(Unsuccessfully) Dealing with Conflict

Nick Shackelford, whom I had the pleasure of being interviewed by in LA last October, had a super-interesting post on X on how he’s seeing the market change.  It’s worth a read.  He’s saying that, on a Macro level, advertising clients’ expectations do not match their pocket books.  I agree; there is an observable disconnect around clients - not all!  - saying “I want full slack integration, social media management, fresh content every day, full media management, 12 month forecasting, and CMO integration.  And I’d like to pay $2k.”

It got me thinking along the same lines.  I’d illustrate this with a specific example from a real client.

This client spends six figure monthly budgets, is in high growth mode, and just closed a round of funding.  Their CMO gave instructions along the lines of “any ad, anywhere, that is below 2 ROAS, cut it.”

Now, I don’t believe it’s our job to do what a client asks.

I believe it’s our job to give our best counsel on how to achieve a client’s goals, and then do what they ask.  In this specific case, any/all members of the team I’d assigned to this client’s account had years more experience than anyone on the client’s side by an order of magnitude.  So we said some version of  “I understand the relentless drive to efficiency, and I am happy implementing a rubric where we pause any ad below 2 ROAS.  But, in some cases, we might be OK with ads at a 1 ROAS or a .5 ROAS.  Upper Funnel awareness ads, for example, we might want to hold them to a different standard than ROAS, we might look at other stickiness metric like Time-On-Site, New Users %, pages viewed, whatever.”  And the client’s answer was “no, if it’s below 2 ROAS, cut it.” 

The follow up point from us was, “OK, but what if we have nothing to replace these cut ads with?” To which they responded with some version of “I don’t care, we need be ruthless, cut it.”

And here’s the conflict.  Two months later, they hire a new VP of marketing.  On the ball, tons of experience, a really good hire.  After a week on the job, the VP says “hey, uh, why are there You Tube videos running, and no DPA ads running?”

The answer is “because your boss told us in no uncertain terms to cut any ad that wasn’t “performing” even if we had nothing to replace it with.

But of course I can’t say that, saying that would be creating friction, and one rule that that client should never have a single negative thought in your presence.

And so, a week later, we were fired.  So there’s my micro example of the macro trend that Nick brought up.