PR / Marketing 101 — How to get the most from your agency

What makes for a good PR agency – client relationship?   Allow me to briefly describe perhaps the most notable and successful agency-client relationship in advertising history.

In 1935 a man by the name of Leo Burnett opened an advertising agency in Chicago. Then,  Chicago was not the place to be if you were in the advertising business.  It of course was Madison Avenue in New York.  But Burnett had different ideas.

For the first 10 years he did okay, not great.  But then the agency took off, eventually growing to become one of the top 10 largest ad agencies in America.

The client example I am getting to is when Leo Burnett Company, Inc. landed the Kellogg’s account in 1949.  Working with Kellogg’s was the birth of a long line of characters that we all grew up with.  Burnett is credited with creating Tony the Tiger,  The Jolly Green Giant,  The Pillsbury Doughboy, and The Marlboro Man.

The Burnett relationship with Kellogg’s has lasted decades and to the best of my knowledge continues to today.  That’s remarkable.  In a business when the average ad agency-client relationship is a few years, representing the same client for 60 years is virtually unheard of.  (It does happen, by the way, as I continue to represent one client going on 27 years.)

To what does Burnett attribute this long-last relationship?  According to one Burnett executive, the two companies will get together for creative sessions and they will scream and yell at one another, arguing for their ideas to be heard.  Because Burnett knows that the relationship is solid and will go on, they have the freedom to be as creative, forceful and loud as they want because they know — “the business is not on the table.”

That means the Burnett people are not afraid to speak their minds for fear of losing the account.  Whether it is an advertising, public relations or marketing firm, most firms are overly careful to speak their minds and be wildly creative for fear they will be fired.  If the agency is able to put that fear aside, what’s left is innovative, creative and effective marketing, advertising and PR.

A PR firm can’t ask a client to promise that they will work together forever.  But when a client has confidence in their PR/marketing consultant, and allows them the freedom to do their best work, the result will almost always be work that achieves the client’s goals and objectives.