It’s important to know your audience. So what sort of agency would a reader of DecisionMarketing belong to, I wonder?
Back in the day, there used to be many marketing publications, each covering a different discipline. When I was working in advertising and digital agencies, we used to refer to the ones which covered direct marketing as “Coupon News”. The sort of agency they catered for was what we called a below-the-line agency; the people who did direct marketing. Not that we were that bothered – we never really ran into them much.
Now that I’m helping marketers find agencies, the question “what sort of agency are you?” has taken on an entirely new significance.
For a start, the answer to this question should not be a one-word description of your principal output, such as ‘advertising’, or ‘PR’, or ‘DM’. That’s so yesterday. More importantly, it’s no longer helpful to the client. The days of agencies being categorised in this way are disappearing.
For modern marketing departments, the smart way to choose an agency is not to consider what things it makes, but what problems it can solve.
Since the advent of the digital economy, agency roles have become blurred. There are many more ways to achieve marketing objectives now, and many more communication channels. For example, “social media” campaigns are routinely planned and executed by PR agencies, experiential agencies, integrated agencies, digital agencies… I could go on. But these campaigns can have dramatically different objectives. To categorise these campaigns as “social media” is missing the point.
Marketing directors do not wake up in the morning wanting to “do” social media, or direct marketing, or anything else for that matter. They wake up with problems to solve, objectives to achieve and targets to hit. For any given marketing task, it is very possible that agencies with entirely different backgrounds and skills may be able to address the task with equal effectiveness.
And as brands move away from expensive retained relationships to more fluid, flexible relationships with agencies, they have to make agency choices more frequently. These will be choices that do not start with questions like “which DM agency should I choose?” Instead, we are finding that clients are starting to see beyond the agency ‘type’, and are more interested in simply finding solutions, with an open-minded approach to where that solution comes from.
So my advice would be to sit back and think hard about what problems you actually solve, for whom, in what circumstances and with what outcomes. This process will enable you to come up with a way of describing your agency which may be more useful to you, and to your prospects.
Shaun Varga is chairman and creative director of Ingenuity