Clients & The Traditional Agency Wakeup Call

Interesting post from Ben Wiener in Imedia connection this week called Digital expertise: Is your agency faking it?

Ben talks about the last several years being harder for agencies to turn away business and that there’s been a lot more of the “Yeah, we do that” responses to clients. But as an agency, sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do (turn away business that is) and in fact, what you must do for the health of the agency.  In the short term it can hurt but you’ve got to look beyond the short term.

According to Forrester, 78 percent of clients don’t believe their lead agency does digital well. And this for good reason: Given the state of the economy, it’s been increasingly hard for agencies to turn away any opportunity to earn some revenue. And as client interest and budgets have increasingly turned towards digital, the response within traditional agencies has been to tell their clients, “Yeah, we do that,” and then try to figure it out. It’s no surprise that the results are often dissatisfying. Agencies discover that digital isn’t just another medium like television. And clients discover that “Yeah, we do that,” means their key digital tasks are being outsourced, mismanaged, or improperly staffed.

Ben lays out a checklist of questions clients should ask when discerning digital capabilities and I have to admit a bit of surprise that there aren’t more comments afterwards.  So, as a digital agency do you agree with these and if you’re a traditional agency, same question.  Would be interested to hear your thoughts. The checklist below with abbreviated descriptions:

1) Which panels did you vote for?

If no one in the room has been to SXSW, OMMA, f8 (or knows what those acronyms stand for), they’re certainly voting with their feet about their commitment to embracing the new world.

2) Who leads the charge?

Does the agency have a CTO? No, not an IT guy. A CTO. As it becomes harder to separate creativity and technology, does the agency’s ECD have a peer on the technology side?

3) Where’s the beef?

Are the agency’s developers in-house, or do they outsource? Maintaining an in-house development capability is expensive and requires learning how to manage people who are completely different from typical ad folks. It’s also essential to delivering high quality digital work on time and on budget.

4) Digital-only clients/projects

Does your agency have any digital-only clients or projects, or is all of its digital work coming from long-standing clients that simply don’t know better?

5) Who advocates for the consumer?

We no longer think of account planning as revolutionary; it makes perfect sense that the consumer should be the primary consideration in the development of compelling, effective advertising. Account planning ensures that advertising constantly achieves maximum relevance.

6) Analytics

Every agency will tell you they’re “into analytics,” in the same way that they assure you they’re digital. But what does your agency measure to optimize campaigns and to determine success?