Lessons to learn
1.STEVEJOBS
APPLE
from the long
marriage between
Allstate, Burnett
ALLSTATE from p. 8
“We don’t want suck-ups,” Ms.
Cochrane said. But it’s a two-way
street, she added. Although “you have
to challenge your agency, you have to
be willing to go with them, too.”
Though it was not his chief responsibility, Mr.
Jobs had with a deep understanding of how
vital marketing is. His long union with
Chiat/Day and, after its acquisition, TBWA,
was a model of agency-client relationships,
producing any number of successful
campaigns, chief among them “1984” and
“Think Different.” Mr. Jobs had weekly meetings with creative guru Lee Clow
but didn’t treat the agency with kid gloves. Some of the best parts of Walter
Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple founder
deal with the friction between Mr. Jobs and
TBWA executives Mr. Clow and James Vincent.
KEEP IT FRESH
Things are not always rosy between
Burnett and Allstate. In fact, they were
downright awful in 2003. The insurer
was feeling the heat from big-spending
rivals Geico and Progressive, and it
thought the agency’s work had turned
lackluster.
Instead of firing Burnett, Allstate
pressed for changes on both sides.
Recounting a critical moment, Leo
Burnett North America President Rich
Stoddart said that Allstate CEO Tom
Wilson called Linda Wolf, then the
chairwoman-CEO of Leo Burnett
Worldwide Chicago, and told her: “I
think I’ve got the B team on this busi-
ness and you’ve got the B team on this
business. I’m going to change my team,
and you need to change yours.”
In an interview, Mr. Stoddart said,
“What do most CEOs do? … Most of
them tell the CMO to call a review.
Tom Wilson didn’t do that. He said,
‘We’re at fault, you’re at fault. … We
need to fix it.’ ”
Allstate faces the same, if not
greater, competitive pressures now.
Though it has recently lost market
share (sometimes deliberately, to limit
exposure in high-risk areas), the com-
pany’s ads are highly regarded—partic-
ularly its “Mayhem” campaign.
But the team is again being reorganized, Ms. Cochrane said. “I just never
want anything to get tired or stale. It
always needs to feel fresh.”
2.CARLHAHN
VOLKSWAGEN OF AMERICA
In 1958, when Mr. Hahn arrived in the U.S.,
brand Volkswagen was nowhere. By the early
‘70s, it had an American cultural icon: the
Beetle. Credit Mr. Hahn’s hiring of then-
boutique agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, a move that sparked a revolution
on Madison Avenue and gave us memorable ads such as “Think Small”
and “Lemon.” He had a background in economics, but Mr. Hahn was a
marketing risk-taker whose respect for the
consumer’s intelligence foreshadowed
contemporary doctrine on the empowered
shopper.
10 FOR
THIN
CLIE
■ BY MATTHEW CREAMER
As the father of the Pepsi Generation, the
late Mr. Pottasch named an enduring brand
platform and identified the importance of
the youth culture for marketers. His decades-long relationship with BBDO,
especially creative head Phil Dusenberry, helped move advertising away
from product information and demonstrated how marketing could
celebrate the consumer’s lifestyle, both real
and imagined.
3.ALANPOTTASCH
PEPSICO
Clients are often depicted as conservative corporat
the Technicolor brilliance of the agency’s creative w
number of brand-side marketers who bring guts a
Here’s a ranking of 10 forward-thinking executives
help you become a better client. And we included f
5.KENCHENAULT
AMERICAN EXPRESS
4.JIMSTENGEL
PROCTER & GAMBLE
During his years as chief marketing officer,
Mr. Stengel did the unthinkable: He made
marketing cool at the staid consumer-
packaged-goods giant. Mr. Stengel
championed spending on cause-related
initiatives and in emerging-media channels, and brought in hip agencies
such as Wieden & Kennedy for Old Spice. Now a consultant and author, he
helped P&G earn a reputation for creativity while he improved sales. He
was an industry firebrand at a critical time and provided intellectual air
cover for budgeting for digital experimentation. A 2004 speech in which
he declared the marketing model “broken” will go down as a classic.
Even while guiding his company through the
financial crisis, AmEx’s CEO carves out a lot
of time for the marketing function. He
cultivated a relationship with Ogilvy &
Mather that resulted in some of the
category’s best creative. Pointing out that
American Express makes nothing, Robert
Solomon, author of “The Art of Client Service,” said the company “is built
on something far more elusive and hard to
define; in some respects it is the purest
manifestation of a brand. Ken is particularly
adept at understanding this.”
6.ANDREAALSTRUP
JOHNSON & JOHNSON
KEEP COMMUNICATING
Allstate gives Burnett a performance
review twice a year, but in reality the
two are always evaluating each other.
“If I start to sniff out that something’s
going sour—and it goes sour every day,
the pace is so incredibly hectic—if I start
to even smell that, I will go right in on
it,” Ms. Cochrane said. “Likewise, I
want them to tell us if we’re not being
the best client partner and address it
[rather] than let things get to be rotten.”
Case in point: About a year ago, Ms.
Cochrane became disenchanted with
Allstate’s radio advertising, so she coordinated a “radio day” at Burnett headquarters, inviting outside experts to
give advice and show off great work. In
October Allstate’s “Mayhem” radio
campaign won a 2011 Mercury award.
Hard as it may be to remember, there was a
time when J&J could call itself the world’s
MANY SHOPS HATE IT, MANY ADVERTISERS LOVE IT:
Pitch practice allows agencies to show off and affords marketers a level of comfort
■ BY JACK NEFF jneff@adage.com
KEEP IT HAPPY
Allstate and Burnett make a point of
playing as hard as they work. At a holiday gathering the team ate, drank and
“danced into the night,” Ms. Cochrane
said. Of course, sometimes people just
click, like Ms. Cochrane and Mr.
Wickman, who joined the team not long
after the 2003 reshuffle. “Within about
five minutes I hit it off with Lisa,” he
said.
IF EVER THERE was a bone of
contention between agency and
client, it’s spec creative—an
agency producing work, solicited
or unsolicited, to dazzle a
prospective client. And while
even some client-side people are
beginning to question its value,
the practice isn’t going away anytime soon.
John Gleason, a former mar-keting-procurement executive at
Procter & Gamble and founder of
A Better View Consulting, holds
that spec creative consumes as
much as 1% of industry revenue—a big chunk, given profit
margins of 6% to 10% in recent
years for big agency-holding
companies.
“I don’t think clients fully
appreciate how this adds cost to
the infrastructure of the indus-
try,” Mr. Gleason said.
Mr. Gleason said the procurement executive in him would like
to see money spent on spec creative go toward reducing fees. He
doubts that would happen if spec
creative went away but believes
at least staffing and quality of
work for existing clients would
benefit.
One agency executive who
requested anonymity called the
practice “an antiquated beauty-contest model that doesn’t cut it
in a complicated world.” Beyond
being unfair to agencies not
compensated for their work, he
said spec creative doesn’t often
reflect how the agency and client
will work together in the real
world.
P&G has seldom used spec
creative for reviews, and some
other big marketers are clearly
moving away from it. Kraft
Foods, for example, went with
the project approach over tradi-
tional reviews, using spec cre-
ative for “Operation Spark,” in
which it summoned new ideas to
market for some of its smaller
brands that didn’t have existing
agencies.
