Mastering the client-agency relationship - Richard Warren, prev. Lloyds Banking Group & Lowe

0:28Welcome back everybody to Uncensored CMO. some of the biggest banking and financial services brands in the country. I thought this would be a great chance to talk about something I've wanted to talk about for a long time, which is how do you get the most out of the client and agency relationship? Because when you get that right, it leads to amazing work. So he is the perfect guest to get into this and we've got lots of hot topics to cover. So without further ado, let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Richard Warren. I'm very pleased to be joined by Richard Warren, who is actually, as we speak, between jobs.

0:59So I thought this might be the perfect chance to get him uncensored because he hasn't got any, well, I assume he hasn't got any obligation to anybody at this moment. No, I'm still under all employment contractual guidelines with Lloyds Banking Group. So no, I won't be falling foul of those. Very good. Very good. Okay. Well, this is great. Thanks for taking the time to come and talk to us. You spent a lot of time on a career agency side, more recently in your career gone client side. I've done the opposite. So I've been mostly client side agency. So I thought there'd be a really good time to have a conversation about agencies and clients and how to get the best out of the work.

1:32But for everyone listening and watching, tell us a bit about who you are and your journey, because you've had some interesting kind of connections through your career that kind of bring you to where you are today, haven't you? Indeed. I basically fell in love with advertising when I was at uni and haven't lost my love for advertising ever since. And, you know, I'm one of those people who has found the thing that they love doing and I'm amazed to get actually paid for it. So I've been very lucky in that respect. And I've pretty much done all of the jobs that you can do in the advertising and marketing world.

2:03I started off as a training account person at Publicis and then went to an agency called Shiat Day. Then I went across the Atlantic and worked in New York for an agency called Kirshenbaum Bond, which was an amazing experience. Did that for four years. Then I actually came back as a planner and converted over to planning and then was the strategy partner of Delaney Lundnox Warren, which set up in 2000. So did that for about 10 years, then became the CEO of the agency, did that for five years and then decided that I actually really loved media. and I've always, always loved media and managed to get a job with Group M, running an agency they'd set up servicing Lloyd's Banking Group, which was called Greenhouse.

2:49Did that for a year and then whilst I was there, my client, a brilliant woman called Ros King, she resigned and to her great credit, she said to me, Richard, how about coming to do my job? And I'd never thought, you know, I wanted to go client side. I'd always assumed I'd be agency till I died, but I'd worked with all the team at Lloyd's. I really loved them, respected them, thought they were all awesome. So, yeah, I moved across to Lloyd's Banking Group five years ago and I've now done that for five years. So apart from the creative part of the job, I've done pretty much everything. So what's really interesting about this is you've done the creative for them, you've done the media for them, and you're now working for them, right?

3:27So that's a pretty, you've seen it from all kind of three sides. I'd love to know, when you went client-side for the first time, what surprised you, you know, having worked in agencies doing creative and media, What was it like going client side and what did you learn in those first few weeks? I think I knew it already, but I was so surprised by how brilliant the other people were that I work with client side. And I think that, you know, in advertising, certainly when I started, agencies used to be incredibly disparaging about clients. And they were like, you know, they're stupid. And we are the people who are going to tell them what they need to do.

4:02And only we are the experts. And if we were investment bankers, they would just, you know, happily take our advice, which isn't true. And we can talk about that. And I think that, you know, what I was so amazed by and so impressed by was how brilliant the people I work with at Lloyd's were. I mean, just incredibly bright, incredibly marketing literate and desperate to do the right thing. Funny you say it, you give me a bit of deja vu. Years ago, I was invited to sit on a panel, an agency event. so probably about 100 people from agencies there talking about the pitch process right and i was the i was the nominal client on the panel representing kind of the client point of view and it felt like i was in the lion's den i mean i can't tell you the anger and frustration and almost hurt i think that that was being directed to me i almost felt like i was like literally apologizing on behalf of clients everywhere so it was quite visceral you know and i remember i i said to them i said look remember this one thing and this was no i wasn't exaggerating at all i said tomorrow morning i'm going to wake up at 4 a.m i'm driving to newcastle because i have a pitch to greg's the baker to try and maintain a listing for my brand which is the worth 30 percent of my turnover i said every customer of yours has a customer who is as demanding and as as painful as you're feeling it right now.

