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Pär Carlson, Senior Pitch Director at Bonnier News in Sweden, is all too familiar with managing client interactions and working in collaboration with them to produce strong results through branded content.
Bonnier News focuses on telling authentic human stories across its multiple channels and publications, with Pär having built the in-house commercial TV department on the back of his career in production. In simple terms, this involves him being a bridge between the departments, using his experience of production in TV, and ensuring their ideas and business proposals are of high quality.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a whole lot of client communication involved in this. While Pär had a whole host of insights and anecdotes to share with us in a recent podcast episode, his reflections on working with clients and managing their expectations is something that really stood out - and something that we all know first hand can be problematic!
As Pär himself puts it: ‘killing darlings for potential new customers is not an easy discipline’.
It takes courage to go against the client in the brief
In one of the recent award-winning campaigns that Pär was heavily involved in, the client came with a brief that the in-house team didn’t fully agree would be the best approach.
Pär explains the reason for their concern, and why they were confident in pushing back against it: ‘We had the data that showed what was going to be successful. That was the number one thing. We knew what worked on Expressen. We had to tell them that we really liked the idea, but there was a better route to take’.
As the campaign was going to be run on Expressen, a Swedish media owned by Bonnier News, the demographics, viewer behaviours, and channel interactions were familiar numbers to Pär’s team. The approach of challenging the client was based on this data, and the knowledge of how the proposed content would go down with them. It’s safe to get into a discussion when you know what will work and what will not work.
Respect the work the client has done - while benchmarking it against data
We all know that it’s not easy to approach these conversations, even when you have the background data to support the suggestions you’re bringing.
Pär reminds us to consider the nature of the relationship when working with a client: ‘Clients know all about their company. But when it comes to the channels we own, we know everything about them. You can’t go in there and confront them and tell them they’re wrong. You have to do it gently, have to be humble. You have to give them credit for knowing what they want - they want to be more fun and more edgy, so tell them what you can do to make them more fun and edgy’.
Pär and his team showed the client benchmarks for their audience, and then tied it into the storytelling and decided together on the celebrities they would use.
The series they produced for this campaign ended up being extremely successful, and reached some of the highest sales figures Expressen has ever seen.
The secret to award-winning campaigns is being chewing gum
Pär sums up his approach to client communications and working as an expert through an apt metaphor: ‘It’s good to be chewing gum: give the client some constructive resistance. The clients make the decisions, but they are not always correct. They like to be challenged sometimes! It’s good to be brave and discuss things with clients. We take the risk of losing the business, but if we think it’s the best for the client to have such an argument, then they often really believe us’.
It’s a good reminder that on the agency side, we want the most successful outcome for the client - and while that can include some difficult conversations, when these are handled in a data-backed and considerate manner, the outcome can be best for both sides.
For more of the discussion, valuable insights and a run down of a TV branded content series that led to conversion, take a listen to our podcast episode.
