"Somewhere between six and nine months after you hire an advertising agency, it will begin to act as part of your team. In the typical scenario, that's how long it takes for an agency to start learning your culture, understanding your marketplace and anticipating your competitors' next moves. If you've chosen the right organization to represent you, if your individual cultures mesh and result in the kind of creative tension that makes for great advertising, the way your agency helps you grow your business will simply get better and better.
If you've chosen well, the right advertising agency will learn your products and/or the intricacies of your service mix. In our work with a large international hotel chain some years ago, it became the agency's job, by default, to break in the resident general managers on important properties. This wasn't because it fell under the definition of marketing or advertising, but because the agency had more tenure and knew the hotel properties better than its peripatetic professional staffers.
The right agency will understand the CEO well enough and have enough exposure to him or her to be able to craft speeches without taking more than a few minutes of valuable time to get the lay of the land. The right agency should have been in on new product development and should have been a principal part of developing the marketing strategy, and so should be able to talk comfortably to the press about everything from product recalls to significant technological advances.
Don't look for a social fit with the right agency. You didn't hire them, hopefully, for their ability to wine and dine the corporate brass or to lose gracefully on the 17th hole. But a corporate fit should be a definite expectation, with the agency knowing as much as possible about everything the client does, thinks, makes and sells without losing the valuable perspective that only an outside organization can have.
A sidebar about in-house agencies: in my experience, they don't work except to create the impression that money is being saved on corporate print work. In-house agencies lack the cross-fertilization that comes from working in a variety of disciplines and for a number of market segments. The cubicled minions of in-house agencies expand to fit the time and budget and contract to fit the expectations of the smallest corporate mind. What I'm talking about is real advertising agencies who make their living by producing outstanding creative work for a variety of clients in multiple media.
Once you have grown the agency relationship into a partnership, it needs to be nourished. One of the best nourishers, and unfortunately an all-too-often fading part of the corporate landscape, is the advertising manager. This is the guy on the tightrope, usually reporting to the marketing director or sometimes to the CEO, who gives the agency its assignments and who helps move good work through the organization. This is a particularly valuable role in highly technical enterprises, chock-a-block with engineers who, brilliant as they are in their technical arena, have little ability to visualize a print ad or understand a storyboard.
The ad manager makes his or her living like a translator, making sense of what the agency is trying to do, helping the inside decision makers understand the benefits and pitfalls and making course alterations that keep the work on target without changing the entire course of the mission. The ad manager must also keep agency bills in line yet understand why certain approaches come with prices that must be paid.
All this amounts to an enormous investment, one that shouldn't be taken lightly when there is a downturn in profits, a slump in a market segment or a grass-is-greener scenario at the perfect agency you didn't have the good sense to hire instead of the one you chose. Most companies change agencies due to a change in personnel. Someone new fills the marketing director or CEO position and wants to bring old, familiar faces with them. That usually means throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of knowledge, brand savvy and marketplace understanding for a group that will take months to curve up, even though they already may know the boss.
Change agencies only when there is valid reason to do so — and do so carefully even then. If sales are off compared to competitors, despite price parity and other market conditions being level, there may be something wrong with your communications approach. If your point of sales materials pale beside those of the competition, if your market share is off, if what you hear year after year is the same old approach to challenges that have never been met, then a change may be in order. Change agencies no more often than you change CEOs or law firms or corporate mission statements. To make your agency investment pay off, you need to treat it like a well-managed portfolio: leave it alone.
Ron Jackson is president of The Idea Farm, an international marketing, advertising and P.R. group based in Danville.