5:27And I said, look, I'm sure the pitch process is horrible, but just remember that if you can help solve your client's pain and help them win their pitch to their customer, honestly, you'll be in a great position. Yeah, and I think agencies are a lot, lot better at this now. So I think the time I'm talking about is in the sort of 1990s where agencies were very arrogant. But I think that now, I think good agencies have got a really good understanding of the client's own customers. And if you explain to them, we've got this issue with mortgage sales amongst first-time buyers, they completely get that that is the issue and it's not just about producing the next ad.

6:09So I think agencies have made big, big advances in the last decade in terms of get much better understanding of clients. Now, I noticed you won three IPA golds, so congratulations. It's always good. I have to say as a client that they're probably the most reassuring awards to win. I know whenever I was sat in reception and kind of wanted to meet an agency, I was a lot more reassured by the Effie count than the Can Lion count. Because basically one is for the industry, the other one is for the customer, really. But IPA is about as good as you're going to get, really, in terms of the rigor that goes into those awards.

6:44Tell me what you won them for and tell me, a particular one to understand is why did you win them and what can we learn from them? To be fair, two of them were for the same campaign, which was the Halifax Howard Brown campaign, which I'll talk about in a moment. The other one was for Digital UK, and that was about when the UK was being converted to digital TV. And it was a very specific task, which was that everyone was going to convert anyway. And what we were looking to do was to get the last 10 percent of people who weren't going to do it. So it was a very specific piece of targeting and type of advertising.

7:18But I think what was interesting about the Halifax Howard Brown campaign, which we won the gold award for and also integrated comms, it was a sort of early example of a completely integrated idea, what you would call a fluent device in that we took something which was true of the brand, which was that staff or colleagues, as they were called, were at the heart of the brand. and we made them heroes. So the campaign we called Star for Stars. And obviously the first star was Howard Brown, who we never expected to completely sort of take over the campaign and dominate the campaign. And, you know, did absolute gangbusters in terms of the brand, you know, blew the socks off in terms of every advertising metric, every sales metric, and it created, you know, this amazing integrated campaign from the company out.

8:06And it was a fascinating campaign for us as an agency because we'd won this account in our first year. We'd set up this agency and we'd managed to win Halifax in year one. And we created this campaign, which, as I said, did incredibly well in the real world. But the advertising industry didn't like it at all because they were like, that bloke can't sing. All the best campaigns. Yeah. You know, this is not very well crafted. You know, this is this is not polished. You know, it was in the era of when X Factor was just starting. So these are, you know, these are amateurs that are on the screen. and we thought, what do we actually mind about this?

8:39Do we mind about the fact that the industry doesn't like this campaign, but yet our client loves it, it's working fantastically well, and other marketing directors are all coming to us and saying, we love your Halifax campaign, can we have some of that? So it was a new business trained for us, and it became very defining for us as an agency, and we said, this is what we believe, we don't care what the industry thinks. Our creative director had this soundbite about, You know, we create work for taxi drivers, not awards juries. And we became very proud about the fact that we were a populist agency.

9:12I remember a friend of mine saying, Richard, you know, your agency is all a bit ITV. So that's a problem. Yeah, that was a problem. This is like the most mass market brand you can possibly be. And he was being disparaging that our advertising output was to ITV. So and that just sort of fortified our belief that, yes, you know, what we were was all about, you know, populist advertising for the people and not worrying so much about what the industry thought. You're so right, because most CMOs, most marketing directors have got to go and take the campaign that your agency have created and go and sell it into their customers.

9:44They've got to sell it into the board. They've got to show it to their employees. And, you know, you have that cringe moment. If you've got maybe one that's won awards for being brave or whatever, but actually what you need is to have something that could demonstrably works, makes the organisation feel proud, you know, actually leads to sales and business effects. So I can really understand that. I've always wondered, is Howard an actual, was he actually an employee of Halifax? He really was an employee. He worked in the Sheldon branch. We conducted, you know, it was an amazing sort of creative idea because we basically did this whole call for participants.

