When I helped to start Lunar BBDO, it was created to be a ‘conflict shop’ for AMV BBDO. They had the account for The Phone Book, but also Yellow Pages, two broadly identical products, so we handled the former, allowing them to keep the latter.

The idea is that an agency shouldn’t have advertise two products in the same category because that will create conflict regarding which insights and ideas they might use for each one. In addition, the research and competitive knowledge they would have on each of the businesses could potentially be quite damaging for one or the other. For example, if the Phone Book’s account team knew that Yellow Pages was about to go entirely digital, that would give them a massive advantage over their biggest competitor.

So whether it’s cars, chocolate bars or travel agents, companies tend not to choose an agency that helps their competitors.

That said, when I worked at AMV, they were the biggest agency in the country, which meant they already had an account in most categories, limiting their potential for growth. This is where some enterprising thinking could suggest that similar products were in fact different. Perhaps one chocolate bar was aimed at the premium market, while the other was more everyday, and thus not a true competitor. I don’t know how many companies accepted such sub-differentiating, but it was worth a try.

I was thinking about this the other day, when it occurred to me that we never really consider this issue from the other side: clients often use several advertising/marketing/PR agencies, whose skills overlap. That would suggest that they are in competition with each other, and that often means problematic consequences.

Here’s an example how it works on the surface: client A has three roster agencies, X, Y and Z, providing help in publicising what they do. X, Y and Z have different core abilities (eg, social, direct, events), so they are briefed on different tasks, but when a big campaign needs to knit that work together, they are expected to be very mature about it and play nice with a good old handshake and a friendly pint after it’s all over.

In reality, as almost all of you know, it does not work anything like that. Advertising offerings are now so disparate and amorphous, and agencies are now so desperate to gain and retain any part of the pie, that everyone claims to be able to do everything. Digital agencies do design; design agencies do PR; PR agencies do brand audits etc. 

If you’re a client, not only do you now find it difficult to truly separate your roster of publicity vendors, you probably don’t want to. The competition leads to desperation, which leads to more work produced for less money, just on the off-chance that agency X can be given some of the budget and work that would have gone to agency Z. In many instances, it’s survival of the cheapest and most craven, accelerating a race to the bottom. 

Clients don’t really want to stop their agencies trying to one-up each other, and even if they did, no self-respecting agency would stay in their lane if they happened to have a good idea that belonged in someone else’s. 

And this isn’t even a new situation. In 1999 I worked on a Millennium Bug campaign (Google it, kids), which we were to present alongside complementary work from our direct marketing agency. When we turned up to the meeting with them, they had also come up with some TV ads, the very thing we were supposed to contribute. In those days you could ask them what on earth they thought they were doing; these days, colouring outside your lines is almost expected.

So now competing agencies have to decide who is leading a joint presentation, designing the deck, choosing which work lives or dies and what order it all comes in. This obviously adds extra stress, work and time to the process, particularly as there is often no definitive right or wrong. Eventually a decision must be made, and when the meeting arrives, one agency might try to undercut the work of another, while always looking as if they are actually best pals.

It’s the very definition of the conflict clients seek to avoid. One agency’s endline might now be the backbone of another agency’s TV campaign, but how does the first agency claim its credit for the contribution without looking petty and grasping? If agency X has an amazing insight that leads to fantastic work from agency Y, is it fair to just use that work for free? The clients would say, ‘Sure, one team one dream’. The agencies might ostensibly agree, while thinking, ‘There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there is a ‘me’’. 

At the end of the process, does it make the work better? One on side the sharing of insights and ideas should improve the overall end product, with everyone allowed to select from the best ingredients. On the other, no agency wants to make the other one look good as it could genuinely cost them the whole account. So they might push their own lesser idea that much harder, giving it lots of expensive craft to lift it above the others. Worse work? Perhaps, but at least it’ll be our worse work.

In the end, it becomes a kind of frenemy situation that must be managed with kid gloves. Each agency knows the other has a direct line to the client, so they must be on their guard 24/7. 

How can this be avoided? Well, you’d be asking a client to turn down the extra effort that is born of competition, which is basically free work. Better for them that agencies live with the conflict, no matter how serious the injuries that result.

It’s now the essential collection of anyone creative’s work and achievements, along with a little ‘about’ section that gives you a delightful window into their career, but also explains that they collect ceramic frogs or enjoy traveling to Chad.

