OPINION13 October 2014
If you think about it, the challenges of advertising and research are not that far apart. Both disciplines create communications for our audiences to notice, heed and act upon. Both seek out and pay for audiences to consume these communications and both are involved in helping marketing departments plan strategically and, ultimately, sell more.
Yet despite these similarities, there are screaming chasms in our basic working practices and, crucially, in the style of our client relationships. And having worked in both these industries, I think there are one or two things that research companies could learn from advertising agencies. In other words, to paraphrase a recent ad, market research could ‘be more ad agency’.
Let’s start at the differences in our relationships with clients. Traditionally a brand employs an ad agency in a long-term relationship to advise them strategically – often at the highest level – and to plan, buy and implement all their advertising. On the other hand research companies relationships are far less secure. We tend to pitch for piecemeal projects, and rarely does any one agency do more than a small fraction of a company’s research.
Ad agencies don’t own the media they sell, they specialise in buying it. In fact they often don’t even own the advertising production companies that create the advertising, rather they brief them and own the relationships with them. Research companies tend to specialise in selling what they have and what they own – a panel, a community, a qualitative service, a product solution etc.
Ad agencies plan out a year’s worth of advertising activity and pitch these plans to the client. Planning teams think through the advertising messages they develop by gaining a thorough understanding of the markets the business operates in, and its target market. Research companies very rarely get involved in planning a company’s entire research activity, or recommending what research they should do. In fact, often they have little real knowledge of the businesses they work for.
Marketers don’t tell ad agencies where and how to spend the money, yet we research companies get very prescriptive briefs.
Most of all ad agencies treat their output and the client’s product as sacred. They invest a huge amount of creative effort in the design and delivery of their advertising messages. We, on the other hand, have a tendency – in some quarters of our industry – to mass produce surveys in offshore production units at low cost, with little or no creative investment whatsoever.
So why don’t we think like ad agencies, pitching for the whole job? Why not think bigger, more ambitiously? If we’re going to do that, it involves a change to our mindset:
- Stop selling only what we can do ourselves, instead act as a buying and decision making centre, an analytics and advisory unit.
- Specialise in spending research budgets and employ research planners and buyers.
- Invest in survey copywriters and research art directors to produce cutting-edge survey solutions.
- Build close long-term relationships with the marketing director and CEO.
What’s stopping us as an industry from astonishing our clients with our bold and incisive advice, borne out of our own research initiatives and thinking? Why don’t we pitch our research plans to marketing departments? Oh and while we’re at it, why don’t we get some cool sofas and funky receptions? And start drinking Manhattans at 4 in the afternoon…OK these might be clichés, and some of this thinking simplistic, but you can see why I’m suffering from a bit of industry envy!
So who wants to start up a new research agency with me?
Jon Puleston is vice-president of innovation at Lightspeed GMI