10:24So we actually got Jonathan Ross to do it. He had this video and basically we got all the colleagues who wanted to take part down to London's swanky West End. You know, they were all up on stage. They did their turns and then we selected a whole batch of them. So actually, you know, in the first instance, we had several stars. So there was Yvonne and there was Matt and so on. But Howard just completely took over. And so it eventually became the Howard Brown campaign. But but it did mean that we could feature colleagues in all sorts of comms. So all the branch advertising had colleagues in, you know, videos would have colleagues in.

10:59And, you know, the person who ran Halifax at the time, this chap, Andy Hornby, he'd come from Asda. And he was passionate about making Halifax a retail brand. And it was all about, you know, our colleagues. Asda was famous. I remember Alan Layton at the time as well. He was big on the kind of colleague engagement. He'd come from Asda and they used to premiere the ads at the Birmingham NEC. so I remember Howard coming on to stage in a limo once and actually performing the song live before the ad had broken and colleagues just absolutely bloody loved it because we were debuting the ads live in front of them um you know before it was even shot so it became a sort of amazing you know it ran for 10 years and I think you know would be agreed to be the most successful campaign in financial servicing during that period and and still you know bedevils Halifax as a brand because everyone, you know, talks about bringing back Howard and where is Howard?

11:53And you rise back to the era because that was very much when X-Fact was at the peak of its fame and it was the number one TV show and so on. Yeah, everyone. Saturday Night, yeah. Alexandra Burke, that whole thing. Yes, it was. Yeah, almost that was when you guaranteed Christmas number one, couldn't you? If you won X-Fact, it was almost a done deal. I wanted to ask you, so what do you wish you knew now? So now you're a client. Tell me what you wish you knew in terms of agency. that you know now? I think how aligned with you clients are. So I think there's still this thing with agencies that they think they have to get things past clients or around clients, or they need to compensate in some way.

12:36And I think that agencies will be very surprised as to how aligned clients want to be. And if you can spend time agreeing, we had this great thing, which was very successful for us at DRKW called Shared Agenda, where we actually spent time to go off-site with the client and create a shared agenda. So we said, and within that, you would uncover all these sort of really interesting sort of client fixations. So, you know, why do you only ever present one idea? And they were so passionate about it. And you said, okay, fine, we'll always present three, and that will be part of the shared agenda with this client.

13:13And we had another example with the Financial Times who are obsessed with us presenting on the day. So, you know, quite often you'd review work and it wasn't quite there. And as with most clients, you could do that with Lloyds, phone them up and say, we've just reviewed the work, we're not quite there, do you mind if we present next Thursday as opposed to on Tuesday? And the Financial Times said, absolutely not, you've got to present on Tuesday. And so when we went off-site with them on the shared agenda, we said, you know, why are you so obsessed with us presenting on time? And they said, we produce a national newspaper every single day.

13:45how come you can't produce an advertising campaign? And he just thought, that's right. So then that became part of the shared agenda with the FT that we would always present on time because it was something that, so I think clients have a lot of sort of specific idiosyncrasies. So it's not one size fits all. And I think it really behoves agencies to understand what are the sort of specific idiosyncrasies and characteristics of that client. And I think if they do that, they'll find that the clients themselves or then be prepared to understand the agency more and what motivates agencies and so on.

