Aligning Stakeholder Expectations - What's a PM to do?

Below is one of the best articulations (definitely one of the most humorous) of why there needs to be a person or party looking holistically at engagements and focusing her/his energies on driving stakeholder alignment. If you’ve been in an agency for decades or just arrived on the last boat, the issue highlighted in this strip should resonate.

Click on the strip image below to enlarge and/or check out the video variation on the theme below it.

Please add your insights, experiences and anecdotes in the comments section of this post.

An Agency's Ability to Deliver - People Are Talking

Industry talk is tantalizing. Externally, aided in great part by the plethora of awards, trade pubs and blogs, buzz tends to center around account-wins, creativity, and to a lesser extent, results. Published industry evaluation reports (e.g. AdWeek's Digital Agency Report Card, Forrester's Wave Studies) evaluate similar things, but an agency's ability to execute efficiently is not considered. However, within the industry, peer-to-peer at the bar (like when one PM asks another about a shop she used to work at), an agency's working environment, and its ability to deliver, are main topics.

I've had the opportunity to get out and about to various industry events and conferences recently. Good form prevents me from listing details of what I've overheard. I will say that I was amazed at the consistency of buzz about certain agencies from one event to another and how well it aligned with the trash-talk I've heard inside of various agencies. The lack of understanding by some non-creative agency parties about the challenges of managing clients and creative/tech deliverables was striking as well.

An agency's reputation is important to maintain. Here are just a few areas where buzz comes into play.

• Hiring - In the current economic environment, agencies that are hiring have the upper hand. However, the best talent out there, especially those that have a stable gig, will still be applying even more scrutiny when considering whether or not to join a new shop.
  
  
• Business Referrals - Media companies often influence clients' choices of what creative agencies to work with or, believe me, to stop working with.
  
  
• Headhunters & Agency Recruiting Personnel- These guys hear it all. They get a regular insider's tour of agencies from the slew of talent they interact with. I've begged one of my long-term headhunter friends to write a book, I, and I'm sure others, would love to read it.
  
  
• Third-Party & Publisher Preference - Guess which agencies 3rd party vendors like PointRoll, EyeBlaster and EyeWonder are going to partner with and feature in their case studies for their newest, high-functioning units? Publishers are well aware of which agencies deliver on time, and which deliver heartache.
  
  
• Who's Got Your Back? - When the trash talk about your agency starts flying (usually behind your back), you want/need someone who knows your agency's and your work to chime in and support you.
  

I don't need to tell you that clients care very much about an agency's ability to deliver. Any agency evaluation report card, or feedback given by a client (especially those leading up to or following an account being put into review) consider agency efficiency and reliability very heavily.

PM's main mission is to ensure high-quality output that is delivered on-time, on-budget and on-spec. It's incumbent on you to not only execute on this and to form positive relationships with those who share the ecosystem with you. Obviously, this will help improve your ability to deliver together, but it will also improve your company's and your own reputation and your ability to thrive. I assure you, you will need it someday. As the Oracle of Omaha suggests:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”

- Warren Buffet

Media and Creative: Live together or die together.

Stakes are higher now than ever for success - actually, high stakes for our survival are more like it. The level of dysfunction between agencies (and the various parties within), clients and publishers continues to elevate as campaigns gain complexity and economic pressure increases. To focus a bit: collaboration between media and creative teams, whether from the same or different agencies, has got to improve.

Gunther Sonnerfeld, in his March 13, iMedia Connection piece, Why Media and Creative Need to Cross the Aisle, addresses the topic to a degree, but veers into the high-ground of " . . . when innovation is the key to success." As PM's we are painfully aware: great thinking isn't worth the PPT it's printed on if you can't execute.

It never ceases to amaze me how seasoned, high-performing industry veterans, who know, work with and respect each other, will claim that the other's agency/team is nightmare to partner with. All day, everyday very smart people across the industry, including very senior talent, are mired in the collateral damage of poor partnerships.

