Need a resolution for the year? Fire your agency and invest in your own creative team.

A couple caveats before we jump in here. I don’t hate agencies, there’s some I adore. If you’re being serviced by a small boutique or mom and pop shop, never mind this article. If you happen to be receiving the services of one of the few remaining great shops left in HK, Bangkok or Mumbai…then also feel free to disregard. Ok, and if Droga5 is helping you then good-bye…but everyone else with a full service agency, you’re wasting your money. You should be investing that money in developing your internal creative teams. And if you don’t have one, create one. Here’s why agencies are out.

It's a bad relationship from the start. The best work you will ever see from your agency is when they’re pitching for your business. They’ll pull out all the stops, burn the late night candle, insert your own cliché here, anything in order to get you to sign on for that retainer. Treasure that moment, because after you sign that’s the last time they’ll be making that same effort for you. They’ll be far too busy doing the same thing to impress the next client hopeful. They’re a business and that business requires a constant stream of new clients. And as a business, they’re constantly cutting costs. They love the idea of AI as that means they can replace copywriters, media planners, researchers…making them even less human and probably, your ads. With a good internal team, you have everything that agency offered you from the beginning right there beside you. Including very creative human beings.

?They don’t care about your business. You live and breathe your brand, your product, your image and you handle it’s positioning like it’s a faberge egg. Your agency doesn’t. Most don’t give a toss. Sometimes that’s actually a good thing as some clients can’t always see the forest for the trees, but mostly it just allows agency laziness to waltz into that relationship. You would think most agencies would be working overtime learning about your market, your problems, and your competition but unfortunately ‘The least effort for the most return’ could be the motto of some I’ve experienced. You feel compelled to be constantly educating these people you are paying about what you do, who you do it for, what your selling points are. An internal team would know it inside out.

You have to fix their mistakes, a lot. I’ve been in meetings that the agency delayed for weeks with a promise to really 'blow our socks off' for them to finally show us somebody else’s commercial and say they’ll do something like that. I’ve seen agencies delay delivery of simple digital graphic banners and elements for social media (and that always means they’ve hired a freelancer they can’t get hold of) for their past deadline efforts only to be wrong. And I’ve seen them deliver copy that you had to ask if anyone else had actually proofread. In each of those cases, and many more I’m too polite to mention, all of those situations were corrected by the in-house creative team who could have done it in the first place.

They’re political. There’s also an ugly taste of politics that can seep in. I’ve been on both sides of the table at early encounters between agency and client and the one thing you need to be wary of, and kill if you won’t get caught, is the agency client director who usually excels at the art of being a sycophant. This is the Machiavellian who immediately understands and exploits the weaknesses of the marketing management, learning what they’ll like vs those they don’t. Then onto the upper levels, hopefully befriending the CEO’s team and tailoring every effort to their taste…being sure to pepper those meetings swaths of ego support making sure the very real line of difference between their taste and good taste has disappeared resulting in work cloaked in the Emperor’s new clothes. Henceforth, thus endeth any hope of a good agency effort for their contract duration. Good in-house creatives would help you see through that rubbish and at least attempt to keep management on track with no political baggage attached.

They secretly hate data. Surveys, research, trend spotting, funnel comparatives…from some sources, it's sloppy work with holes big enough to drive through. While agencies have no problem presenting it, they secretly hate data as much as you may love it. Data means tracking, and tracking means accountability and responsibility. It’s in the agency’s best interest to blur the lines. If you have a full service agency, that’s all taken care of as they’ll be placing the ads and coming back with their own data. Problem is, these days, most of those efforts can be placed and tracked for effectiveness by inexpensive software or working with the platforms themselves. The best example I saw was several years ago with a Murdoch group I was with. The agency presented a rather large and expensive marketing campaign. They made the mistake of saying to the money people in the room that they guaranteed a certain effectiveness target level. Murdoch’s people smelled blood in the water very quickly and said ‘great! How’s this…we’ll pay your full fee when you hit the target…and even bonuses if you exceed! But, should you fall short of the target, we’ll reduce fees by a sliding percentage. And if we don’t hit the minimum, you owe us!’ The agency didn’t think it was fair that they should be accountable, so they left…and in that case the in house creative team saved the day as well.

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Your full service agency is supposed to be exactly that. If you can look back on the year and see it was agency problem free then it was money well spent and you’ve got a media partner to hang onto. If not, find someone (like me) who can help you build a great internal creative team to look after both the big and small efforts for your markets. It only makes sense to invest in your own crative team who will understand the problems (big and small), the product and the possible solutions and get on it immediately. ?If there’s a project you want outside help with from time to time, even better. There’s plenty of advertising professionals out there who prefer working on projects directly with your marketing and creative teams.

This year, be smart. Invest in your own creative team. It's an investment that'll keep you happy all year.

Rob

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