When you bring in a marketing agency to help grow your business, it’s easy to get swept up in a slick presentation. You’re paying for expertise, and the people in front of you sound very sure of what to do next.
You can leave that meeting excited about the work without asking whether it’s where your limited budget should go. That gets expensive when the question resurfaces weeks later and the team has to do the work again.
Martin Weigel spent four decades in strategy, including 14 years as Chief Strategy Officer at the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy in Amsterdam. He’s the author of Strategy Is a Verb, and he knows how satisfying it is to win a client over.
I asked him to write about what you need to settle before giving an agency the go-ahead, especially when you love what they’ve put in front of you. 👇🏻
The room applauded, and the chief executive called it the best strategy presentation she’d seen in years. Nobody decided anything.
Sales in the brand’s established markets were weakening. The business saw room to grow elsewhere, where the brand was barely known, but it didn’t have enough money to invest properly in both. It needed to choose where to spend its budget.
The agency presented its answer in eighty slides, with insight and data alongside a call for the brand to return to its roots. A rousing manifesto film played in the middle of it. There was even a line, something about being the best of the best.
The agency built its answer around the existing markets without anyone choosing to put them first. Nobody asked what returning to the brand’s roots would mean in markets where it had none.
Weeks later, the client called the agency back to explain how the proposal would work in the new markets. That was the conversation they needed in the first meeting. The agency lost weeks repeating the work, and the client’s confidence took a knock. The agency built the deck to win agreement, and won it by leaving the hard question unasked.
I loved the big reveal
Joining Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam as head of planning some 17 years ago opened my eyes to what a deck could look like. For the next 14 years, I sweated every slide and every pixel, beaming with pride at the gorgeous work my department delivered day in and day out.
I’ve given hundreds of presentations, and I confess that the theatre and drama of persuasion satisfied something in me. The big reveal is an adrenaline hit, but until we kick the habit, we’ll never put the deck down.
I know how easy it is for a presentation to take over the room. The speaker decides what appears next, and the audience follows along. An eighty-slide deck can give the impression that its authors have done an enormous amount of thinking. You can agree with the story without challenging the choice that matters.
Strategists are fond of saying that “strategy is sacrifice”. The hard part is deciding what matters enough to pursue and what we’re willing to leave out.
So why the industrial-scale slide count? Could it be that we feel compelled to make our case at painstakingly and gorgeously art-directed length because we worry (or know) that our audience just don’t trust us or believe us that much?
What that first meeting needed
Before you approve the work, ask what the proposal commits the business to.
Here, you’d ask: “Are we putting the money into our existing markets? What won’t we fund as a result?”
Ask the agency to explain why that’s a better use of the money than building the brand in new markets. If the recommendation depends on putting existing markets first, everyone needs to understand that before agreeing to it.
Once you’ve decided, write down what you’re authorising.
For example: “We’re using this budget to recover sales in our existing markets. Investment in new markets will have to wait.”
If you haven’t got enough information to choose, agree what you need to find out and who’ll bring it back. Make sure the team knows the spending decision remains open.
Thirty minutes in silence
I’ve experienced a different way. In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from Amazon’s senior-team meetings and replaced presentations with written memos, initially four pages and later six. Participants spent thirty minutes reading in silence before discussing the document.
What felt like some kind of psychopathic torture test at the time makes more sense to me now. Writing a decent memo forces you to explain how your argument holds together. Everyone can read it at their own pace and go back to a claim that doesn’t add up, without a presenter pushing on to the next slide.
For your next proposal, ask the writer to put the decision you need to make at the top of the document. In this case, that was where to spend the available budget. The explanation underneath should compare the options and say why the writer recommends one. Give people time to read it before you ask them to agree.
Choose the meeting before the presentation
There are times when the job is to get people behind a direction you’ve already chosen. Theatre can absolutely play a legitimate and vital role there. The trouble comes when we use the same show to ask people to work out what they should do.
To my mind, there are three different kinds of meeting, and each calls for different preparation:
Hear what people know: bring your ears and give people room to speak.
Choose what to do: bring the options and explain how you’ll compare them. Let people challenge the recommendation.
Get people behind an agreed plan: use the presentation to help them understand and support the choice.
Only one of these might require the widescreen, Technicolour, all-singing, all-dancing “deck” that we cling to.
— A version of this article first appeared on Martin Weigel’s website. The client example is based on a real meeting, with details changed to protect the client.
👤 Martin Weigel is a brand strategist and founder of EMDUB, advising leaders on strategic narrative, organisational alignment, and competitive advantage. He previously led strategy at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam and is the author of Strategy Is a Verb: Notes from the Front Line.
