Publications
Publications
- 2012
- Foundations and Trends® in Marketing
Conflict Policy and Advertising Agency-Client Relations: The Problem of Competing Clients Sharing a Common Agency
By: Alvin J. Silk
Abstract
What restrictions should be placed on advertising agencies with respect to serving accounts or clients that are competitors of one another in order to avoid conflicts of interest? In recent decades, the advertising and marketing services industry has undergone a number of structural changes that forced an ongoing re-examination and modification of traditional norms and policies emphasizing exclusivity in agency-client relationships. A typology of conflicts that has arisen in the U.S. shows the variety and complexity of contemporary conflicts. Cases of conflicts reported in the trade literature are used to illustrate policy issues as well as the spillover effects and resolution of disputes. To cope with these developments, two significant changes in conflict policies evident in current U.S. practice are identified. First, safeguards to preserve proprietary information that function as organizational, location, and personnel mobility barriers among quasi-autonomous units within a mega-agency or holding company have become an essential component of conflict policies. Subject to the protection against security breaches afforded by safeguards, rival clients may be served by separate organizational units that are under common control and/or ownership. Second, a family of hybrid conflict polices has evolved that feature elements of the split account system long practiced in Japan, augmented by safeguards that serve as partial substitutes for the umbrella prohibition on serving rivals imposed by exclusivity. By relying on safeguards and splitting account assignments in a variety of ways among different organizational units within a given mega-agency or holding company that may also serve rivals (or across different mega-agencies or holding companies), clients exert a measure of control over the access of those agencies to confidential information while also offering them incentives to avoid conflicts of interest. Findings from the existing body of conceptual and empirical research bearing on the sources and consequences of conflicts are reviewed and directions for further research are discussed.
Keywords
Advertising Agency; Competitors; Marketing Services Industry; Structural Changes; Agency-client Relationships; Hybrid Conflict Policies; Safeguards; Advertising; Advertising Industry; Europe; Latin America; North and Central America
Citation
Silk, Alvin J. "Conflict Policy and Advertising Agency-Client Relations: The Problem of Competing Clients Sharing a Common Agency." Foundations and Trends® in Marketing 6, no. 2 (2012): 63–149.