Portfolios weren’t always so elaborate. For a start, they used to be made of paper and contained nothing but the work. They almost always came in a faux-leather case, complete with ring binders that never quite worked, and filling them up required finding laminated proofs of your ads, while TV and radio could be collected on additional cassettes that you shoved into a sleeve at the back.

There might have been a short step that involved putting the work on DVDs, but that was kind of complicated, so the hard copy portfolio was king until maybe 2010, when you pretty much had to have a website of some sort. 

Before Squarespace made life a bit easier, getting that site together was difficult and expensive. They tended to look a bit crap, and updating them to add your new work was a tedious and annoying process. But sending a link around was much easier than lugging a portfolio case across town, and ECDs were much happier viewing ten books via the convenience of their laptop.

Now that a spiffy-looking site is within the reach of us all, a few fundamentals have changed. Instead of simply letting the work speak for itself (and in this brave new world of mandatory case studies), additional explanations are expected. You can give strategic context, production information and results, if you’re so inclined. 

And as with those case studies, that seems to mean finding the most positive possible lens through which to present yourself. A minor pair of social posts can become ‘Client X’s first-ever Instagram campaign, which used the illustrations of sneaker influencer PJQ to set the brand off in an entirely new direction. It gained 341,867 media impressions in the first ten days, on its way to becoming the most-watched carousel for the FMCG market in the month of July’. 

A recent LinkedIn post from an ECD suggested that, ‘If you didn’t write it, go through a dozen iterations, and attend rounds of meetings where it was discussed. If you didn’t pick the director, nor flew to the shoot and fought for that take you thought you needed. If you didn’t spend days in an edit suite, painstakingly moving frames, undecided between V.63 or V.64 while trying 100 tracks on your laptop. If you were not there… THEN DON’T PUT IT IN YOUR PORTFOLIO.’

I can see where he’s coming from, but I’ve witnessed enough inside stories of great work to know that the division of labour between members of a creative team is rarely equal enough to ensure that the above would apply to both. One copywriter might have slaved away at the concept, only for their AD to dominate the executional elements. Does that mean neither can claim the finished piece as their own? 

That ECD’s point is that you need to be able to use a portfolio to accurately evaluate its owner’s abilities. What if you’ve been fooled into hiring a CW who will not be great at the post-production stage? Or an AD who can’t come up with a concept to save their life?

But that’s always going to be tricky. For some teams and creatives the degree of contribution can ebb and flow, and sometimes the editor or sound engineer ends up suggesting a better endline, which is then used in the final ad. Does that mean the creatives shouldn’t claim full credit? Where does an ad cross the line between ‘yours’ and ‘someone else’s’?

And what about creative directors? When it comes to their portfolios, some of them clearly delineate between their CD work and their work as a creative foot soldier, but even then, there are CDs who transform base metal into gold, while others make little difference, or even make things worse. If that happens it’s unlikely the CD will honestly cop to a lack of contribution; after all, everyone is the hero of their own story.

Advertising is full of misattributed credit, fluffed-up CVs and rose-tinted glasses. Positive takes are what we create for a living, so it’s no surprise that people use them for themselves. That probably means we should take portfolios with a pinch of salt, perhaps downgrading claims by 10-20% (as I do when I watch a case study).

This is especially true as portfolios are now out there for everyone to find and pore over. Just Google the name of the creative alongside the word ‘advertising’ and you should find what you’re looking for. Then you can see if they list every single award, whether huge or tiny, or just use the low-key, but suspiciously non-specific self-endorsement, ‘I’ve been recognised by all major international award schemes’.

You can also check out the window to their soul: the ‘about’ section, which can be po-faced and self-important, or humorously self-deprecating. I find that it’s often surprisingly revealing, as much for what is omitted as what is included. 

Last is the style. 90% seem to be Squarespace sites, with a fairly neutral and functional design – the closest thing you can get to letting the work speak for itself. But I feel the ADs often want to demonstrate their visual chops more obviously. They are usually the ones that get a proper site done, bringing the design flex with a bit of parallax scrolling.

Just like the rest of the industry, the internet has provided your portfolio situation with many more tools, but also many more choices, so make sure you think though it all with the care you’d apply to your ads. As one wise person’s portfolio says, ‘Ah! The good old ‘about’ section. Time to decide whether to talk about myself in the first person or the third…