Not surprisingly, most of what we’re asked to do involves elaborating on some of the themes covered in the book, but tailored to a particular client’s current or future advertising.
This may mean working for the advertiser, the agency or both, but generally it entails delving deeply into areas such as: developing communications strategies that won’t have creative people alternately scratching their heads or climbing the walls; discovering how to better evaluate and nurture early-stage advertising ideas; determining the most effective research approaches and interpreting their results constructively; or gaining crystalline insight into the power and business power (or lack thereof) behind a particular brand.
We’re fundamentally opposed to conventional agency search assignments, but have discovered some interest in a practice we call agency “search & rescue”. Our observation being that frequently the most expeditious and cost-effective answer to many client-agency struggles is to thoroughly explore and then rejuvenate that relationship rather than investing all the time and effort required to develop a new one.
Lastly, on rare occasions we do take on actual creative assignments, but we do mean “rare”. It’s not that we don’t want to get our hands dirty, it’s just that in our experience developing extraordinary advertising involves a commitment of time and resources we’re reluctant to make (and most clients are reluctant to pay for).
And while we’re on the subject of fees, while we don’t have an enormous overhead to support, we are firm believers in “you get what you pay for”, thus our pricing structure has a lot more in common with McKinsey than McDonalds.