KAMPALA — Advertising and Communication agencies have been advised on how to enhance agency-client relationships to boost the sector’s performance and quality of services delivered to the brands they support.
The call was made by industry experts during a webinar hosted by the Uganda Advertising Association (UAA) recently.
Advertising agencies are businesses that offer marketing and communication advisory services by creating, planning, and executing campaigns or activities on behalf of brands to help them grow their market share in the industry they trade-in.
According to UAA statistics, Uganda boasts of over 300 advertising and communication agencies that offer specialized services ranging from; digital marketing, all-around marketing and communication, and Public Relations, among others.
Diana Komukama Ssempebwa, Head of Marketing and Communications at KCB Bank Uganda, who was one of the panelists highlighted, “Expectation setting should be the first step both the client and agency that are looking to work together align on. Sometimes we promise the world and deliver a village.”
She added, “Having a wrong agency-client relation can greatly affect the output especially if the agency and client have completely different cultures. Agencies should take time to understand, be genuinely interested in the client they are working with if they are to attain the desired marketing and communications objective”.
UAA Chairman Frank Muthusi mentioned that “UAA has organized a number of webinars dubbed the KANVAS on different topics. This month, we focused on enhancing client-agency relations and covered a topic on; Would you fire a client? a dilemma that most advertising agencies and clients have dealt with since time immemorial.”
He further revealed, “UAA wants to professionalize the adverting industry through training, among other engagements we host that feature industry leaders both in Uganda and other markets who share insights, exposure on trends, and we believe such an environment and deliberate efforts will boost Uganda’s advertising sector to ably compete at the regional and global level”.
Komukama encouraged clients and agencies to have regular review meetings for real-time feedback, measure and track the performance of key project deliverables.
Adding that “The agency-client relationship should be a partnership and not a servant-master relationship”.