14:19And I think that's probably the thing that I wish I understood more. That's really good advice. I remember when probably the only arguments I've had with my ECDs in the past have usually come down to the fact that I remember often saying, I totally agree with your recommendation, but what you've got to understand is I have to sell this idea to a bunch of accountants, effectively, right, who do not live in our world they do not understand you know i mean if i was working on cabaret can you imagine selling in a drumming gorilla i mean like you'll be laughed out the room i mean genuinely laughed out the room so you you need to help me help me you know you instinctively know right you instinctively know this is a brilliant idea it's going to create fame everyone's going to talk about it go viral i get that help me sell it in and that's always that was always the bit that i found a bit of a story in fact weirdly it's actually why i work at system one because what i found with system one is by pre-testing with the audience you often gave the rational case for doing something quite emotional that that people wouldn't necessarily understand so it was often the thing that unlocked the big you know how on earth are going to sell this crazy idea and you know i mean and i think i think again you know that that gorilla ad was you know done in the 2000s i think that agencies have become much more conversant on this and i think that I think everyone collectively is much more literate in terms of how advertising works, how it needs to be sold in, how it meets business problems.

15:46So I think many of those issues have improved significantly. You're spot on. I mean, the evidence base, the theory, you know, the amount of work that goes into it, I totally agree. And in fact, you know, I certainly feel as a marketer now, we're so well equipped with data and books on it and podcasts, for example. you know so we've almost had the the sort of mirror career right so so i think we're a similar sort of age um i've spent 20 or so years client side and in the last four years i've done i'm now working for an agency effectively well a platform i suppose but but you know i'm in the industry of helping what you know clients like i used to be make great advertising so it's kind of like you know a bit of a flip and uh when i i had about six months between job i got fired by brew dog and then had to suddenly found myself out of a job.

16:33How unique to be fired by Brudel. I know, exactly. Breaking news. You've got to be the only person in Britain that's ever been fired by Brudel. That's never happened before. Yeah, exactly. The first and only CMO, which is probably worthy of another podcast episode, actually, before I go down that little rabbit warren. But in the six months between leaving there and then starting, something quite funny happened, which is I just got inundated with calls from agencies and they said, John, can you come and do some training on how to pitch to a CMO? you know how you know what do we not know about our customer and um it was quite fun actually i i kind of had loads of fun with different lots of lots of different agencies design and pr creative media and um i used to kind of run this workshop but i thought i'd just run a few of these past you to see what you think the first thing that surprised agencies to know is i actually worked out that i spent in a typical week five percent of my time on communication communications right People are really shocked about that.

17:31They kind of assume that as a CMO, I'm there thinking about advertising all the time. But I'm actually kind of doing finances. I'm doing budget. I'm doing training. I'm doing strategy. I'm doing everything else, really. I'm doing custom presentations. about five percent of my time is on communication i think i i sometimes think that creative agencies don't realize that the thing they do although expensive high profile is actually still a minority of their customers job do you do you think that does that ring true for you yeah definitely rings true and i think the other sort of allied truth is that there's this sort of thought on the agency side that whilst that might be the case the bit the client likes doing the most is the communications and that's not true um that you know i am as interested in you know talking to you know halifax mortgage people about the problems with first-time buyers or making the case for advertising or being in a brainstorming talking about a new product proposition that to me is as interesting as creating the new lloyd's ad so i think there's also this thing that you know it is five to ten percent and the client thinks that's the cream of their job yeah well it links me nicely to the next point actually because the times i got most excited by a creative idea was when it actually solved a business problem not a creative not a comms problem so i think so as soon as i got an idea that i thought oh that could be our employee internal engagement platform or i could go down to the factory and talk to them about you know you know the how it's going to position the brand it was those kind of things or when it kind of So I always, one of the bits of advice I always gave is whenever you get a brief, right, you should ask one question, which is what's the business problem that this brief has led to, that has led to this brief rather.

19:18Because often what I find with briefs is briefs, you know, briefs will go, who's the audience? You know, what are the campaign objectives? You know, et cetera, et cetera, right? When's the deadline? Not everything in a brief is of equal value. you and the other thing i know i i found i mean maybe this is just because i'm not very good at writing briefs but it's often not written by the decision maker and often the decision maker's got access to far more intel about the business and where it's going in the strategy and often actually between a brief being written and a brief you know being responded to the world's changed as well i used to sit in debriefs gone oh they've responded to the brief but actually since then this thing has happened or whatever and one bit of advice he used to give is like when you get the brief just ask for 20 or 30 minutes with the decision maker and just ask them two questions right first question is what's the business problem the second question is how will you decide and what was interesting about that is whenever i did the training not once did any agency i spoke to do that because what they said to me they always say oh we can't possibly bother the clients like the client's really busy and i'm like they're going to be more busy if you get the answer wrong You know what I mean?

