“Breaking up is hard to do.” – Neil Sedaka
They were childhood sweethearts who’d grown apart. Maybe they stayed together for the sake of the children. But in the end, friends said it was obvious the two parties had changed, and last week they made it official: after almost 91 years, General Motors’ Chevrolet and the Detroit-area ad agency Campbell-Ewald were getting a divorce.
In the annals of contemporary marketing, few partnerships had lasted as long, unless you count the Vatican’s work on behalf of Jesus Christ. Chevy and Campbell-Ewald grew up together. In the 1950s, as the interstate highway network opened up the country to travellers, the agency produced the iconic “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” campaign. It went on to produce Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” truck ads, and created the “Heartbeat of America” tagline.
In the manner of such things, Chevrolet thanked the agency for its years of service and promised they would still be friends. Then, it ran out the door and drove down the road in a shiny Chevy with its new agency, Publicis Worldwide, a “Just Married!” sign flapping from the back bumper. During these days of extreme upheaval in Detroit, that’s not too unusual: Last November, Chrysler abruptly dropped BBDO after almost 65 years.
But the marketing world is itself in a state of extreme upheaval, as digital technologies throw up astonishing new possibilities and the greater economy tries to find its feet like a drunk at Coachella. And with the average tenure of chief marketing officers hovering in the range of 24 months, some clients feel they need to make radical shifts, it only for the sake of change. Yet the short tenures of client personnel means that institutional memory, the lifeblood of a brand, is often stronger in an agency than at the client itself. And though everyone agrees the best work and results usually emerge out of long-term relationships, sometimes clients can’t resist the shiny new object that is a hot agency (“Get me Bogusky!”) on the prowl for accounts.
“I think achieving strong relationships is even more important than ever before, and unfortunately that’s true at the same time as it’s even less likely to happen,” suggested Shelley Brown, president of the Toronto-based agency Zig. “I think we live in a culture where the grass always appears to be greener on the other side of the fence, where change is always good, where [people often say] ‘Let’s move on.’ It always seems better to have a new relationship with a new agency or person rather than actually work on the relationship we have now. I think that’s a cultural phenomenon, not just a marketing phenomenon.”
The problem is that shiny new things aren’t always good for us. “The thing that scares me the most is that you see these relationships where you’re just trying to make sure the client’s happy and you’re just giving them what they want,” says Andrew Bruce, the president and COO of Publicis Canada. “They inevitably end up in doom because you’re not adding value.”
One after another executive polled this week, whether working for an agency or a client, noted that the best creative work – and usually the best results – come out of deep, earned trust.
Some years ago, when Mr. Bruce was at Chiat\Day Toronto, he worked with Neil Everett, the chief marketing officer of Shoppers Drug Mart, to develop a campaign for the chain’s Health Watch service. Mr. Bruce pitched a series of ads that would shock viewers into paying attention. “It was very risky. We did things like simulating people having heart attacks,” Mr. Everett recalls. “The first time we showed the ad we wanted to produce, to our president, he almost had a heart attack himself. He said: ‘You’re gonna’ do what?’ ”
