A couple of issues ago, a column appeared in Advertising Age Central America and Caribbean. It may well have gone unnoticed by many, especially since the publication does not have a digital version, as hard as it may be to believe. However, because of the way it expresses another point of view, totally different from that of many, including mine, I allow myself to add it to the industry section and place it in the numbered series a day before the start of the Cannes Lions 2011 Festival.
The author of the column is Arnaldo José Garnier, President of the Garnier Communication Group. Without further introduction, here is the text of his contribution to the magazine and the advertising industry:
The client’s success is one’s own success, not the other way around.
Our raison d’être as advertisers is to generate value to the brands that clients entrust to us, based on the good development of the strategic plan and with first class human talent.
The goal of advertising agencies is that clients achieve sales results, that their brands grow and stand out from the rest. All this with innovation, creativity in the message and efficiency in the means of contact.
We want to become a strategic partner of our clients, a differential tool for the achievement of their business objectives.
But what happens when agencies think more about awards than clients?
They start to distract creative resources to develop “gimmicks” and force clients to place unsolicited campaigns, without any strategic basis, but “very creative”. This causes clients to doubt the agencies’ professionalism and question their economic compensation.
They doubt whether their campaign is objectively good or whether it responds to pressure from the agency to win a prize. The desperate search for one’s own success and not the client’s leads to a disproportionate growth of the ego, to seek creativity in the foreground, leaving the client’s interests in second place.
Creative awards should come as a consequence of the achievement of the client’s objectives. The relevance of the ad, the impact on sales, the value it adds to the brand.
Advertising is a tool to accelerate the awareness or perception of the brand before the consumer. It is a business that must give economic results in favor of the advertisers.
We must not forget our essence, avoiding creating a Hollywood-like fantasy world at the Oscar Awards ceremony.
For this reason, we always celebrate our clients’ success as our own… and we see the creative awards as a good drink at an advertisers’ party, but in moderation, as it can intoxicate us and make us lose our way.
Arnaldo Garnier, President of the Garnier Communication Group
I celebrate diversity, so it is no coincidence that in the third entry of this series I published a note entitled Viva la Diferencia (Long Live Difference). The important thing is to add to the controversy, to open spaces for ideas to be exchanged and for evolution, creativity and the future that we are obliged to deliver better to prevail.
While life goes on, tomorrow Cannes begins. Several networks are confident that they can unseat BBDO as the most awarded network at Cannes, a condition they have achieved for 2 consecutive years. There will also be more than a few agencies that will try to beat Almap BBDO for the Agency of the Year Lion they won in 2010.
At the same time, all the Costa Rican agencies participating in the festival expect to win finalists and lions, among them Tribu DDB, jotabeqú, Ogilvy, Publimark, Father, Comunicación Corporativa, as well as Garnier BBDO and House Rapp, agencies of the Garnier Communication Group. In fact, in 2011 we broke the record of entries in Cannes by Costa Rican agencies. I’m sure they are all participating to win the most sought after awards in the world of branding and advertising.
So good luck to all Costa Rican agencies, and Central American agencies as well. It’s time to continue stimulating creative talent, to provoke the brands we manage and hopefully to collect more lions for our region. Of all this, the ultimate winners will be our clients, because ours is a business that results from theirs.
