​There’s no such thing as (new) business as usual

It’s rolled out, usually by senior ad execs, as a reminder that the responsibility for new business cannot, and must not, lie solely at the door of the small department that bears its name. Instead, it must be divided across an agency, with everyone feeling a degree of personal accountability for its delivery.

In our industry, we are, as another well-worn phrase goes, ‘all in the business of new business’. And that’s most true at this time of year when Q4 appears seemingly out of nowhere, bringing with it a noisy reminder of the imperative of annual commercial targets.

So, what’s new about all of that, you may ask?

Another year, same old targets to hit. Well, as it turns out, a lot. Increasingly, there’s no such thing as (new) business as usual. The scale of change that our industry is experiencing is bringing with it different answers for clients to consider. Briefs that once automatically left a client’s desk in the direction of an agency, are increasingly going elsewhere. Some are staying in-house, with two-thirds of major multinationals now operating in-house agencies and a further 21% considering establishing one (World Federation of Advertisers & The Observatory, 2023 survey). Other briefs are taken care of by AI before they get anywhere near an agency reception.

And despite all the headlines warning of change, we still remain a crowded and stubbornly over-serviced industry. According to new business consultancy Ingenuity, there are over 30,000 agencies in the UK alone. A sobering figure for any agency pinning its hopes on landing a new brief and delivering a strong Q4.

Politely put, it’s a competitive landscape. More accurately, it’s gloves off. In such a market, it can be tempting to double down on the belief that all new business is good new business. It is not. Or rather, not all new business is good for you. The best question a client ever asked us in a pitch was, ‘Under what conditions do you do your best work?’.

In those nine words, we knew a number of things.

We knew that the client respected creativity, our output, and most importantly, us. We also knew that the brand in question was looking for a partnership. For us as an agency, where all of those things matter deeply, we knew that we’d found a client with whom we could work.

But in the race to year-end, those moments can be rare. That’s not to say that thought isn’t still given to partnerships. Many of us will have worked in agencies where real care is given to decisions over when to pitch and what to pitch for.

Amen to that. But it is not always so. One of the worst offenders is the misuse of the ‘Three Ps’ model (People, Product, Profit). Originally intended as a connected strategy for delivering a strong business, I’ve seen it used as a way of dividing opportunities into buckets. Is the opportunity good for our people, good for our product or good for our profit?

With just one box needed to be ticked for an opportunity to be green-lit. Flawed logic. And, frankly, I don’t know many clients who want to think of themselves of simply supporting agency profit or conversely many agency people who want to think of themselves as just working to fatten up the bottom line. We should be in the business of creating work we are proud of, work that shifts the dial on creativity and work that we get properly paid for. All three Ps working together in concert. When we don’t do that, we do ourselves and our craft a disservice. So, as we approach Q4 this year, let’s be ambitious, for sure, but let’s also make decisions that we’ll be proud of this quarter as well as those that follow. That’s the kind of new business I want to be involved in.

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