When you start an agency, you often get treated as if you've had a full frontal lobotomy - and not just because it's a brainless thing to do either. The problem is that, however long you've been in the business, the moment you start afresh the first question people ask is "Do you know how to do an ad?"
Fair cop, personally I don't (but Maria sure as hell does) but, moving really swiftly on, this is akin to asking someone who opens an accountancy firm (not Arthur Andersen) whether they can count (fair cop, I can't - and I used to be an accountant - but that's not the point either).
The fact is you bring everything with you ("In your head that is. Not proprietary stuff and so on" - Legal Ed), including memories of where you have gone wrong in the past. For example, although Giraffe is going to get close to our customers, we're not going to bang on about 'luuuuuuuurving them' as we did when we started before. The embarrassed silence this little selling ploy used to induce is as nothing compared to the violent heebie-jeebies we still get when we remember using it.
This time we are totally focused on the type of clients we want. Simply put, we are looking for people who appreciate that there's more to the choice of agency than a slick presentation by top agency bods - the only people in the world who can strut while sitting down - who come with a lifetime guarantee. Give them your business and you can guarantee you won't see them again in your lifetime as they pass your entire campaign over to an admin lackey whose industry experience consists of making coffee for the MD with a double ego from Cambridge.
Instead we're offering a homespun approach from the people who do the work (and Kim) which, unusually, will concentrate on how to use your recruitment advertising to recruit good people without resorting to rocket science very much at all. We also promise to curb the impulse to talk in preposterous length about ourselves - the standard practice of demonstrating your ability to listen by talking for hours on end about your rigorous proofing processes (before triumphantly presenting ads for "Uninformed Security Officers" offering "expensive benefits") does tend to drain the life force from the average HR professional.
What we are really keen to avoid are beauty parades (AKA crapshoots) where a load of agencies give away what passes as top strategic thinking (snort!) for free, present some ideas that will never see the light of day and then tell porkies about their service in the deep, rich corporate tone of voice that they have perfected through constant use. We don't like them because they are 100% artificial - the smoothest talkers always win even though the relationship between ability to charm the buzzards from the trees and effective recruitment advertising remains a little unproven. And there's not enough use of polygraphs either.
But above all they're dead scary!
Especially when you end up last in line. Because, after six hours of presentations from people who appear to be from the shallow end of the gene pool all talking about creativity seriously - which is almost the same as actually taking it seriously - interspersed with rip roaring, pre-rehearsed recruitment anecdotes to help the time drag more slowly, the last thing the client wants is one more hour of the same.
You know you're in trouble when you walk in to find the client demonstrating utter dedication to their company's core values- decisiveness and immediacy - by decisively flinging the previous agency's documents in the bin while taking an immediate dislike to you. Seizing the chance to munch their way through the huge pile of refreshments provided - that all agencies are too scared to touch for some reason - they give you a look that demands money with menaces, tell you not to worry if they yawn as it really does mean they are interested, then order you to begin. Feeling like Custer when he realized the Little Big Horn wasn't going to be such a doddle after all, you make stuttering introductions, though even this process is fraught with danger. Who can forget the time one member of our team who shall be nameless (JIM SHANNON) completely forgot his own name?
It's at this stage that I often wonder about my habit of spending the entire journey to the ordeal terrifying the team about what is to come. For example, when I know the pitch consists of an informal chat to three people, I tell the Mooners they'll have to speak through a mike on a podium to a throng so huge that tickets were sold out three weeks in advance. While this may not be productive in the classical sense it certainly produces huge entertainment for me, which is what it's all about after all, while a touch of nerves is often a good thing - it stops us coming across as typecast trolls and quite often induces an element of hilarity into the solemn proceedings. I once got so distracted by a client's inability to peel the banana that he decided he just had to eat just as I started talking that I nearly toppled sideways out of my chair - saved only by grabbing my presentation partner so violently that she, unfortunately, did. Topple that is.
Oh, how we laughed.
