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Preparing an Agency Brief
Many clients and their agencies can find themselves in a rather tense relationship. Clients are often frustrated by the lack of high level strategic input and thought leadership shown by agencies. On the other hand, agencies can feel frustrated by the lack of clarity provided by the client, and by the desire for a fast and cheap service – without the recognition that this will affect the agency’s ability to contribute any high level intellectual input.
Both parties would really prefer to work as a partnership – but to achieve this, some of the barriers between them need to be removed. One of the key issues is the agency brief. Clients tend to be very good at specifying the research that is needed, but don’t usually go much beyond this. If they want to get the most out of an agency, they need to produce a clear brief which will enable the agency to bid more realistically.
The brief case
These are some of the questions you should consider when preparing a brief:
- How much do you include in your agency briefs? No doubt you specify the project content, but what about the ways in which you will work with the agency? This (rather than the project content) is the type of issue that can lead to disappointment. So try and specify clearly what you are looking for from the start.
- How do you want things to be managed on a day-to-day basis? Do you want to be kept informed by phone or by e-mail and if so, how frequently?
- Who do you want to do the work, and who do you want to manage the relationship with you? Make sure that you specify the level of experience required by key people and the consistency of people working on the project.
- What level of interpretation do you need? Do you want the project led by an expert in fieldwork, or a real industry expert who understands the business issues? If you want them to present the results with a full business context, identifying opportunities and threats and their financial implications, you need to specify this from the beginning. You should expect to pay for it – but it should be worth it!
- What onward communications do you want? In addition to the initial presentation, think of any other items you may need (e.g. summaries and different formats). If these elements are agreed beforehand, it can save hours of work later on. But again, you must be prepared to give the agency the time and the budget to be able to do this.
Ultimately, you may find that you have a variety of needs that might not all be met by the same organisation. Perhaps one agency should collect the technical data, and another act as a high level consultant.
If you want to read our MRS paper covering the whole issue of client-agency relationships, click here.
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