By James Saville, Partner at Goldbug. James leads media and press strategy across PR campaigns.
The latest PR Week Top150 is filled with insights about agencies toughing it out amid a challenging financial landscape – with headcounts falling for the first time for years.
If you’re wondering whether you’re getting the right kind of support from your agency – whether that’s employee engagement or external engagement, then use this as your litmus test.
1. VALUE
With every conversation and interaction, you need to see they’re adding value to you in chime with your business objectives. This means outside thinking, understanding the macro and micro trends that brands like yours can capitalise on. It means being proactive – don’t tolerate an agency that hangs around painting its nails waiting for the next brief or being told what to do. Expect your agency to be helping you to write your briefs for them. They should be giving senior counsel, generating talking points and turning up to meetings with a golden-lined suitcase packed full of insights and fresh thinking. They should also be easy to get on with, a pleasure to brief, with a ‘Yes…And’ attitude. If their answer to a brief has the words ‘key considerations’ in it and underneath that all the reasons that your dream will unlikely become reality then understand you’re with an agency that brings problems not solutions.
2. CREATIVITY
They should not only be capable of doing the heavy lifting on campaigns, but should be challenging you (in a friendly, we’re-on-the-same-side way) then providing the ideas, and seeing projects through to delivery and evaluation. They should be ensuring the creative idea marries up to the strategy and works for integration. While that’s the standard, you also need your agency to reinvigorate the creativity within your own teams, getting them to start challenging sector norms and building a creative energy and momentum that produces stand out content and campaigns. So you can feel more connected and invested in the whole process.
3. ENGAGEMENT
They must be focusing on outcomes, not outputs. Engagement has become the No.1 commodity in communication. The ideas and campaigns must underpin everything you do. We know that audiences respond better to campaigns when people they relate to are at the heart of it – whether that’s peers at work or like-minded fellow customers. The impetus must be on putting people in the middle of the story, getting them talking to each other, either online or in person; getting people excited, making people care, making people read, post, create, move and share.
And then being able to measure that engagement; the impact it’s had on your audience as opposed to how many people might have seen it.
Get in touch if you want to learn more about what your agency should be doing for you.