Along the campaign development continuum, from Initiation to Deployment & Diagnosis, there are key activities and deliverables that require media/creative alignment in order to get projects out on-time, on-budget, on-spec - let alone reaching Sonnerfeld's ideal of innovation or, even high-quality. Below are some key milestones, grouped by project phase. Let's play a little game: See how many you recognize as dys-integration pain-points from your past experience (and likely, your future ones):

INITIATION PHASE

• Client Request:
  Always hear about this in time?
  
  
• Brief (Media, Creative, Project ):
  Integrated?
  

DEFINITION PHASE

• Strategic Recommendation:
  Always considers both medium and message?
  
  
• User Experience or Design & Channel Roles:
  Full customer journey considered?
  
  
• Measures of Success:
  Ever see CTR driving a branding campaign or humor/animation that impedes reaching desired response objectives?
  

DESIGN PHASE

• Media Consideration Set:
  Creative folks have an opinion on where/when ads should run?
  
  
• Conceptual Designs & Prototypes:
  Media folks have any thoughts on whether units will work or what the competition has already done?
  

DEVELOPMENT PHASE

• Specifications:
  Red Meat! Don't even know where to begin on this one!
  
  
• Main Ad Units:
  Wish you'd seen/shown to your partners before client buried you?
  
  
• Unique Units, Odd Sizes & Resizes:
  Too many / too few? LCD issues? Show client all units or assume because client approved the main ones, the others are approved?

DEPLOYMENT PHASE

• Traffic:
  Ever resent a site,media or creative partner for caving and saying they can turn around in 1 day?
  
  
• QA:
  Listed after Traffic intentionally. Ever wish you checked yourself, before trafficking?

DIAGNOSIS PHASE

• See comments re: Measures of Success in Definition Phase section above:
  How good are you at arguing both pro and con DL study results? Have enough time / budget / data to optimize creative?

There are a myriad of best-practices to be applied to address issues across this broad a spectrum. They all include better, more timely communication between media and creative teams / agencies. As far as serving the client, we only succeed together. In terms of CYA, if your partner blows up, the shrapnel could be headed your way.

Client Management - The answer is, "maybe"

Successfully managing client relationships, especially in these pressured times, takes the combined efforts of skilled interactive agency professionals. More PM's have lost more hair (or at least their coloring to gray) hearing phrases like, "XYZ Account person told the client that, we could do "it" and still meet the schedule. S/He made no mention of a potential fee increases."

I have toiled, presented, implored, cajoled, collaborated and otherwise tried to influence agency Account people not to play the game of, "Client says, 'jump', we say, 'how high'?" or to look at the advice/insult another way, to stop being "yes-(wo)men" (I can assure any offended Account people that this is a mild characterization compared to those bandied about an agency - especially in the wee hours of the morning.) Among the many benefits of removing the instant, "yes" are that it would take some pressure off of the PM's, who invariable are vilified when they assess the situation and have to say, "no".

The aim is to migrate towards more of aconsultative answer of, "maybe". Ideally, towards an Account Management-response along the lines of, "Client, I understand the request, let me talk to superwoman-PM back at the office, see how we can address this. I will get back to you ASAP with a recommendation and let you know if there are any impacts to the project's scope, timing or pricing." This is not a bait and switch. It actually gives the agency some time to thoughtfully address the request and be fairly compensated if there is a legitimate change in scope.

When discussing this issue with a wise agency president, he suggested that one way to facilitate the migration of yes-(wo)men on the Account team to the maybe column was to also move the PM's to the maybe column. He posited that one reason PM's are often met with resistance or, worse avoidance, is that in their zeal to defend, PM's can become very problem-oriented vs being solution-oriented - effectively turning themselves into "no-(wo)men". If PM's reflexive response was also, "maybe, let's see what we can come up with", the partnership would benefit, friction diminished, and the ecosystem would be better aligned for success.