By Paul Furiga
The sad truth about the agency business is not that most clients consider it a liar’s world. It’s that most clients expect it.
With the debut recently of the fourth season of the AMC series Mad Men, those of us who love the agency business are once again catapulted into a time when the glamour of agency life was still rising. For clients, the series is more than the best period piece on TV (and the best series period, in my view). It’s a winking, boozing, skirt-pinching confirmation of the liar’s roots of the agency business. Even the double meaning of tag line for the series tells the story: “Where the truth lies.”
While the cigarettes, noon martinis and overt sexism of 1960s agency life may be over; the liar’s reputation has only grown for the agency business in the last four decades.
What else to make of a 21st-century world in which the cynicism and rejection that meets most agency work has thrown so much of the industry into turmoil? Ad agencies in particular struggle for relevance against the crumble of the traditional media environment and the still evolving Internet/online/social media world that doesn’t seem to conform to the old way of doing things.
Meanwhile, in the agency business and beyond, there’s never been a greater need for the kind of transparency and clarity that only real public relations can deliver. Instead we continue to see lies, half-truths and misstatements from too many who should know better.
Unlike most who work in agencies, I came in through a side door. I spent two decades in journalism before I crossed to other side of the notebook. I had a chance to experience life from a very different perspective. In other words, I have seen lies from all sides. And, I have seen truth from more than one perspective as well.
What I have learned is that certain human truths, like certain human failings, stand the test of time.
Perhaps the greatest of these in the agency business is authenticity. Whether it’s the smoke-filled rooms of a Mad Men agency or the hip-hop sounds of a 21st century ad team in full pitch mode to a prospective client, the sell is the same. In advertising, PR, or any flavor of marketing, agencies sell. They sell ideas, they sell brands, they sell (to) clients. Clients and the world at large know this. And yet, over the course of time, clients and world in general buy. Why? Do they just love liars?
In my view they see something else. And that is authenticity.
Even in a friendly neighborhood bar (or styling salon), we expect that two people involved in an adventure will share a slightly different story. Even when they are strapped to a polygraph, these versions of the same story will seem different.
My point is that these stories will be equally accurate and equally valid if they are authentic. That is, if they are true to what facts the audience considers relevant, and to the timeless truths about human society that most of us understand implicitly. That means that the story not only seems authentic, but the person (or brand) sharing the story seems trustworthy. And last but not least, the story is one that resonates with the audience, that incorporates what they know of life.
Why is it so easy for so many of us in the agency business to forget that it’s OK for us to market a product, service or idea with a particular viewpoint and remain authentic? Instead, too many avoid the opportunity to share a picture, a sound or an experience by tapping an authentic view, tone or moment. Too many are willing to joke or lie at the expense of the consumer, or worse, the client.
Like Don Draper, the brooding ad man at the center of Mad Men, some agency types seem to have lost their compass in the smoke-filed haze.
It’s time to reclaim reality. Stand up for what’s real and authentic in your agency and your work, and your clients (and the audiences they reach) will deliver the response you (and they) really want: true engagement.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
