Ten Things Your Agency Prefers You Don’t Know: #8

There is no real difference in capabilities between agencies.

The marketing services business in heavily saturated. There is no shortage of people willing to manage your social media campaign, make a TV ad, or facilitate an innovation workshop. There may be a brief window in the very beginning of new tool’s life, when there are a more limited number of people who can claim competency. Experts in search engine optimization were limited in 1996, as were television producers in 1938. But the pace by which people master new media has accelerated, such that those windows of scarcity are increasingly short. What that means is that there is no agency that is going to distinguish itself by having some capability that another does not.  Everyone has the same type of experts in the same fields. If not, they are easy to hire. While it is true that the very best in any field will always be rare, that true elite is probably not on staff at an advertising agency anyway. So agencies are not differentiated in terms of what they can do for a client, though a few may be differentiated in how well they do it.