Digital Agency: Aligning the stories of the CEO, the European Creative

We were called by the New Business Director of a world-famous London digital agency. She realised that what they were famous for wasn’t what they spent most of their time doing. In addition, she noticed that depending on who stood up to tell the agency’s story, a different story would emerge.

She asked us to work with the Senior Partners to develop the one true message.

All the elements, but in what order?

We worked in 1:1 sessions with each of the agency’s senior partners. We quickly realised that, while their stories sounded different, they were essentially the same: they had the same elements, but they presented those elements in a different order and with a different focus.

MECE is nicey.

We borrowed a technique from our friends in the Management Consultancy world. They have a term, “MECE” (pronounced Me-See) which stands for Mutually-Exclusive, Completely Exhaustive.

What this means is that when you’re looking for a solution, you have to consider everything, and you have to make sure that no sub-sets of your recommendation overlap.

Using this idea, we showed the partners that there were only a limited number of ways of ordering the elements of their agency’s positioning and story.

We showed which didn’t work, and showed the only solution that would work.

Immediately, the Partners were able to understand how to co-operate on making a more powerful story.

Even better, they were able to see how this story could be used to more quickly construct RFI documents and the pitch itself.

Better than we can say it.

Around 3 months after our work with the agency, they pitched for and won their second biggest piece of business ever.

Inevitably, this work is confidential. But if you would like more details, within the limits of our confidentiality agreement, please contact us