Finding The Right Ad Agency Is Like Getting A Hair Cut (Part I)

Terry Young

If you want to know the secret of properly selecting an advertising agency, start with a haircut.

Spend a Saturday morning in a barber shop or a styling salon. While waiting your turn, you may notice others flipping through magazines as they search for a style they can make their own. And when those patrons climb into their seat, they take the picture along.

"Make me look like that!"

Sometimes it’s an order. Sometimes it’s a plea. It’s always about hope.

The hair cutting professional (perhaps after some discreet eye rolling) says, "Sure thing." And the snipping begins.

This simple exchange of expectations, however, guides the person with the clippers as they navigate the spectrum between big hair and buzz cuts.

This is a simple analogy, but perhaps useful in the sometimes hair-pulling process of selecting an advertising agency. Image counts, whether it’s a hair style or a credit union’s identity. And the wise marketer avidly avoids the advertising equivalent of a bad hair day. To accomplish this, sometimes it’s necessary to call in the professionals.

What follows is a straightforward process for successfully selecting an advertising agency.

1. Plan: Start at the end

What’s an advertising agency, and why do you need one? In simplest terms, it’s "more." More arms. More legs. More hands. More ears. More brains. More talent. And, of course, more expense. The trick is to create more solutions--not more headaches or more stress.

A good place to start is at the end. What does the finish line look like? This vision will be helpful in communicating your expectations to an ad agency. (Remember those people with the magazine pictures on their way to their stylists?)

"Be clear in your expectations. The greatest danger to a client-agency relationship is ambiguity of expectations," says Rob Allyn, president of Allyn & Co, a Dallas-based advertising agency. "Tell us exactly what you want, with the greatest possible degree of specifics."

Let’s face it, though: Advertising needs aren’t staggering. Here’s a list of marketing chores that might have you asking an advertising agency for help:

• Introducing a new product;
• Developing a marketing promotion;
• Changing the credit union’s name;
• Creating an annual report;
• Developing signage;
• Creating a new theme or tagline for your credit union; and
• Perhaps most significant, creating a brand identity or rebranding an old image.

According to Marketing for Dummies, "One of the most important things you can do in marketing is to create a strong, appealing brand image."

The book’s author, Alexander Hiam, adds: "Creativity is the key to doing just that. A brand image or personality can be an important part of what advertising communicates. Sometimes that image is the main focus of advertising--and provides a common focus for all other design decisions…A strong brand identity, or personality, can become a living entity, something the marketer creates and gives to the world."

I was going to make a point that credit union marketers have two levels of needs for an ad agency--the project and the campaign.

I was going to suggest that "projects" usually require only the simple assistance, and longer-term "campaigns" likely would be the spot where marketers might need more resources provided by a fully engaged advertising team.

But I’m switching horses in midarticle. The two levels of need for an advertising agency are: 1) When you need help; and 2) when you need more help.

It turns out that projects--such as a brochure for your automated teller machine (ATM) card--can benefit from the professional services of an advertising agency as much as, say, a foray into radio advertising to attract new members from your community.

A good advertising agency can help you with the ATM brochure, often by making it simpler. Because good advertising boils down complex subjects into simple, easy-to-understand language and visuals, creative development can appear elementary, particularly to the uninitiated. But it’s not. And it can cost you dearly if do-it-yourself advertising efforts consume your limited budget and yield poor results.

Ad agencies should remind us that we’re not producing this brochure for ourselves or for our lawyers. We’re producing it for real people: our members.

Good advertising counsel helps us to focus on the simple. And making things simple, as it turns out, is even better than making things clever. In marketing, "complicated" is one thing to avoid. Clever sometimes can be complicated, but simple never is complicated.

In reality, an ad agency isn’t likely to consider producing a brochure simply for the sake of creating a brochure. It’s more likely to suggest developing a brochure in the context of a defined marketing strategy that looks at who you want to use your card and how often.

"It’s often helpful to create a checklist of reasons for hiring an agency in the first place," says Rick Carnes, creative director of Holt Design in Dallas. Reasons might include production expertise, the need for a creative solution, or help in completing a project before a deadline arrives.

"Once that’s done, a client can begin looking for the agency with the right experiences and resources," Carnes adds.

Experience and resources are important. But desire counts as well.

For an ad agency to do its job properly, it must learn about you, your products, and your members. That way you’re not just hiring someone to create a brochure, you’re hiring someone to develop marketing.

2. Evaluate: One part science, one part gut feeling