Scoping for Success. Help your agency to help you
With the recent and much anticipated release of our new Flock Agency Scoping Tool, I wanted to share some thoughts and experience on defining a Scope of Work and how this will usually be the make or break in determining the success of a Client / Agency relationship.
Campaigns can often go ‘off-piste’ and not deliver for a number of reasons, most of which point back to the foundations of the idea and grounding for the relationship between the agency and client, which you and I recognise as the scope.
While there is no complete formula to avoid derailment, there are some key principles to stick to:
1. Unclear scopes will always lead to unclear objectives, bad relationships and bad results
Start with transparency. Being clear with any supplier about exactly what you need and when you need it is not new news. So why should it be different when dealing with your agency on something that could drive a huge ROI?
2. Plan as far ahead as possible
You may not always be able to predict 100% of the marketing requirements for the year ahead, but you should be getting as close to this certainty as possible to ensure your agency can plan for them and avoid surprises later on.
3. Define the Outcomes
It is always pertinent to be aware of what type of scope you need from your agency, given your brand and current position in the market, whether you need to defend your position with breakthrough, transformative ideas from other high investing brands; grow your presence from grass roots with distinctive work; or build powerful campaigns with more predictable returns.
For example:
Develop the global core “Big Idea” to drive integrated comms activity in all channels. Including development via local marketing ensuring relevance
4. Define the Outcomes
When drafting your outputs be scrupulous with the detail. Scopes should capture the output and where possible this should be quantifiable.
For example:
FILM/AV TV (30″, 20″, 10″), Cinema, Digital Outdoor, 3x digital mobile edits for different formats, 5-10 Social Media edits across different lengths and formats to suit Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, VK etc Also dealer collateral (e.g. in dealer video screens)
5. Define the Frequency
With every action or output you require, the next stage should be defining how much and how often you need it to happen. Whether it’s a market report on your positioning or micro-influencer posting, lay this out.
For example:
2020 experience will involve 10 EMEA, 6 NA, 4 ASIA PAC campaigns to be executed across all channels
6. Clarify your pass throughs
Analytics, reports and data sets are rarely detailed very well which only make it harder down the line to measure a campaign’s effectiveness according to the original brief.
For example:
The agency may need 3rd party data to allow them to build the most impactful campaign which could be at a fixed rate or percentage Be definitive to bring the value
Great client-agency relationships are a sum of many parts. Effective scope creation and management can mean the difference between agency partners who are motivated and empowered to put their best foot forward, and lacklustre work which does not deliver against what you thought had been communicated. Help your agency to help you by not neglecting this critical part of the equation.
If you have any questions, Flock are well versed in the challenges that scoping can throw at you and have significant experience in creating scalable scoping solutions no matter how fragmented your business model, so give us a call.