The Best Reps
Here Frank Wainwright - in his Best Practice series in the monthly Field Marketing magazine - assesses the value that the best reps can bring to a temporary campaign.
Tactical field marketing and just about all experiential activities draw their staff from the same available workforce, a staff army who are often still referred to by some of the industry old guard as promogirls. More correctly they are promotional staff, field representatives and brand ambassadors.
The last term, brand ambassadors, is the preferred term for most agencies these days. It is a term which is designed to reinforce the quality message. It says “we don’t just sling bodies into the field for you, we provide level-headed brand advocates”.
People are imperfect and quality will definitely differ. So how can you tell the difference between an agency that provides true ambassadors and one that just says they do? There are checks you can make, and if you don’t make those checks then you risk sending brand loafers out where you’d been promised ambassadors. The checks can be performed as part of the pitch process.
In my experience RFIs often ask numerous wasteful questions about agency philosophy and internal procedure but ask virtually no useful questions about staff. Staffing questions will not only give you a realistic expectation of field performance but also show up more about the responsibility of the agency than 00 other bland questions.
“Where will the staff come from and why?” is a good place to start. Staff will sometimes be directly employed by the same agency that is devising the strategy. Sometimes they will outsource the job to a specialist staffing agency. Both routes have their merits. The next question should be “What is the employment procedure and how quickly do the staff get paid?”
Once a campaign is underway, speaking directly to reps in action on your work is invariably useful. The reps owe no allegiance to any one agency and a good performer will have been through plenty of employers until they have enough work to pick and choose. They will soon tell you about past bad experiences. A typical complaint is the waiting time prior to getting paid, a process that can drag on for months.
At the core there is a key best practice question for clients here too. All field and experiential marketing relies on cashflow and because this is a people business the knock-on effects of clients who don’t pay on time is more severe than in other forms of advertising. Agencies can be put under undue cashflow pressure and in the worst instances, pay for the reps who have carried out the work can be delayed.
Nevertheless there are definitely agencies that have a reputation by key regular reps in the industry as bad payers on a regular basis. These regulars are often the reps who love promotional work and understand brand values. They can make a significant impact on campaign success. These reps find their preferred staffing agencies and won’t go back to the bad payers. So, where they go is often an indicator of quality of both the performance and the administration process at the agency.
Top Masher :: Fay Harvey
Fay Harvey is a brand ambassador who takes on a wide range of work, choosing to work for three agencies in advance of the rest - Mash, Tribe and Method Two. She has been in the industry for 5 years, enough time to know where not to go.
Fay’s work for staffing agency Mash takes her to Dubai and Rome helping to host B2B events for airport supplier Arinc and on sampling/experiential activities for brands such as Jordans or The Natural Confectionery Company. Some of this work, including TNCC, originated through the agency Sledge who use Mash for much of their staffing. She estimates that she does 80 per cent of her work for Mash.
Fay sampling for the successful Jordans campaign
For Method Two, Fay has been working on a Wolf Blass wine sampling activity - work which has seen her attending rugby internationals this winter and will make her a prime participant in the forthcoming Ashes series this Summer.
For Tribe, Fay has been providing the public with knowledge of the plans for NHS development in London boroughs, gaining feedback for the authorities on the popularity of their plans.
This schedule is the perfect illustration as to why good promotional people enjoy their work. It offers enormous variety and scope. I spoke to Fay on a day when she was not working - also a guilty pleasure. “I really enjoy the work that I do” she says, “and to an extent I also get to pick and choose the days that I work”. Fay is full of praise for her current roster of employers, just as they praise her, and she will be nobody’s fool. She doesn’t go back to agencies that mess her around and she discourages others from doing so. Staff in the industry inevitably overlap a lot, and so better operators get to know where to choose to work. “Pay rates in the industry are fairly uniform”, she says, “so you choose where to work based on how quickly they pay and by who you will work with”. The reference to who you will work with intrigued me. “It’s about doing a good professional job as a team”, she says “with Mash you will see everyone on the same job working with the same positive attitude. You don’t get that everywhere. Sometimes there will be people there who don’t want to be. It can have the effect of holding the whole team back”. Mash, she points out, make themselves close to reps, using newsletters and running incentive competitions building a club atmosphere.
TNCC Activity :: Created by Sledge :: Implemented and staffed by Mash
I speak to reps on a regular basis and always ask them about their work in stores and stations and at events. Fay confirmed for me what I have heard on numerous other occasions, there are two types of rep available, brand ambassadors and brand loafers. As consumers we have all been on the end of positive and indifferent brand experiences.
The encouraging news for brand owners is that there are more and more genuine brand ambassadors available. They are creative people who see promotional work as a career that supports their other creative talents. Fay is a dancer, a musician who dislikes working in offices. Karen Laubscher, our 2008 field rep of the year combines sampling and sales work with her demanding parenting role.
Getting the best faces to your brand will make a huge difference to the success of the campaign. Setting out cashflow principles between yourself and the agency from the off and asking pertinent staffing questions at pitch stage is a good way of controlling and making sure that the clever creative ideas translate into positive impact at street level.
