Articles & Whitepapers

Why Everyone Gets Burned with a Bake Off...

10/01/2008

By Jonathan Fisher, CEO

You need creative. You want the best. You know many firms would love your business. So why not make a short list of agencies, have them come in and see who creates the best ideas? Then you can pick a “winner,” sit down with the lucky team and talk about your strategy and doing some “real” paying work. Makes perfect sense, right? Absolutely.

Except it doesn’t work.

Requesting creative work on speculation (for free or a nominal charge) doesn’t bring out the best creative, even when you’re demanding concepts from elite agencies — which means it doesn’t give you a true idea of a firm’s capabilities. And there are many other reasons why this approach will fail.

To start, you’re developing creative that isn’t properly informed. Effective programs demand access to top-level personnel, proprietary information and a thorough discovery process. Asking for creative outside of these channels of information is like demanding the best apple you’ve ever tasted without first giving the tree sunlight, water or fertile soil. Design should never be the first step to solving a communications challenge, unless you want a cookie-cutter template.

But the most compelling reason to steer clear of this approach is that it thwarts proper creative engineering. Suppose that sales are weak. Does this mean you need an ad? Maybe so. But what if there’s a more cost-effective way to solve the problem? And what exactly is the real problem? A quick fix won’t solve a deeper problem and neither will creative competitions. You need to dig deeper into the real issues.

Advertising and other marketing tactics are just tools. Don’t lose sight of what you really want. It’s not the ad or brochure or Web site. It’s higher profitability — now and in the long run. It’s market share. It’s your corporate objectives realized consistently among your employees and across your offices. Rely on references, interviews, smaller trial projects — whatever methodology makes you comfortable — but find another way to pick a lucky firm. Give them the resources they need and you will know very quickly if they are capable of developing a winning program for your business. Avoid a “bake off” and asking for spec work; it will only hurt you in the long run.

Jonathan Fisher is the CEO of BrandExtract, an integrated branding and communications firm that guides growing companies by providing strategic branding solutions, marketing communications, advertising, print and interactive services.

For more on evaluating agency performance, contact Jonathan Fisher or Bo Bothe at 713-942-7959.