Getting more from your agency ?

chaos

Getting more from your digital marketing agency, my five cents on picking your next agency.

I worked long and hard in digital marketing. I think the people who I worked with were amazing. Management was hands-on, creative and innovative. And there were some insights I would pass on to anyone picking their next digital advertising agency.

TL;DR

“Your agency is not your partner” is the title from (Burger 2007) in which the author dispels many myths associated with advertising agencies. I found his astute observations resonating with my experience. Yet this chapter is hardly the final word on the subject. I noticed that thoughts on digital marketing agencies tend to creep into my more marketing oriented articles. Somehow these sections expand and dominate the rest of the article becoming off-topic. I decided these thought should be better collected and organized here to provide the most value to my readers.

Having worked both as a marketing manager with agencies and as in different capacities within an agency I think that there may be more myth busting to be done here. I hope not to come through as someone with an axe to grind but rather to offer some advice on how to get more from your digital marketing agency.

Your agency is not your partner and other myths

So I think that Burger is a little conflicted on the role of the agency. In one place he calls then “your strategic communications partner” yet later calls them out saying they are not a partner. I recommend reading with book but to kick things of let us begin by going over his summary:

Your advertising agency is not your strategic communications partner.

In reality digital marketing agencies become privy to strategic marketing secrets. In data driven settings agencies are more efficient when given access to sensitive data beginning with sales data and even access to CRM database.

To avoid getting sued for conflicts of interests an agency will avoid representing competing clients. But in many of the bigger firms there is a convoluted holding structure to allow the same staff to service possibly conflicting clients of multiple agencies. And there are also well documented cases where an agency dropped a client to pursue a bigger account.

Today data analytics and technology are becoming more important than creative in picking agencies.

Using more than one ad agency.

One recommendation by burger that I do not agree with is to use more than one agency. This was common practice for many big clients. The divide and conquer strategy is rooted the wish to fostering a spirit of competition and not allowing any one agency to become complacent. I too, think this idea has merit.

So why does using multiple agencies become problematic?

First it means the marketing manager has to make more decisions and communication on the managers which are going to be stretched to the limit with one agency. I notice that managers have limited capacity for making many low level decisions that arise in digital campaigns. I’m thinking creative choices about micro copy, and creative, for digital ads, as well as other content.

Secondly using multiple agencies means that information generated by their activities will be siloed and putting all this data into one place to generate a 360 degree view of the customer is the greatest undertaking in the digital age.

Test creative executions against one another.

It is really a matter of priorities when it comes to spending on creative. You can spend big and win an award for your advertising agency which will make them very happy. Or you can spend much less, put that budget into performance marketing and make more sale and reduce your future acquisition prices. Spending big made more sense when campaign used mass media, run for months and cost in the tens of millions. Today digital marketers can handle much smaller campaigns that are super focused on specific markets and incredibly agile in terms of time.

I notice that creative advertising firms like to sell the big concept but are then unwilling to grasp the minutia of digital advertising formats and lack the capacity to handle the many opportunities they present. They are ready a few days before going on the air, and they are not interested in going back to reshooting shorter or longer versions for digital video. You can only do so much in the editing room, so most TV ads do much more poorly in digital. If you want to test agencies you should look at how readily their creatives handle the full gamut of digital formats.

I mean doing art direction of banner ads in different shapes and sizes that are not a good fit for the original concept, Making shorter and continuation ads for video. Making sequences of ads based on the original concept for making remarketing interesting and exciting to the viewer. Making variants for different location, handling different palettes and fonts to be organic in sites with different look and feel. Using animation, typography and so on to stand out and thinking about Guerrilla marketing opportunities that can make the campaign go viral.

Talent and expertise in Digital Marketing Agencies.

Many Digital Marketing agencies have been established in the last decade around SEO, managing advertising platforms for search, display and social. These clients tend to view these agencies as bastions of talent and expertise. This is because this is how the agencies like to present people it brings to meetings. I find this terminology amusing because creative agencies were differentiated by the talent of it creative teams. But in digital marketing these are replaced by writing micro copy for an ad group which just requires the ability to type with one finer.

While agencies are always on the lookout for good “talent” they have a greater predilection for attract staff with no prior experience and without the benefit of academic education in marketing. They are given minimal training on the use of online marketing platforms or SEO and put to work at a low wage. Platform vendors like Google require that agencies train their staff on the platform. With such a minimal barrier to entry there is high turn around for staff. Experience has some value but the “talents” which a digital marketing agency fosters are: - the ability to convince the client to increase their budget

• to sooth angry clients when a campaign goes awry which they often do on such complicated platforms. Initiative is rewarded and can lead to promotion to manage the account or the client but sooner rather than later experienced staff will get better jobs elsewhere.

The more traditional creative advertising firms were bigger and had some better trained staff but at the end of the day they operated along similar lines. And when your agency lacks deeper knowledge of marketing and quantitative analysis they tend to compete on their levels of service and how they schmooze their clients with very little ability to innovate or advise beyond what the platform recommends. While knowledge of marketing platforms which are continuously evolving and rapidly increasing in complexity is essential it is simply not enough to do good marketing or advertising for the clients.

Digital marketing is not something that happens in a vacuum. It is intimately intertwined with all the marketing, software engineering, and statistics.

What I found most astonishing the almost universal state of ignorance that these companies operate within when it comes to the decades of research used in modeling. It is even more surprising when looking at some surveys from the 80, 90 we can see that the majority of firms trying to use advanced techniques to plan and budget their advertising and even more so when it comes to their marketing efforts.

The following table based on (Funke & Beckmann, 1976) shows the growth in the literature on marketing models up to about 1976.

Year	models
1940	1
1950	12
1960	80
1975	58

And the more one explores the literature the more I see that most of the research is replicating existing models or making small adjustments. So here is a quick survey of marketing models. I hope to supplement this with figures and python/R code. As such it is likely to remain a work in progress.

Quotes

“The pitch is an archaic practice, and it is mainly responsible for the deteriorating stability in client-agency partnerships: In 1984, the average client-agency relationship lasted 7.2 years. By 1997, this had fallen to 5.3 years, and today, the average relationship lasts 2.5 years.” (Dan 2021)

References

• (Dan 2021) Dan, Avi 2021/8/16 “The Agency Pitch Is A Losing Bet For The CMO”, Forbes
• (Armstrong, J. S. 1985). “Long-Range Forecasting: From Crystal Ball to Computer”, 2nd Edition. John Wiley. This is a link to a review article. LRF is a thorough review of the literature on predictive modeling for marketing.