By Peter Ibbetson, director, Journolink,

There is one word that crops up in the first sentence of every conversation I have had in the past fortnight with existing and prospective agency clients.

Budgets.

In the second sentence comes the explanation that it’s both the agency’s budget, and the budget of their client that they are talking about.

Then in the third we get onto the two words of cancellation and retention.

If this doesn’t sound familiar, you are emphatically in the minority. For the rest of us it quite simply is the reality of life at the moment.

So how should we handle it?

In the hope that collective wisdom might help us all, the following three consensus positions are a summary of how those we have spoken to are surviving.

Bear in mind that the reason we have been calling is to put what we do in JournoLink front of mind with agencies with two simple objectives in mind. Retention and Costs. So maybe it’s no surprise that the number one focus has been retaining clients.

But I have picked up on three distinct strategies:

• Freezing accounts and doing nothing,
• Pro bono support ‘for the moment’
• Light cost service

So, which is the best one?

Talking things through, there is a real reluctance just to freeze accounts. Inherent in this is the inevitable likelihood that the clients will either have been served by another agency on a ‘light cost’ basis during the downtime as a recruitment initiative. Or, in fact, worked out that they don’t need an agency at any cost anymore.

So, many of the ‘frozen accounts’ may not actually unfreeze.

Pro bono wins the sympathy vote but will for sure set negative expectations for exit time.

A light cost service is being seen by most as the smart option, both to retain and expectation manage.  Of course, when the crisis is through it may well be that a lower cost service is sought, but at least that gives the retention choice to the agency.

Budgets then come into play

One of the real surprises for me is that many agencies that I spoke to don’t actually know what they are paying for, largely because the users of the services aren’t the paymasters and the paymasters are not the users.

So, if nothing else, the crisis is encouraging not just the agency clients to look at what value for money they are getting, but also the agencies themselves to audit their spend and value, and look at alternatives, some of which will do the job just as well as the expensive over engineered solutions they have been inadvertently paying for. And will at the same time allow an agency to serve those clients who themselves will continue to be budget constrained even after the economy returns to some form of normality.

From JournoLink it’s fair to say that we have not intentionally taken the conversations in this direction, albeit it is the environment that we have been building in the expectation of an inevitable shift towards online intelligent cost-effective platforms.

The third area which has been a common topic, and which surprised me, has been an assumption that during the crisis most clients will have nothing to say.

It’s surprised us because that is the exact opposite of what we have experienced within JournoLink.

Just at the moment we have found that working from home has given many businesses the time to reflect and the desire to engage with the media both to share how they have pivoted their businesses, and also to communicate to their customers.

So, the assumption that lock-down translates to silence is actually completely wrong.

What has been clear though is that there hasn’t been any real steer from the agencies on how their clients might be leveraging Covid19 to win coverage, and we have picked up a call for pointers from journalists on what they are looking for, and for calendar items that might be a light-hearted distraction from the 24/7 coronavirus reporting.

In the same way that clients are making the most of some ‘down time’, many agencies are doing the same, researching are trying the various calendar and request options.

So what survival traits are coming through?

• Retain what you have, at a compelling light touch cost
• Use your time to audit where budget savings are achievable within your agency, whilst retaining broadly similar service capabilities
• Think laterally for your clients, and surprise them with angles that meet the need now

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Image by Stephan Kelle from Pixabay