What are the most important projects a marketing team is responsible for?
Is it the global brand campaign? the result of months of research, strategy, careful planning and exquisite creative? When all of the preparation, late nights and effort finally arrives in social feeds for the keyboard warriors to pass judgment on.
Or is it the PowerPoint deck? Prepared and polished in time for the meeting that marks the final hurdle of an opportunity the sales team have been nurturing for the past 6 months and that will (hopefully) convert the opportunity into a secured piece of work.
The answer, of course, is both.
Yet having spent much of my career on the client side, I have always been struck by how differently agencies treat these projects. The campaign will often bring the senior team to the table. It will enjoy being written up as a case study. It will be submitted to the usual awards. But the day-to-day support, the sales document or the capability statement or the project report, receives rather less visibility and enthusiasm.
Which is odd, because from where I sat those ‘smaller’ projects often carried the greater consequence.
The agencies I worked most successfully with, many of which became friends, were the people who simply turned up. Again and again. The ones just as willing to spend an evening fixing tables in PowerPoint, laying out a report or preparing an executive presentation as they were creating a global campaign.
Those agencies understood that I did not experience my working life as a series of glamorous creative opportunities (far from it!), but as an endless succession of last minute requests, conflicting commercial pressures and occasionally organisation-defining moments. The relative importance of each is rarely (if ever!) reflected in the budget attached to them.
Those were the agencies that became trusted, because they never made me feel that any challenge was beneath them.
It’s one of the reasons I joined HB.
For almost three decades, HB has worked alongside some of the world’s largest professional services businesses, frequently operating as an extension of their own creative services functions. Working within their systems, alongside their people, often on-site, dealing with everything from global brand programmes to the presentation someone has just remembered they need for tomorrow morning.
A matter of professional service
And it has to be said that professional services organisations are peculiar environments in which to practise creativity. That’s not to say they’re odd, maybe particular is a better word. Within a professional service business the principal product is expertise. Something difficult to photograph, albeit Getty will offer you an endless stream of options…
…regardless of the visual ‘inspiration’ professional service organisations often very hard to put what they do in a box – to ‘productise’ the different they make. And perhaps rightly so, the fact is the scope of interest and expertise is difficult to tie down. The reality is that what they offer is often unique to every client and project and therefore not easy to consistently explain. Add to that their audiences are sophisticated, their subject matter complicated and the commercial consequences of getting something wrong considerable. And suddenly the comm’s team that have to make sense of these dynamics seem less like a professional marketing function and more a group of miracle workers (you know who you are!) able to turn the ephemeral into something tangible.
Especially so when you consider the extraordinary volumes of work that needs wrangling into shape. Presentations, proposals, reports, credentials, thought leadership, research, events, campaigns, internal communications. Thousands of individual pieces of communication, for hundreds of time poor partners and consulted, across different offices, countries, continents and time zones for different audiences.
Working in these environments teaches you something about the relationship between creativity and diligence. The designer who notices a misaligned table or a poorly considered chart is often able to notice something more fundamental. That the information isn’t organised properly. That the hierarchy is wrong. That the argument is difficult to follow. That the audience is being asked to work harder than it should.
Fixing the formatting might be the immediate request, but making the communication work is the actual job. And doing that at the pace of a professional service business is a superpower.
And once you start thinking like that, any implied hierarchy between fixing a presentation and developing a brand strategy evaporates. Both require an understanding of the audience, an appreciation of what is important and what can be left out, and the judgement to keep working at something until it communicates what it needs to communicate.
One might involve defining the positioning of a multinational business. The other might involve finding a more effective way to present six columns of financial information. The scale is different. The intellectual process is remarkably similar.
Attention to detail is not a different skill from strategic thinking. It is strategic thinking, applied at a different scale
I would go further and argue that the people who regularly work at both ends of that scale are all the better for it. It’s certainly the case at HB.
It is our view, indeed it is our experience, that a designer who spends time wrestling with complicated corporate information develops an instinct for clarity that is enormously valuable when creating a brand identity. A strategist who understands how an organisation actually communicates, how its people use the brand guidelines, Tone of Voice documents and the templates available to them (and where things tend to fall apart) is better equipped to develop a strategy that can survive contact with the real world.
There is a tendency within our industry to separate the glamorous business of creating identities and campaigns from the supposedly less interesting business of making them work in the real world. To regard strategy and the conceptual as the intellectual endeavour and production as the mechanical one.
I’ve never been particularly convinced by that hierarchy.
Some of the most beautifully articulated strategies I’ve encountered have been rendered almost useless by an inability to translate them into the everyday communications of the businesses they were supposed to serve. The fact is that a brand doesn’t live in its brand documents. It lives in the sales proposal, the investor presentation, the recruitment brochure, the annual report and the email someone sends to a prospective client.
The HB way
It’s this experience that has shaped HB’s culture. Nearly thirty years spent learning how professional service firms actually work, understanding the pressures on their marketing teams, the competing demands of their partners and leadership, and the importance of responding when something unexpected lands.
It’s created a business with relatively little interest in the traditional boundaries of agency work.
Need a global campaign? Absolutely. Need a new brand identity? Of course. Need someone to straighten the tables in a presentation, rebuild fifty charts or lay out a 260 page audit report overnight? Fine.
And because we’ve grown up working alongside clients rather than simply delivering the big marquee projects to them, we’ve built a commercial model to match. By the hour, on demand, retained, embedded in-house or working from our own studios. Whatever makes the most sense. No particular attachment to a platform, software package or prescribed way of working.
Knowing when to bring considerable intellectual firepower to a problem and when to simply get on with it is part of the judgement that 30 years of experience provides.
From our perspective, there is no hierarchy of importance. There are only our clients’ priorities. Our people don’t see the smaller jobs as beneath their talents. Their talents are precisely what can transform those jobs. And the familiarity with the everyday demands of our clients makes our strategic and creative work richer, more informed and more effective.
The strongest relationships between clients and agencies are built through the accumulation of those moments. The global campaign that wins an award. The new identity that transforms how a business presents itself. The investor presentation that helps secure the next phase of growth. The report that somehow becomes readable overnight.
And at half past ten on a Tuesday evening, when the URGENT email lands in the inbox, we get straight to it.
“Leave it with us. It will be with you by the morning.”