Your team delivered exactly what your client asked for. Which means they failed to add value.
Value, and added value, are the kind of concepts that everyone in agencyland agrees really matter, but still end up in the graveyard of good ideas without something practical to hang them off and apply to specific clients.
I've written about the three G's of Generic, Good and Great work before and come back to them again because they’re just the kind of practical hook that helps teams get to grips with what adding value really means in practice.
Generic => delivering what was asked for.
Not worthless, but to be expected, and with AI it's what your client could do for themselves if they had the time.
Good => going beyond the ask.
Craft or experience applied outside the brief. Adds real value, but also where the trouble starts, because any good agency can do good work. It seems like a decent place to be, right up until it forces your client to compare you against competitors on price alone because everything else about you is the same.
Great => pivots on unique insight.
Not necessarily a different output, but one that carries something only you could have added, because you used insight no one else had. And your own team almost certainly already have it.
What tends to happen when teams measure themselves up against this is that everyone puts themselves at 'Good' to start with. The awkwardness comes when they realise they're actually at 'Generic'. I ran a recent workshop where, by the end of the day, a 'Great' proposal was mapped out by an account manager who started from a place that was clearly 'Generic'.
Is there anything in your work that only you could have put there?
What this account manager come to appreciate about his client's business that nobody outside the relationship knew came from months of client conversations, moans and reviews never written down anywhere. Reshaping the proposal to account for these insights was all it took to move it from something any 'Good' agency could have sent to something uniquely focused that no one else could have produced.
The three G's test works because it is simple: could any 'Good' agency have delivered the last output from your team, without knowing what only you know about your client?
