19 Signs For An Ad Agency Review
It happens. One day you look at your marketing partner and think to yourself, “It’s not working, I’m not happy in this relationship.”
What are the warning signs that a marketer should begin looking for a new agency?
1. When their work doesn’t work
2. When they don’t know their stuff, your audience, your competition
3. When they’re more concerned with their business than yours (they’ve got to get those margins up to pay their global holding company overlord)
4. When their media plans are stale and demonstrate no innovation
5. When turnover is high and constant
6. When they’re more concerned with winning ad awards than winning you more customers
7. When they won’t play nicely with your other agencies/partners
8. When your agency takes you and your business for granted, and everything feels like a struggle
9. When their juniors are getting professional experience at your expense
10. When they are slow and unresponsive
11. When they keep raising rates or nickel and diming you with overages
12. When they’ve become account service-oriented instead of account management-oriented (they should be bringing more to the table than just pastries and coffee)
13. When they bully you or try going over your head
14. When their creative ideas are dull, stupid, or outrageous with no strategic purpose
15. When they don’t or won’t listen
16. When they become lap dogs–– your partner should be pushing you by bringing fresh thinking, not simply pushing pens and taking your order
17. When they add little or no value
18. When they don’t demonstrate empathy for you and the pressures you face
19. When you’ve raised issues in performance and they have not been addressed
Those are some of the reasons you may consider looking for a new partner. I’m sure there are plenty more. Please add yours in the comment section.
Our business is tough enough, find a partner you like and respect. One that adds value in ways that make your professional life easier.
You deserve that, don’t you?
Patrick: The agency-side counter list – “Maybe you don’t need a new agency if…:
1. You struggle to answer the question, “How will success be defined on this effort?”
2. Your latest customer satisfaction, attitudes & usage and/or brand perceptual research is five years old or older.
3. Your sales and marketing teams are siloed, or worse, they hate each other.
4. You believe senior management should be insulated against dealing with major marketing decisions because they are too busy.
5. You expect the agency to be on call 24/7 but your payment terms are 60 days or longer.
6. You want “digital marketing” but have no budget or personnel capacity for web development, content management, data capture or analysis, and social media monitoring and response.
7. You believe a new marketing campaign can overcome systemic service, product and delivery deficiencies. And God forbid, some one should ever talk frankly about those deficiencies.
8. Your pat answer to the marketing communications objective section on the agency’s creative brief is “Sell more stuff, dammit!”
9. Your oversight, review processes and risk/compliance procedures are so rigorous that the last “big idea” that made it through was changing the corporate brand font in your 97 page graphics standards manual.
10. The only thing that turns over faster than your agency list is your brand management staff.
11. Your brand strategy consists mostly of cranking out new brand taglines (via the new agencies that often accompany them) because that’s easier than addressing the macro-brand impact issues.
Excellent points, Grant. I value your perspective since you’ve seen the good, bad and the ugly.
All too often the agency review process is a mask for much deeper issues–– some accounts are seemingly in perpetual review. Now we know why.
Thanks so much for your learned comments.