Opinion: On the Campaign Couch ... with JB.(Jeremy Bullmore)(Column)

A client writes: While our agency has produced sterling work for us over the past five years, there's a general feeling - both in the company and the trade press - that none of it has been as good as our launch campaign, created by another agency. Should we consider revisiting our original strategy?

A: You may remember Punch. This humorous magazine appeared weekly, with occasional interruptions, from 1841 until 2002. For most of that time, as its reputation and circulation soared, its readers complained that it wasn't nearly as good as it used to be. It was 150 years before they were right.

So it's entirely possible that you're suffering from what we call Rosy Retrospection, a distortion of memory that constantly perceives the past as better than the present despite commonly accepted rising standards. The trade press suffers from Rosy Retrospection in a big way.

Alternatively, you may be right, so forgive me if I ask: if they were so good, what made you abandon your original strategy and your original agency in the first place?

Boredom, perhaps? The shapely ankle of an alluring new agency? Your new marketing director?

That change back then didn't do you any favours. There's no reason to believe that another change now, fuelled by no new vision, will serve you any better. The temptation to return, to build on former glory, is touchingly human and understandable: it seems to promise marketing's ultimate nirvana, risk-free originality. But the archive folder of successful strategy revivals is a very slim one indeed.

You have an agency of five years' standing. They know you and you know them. They've done sterling work - by which, of course, you mean work that's strategically unexceptionable but without spark. So before you do anything else, inspire them to fly. Challenge them to produce work which, in five years' time, even without the filter of Rosy Retrospection, will be seen to have set enviable new standards. If you're prepared to back them through a couple of bumpy months, I bet they'll deliver.