The Footprint

The Footprint is the first of our tools designed to help you evaluate agencies against the performance you really need from them over time, rather than on "A Performance" in a pitch.

We start with a discussion with you about your business - objectives, culture and marketing structures - and the role of your agency or agencies within those.

Then we ask you to weight five factors in the way agencies work*, by dividing 100 points between them, according to their importance to you.

The five factors are:

•	Business thinking - understanding of your business and its objectives and ability to contribute to them, grasp of commercial realities
•	Relationship- goes beyond "chemistry" into "partnership"
•	Planning- you may want to specify the role of and kind of planning you envisage, strategic and/or creative
•	Creativity- not just the immediate solution, but the depth
•	Service - availability, accessibility, speed of working etc.

By mapping the way you allocate the points to the different factors we get a Footprint. The following is an example for a hypothetical client who places most emphasis on planning and creativity:

*Note: Of course this is a very basic picture. Each of the five factors will contain a number of dimensions, and these will vary by client and by brief. Alongside the five there may be other critical requirements - for instance a strong international network, or genuinely integrated communications capacity. When they are key, one or two can be included in the Footprint.

The rest of the process consists of searching for the agency who most nearly fits this "print" - or, if you prefer, of helping you and your current agency become a better fit for each other. We keep the Footprint visually in front of you, coming back to it constantly.

How we work with you	Solutions
The Footprint	Search and Selection
Performance Check	Performance Measurement