Tag Archives: capabilities

16 August, 2010 · 2:05 pm

Ten Things Your Agency Doesn’t Want You to Know: #4

You have the wrong people in your agency meetings.

It is a truth of life that people often make the mistake of assuming that just because they consume a lot of something, they are expert at how to make it. People who drink a lot of fine wine will talk about terroir and tasting notes even if their palettes couldn’t distinguish between Merlot and pine tar. The same can be said about movies, driving and advertising. People have been surrounded by advertising all their lives, so they naturally and erroneously assume they know a lot about it. The result is that there’s an implicit and harmful assumption that everyone’s opinion is valid. The CFO weighs in, the summer intern gets a vote, and various other unqualified personnel are encouraged to participate in the evaluation of the work “as part of their development.” It’s hard to believe that a company would let a first-year finance associate tweak the firm’s capital structure, or the HR director play with the supply chain, yet often have no qualms doing the equivalent thing to their marketing. If you want your marketing programs to be better, than have your most qualified marketers work on them. You should demand the same level of expertise and experience in your marketing decisions as you do in your other business decisions.

Leave a comment

Filed under Activation, Business Management, Innovation

Tagged as , , ,

14 July, 2010 · 10:43 am

Ten Things Your Agency Prefers You Don’t Know: #10

Only two things really matter when picking an agency.

If you are a major marketer, the type of agencies you’ll consider all have the same basic approach and capabilities.  Their processes, for better or worse, are all about the same as well.  Many claim to have proprietary tools or processes, but that’s just not the case. They may have different names and different labels for what they do, but the breadth and delivery of services is essentially the same at any holding company agency or major independent. Pricing is also not different. More accurately, if there is a pricing difference, agencies are quick to match their competitors in order to win or retain a client.

If the basic capabilities are the same at most every agency, what distinguishes them? In my experience there are two factors that really matter. The first factor is the quality of the people working directly on your business.  A great team at a mediocre agency will tend to do great work, and the opposite is true as well.

The second factor is the standards an agency sets for itself – standards for creativity, professionalism, and integrity. The agencies with higher standards make it harder for bad work to get out the door, and are quicker to realize when their work is falling short of what it should be.

If I had to choose a new agency as efficiently as possible, I would do three things.  First, I would look at all their work. Not just their highlights or major clients, but everything they’ve done in the past 6-12 months so I could judge their overall standard of work. For example, on a big retail account there is often a lot of little stuff that has to get churned out quickly and cheaply, like tent cards or shelf talkers.  Do they just jam their print ads into another format, or do they actually take a little time to design it for the environment it’s in.

Second, I would talk to each of their clients to see if they had more than the usual compliments and gripes so I could assess their standards of professionalism and integrity.  No client-agency relationship is without its spats and hiccups, but I’d listen to see if problems get addressed, or if  the same spats and hiccups keep recurring

Third, I would meet directly with the people who would be working on my business. I’d not only assess whether I like and trust their work, but also to sense if they are people who will champion my business back at their place. Big agencies have lots of people competing priorities and opinions, so I want someone who is going to advocate for me when I’m not there. Oh, and you can have them do some work too since most agencies are giving it away for free anyway.

The typical pitch process gets around to accomplishing these things indirectly, but generally takes a lot more money and time.

4 Comments

Filed under Agency Management

Tagged as , , , , ,

23 October, 2009 · 12:50 pm

Ten Things Your Agency Prefers You Don’t Know: #2

Square Peg in a Round Hole_0565The agency structure dictates the ideas you get.

Every agency makes the claim that they are media-neutral, fully integrated, 360, or some other catchphrase implying ideas that are bigger than any one channel. The intent is certainly there, but the very structure of the agency prevents it from happening.  Agencies have accumulated a full-time staff of people who need to be allocated if that agency is to survive as a business.  This is true for almost any type of agency, be it traditional, digital, or social. If you have a dozen copywriters on staff, you better be generating ideas that require a lot of copywriting. Similarly, it you have 3 Flash programmers on staff, you better be doing some Flash development.  So imagine a situation in which a traditional agency is on retainer with a client.  What is the likelihood that the agency will come back and recommend moving most of the budget into shopper marketing? Sure, the agency has shopper marketing in their holding company network, but moving the budget to them means the agency loses the bulk of their retainer. Will the agency reward the Account Director for slashing their retainer and putting agency staff in jeopardy? Of course not.  That’s why you’ll get the ideas that match the resources of the agency.

Related to this structural issue is the myth that agency creatives are focused on ideas that transcend channels. It reminds me of the “IT expert” that only shows up in movies. This fictional guy is equally adept at every computer application ever written, knows both hardware and software, has a PhD level understanding of encryption algorithms, and immediate access to every database on the planet.  Meanwhile, in real life, if you need help with a Mac version of Office, the PC guy in tech support can’t help you. Similarly, a creative brought up to think in terms of websites is not likely to start thinking about a marketing problem in terms of retail events. Another one highly skilled in the art of scripted :30 stories isn’t going to be comfortable crafting a social media program.

It is not a question of smarts, talent, or even intent. Architect Louis Sullivan expressed the adage that “form follows function.” In the case of agencies, function follows form.

Leave a comment

Filed under 21st Century Marketing, Agency Management

Tagged as , , , ,

3 July, 2009 · 4:26 pm

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

olsen twinsThere 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.

1 Comment

Filed under Agency Management

Tagged as , , , ,