“Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.”
Albert Einstein
Client Service.
What do those two words mean for an ad agency? The term has become relative to the point I feel it’s lost its true meaning. Whether your client is big or small the real job is to always serve the client, right? How do we do this? What does it mean? In my experience it always comes down to 3 things:
- Integrity
- Competancy
- Reliability
From East coast to west, no matter the size of the client they all have 1 thing in common – they all value great work, on time with integrity. There’s no substitute for any of these, ever. Not a flashy website, a great pitch, a big staff or even a “value proposition”. You have to be real and good and reliable at what you do. No excuses.
Anyone with any advertising business savvy would agree with everything I’ve said so far. That’s not the point. Here’s the rub — Price. You’re only truly good at what you do if you can do it with excellence, on time and at a fair price. Anyone can charge sky high prices and deliver good creative, on time. That’s just playing the odds. More people, more money, more ideas, more pitches, more business. It’s not about economies of scale in this business. It can’t be. For a creative agency that model spirals into apathy, every time…or if it succeeds it does so on guesses and “big wins” every so often to stay afloat. All the smaller wins really become losses.
Here’s the bottom line: client service. It’s a real thing that real agencies still do. When you recognize it and reward it, it will only reward you back.
That’s my two cents for today. Thanks for reading.