Will you love me tomorrow?

This was one relationship that had started spiralling downwards. One of the partners was unable to understand why. In one of those low, why-me moments, the partner called up a “marriage counsellor”. The counsellor in this case, Aprais, which calls itself a business relationship management expert, decided to investigate. The couple, who shall go only by the name of an advertising agency and a large multinational client, finally kissed and made up.

Aprais did a third-party appraisal of the situation and found that the scoring of the ad agency’s performance by some relatively new client personnel was unfairly skewed. It advised both partners on what was actually happening and what needed to be done. “This type of situation is delicate and fraught with egos and fine sensibilities, but as objective advisors, we were able to deliver difficult feedback and ensure that justice was done. More importantly, the relationship was set back on an even keel,” says Sunil Gupta, regional director, South Asia, East & West Africa, Aprais.

In the marketing space, client-agency relationships have always been rocky. And they have often been compared with marriage. On a lighter note, RS Sodhi, Managing Director, GCMMF, which markets the brand Amul has been quoted in the past comparing agency-client relationships to that of a married couple.

“Since the client earns and the agency spends, the client is the husband and the agency is the wife. However, we have two wives - DaCunha Communications and Draftfcb Ulka,” he jokingly told the audience at Goafest last year.

Aprais would rather be politically correct. “The principle of the client-agency relationship should mean a partnership of equals,” says Gupta.

Unfortunately, this is often passed over in the hurly-burly of daily deadlines. The result is a ‘master-servant’ relationship with the ad agency often playing the subservient role. Consequently, agency-client relationships are falling apart a lot faster.

“The overall sense is that there are quite a few more ‘pitches’ against incumbent agencies than there were in the past,” says Gupta. Some happen within a year of the partnership being forged. Even as we are writing this, a huge MNC personal accessories brand is looking for a new partner after just one year with its current agency.

“Imagine the deleterious effect on the brand, not to mention the time and cost of going through another pitch so soon,” says Gupta.

Other service providers such as R3 Worldwide which claims to help clients establish high-performing relationships with their marketing agencies have been around for more than four decades globally.

But Aprais, born only 12 years ago, claims to be different. An ad industry veteran, Kim Walker, the founder and chairman of Aprais, realised that agency evaluations were becoming increasingly one-sided (client evaluating the agency), and this usually tended to become arbitrary and subjective.

The realisation that client-agency relationships were interdependent on the performance of both client and agency teams, and both needed to be evaluated, also became prevalent.

The other factor was the employee churn on both sides.

“The teams which consist of different people who come and go need to work together on both sides, many times on a daily basis. That highlighted the need for a system that could incorporate everyone’s feedback, which could be given without fear or favour, and which would lead to joint ownership of the process and the future plan of action,” says Gupta.

Next, as marketing companies and agencies spread their operations across the world, they felt the need for a system that could evaluate the performance of the relationships on a standard that was benchmarked, and allowed them an objective and detailed view, especially at the regional and global HQ.

Marketing companies were often using multiple agencies as well, so the need to evaluate inter-agency and inter-market performance was also critical. For example, MNC clients have to focus on multiple agency partnerships across different markets, brands, brand variants, categories and more recently, different services for the same brand with different agencies, and so on. “The complexity of many markets, many brands and many agencies became such that a standard system that could manage this complexity, provide comparable results and add value to the feedback was required,” says Gupta.

Further, as agency remuneration began to be based on fees and variable incentives, the need for a system that could help fairly calculate the variable portion of agency fees was also felt, and Aprais included this feature in its overall offering.

The company also realised that a one-time, dipstick type of system would not really add value. So Aprais introduced the principle of regular evaluations (twice a year) with actionable feedback integrated into the system. “Client-agency relationships are organic, ongoing and involve many people; thus the need to have a regular feedback system was particularly relevant,” says Gupta.

Finally, any system, even if it is in-house, is run by the client company and besides the cost and complexity, often objectivity becomes an issue. The system can become inward-looking because it will not have any external benchmarks to refer to. Gupta claims that to be one of Aprais’ big advantages.

“We have now completed almost 12,000 relationship evaluations and have a tremendous amount of data on benchmarks of performance by sector, region, network, country,” says Gupta.

A large ad agency head, however, feels that services such as these would work only when both partners agree that they have a problem in the first place. “But often both agencies and clients like to live in denial mode.”

Did someone say, stay single?

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