ABSTRACT

Agencies attract their own kinds of clients: creative clients use creative agencies, international advertisers use agencies with international networks, planning-orientated agencies attract advertisers who believe in planning. Clients could be faced, at one extreme, with an agency which insists that everything it produces is perfect and which remains impervious to the advertiser's arguments. As well as selling its product through UK department stores, it had its own chain of shops. The new clients instructed the agency to prepare a 'retail-style' campaign based on the premise that people will only buy something if it seems cheap. The verdict could be: 'bad' agency, but very bad client. Some clients deserve to go out of business. Instead, the target audience said they wanted lots of information about the product, in a classy, preferably colour, environment. Sales continued to decline. True, the big agencies won't take on small advertisers because it was not geared to take on small accounts.