WE GIVE GREAT MEETING
People are always saying “Why isn’t advertising as good as it was?”
Personally I don’t:
a) have a clue
b) know if it’s true.
Maybe people always remember the old days as better.
But I just read an article on a New York blog and something went ‘ping’.
For the first time I thought “Yeah, that’s the reason. And I never spotted it.”
You can check out the whole post here: http://adaged.blogspot.com/2011/04/answer-to-question.html
The point he makes is that agencies used to be paid on commission.
You got a percentage of the amount of money that was actually spent on the advertising.
So you only made money on advertising that actually ran.
What happened was that agencies moved away from commission towards fees.
So agencies now get paid an amount every month, whether they run any ads or not.
They get paid according to the hours spent working on it.
Under a commission system, the incentive is to make advertising and run it.
Under a fee system, the incentive is to string out the process to justify the fee.
That means we have to do time sheets to prove how long we spent.
Not sales graphs to prove how well the ads work.
At the end of the year the client doesn’t say “Did the ad agency put sales up?”
They say “Did the ad agency justify all the hours charged?”
But surely advertising shouldn’t just be about book-keeping.
Albert Einstein said “Not everything that can be measured counts. And not everything that counts can be measured.”
Under the commission-based system the incentive was to run ads.
So that’s what we did.
And any advertising works better than no advertising.
So the advertising worked.
And the brains were focussed on what made money, so they made better advertising.
But now as soon as the advertising runs we stop making money.
Because we stop billing hours to the client.
Now we make our money on hours spent having meetings, doing research, debriefing research, travelling to meetings, having pre-meetings, all of it chargeable.
So the more the better.
This is like changing the rules of football.
So the object isn’t to score as many goals as possible.
The object is to take the longest time possible before eventually scoring a goal.
Then adding up how many people were involved, and how much time they spent, and increasing the goal’s value accordingly.
And the team that spend most time before scoring a goal wins.
It’s like judging a mechanic, not on how well or how quickly he fixes your car, but on how many meetings you have about it.
It’s like judging a doctor, not on whether they cure you, but on how many times they take your temperature and blood-pressure.
It’s like judging a meal, not on what it tastes like, but on how long and how many cooks it took to make.
It’s like judging a comedian, not on how much they make you laugh, but on how long they take to get to the punch-line.
It’s like judging an artist, not by the quality of the pictures they paint, but by how much paint they use.
It’s all about the process, not the actual result.
As my mum would have said “Penny-wise, pound-foolish.”
