Universal McCaan boss tasks multinationals over agencies’ remuneration
Associate Director, Business Development, Planning and Control at Universal McCaan, Bimpe Fayemi has advised multinational clients in the country on the need to ensure that marketing communications agencies working for their brands were adequately remunerated.
Fayemi, who spoke in an exclusive interview with MARKETING EDGE in Lagos, noted that only by so doing would agencies be properly galvanised to give out the best of their creative abilities in building and marketing of brands.
According to her, some multinational clients were in the habit of shortchanging their agencies through slashing of media budgets, adding that this attitude was unprogressive and not in the long-term interest of the brand owners.
In addition, the agency boss criticised vehemently what she termed as “the unwilling attitude” amongst some multinationals towards paying compensation fees (pitch fees) to agencies at the end of pitch processes, stressing that such was inimical to agencies’ survival.
“I came from a creative agency. I grew up in this industry hearing of pitch fees because of all the works we’ve done. Of course, monies would go out of the agency that you can’t recover. Monies are spent. We do face-lift for the agency.
“It would have been a bit preferable for clients to at least remunerate. It might not be something big but a token of saying thank you for doing this because we do researches, we do group surveys and in all that monies are spent.”
Similarly, she decried the uncooperative attitude of some multinationals clients who are reluctant in issuing feedback reports to agencies after the pitch pointing out that feed backs were necessary in helping the agency to improve upon and be better equipped for subsequent pitches.
“One of the major challenges I think is that we’ve got to further make it an open thing and make it an integrity thing. I think the client should always come back with a feedback.
“When we go for pitches, we would like the client to come back with a feedback on how the pitch went. But some clients will just sit back and keep mute and then you start hearing different stories, grape vine rumours and all that,” she said.
She further lamented that some media monitoring agencies were in the habit of not releasing accurate and detailed reports to the client thereby portraying other agencies in bad light.
She, however, commended the initiative of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN) by instituting a culture of integrity and transparency in the industry by its recent move towards constituting an ethics committee for effective regulations.
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