This is a crap article. It’s a list thingy, which of course means the writer is an avid reader of list thingies like “10 ways to increase your blog readership”.

Its underlying thesis is that agencies are down on their luck these days, so now’s a good time to conduct a review and really screw some luckless bastards to the wall.

Well perhaps it’s time clients took a look through the other end of the telescope for a change of perspective.

The article’s author, Robyn Freye posits the following client “frustrations”:

1. My agency doesn’t bring new ideas to the table
Before coming to that conclusion, you might ask yourself: How many ideas have I shot down before giving them a chance to be developed or refined? Have you ever said “our target don’t use the internet/do social media/read copy?” How many times has a junior marketing person suppressed ideas before they even reach the decision makers (Jay Chiat once said, “Anyone who can’t say ‘yes’ to an ad shouldn’t be able to say ‘no’ to one”, an aphorism that applies well beyond ad concepts)? How many ideas have been squashed for purely subjective reasons?

2. You feel like you’re not important
This can happen when the fees you’re paying barely cover the cost of renting the coffee machine. Trust me, clients who pay a good buck for a good day’s work rarely get their meetings re-scheduled at the last minute. Neither do clients who act like partners in the process, who are open, candid and participatory (in fact this can offset a considerable amount of stinginess on the remuneration front).

3. The only thing keeping campaigns afloat is hope
The relatively new culture of accountability has mutated into the quest for guarantees. I don’t care how many metrics and tracking devices you have in place, there is an element of risk in all marketing. The goal of marketing is to influence human beliefs and behaviour. If there were guarantees to be had, criminal activity would be a thing of the dim and distant past and we would never argue with our spouses or children.

What drives successful marketing is informed creativity. Creativity happens when clients and agencies share risk and responsibility in an open, equal relationship. Creativity is how company A outsmarts company B; it’s where new product ideas come from, it’s the reason a company or a brand becomes interesting to it’s audience; it’s how the category value equation gets turned on its head; it’s how a company attracts the best and the brightest. By definition the value of a creative idea is untried (if well informed) and no one can be certain that it will have the desired effect.

The rest of Ms. Freye’s article is essentially a guide to the mechanics of screwing your new agency: top talent’s out of work these days – you can get them for peanuts; times are tough – now’s the time to renegotiate the contract; in tough times agencies will really pull out the stop for new business; and so on.

Not really a productive way of looking at things in my view. The agency business is on its uppers these days and certainly bears a lot of the blame for its fall from grace. But equally the agencies aren’t the sole contributors to the problem. Aversion to risk, asking communications programs to solve what are actually fundamental business issues, lack of creativity in the broader sense, scrimping on remuneration have all played a part in the confusion that exists today.

Accountability is not a one-way process.