Even the most brilliant creative team can’t produce great work on their own. They need your help. You have the power to lead your agency in bold new directions – directions that result in powerful work that gets your audience to respond.

Here are six ideas on how to get that kind of work.

1. ENCOURAGE HONESTY

Ad agencies are supposed to be full of expert communicators. But the truth is, they’re not always good at telling you what they really think. That’s because they have two goals that can sometimes be in conflict. One is to give you the very best work they can do. The other is to keep you happy, so you remain a client.

Ask yourself this question: “Is our agency giving us the fresh, effective work we need — or are they giving us what they think we want?” If you’re unsure of the answer, it’s time for a heart-to-heart talk with your agency. It’s essential that everyone on both the client and agency sides remains focused on the wants and needs of your customers and prospects, not each other’s likes and dislikes.

2. FEAR IS THE ENEMY OF CREATIVITY

It’s important to give your agency the freedom to take risks and to think in new directions.

Steve Doyal, Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications at Hallmark Cards, said: “Some people think that if you give your agency enough rope, they’ll hang themselves. I’ve found that when I give the agency enough rope, they jump rope.”

Corporate CEO Harvey Mackay, in his bestseller “Beware of the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt,” also supports this belief: “Unfortunately, advertising is one of those soft sciences in which everyone regards himself as an expert. The results often are ads that are designed for a target audience of one, the guy who pays the bills.”

This doesn’t mean you don’t have the final say, or that you shouldn’t be a part of the creative process. But just remember that you’re paying your agency for their fresh ideas — make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for.

3. Make a Point of Making a Point

Your agency can’t give you great work until they have a single selling message. What that means is someone needs to take all the relevant information and boil it down to one statement: the single most important benefit to your audience.

What do you do if there is more than one important benefit? Pick one. An ad may cover many selling points, but the focus of the ad must be only one. One point is simply more powerful than many. Put a big nail in a board, and you have a deadly weapon. Put 100 more nails in that board, and you have a bed of nails that any yogi could sleep on.

So, whose job is it to write this statement? That’s for you and your agency to decide. But regardless of who determines the selling message, you can save a lot of time and money-- – and create the foundation for an effective ad – by approving it before the ad is created.

4. Put Time on Their Side

Everyone knows that timing is everything in business. But it’s also true that your agency needs time in order to produce great work.

Make sure every project doesn’t become a rush job. Save that status for critical situations. Otherwise, your account team will become frustrated and quality will suffer. And if that isn’t bad enough, those rush jobs can cost you more, too — especially if they have to be redone.

The next time you need to assign a deadline, find out how long it will really take to do the job right. And here’s the other side of the coin: Once you make the schedules realistic, you have every right to make your quality expectations very high.

5. Streamline Your Approval Process

The more layers a project must go through for approval, the harder it is for a good idea to survive. And the harder it is to stay focused on one clear direction.

Without a doubt, a streamlined approval system benefits you as much as it does your agency. First of all, you can save a lot in revision costs. When too many people have the power to change the agency’s work, you often wind up paying to revise revisions.

Consider how much better your creative product will be when your agency learns that their goal is not to produce work that is most likely to move easily up your hierarchy, but rather to produce work that is most likely to accomplish your marketing objectives.

6. Call a Meeting of the Minds

Believe it or not, the harshest critics of your advertising are the very people who create it. Their job satisfaction comes from producing the best work possible for you. They sweat over every strategy, every design, and every word.

So find out what they think. Invite them to a creative summit. Ask them if the year’s advertising was everything they intended it to be. And ask them if there is anything that could have been done — or not done — to make it better. Then tell them what you think.

You’ll be surprised at how much you learn from this meeting. Your honesty and receptiveness will inspire your creative team. And you’ll have a rare opportunity to see how passionately they really feel about the work they do.

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