Are You a Partner or a Vendor?

A vendor is more often than not an accounting description that helps you to get paid. It is a part of Supply Chain Management where someone provides goods or services, where one is a cost, a part of the cost of goods for a business. Part of the accounting process to determine profit. Just as your agency has suppliers, isn't vendor a better sounding term then supplier? Vendor is also used by accountants to designate and differentiate the type of 'cost of goods' you are. Better a marketing or sales vendor than a supplier, a material or ingredient. You should note that while they call you 'vendor' they are in fact 'customers," the ones who are buying your services. That is the good part: vendors get paid by customers.

I hated to be called a 'supplier.' Supplier to me has always meant a supplier of goods that are resold by the business that hires you. I prefer vendor. And as long as a client pays their bills on time and don't string you out for 60 to 120 days, who cares what they call you.

I do get your point though, developing a cooperative relationship, or a marketing partnership where you bring your expertise and compliment the businesses marketing efforts.

To me, that is what we do, and we call it advertising, but without the cooperation, or partnering of the client, the entire promotional effort suffers. If they have been making and selling 'widgets' for hundreds of years they should have amassed some sort of intelligence that will be of use to the advertising agency when they create the promotion.

I agree with your first two points but disagree with the last two: "3.) An agency that's willing to open itself up, to become somewhat vulnerable. Ask to be treated like a partner, then put up walls, and it's not going to work. While you never want to bring work to a client that you wouldn't be comfortable running, you need to let them look inside a little, understand your thought process, see some of the tradeoffs. Just like you want them to reveal themselves, to react to your ideas in depth and in person. You're a team."

You might be a team, but my experience has always been that unless you are on the payroll you are an outside vendor perceived as someone with a hand in their pocket, no matter how much you and they may pretend otherwise.

"4.) A willingness to accept each other for better and for worse. The partnership doesn't really start until the honeymoon period is over and you've survived a few ups and down together."

Employees get the opportunity to learn and the luxury of mistakes, but an agency was hired to attain or achieve stated objectives. They either do it or they don't. The 'client' has several agencies, in many cases, just as the agency has many clients. Frankly I prefer the agency side of the business where you have a diverse group clients and the opportunity to impact each of them.

In-house agencies are employees and no one gives them a share of the profits (unless an employee profit sharing plan is in place) and they don't seem to mind. Perhaps that is the ideal segue for agencies, a profit-sharing model on a par with an employee profit sharing plan. But it still sounds like a stretch. In reality you really do have a relationship and an unspoken partnership. But as Glenn said – we don't share the risk: good or bad we get paid. Not much of a partnership if you ask me. But as far as the marketing and promotional effort goes – it is imperative that the two, agency and marketing/sales department, work together in concert. Some can even say, as partners. Because when one wins, the other does too.

I agree with you.

Doing your job in the best of all possible worlds sometimes comes up short. We do the best that we can do, and if we know what we are doing, just practicing our craft has to be good enough.

I look back on failures and it was always because I paid too much attention to one client over another. Sometimes the client got junior advice, but we did the best we could with the economics we had to deal with. Most disgruntled clients are so because of results first, poor account servicing second.

About your last comment about building the brand from the ground up. The input phase -- it is more difficult than it sounds. I was at General Mills in a new product development team, with me the outside vendor, there to provide promotional marketing ideas. This GMI brand manager comes in with what at first sight looked like dog barf on wax paper. It was dehydrated apricots. His wife had a dehydrator and was feeding him this. The idea was for the snacks unit to sell preserved fruit in a new form. I immediately said that the fruit value is almost gone and what is left is Fructose, like sucrose, that is just another word for sugar, and this is the worst kind of sugar, it sticks on your teeth to rot them. I said the American Dental Association and parent groups would be all over you if you tried to market it as a healthy fruit snack, even if you fortify it with nutrients they'll be all over you. Immediately I was the outsider, the naysayer in the group. What that was, was the truth. Telling it like it is, in your best judgement. I was asked how it would be packaged, I said it must be on waxed paper to maintain its shape because it is sticky, perhaps rolled up, aseptically pouched. Then I was asked what should be call it - I said Rolled Up Fruit. The Marketing Director Floyd quickly said Fruit Roll-ups. And so it stayed - and became a multi-million dollar category. We did some positioning statements and preliminary designs just to lose the whole thing within the first year. I had other similar experiences. We introduced Toaster Strudel for Pillsbury also. Positioning it as "You Never Toasted Anything Like It." Against Kellogg's Pop Tarts, it became the most successful new product introduction in the company's history and immediately became the category leader. We did that from the ground up. I do like working with R&D Food Scientists looking at their inventions and figuring out how to market them. Did you know that Pillsbury invented Microwave Popcorn because of Burger King? BK had this microwave oven heating Yambo sandwiches - the Efficiency Experts wanted it to do more - thus microwave popcorn. They put it in BK but people stayed eating it forever and the fastfood business is about getting them in and out quickly. So we got it as agency of record for Pillsbury Microwave Foods. We packaged it and created a new category. We were number one but lost the category leadership to Orville's gourmet popcorn. No matter what we did, it finally came down to price discounting, and that eventually dried up all of the advertising dollars.

So my thoughts are that it is much easier to repair someone else's mistakes then to build it from the ground floor. Although my agency had a reputation for new product introductions, I preferred getting a problem case and re-working it. Do that, make a loser a success, or an also ran into a category leader, and you prove your agency's effectiveness and worth. The partnership I always saw was this: you develop the product, we'll develop the brand. Their marketing identified the market and the opportunity, we made it happen by promoting the brand we created for them -- some would call that a partnership.