Of all the things we can pass on to future ad pros, our trust issues shouldn't be one of them.

Advertising is getting it’s butt kicked by consultants. If we are honest with ourselves, we’ve known for years that we in advertising have been losing credibility with clients. And this loss of trust has lead clients to rely on consultants for offerings they used to get from us in advertising. They don’t trust us anymore.

It is our fault. We’ve made mistakes that have eroded clients’ trust in the practice of advertising and the practitioners of advertising - us.

I believe we can regain their trust. 

This is why I blog and teach. Advertising is far from perfect but I believe in its potential to be more than what we are today. But we have to ensure that future advertising leaders learn from our mistakes instead of continuing to make them. We have to stop teaching the young ones our bad habits.

I recently found out how hard that is going to be.

"Those of you that told the client that their product was not popular or good, need to be careful. It is never a good idea to tell a client that. Try finding a softer way to couch that," said one of the judges on the panel during a recent college student advertising competition (I'm paraphrasing because I think I lost consciousness for a moment). 

The other judges agreed with this person.

And deep, deep inside of me, I was losing my freaking mind!! Here it is more than a few days later, and I am consumed by rage over what I heard. 

I'm disappointed more with myself, than with the judge. I should have called them on this "male beef excrement." 

I couldn't. My students were watching, and I have to be better than that for them. We had just lost the competition, and me speaking out would have looked like sour grapes.

It isn't.

We lost fair and square. Our work did not deserve to win. I will address that with my students over the coming days. I am proud of them for trying but we should have and could have done better - that is a reflection on me. I'm to blame.

But back to the judge's comments.

They were made during a public Q&A for a district competition. Several of the student teams had discovered through research that the client's product either was not liked or had a bad perception, which had resulted in it slipping in sales and status. These students were assigned the task of increasing sales and improving brand status. Each team started with stating the problems they discovered as outlined by their research. They didn't stop there. They spent the majority of their presentations demonstrating how they believed this problem should be address. True, what they told the judges wasn't easy to hear but it was the truth. 

And the judges as a panel admonished them for this.

This is why advertising is in such horrible shape as an industry. 

This was the moment when I could see our major problem so clearly. Here is a room full of future advertising professionals, being taught by seasoned advertising professionals, and being judge by a real life client and working advertising professionals, being told that they should lie to the client, that the client cannot stand to hear the truth.

Okay, okay, I know what they meant, and I know they did not specifically say lie to clients! But if you "couch" the truth so that it is more palatable are you really telling the truth? In my insane corner of the universe, "No, you're not."

Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe.

Maybe agencies don't have credibility issues with clients. Maybe clients are not doubting what it is that agencies provide because they are finding better and more counsel from other sources. Maybe clients have not been saying for the better part of a decade that they can no longer trust their agencies.

Maybe I am imagining all the issues that agencies are facing because they have stopped being more consultants and become more order takers to clients. Maybe.

No one has clean hands in this mess. No one. 

First, a group of working advertising professionals should be advising future advertising folks to be brave and honest, to better serve their clients by telling them the things that the client needs to hear! Not "couch it in softer terms!"

If an agency cannot tell the client the truth about its situation without having to sugarcoat it, how are they ever going to do the type of work needed to help this clients succeed?! 

Now, what kind of client tells its agency to "be gentle" with the truth? Uh, they are the client, if they don't have an idea how bad things are, then there are bigger issues than hearing bad news from their agencies, especially when that bad news is accompanied with a plan for correcting that. Dear Lord. 

"For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear." (2 Timothy 4:3 NLT)

I hate going Biblical on us, but tell me if this doesn't describe the relationship between agencies and clients if we condone "softening the truth?" 

Thankfully, they moved onto another question from the audience. Or at least I thought it was great.

"What do you think about having a contingency in the budget," a student asked.

And the other shoe dropped. And it dropped so very hard.

For the next few minutes (I really can't tell you how long it was because like in any horrible car wreck, time seemed to slow down so that I could soak it all in), the panel told the students how having a contingency was a bad idea, and that they should spend every penny of the money the client allocated for the project. One judge even "implied" that it was okay to fix the numbers so that they came out to match exactly the amount from the client to the penny. 

I know there are plenty of agency folks who don't see anything wrong with this, but I was taken aback by the casualness with which they talked about manipulating the numbers to match the client's budget. And the client on the panel didn't disagree with any of this!!

What is going on here?!!!

To be fair, the client on the panel did say that whatever number they had was all the money the client would have for the project. But that only made me wonder, "what happens if something unexpected comes up and there is no contingency?"

I looked around the room and none of the other team "advisors" seem to have any problems with what they were telling the students. They acted like this was the gospel for the industry. I'm praying it is not.

The idea that an agency doesn't have a contingency fund means that if something has to change or pivot, either the agency has to go back to the client and ask for more money or eat the costs. Either of these options screams that an agency was not realistic in its planning - something always go wrong or some unforeseen cost arises. 

No wonder procurement is leery of agencies numbers. I don't know any large company that doesn't keep a contingency fund in case something needs to be addressed. Why would a client expect their agency not to have one? I am so confused.

And we wonder why advertising struggles so mightily with its image and relationship with clients. My accountant doesn't sugarcoat it for me, neither does my doctor, my mechanic, my lawyer or even my lawn guy. So why in the world would a client expect their agency to speak softly to them? 

Okay, I am never a fan of playing with the numbers. The numbers are what they are. I know there are some who are going to disagree with this - great! Then let's talk about how we conduct business. To me, adjusting my budget to align directly with the client's budget is a troublesome practice. I'm no "Boy Scout," but I feel clients deserve more honesty in this area. To me, having a contingency acknowledges that we cannot plan for everything, and if something does arise we are prepared to deal with it without having to ask the client for additional funds. 

Later, I spoke with some of my team about this, and I told them what they heard from the judges comes from a place of fear. 

We are so afraid of losing a client that we will no longer tell them the truth. This fear is crippling us and preventing us from developing solutions that are based in the reality of the client's situation.

We are afraid of shrinking budgets, so we take short-cuts to insure that we utilize every penny of the client's budget, even if that is not the truth.

Fear has made us an ugly industry to be a part of - it has stifled the work, crushed the spirit of those who work in it, and in the end fear has hurt how we can perform our jobs. 

And I let fear keep me in that damn chair. I should have looked like a sore loser. I should have embraced being that crazy guy that stood up and said that this is not who advertising is or ever should be. Not for me. But for these talented, smart and creative students who deserve to enter an industry better than the one we currently are. 

Shame on me. Shame on us.

I got to see first hand what is killing advertising, and the damaged being done to us is self-inflicted. And if we can injury ourselves, we can heal ourselves too. 

That is the part I regret the most. I missed an opportunity to tell the future of advertising that they can be the solution for much of what ails us as an industry. They need to know that advertising can be so much more than this. 

Ultimately if we’re unwilling, unable or too afraid to shine a light on the errors we’ve made and continue to make, how can we expect or ask our future leaders to act differently?

We can’t. And they won’t.