Be daring, be driven & be down to earth – Get the facts & numbers right

Here we must quote Madhukar Sabnavis, our last boss, for we can never ever forget what he told us in one of our discussions about role of emotions and feelings vs. hard logical evidence, as two approaches to sell ideas. Our discussion was in connection with the constant ranting that we as advertising agencies engage in, about most of the advertisers being very logical and linear in their thinking. We were once telling him “you can never make great work happen if you only think logically.” I went on to say that “the client must understand feelings and emotions more.” To this he said very patiently, “the client is also a human being, s/he also has feelings and it is not necessary that your feelings would match theirs all the time. If you walk into meetings only with your feelings, you will end up walking out with just feelings. To make decisions happen and more importantly to make the right kind of decisions happen, we have to blend the magic of feelings with the reality of logic.” Never in our careers thus far, have we seen this holding truer than in the last six months. On almost all the businesses that we have worked on for the past six months – best results have emerged from a good blend of imagination (magic) and engineering (facts, logic and numbers). In fact it has dawned upon us that if we walk into every discussion that we have with clients and prospects, with a good balance of numbers and ideas – the client listens more carefully. This could also partly be due to the fact that advertisers usually do not expect advertising agencies to have done extensive ‘numbers’ work before getting into a discussion on the brand or business. However there is a huge opportunity in breaking this perception. When we talk ‘numbers’ before taking a ‘creative leap’, the client looks at it more seriously than just as an unfounded radical and risky idea.
Needless to mention the fact that every time the advertiser sees the communication partner doing numbers work, they feel more confident of the team and share more information. In many ways we end up becoming their marketing and perhaps even business partners than just being a communication specialist. This in turn can greatly help us in moving up the decision tree with our partners and prospects.