Author archives: Simon Hayhurst

Pay your creative agency by results? Be careful what you wish for…

It’s over 21 years since the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers published a report that claimed that “Payment By Results will form 75 per cent of advertising agency contracts within five years”. https://www.marketingweek.com/payment-by-results-is-on-the-way-says-isba/ Two decades later, and the forecast rush to payment-by-results doesn’t seem to have materialised. Having worked on both client and agency sides, the …

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“You say it best when you say nothing at all?”

In Professor Byron sharp’s recent piece in Campaign (“Why the best response to Covid-19 was to stop advertising”) the Prof rails against the endless hand-wringingly earnest advertising many big brands put out in the wake of Covid. In the article he is quoted as saying that it is “embarrassing arrogance” that marketers would think people were …

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Why account managers shouldn’t just do as they’re told

Many years back – goodness me, it was almost in the last century – I was a Senior Account Director at a long-gone London integrated advertising agency. For my sins, I was put in charge of annual graduate account management recruitment. Each year a new crop of prospective Frank Lowes* would turn up for our …

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A refocus on brand as a long-term sales driver

In recent times, CMOs (under pressure from their CFOs and CEOs) have increasingly – wrongly – shifted focus and budget away from long-term brand building, and towards short term growth through sales activation.  In part this is because the impact of sales activation is easier to measure (e.g. PPC rates), increasing pressure for MQL volumes …

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