2008 ANA Client / Agency Forum

I had the pleasure of attending the annual ANA Client / Agency Forum in New York last month.

Around 200 marketing, procurement and agency executives congregated at the B.B. King Blues club on 42nd street to hone their knowledge around relationship management. There were some interesting presentations and this is a very quick "cherry pick" of the parts I found most interesting.

360 Evaluations

Michele Buck, Senior Vice President, Global Chief Marketing Officer, The Hershey Company

Michele spoke in depth about their agency evaluation process and how she views the 360 degree assessment feature as being very important. Hershey encourage frank feedback from their agency to ensure they are operating at maximum efficiency. She also views the use of a 3rd party to be of great benefit for their agency relationship - for example to present feedback objectively.

Agency Compensation

Nancy Hill, President and Chief Executive Officer, AAAA

The main thrust of Nancy's presentation was around the unfair nature of the current compensation arrangements. She feels that the focus on "Time based costing" focuses on Inputs, while the emphasis should be on Outputs - again we here the call for Value-based Compensation.

And while this always seems to be a hot topic in the industry and there's quite a lot on the theory, there still appears to be little information offered about the actual practice of Value-based Compensation.

Dell's global agency

Torrence Boone, Chief Executive Officer, Enfatico

Having read some negative articles around this type of model prior to the conference, I was unsure about what to expect from this presentation.

Torrence did a great job explaining the goals of Dell's new model. And I also liked the way that he reinforced that this is just one commercial model - and that he was not trying to convert everyone to it.

For the Dell relationship, where efficiency (cost containment) and speed of execution are so important, particularly on the global scale they operate on, he did put forward a strong case - as well as acknowledging possible negatives (mainly around creatives getting "stale)."

In-house agencies

This panel discussion, as the last session, was also extremely interesting, mainly as it was not an area in which I have much exposure. Most of the emphasis seems to be on the Execution / Production elements and as with the Dell model, it would seem that efficiency is the dominant reason for having in-house agencies.

Conclusion - a very good event!

All in all, another great conference from the ANA and I'd highly recommend that marketing professionals interested in Agency / Client relations should attend next year.

Author: Richard Benyon (Decideware)