Newsflash: selling is tough and agency new business can be even tougher. Our new business directors operate on principles of polite persistence, consistency and reaching out with value. We strive to avoid overly aggressive reach-outs, generic messaging and the crappy tricks we see some salespeople use. And speaking of those crappy tricks, here are a […]

Advertising and marketing industry changes bear fresh opportunities for new business development; they also bring fresh challenges! The pace of industry change exceeds “evolution”.  Considering only  the explosive growth in marketing technology – and budgets associated with it – “revolution” could be a more accurate description. A recent MarketingCharts post gives us a peek at what Marketers […]

  Seasonal habits die hard.  It just feels like agency new business planning should be in the air! Years ago, as a Consumer Marketing Manager for top household cleaning products, spring brought flowers, birds returning from winter homes, and the hatching of the business planning process for the upcoming calendar year. It’s highly likely that the […]

The Advertising Age article, The Ad Agency of the Future Is Coming. Are You Ready?, is one that you may have seen.  If you haven’t, set aside some time to read it. As industry leaders from Procter & Gamble, Wunderman, PepsiCo, Omincom and others describe their views of the “Ad Agency of the Future”… how […]

Brad Jakeman, the President of Pepsi’s Global Beverage Group, had a pretty tough message to send to the 2,700 attendees at this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing Conference: Stop Calling It Advertising! Jakeman, in an impassioned speech given on Thursday at the event, suggested that agencies have not kept pace with the changes that have […]

In a conversation with one of my New Business Director colleagues the other day about particularly successful clients, she reflected on the importance of “Thank You”. She specifically recalled the AdAge article reporting on the new business panel discussion at their Small Agency Conference, when one panelist remarked: “I’ve seen when an agency won the […]

Over the past few weeks, our posts have presented the Agency of the Future, describing traits agencies will need to flourish in our rapidly evolving industry. Several traits we presented described how agencies can continuously grow in value as a partner to their clients.  Others centered on becoming a more effective competitor as marketers consolidate agency partners. […]