20:26I think, as you say, if you're in that situation where you're saying we can't bother the client, then the relationship's not good because the client would be delighted to be bothered. And as you say, it's not, you know, I've got into a bit of a trouble about this with my agencies, but I don't place so much store on a sort of fixed brief because I think, as you say, it's rolling all the time. So, you know, I'll often just phone up the agency and say, this has happened or we've got this issue. And I'm expecting the brief to evolve. And I think when it becomes too fixed in time, then is when you get into those problems and it becomes very much sort of us and them and we respond to the brief.

21:08Whereas I think what you want to do is to create a sort of single team where, you know, this is widely documented when people don't know who's on the agency, who's on the client side, and it's a single team. So, yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, interestingly, we in fact won last night at the campaign media agency awards, the agency team of the year. And what the team was is half Lloyd's Banking Group people and half Zenith people. And they sit all together in Zenith offices and it's just a single team. And they won the award for the best agency team. That's such a good, such a simple thing and such a good tip.

21:44So in my experience now, agency size, whenever I've even spent one or two hours in reception, like just working in reception of one of our customers, the amount of conversations that lead to work, I can almost guarantee it. People walk past going, oh, John, I meant to talk to you about this thing I've got and this ad I'm creating. Can you give me a point of view on this? And it always leads to work. It's really funny. So if you can engineer a reason to physically be with your customer, it will pay off. No, I agree. I remember when we had the Morrison's account, you know, which was a sort of set piece advertising account.

22:23We thought this was a big account, but there was this guy who ran another agency. He literally spent his life up there. And, you know, all he was doing is going around from room to room, picking up briefs wherever he went to. And I remember sitting down with him one time and he told me that actually the size of his business was bigger than ours. Actually, you reminded me, actually, a former colleague of mine, Marcus, who was a top sales guy. In fact, he always phones me up after every episode, going, when am I going to get a mention on your podcast? So, Marcus, if you're listening or watching, this is it.

22:52But one of the things I learned from Marcus is Tesco, obviously, biggest customer for most FMCGs in the UK. There's a little tiny Costa Coffee in their reception. And he would literally just work there every day and would wait for the buyer to come in and then accidentally bump into them and go, oh i'm glad i saw you because you know i'm here for some other meeting yeah not really but you know and it's just it's just brilliant i think you know those kind of hustles are key agreed one of the other things i use i often uh said when i did this was what i think lots of agencies get wrong is they they sell they sell the service they provide not the solution they provide and i always say you know sell sell the problem you're solving not the service so often in pitches i know or even induction presentations it'll be like 50 50 minutes of this is what we do yeah right and there'll be the this is the logo slide this is our unique kind of approach this sort of thing and i remember right often stopping and going can i just ask you you've not once asked me a question you haven't asked me what my problem is yeah so how do you know what the solution is i just find i mean it's the art i mean when i did negotiation training years ago they used to talk about the art of the customer interview which is always start with some casual questions of to the customer you know how's your business going you know where where are your objectives what's keeping up at night all those and then of course you can reverse nicely into it where it's just go here's my creds then you might miss the mark entirely yeah and i think i think one of the challenges for agencies is what currency is celebrated internally because i know that you know when i was creative agency side you know everyone would gather you know once a month and then people would show the latest ads You know, so it was always about here's the new X TV ad and the new campaigns and so on.

24:38And so the currency that the agencies value is their output. And I think that to your point, you know, there is opportunities for agencies to change the currency of what they value. So if they valued, you know, problem, you know, lateral solutions to problems or, you know, celebrating, you know, correct diagnoses of client problems and different solutions, then that would change that. So I think that is a significant opportunity for agencies. I'll tell you what I'll do, right? So I once, working with a large soft drink company in the UK, we had a big conference in Ireland, and we actually invited the Tesco director of drinks, basically.

