If Your Clients Don’t Trust You, Who Does?

“I do not have time for things that have no soul.” Charles Bukowski

Advertising agencies should be worried these days. Clients are leaving faster than angry in-laws after Passover. Even Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive officer of WPP, stopped fire-breathing long enough to admit he’s seeing a decline in client trust.

“We need to focus on deep meaningful relationships,” he explained, a bit of a stretch since, at the last WPP shareholder’s meeting, one third voted against giving him a raise.

Agencies talk about trust like it’s a manufactured product. You can’t fake it the way you can with a bar of soap. And forming “deep meaningful relationships” in advertising is like asking Hell’s Angels to join a yoga retreat.

It’s always going to feel stilted and slightly disingenuous—especially coming from Sir Martin Sorrell. He’s just not that likeable.

The real question is how many agencies stayed.

Sid Lee put out an article recommending a four-step plan, a contract of sorts where agency and client review their relationship based on guidelines like “communication breakdown” and “misaligned vision.”

I don’t see that affecting the “flee rate.” Last year alone, 30 of the largest advertisers in the US changed agencies. You can’t just write that off as “spring cleaning.” The real question is how many companies stayed.

According to a Bedford Report, client-agency relationships have been on a steady decline. The average tenure in 1984 was 7.5 years. Today it’s less than three years.

We can blame it on “changing dynamics,” as the Bedford Report suggests, but companies aren’t leaving because of changing dynamics. They’re leaving because of soul. We’ve become a soulless industry, and clients — like Charles Bukowski said — don’t have time for “things that have no soul.”

Experts will dispute this, of course, saying the market has intensified. If agencies are soulless, isn’t this the fault of technology? Aren’t we the age of emails, text messaging and data mining? And isn’t Sir Martin right when he says that agencies have transformed into media buyers?

Blaming client mistrust on technology or changing dynamics is ridiculous. We didn’t become soulless through our computer screens. All technology afforded us were new platforms to sell. What made us soulless was thinking it could replace — not just the method of selling — but how we sell ourselves.

Preparing for a pitch a few years ago, my team covered the walls in ideas. Everyone looked at those ideas, commenting on some, passing by others.

Then they focused on the IT guy. What could be done online? So the guy suggested a few things, especially stuff consumers could do with their phones. Within minutes, the account people, the media people — even the research people — were telling each other this would win the pitch.

They didn’t win the pitch. They weren’t even close to winning the pitch. You could hear the account people in the halls afterwards, saying, “I don’t get it. They were smiling when we showed them that thingamajig. What happened?”

What happened was they confused platforms with ideas. They forgot the cardinal rule of advertising. “We’re not selling product,” Steve Jobs once said, “we’re selling dreams.” Technology doesn’t sell dreams. You can use it to sell dreams, but you’d better have a dream.

We all love sideshows, but we know they’re full of hucksters and freaks.

Selling a dream means you demonstrate humanness. Without some semblance of humanity, nobody believes you. Tim Cook is learning that now. Apple advertising has never been more shallow, or less trustworthy. He relied on technology, on digital fun. That’s no different than a sideshow. We all love sideshows, but we know they’re full of hucksters and freaks.

When Chiat/Day first presented “Think Different” to Steve Jobs, he hated it. Not the campaign itself, but what it represented. He’d just come back to Apple. He worried people would think he hadn’t changed. Then he called Lee Clow and said, “Fuck it, let’s run it.”

There would be months of script changes. Jobs wasn’t an easy man to please. But what he was doing wasn’t niggling the product message. He was trying to get the copy to mean something. As Clow pointed out later, “We essentially ended up back with the original copy.” It had the most heart because the copywriter was inspired. Jobs was just trying to make sure it came across as authentic to the consumers.

“A brand is simply trust,” Jobs once said.

If you aren’t selling trust, nobody has faith in you. Not the client, not the consumer — not anybody. You have to find the soul in a product. You have to make it real by being real.

When I hear people talking about four-step plans, I don’t trust them. Trust isn’t something you tick off in a column. It’s what you believe despite the criticism and commentary of others. It’s your soul speaking.

I worked for a guy who had a successful advertising agency. He’d come over from Hungry in the sixties, barely speaking English. He hustled, he got his receptionist to write out what he wanted to say. I asked him one time how he got clients. In his thick accent, he said, “I started with a contract. It said: ‘We both hereby agree not to piss each other off.’”

Nothing comes out of eight by six foot cubicles (isn’t that the size of most jail cells?).

Sir Martin Sorrell can talk all he wants about “deeply personal relationships.” It still feels stilted and disingenuous—just as it did when he wrote an article defending creativity. I worked at J. Walter Thompson when WPP creatives sat in eight by six foot cubicles. Believe me, nothing comes out of eight by six foot cubicles (isn’t that the size of most jail cells?).

It doesn’t inspire authenticity, it inspires recidivism.

Right now, clients and consumers alike doubt our sincerity. They don’t see the inspiration. They don’t see what Steve Jobs once called “gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” They don’t see anything believable.

Until we get that back, we’ll remain a soulless industry and clients will flee.

Robert Cormack is a freelance copywriter, novelist and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores. Check out Yucca Publishing or Skyhorse Press for more details.