agency Register and previously new-business director at J.
Walter Thompson, adds: ’Since I’ve been doing this job, I’ve seen an
increasing number of ex-agency people on the client side. It never used
to be like this.’
Agency people are moving for many reasons, not least because advertising
is increasingly seen as less fun and harder work than it used to be,
while client companies often offer more security, new challenges and
better quality of life. The gap between client and agency pay also
appears to have narrowed in the past five years. Campaign’s latest
salary survey shows that account directors command an average salary of
pounds 38,000 a year plus a car, while Marketing magazine’s recent poll
shows that marketing directors receive pounds 45,161 annually.
Also encouraging the churn is the increasing number and quality of
client jobs. Bob Wootton, director of media services at the Incorporated
Society of British Advertisers and formerly media director of Griffin
Bacal, comments: ’More opportunities are opening up in advertiser
organisations. Media is becoming more complicated, so many of the larger
companies are moving towards in-house expertise and the same is
happening with production.’ Marketing conventional and new media is also
attracting individuals who want a job with the pizazz of an agency but a
certain freedom of scope.
Sands says: ’Like many people I know, it’s unlikely that I would have
gone somewhere like Proctor & Gamble where the possibilities for
innovative, new thinking are limited. But television is a monopoly
industry facing competition and that makes it a marvellous greenfield
site. It has the potential for you to do what you like because you’re
not inheriting rules.’
These new-look marketing jobs, coupled with the confidence that comes
from seeing others pioneering the switch, has given people the impetus
to change their own career paths. Agencies provide an invaluable
training for anyone wanting to move.
Lizzie Palmer, marketing director of Capital Radio and a former staffer
at Still Price Lintas and Bartle Bogle Hegarty, recalls: ’When I left
advertising, I thought: ’What skills do I have?’ Then I realised that I
had loads. Business skills, people and communications skills, budgeting
skills, creative and writing skills. In some respects it’s all change,
no change.’ Dan Brooke, marketing director of Paramount Comedy Channel
who left his job as an account director at St Luke’s last December,
adds: ’Advertising has given me a tremendous instinct for the customer’s
point of view. The downside was that I didn’t know some aspects of PR
and below the line, but there’s no magic to it. It’s taken me six months
to feel comfortable with them.’
It is this knowledge of advertising that makes this generation of
clients one of the most innovative and opinionated agencies have had to
deal with.
Faced initially with an ex-agency client, some will expect an easy time,
as Virgin’s Barnett recalls: ’Agency people, especially less senior
ones, expect you to sign off pounds 300,000 without quibbling because
you know them.’
And to some degree, people with agency experience do tend to show a
fairness and empathy that can only come with having experienced the job.
’We’re firm but fair, because we know every trick in the book but we
also understand the process. At Capital, if things go wrong, we don’t
say, ’it’s the agency’s fault’, because we bought into it too,’ Palmer
says. Wheldon agrees: ’Agencies must be motivated and making money. You
don’t get great work by beating the shit out of them.’
But just a few weeks on the outside can provoke scathing comments about
agency practices. Set-piece entertaining, lavish lunches and creative
solutions for their own sake are all cited as failings, while criticism
of shops that falsely claim to offer integrated solutions abound.
Perhaps because of this, ex-agency clients are not afraid to experiment
with agency arrangements.
At Coca-Cola Wheldon centralised all advertising decisions through his
own office and broadened the company’s arrangements away from using just
CAA, recruiting instead a large roster of hotshops including BBH and
Wieden & Kennedy. At the COI, the former DMB&B joint chairman and chief
executive, Tony Douglas, has recently restructured the division with an
emphasis on integrated solutions.
At a smaller advertiser such as Paramount, Brooke was one of the first
clients to test the HHCL Brasserie’s no-frills television service. While
Maddie Morton, head of marketing at the English National Opera and once
an account director at BBH, got so fed up with agencies using her pounds
300,000 annual budget to do award-winning rather than
business-generating work that she briefed her design company
instead.
But at the most extreme end of the spectrum are people like Cochrane,
who commissioned Mother to help launch the station but used the ’gimme
5’ strategy and colour bar logo invented by the design company, Wolff
Olins, as the centrepiece for advertising. ’We struggled to find an
agency, which is why we went with one that formed especially to work
with us,’ she says, pointing out that traditional agencies are too
bureaucratic and give clients little access to creatives.
And she adds that her decision could pre-empt a dilemma that other
clients may have in coming years. ’All agencies are struggling to find
appropriate ways of working with clients and the next few years will be
increasingly difficult as above the line, below the line and brand
identity blurs,’ she says.
The diagnosis is backed by Sands, who says Granada will only use
agencies on an ad hoc basis. Ask him if this decision feels odd given
his old loyalties and he replies: ’I don’t think the problems facing TV
will be solved by a traditional advertising agency. And until agencies
can convincingly prove that they’re not just interested in ads and can
take a bigger view then, no, it doesn’t seem odd. Advertising is an
extremely conservative business that’s trying to grow up.’
Despite such uncompromising thoughts on the state of the industry they
recently left, few career-switchers rule out moving back at some point -
particularly to ’make changes’. But, for now at least, many are
evangelical enough to start recruiting from agencies for their own
departments. Many of the highest profile clients had ex-agency mentors -
such as Palmer with Richard Eyre at Capital and Cochrane with David
Brook at Channel 5 - and others want to perpetuate the trend
themselves.
Paramount’s Brooke concludes: ’I’m certainly hiring a lot of people and
I’m going to be looking in agencies rather than marketing.’ If he and
his colleagues succeed, then the drift from agencies to advertisers
could well turn out to be in its infancy.