25:17So probably the most powerful person in drinks, because Tesco accounted for like 30 % of all consumption of soft drinks in the retail sector. And I was up with him very late, very, very late in the bar. In fact, you know, I think he had a flight at 7am. We're still there at 5am. Straight through. Exactly. Just doing the straight through option. And he said to me something that you could perceive as deeply arrogant, right? But was incredibly revealing. He said to me, how are you going to get me promoted? And I thought, damn it, that is such a good question. Now, most people are real going, bloody hell.

25:54That's a bit arrogant, isn't it? Who do you think you are? But I thought, there it is. so what what came off the back of that conversation is i said okay well health is a single biggest issue that we face as an this is a few years ago when the sugar tax coming in we are committed to creating a revolution in healthy drinks we will collaborate and i will give you exclusivity on all our initiatives you know and make sure that you get and in fact what we'll do is we'll do joint press activity together we'll get on sky and bbc and talk about it together a sort of thing so that you get the benefit of the publicity.

26:27And it transformed our relationship. But it started from what perceived as an arrogant question, how are you going to get me promoted? I just wonder as an agency if you thought, you know, how can I get my client promoted? I think promotion is sort of, you know, nakedly venal. So I think I'd probably shy away from that specific. But I think if you can do something which would result in a promotion. So what I was always very fixated on, which I still think has great relevance, is agreeing some quite exciting language. So, you know, in your case, you would say, right, we want to make Tesco, you know, the key partner in the revolution in soft drink, healthy soft drink.

27:07So you've established this sort of bridgehead, this mantra that you're going towards. And that's what I always used to try and do with my clients is say, right, we, you know, if it was, you know, Morrison's issue at the time was they weren't associated with good fresh food. And I say, we are going to solve the Morrison's fresh food problem. So that becomes the mantra. So you only ever talk about the mantra. So then that becomes your gift to the client that they in turn can say, I am going to be the person who are going to change Morrison's perception for fresh food. And then hopefully they'll get promoted off the back of it.

27:40That's a very nice way of doing it. I like that. Not quite the naked ambition of get me promoted. The outcome's the same. Yeah, production is the byproduct. Yes, indeed. Well done. Another thing as well I notice as a client is often like how on earth do you pick an agency? Because like even those top 100 lists are intimidating. I mean, I used to think like when I'm looking for a new PR agency, for example, a few years ago, I'd go top 100 PR agencies. There are 2 ,000 PR agencies in the UK, it turns out. There's a top 100 list and no one's got time to do that. The only way around I found it is a friend of mine, Gav, who runs a PR agency in London.

28:20And I used to phone him up and say, Gav, who are the three agencies you fear when you're pitching against them? You know, sort of like, and you go, oh, right. I'll tell you what, the three that if they turn up, I know we're toast or whatever. You know, and I used to use that as a way of deciding. But how, what would you advise a client in terms of how do you pick an agency? I think, you know, obviously looking at some of the work that they produce and thinking, do I like that kind of work? And I think that, you know, the advantage with creative work, unlike with media agencies, is that there's a massive variety amongst it.

28:53So you can you can see. And I do think agencies tend to produce particular kinds of work. So I think I think that acts as a good filter. I think it does, you know, come down to people. You know, I think I think that all of the best client agency relationships come down to the relationship between the people. and I think it's incredibly quick and easy to discern. I think you know, I always felt when I was agency side, I was instant, the clients that instantly we'd get on with and then there were clients we just knew we'd never worked with in a thousand years and they went out and we're just like, no chemistry whatsoever.

29:30And I think you get a really good feeling and it's incredibly important because you spend so much time with them and you need to trust them completely and get that they're on the completely same page as you. So I think the personal part of it is hugely important. I could not agree more. The people buy from it. I think with our obsession with technology and with automation, we somehow forget. Also, purchasing departments really screw this up because they're talking about hourly rate billings and terms and payment days and all this kind of thing. Whereas actually the power of a strong relationship and also a long relationship as well where you really trust each other.