by Judy Neer
17. June 2009 07:23
It seems every year there are heated discussions among agencies about how they are not going to do spec work in an agency review. I recently read a piece on the 4A’s New Business about the topic. Dr. Jodi Lisa Smith did research with clients, agency personnel and search consultants and came up with the theory that agencies should “Avoid Spec Work Like the Plague”.
I think there are really two issues at play here. One, should there be some sort of spec assignment within a review and two, should the client pay for it and therefore own the work? I’d like to respond to first issue here:
Spec or No Spec: It seems totally unrealistic to me to ask a client to make such an important decision around who their agency partner will be for the future, without getting a sense of how the agency will think about their business. This is a creative business. It is also a business where the lines of who is doing what are getting more and more blurred every day. During a review, clients often see case histories and work that 2-3 agencies are taking credit for. Is that confusion what they should base a multi-million dollar decision on? I don’t think so.
The assignment allows the client to see how an agency thinks about their business versus trying to extrapolate relevant experience from its case histories. The completion of an assignment provides a meaningful forum to engage in discussion with each finalist agency about the strategic and creative direction for the brand. It also allows the client additional opportunities to interact with the agency in a more “true to life” way.
We set up Strategic and Creative Workshops to provide collaboration along the way to the final presentations.
A common question is: Will the work see the light of day? If not, is the exercise a waste of time?
It is unusual for a client to run the work actually presented in a review. They hope for it, but it doesn’t often happen. The assignment represents a real need of the client and the process allows the agency to be much further along in getting to the final solution. So, it is not a waste of time.
Are the agencies that don’t win giving away their ideas? I don’t think so. I have yet to see a client take one agency’s ideas and give them to the agency they hire to execute. And quite honestly, the client is often not impressed with the ideas the losing agencies present.
The bottom line is that of course agencies would like to win business without doing spec work. But if a client is doing a formal review, the spec assignment is a critical piece of the review process.
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