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  • Uri Baruchin is a marketing strategy consultant based in London, working on branding and customer experience projects with Brandinstinct in the UK and across Europe. In his ever decreasing spare time he co-creates ambitious web things, so far in Hebrew. Start Here

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  • The creative agency Peter Principle - reputation gone wrong

    23:08 April 22nd, 2006 by Uri

    879094_80a1447caf_m.jpgComing across some really bad advertising and branding lately, from some of the world’s leading agencies, I realised the following:

    Every creative agency evolves to the point where it has the highest chance to have bad ideas approved by clients and implemented.

    How?

    • Every creative process involves the creation of some bad ideas along good ones.
    • Creatives are often not objective about their own ideas, and will occasionally try to pitch them to clients.
    • You’d think that the better an agency’s reputation is, the more clients expect, but the reality is that this reputation will have a certain voodoo affect, intimidating clients into believing that maybe not getting the agency’s ideas is their own fault (emperor’s new cloths).
    • The fact that successful agencies tend to become better and better presenters and sellers of ideas as they evolve also helps.
    • The amount/rate of bad ideas succeeding in traveling outside of the agency may decrease with experience, but then ego, which grows with reputation, kicks in and “mitigates” criticism.
    • So a top-5 agency, has a better chances of selling a bad idea to it’s client than anybody else. QED

      Wikipedia: “The Peter Principle is a theory originated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter. It states that successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not
      competent.”

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