"Breaking up is hard to do." - Neil Sedaka
They were childhood sweethearts who'd grown apart. Maybe they stayed together for the sake of the children. But in the end, friends said it was obvious the two parties had changed, and last week they made it official: after almost 91 years, General Motors' Chevrolet and the Detroit-area ad agency Campbell-Ewald were getting a divorce.
In the annals of contemporary marketing, few partnerships had lasted as long, unless you count the Vatican's work on behalf of Jesus Christ. Chevy and Campbell-Ewald grew up together. In the 1950s, as the interstate highway network opened up the country to travellers, the agency produced the iconic "See the USA in Your Chevrolet" campaign. It went on to produce Bob Seger's "Like a Rock" truck ads, and created the "Heartbeat of America" tagline.
In the manner of such things, Chevrolet thanked the agency for its years of service and promised they would still be friends. Then, it ran out the door and drove down the road in a shiny Chevy with its new agency, Publicis Worldwide, a "Just Married!" sign flapping from the back bumper. During these days of extreme upheaval in Detroit, that's not too unusual: Last November, Chrysler abruptly dropped BBDO after almost 65 years.
But the marketing world is itself in a state of extreme upheaval, as digital technologies throw up astonishing new possibilities and the greater economy tries to find its feet like a drunk at Coachella. And with the average tenure of chief marketing officers hovering in the range of 24 months, some clients feel they need to make radical shifts, it only for the sake of change. Yet the short tenures of client personnel means that institutional memory, the lifeblood of a brand, is often stronger in an agency than at the client itself. And though everyone agrees the best work and results usually emerge out of long-term relationships, sometimes clients can't resist the shiny new object that is a hot agency ("Get me Bogusky!") on the prowl for accounts.
"I think achieving strong relationships is even more important than ever before, and unfortunately that's true at the same time as it's even less likely to happen," suggested Shelley Brown, president of the Toronto-based agency Zig. "I think we live in a culture where the grass always appears to be greener on the other side of the fence, where change is always good, where [people often say]'Let's move on.' It always seems better to have a new relationship with a new agency or person rather than actually work on the relationship we have now. I think that's a cultural phenomenon, not just a marketing phenomenon."
The problem is that shiny new things aren't always good for us. "The thing that scares me the most is that you see these relationships where you're just trying to make sure the client's happy and you're just giving them what they want," says Andrew Bruce, the president and COO of Publicis Canada. "They inevitably end up in doom because you're not adding value."
One after another executive polled this week, whether working for an agency or a client, noted that the best creative work - and usually the best results - come out of deep, earned trust.
Some years ago, when Mr. Bruce was at Chiat\Day Toronto, he worked with Neil Everett, the chief marketing officer of Shoppers Drug Mart, to develop a campaign for the chain's Health Watch service. Mr. Bruce pitched a series of ads that would shock viewers into paying attention. "It was very risky. We did things like simulating people having heart attacks," Mr. Everett recalls. "The first time we showed the ad we wanted to produce, to our president, he almost had a heart attack himself. He said: 'You're gonna' do what?' "
By that point, however, Mr. Bruce (and his brother, Duncan Bruce, who was also at Chiat\Day) had built up a relationship with Mr. Everett that helped give him confidence in their counsel. After a lot of debate, Mr. Everett's boss approved the campaign, but not without some strong words that gave them a final moment of pause. "He said the following to the agency: We're gonna let you do this campaign, but if this thing flops, first we're re-evaluating us in terms of why did we let you do this. And then we're going to re-evaluate you,' " recalls Mr. Everett with a chuckle. "But the fact that we did trust them, we had success with the first campaign."
Here's where you might think you'd wandered into the Life section. Because when I called up Shelley Brown to discuss the importance of long-term relationships, I asked how long she'd been with a couple of clients. She couldn't remember. Then again, she said, she also couldn't remember exactly how long she'd been married.
"I don't really think it should be about the date," she said. "It should be about: Are you working as a team, day-in and day-out?"
Wait, I asked - was she talking about her own marriage, or Zig's relationships with clients? "I'm speaking about all partnerships," she replied, "because fundamentally this is about people working together - as partners, collaborators, members of a team. And that kind of relationship has to be sustained on a daily basis, it's not something you can top up every once in a while and then ignore for a bit and then, 'Oh, it's the anniversary, I'd better show up with a great new campaign' - or flowers, as the case may be. It's something you have to work at all the time."
Zig hit a bump last year when Molson, its client since 2004, felt that the positioning for its flagship brand, Canadian, wasn't working as it should. Its TV commercials depicted a tribe of drinkers who adhered to an unwritten code of Canadian masculinity. Sales were down; Molson brought in a whole new marketing team.
Still, Ms. Brown says, "When a really strong agency-client partnership is in place, and together you come to the conclusion that the strategy needs to change, that has obvious implications for the campaign, and some of the children have to be sacrificed." Together, the clients and agency hammered out a new positioning - Made From Canada - that brought focus back to the beer itself. New TV spots made their debut shortly before the Olympics.
Like any relationships, agency-client bonds sometimes fray to the point that interventions can be necessary. Shelagh Stoneham is currently vice-president of brand and marketing communications for Rogers, but a few years ago she was on the agency side at BBDO. One day she was assigned to an account that the agency had been informed it was in danger of losing. Omnicom, the parent company, sent in a consultant - a marriage counsellor of sorts - who sat down with members of both the client and agency teams to try to get to the source of the problem, then brought the two sides together to hash out the problems.
"They provided an independent perspective," Ms. Stoneham said. "As a result, there was an open dialogue on both sides. Within six months, the relationship was outstanding." And in this story that began with the tale of a divorce, here's a happy ending: one of the commercials that BBDO produced for its almost ex-client went on to win a Marketing magazine award.