Your Agency problem might not be an Agency problem

It is possible, even likely, that you are having problems with your agency but before finding a new one consider this. Your problem with the Agency might be a marketing problem.

The issue could well be on your side.? And if you don’t address this the same problems will appear with the new agency.

Here are five largely unacknowledged ways that marketers affect agency performance.

Delegating the Agency down to the lowest rung in the Marketing department.

For some reason, Marketers have concluded that the Agency can be managed by the most junior people on the team while the senior marketers deal with “more important issues”.

This is a gross mistake for two reasons. If you force the Agency to deal with people who do not have the authority to approve (and will use their ability to say “no” to show who is the “boss”) you will not get the best out of your Agency. senior people will opt to work on other more satisfying accounts, and you will be left in the hands of the less talented and experienced ones who have no other choice.

Secondly, if senior marketers believe that the management of the marketing budget can be left to junior people, they probably deserve the poor results that will come of it. They should be reminded that the Marketing budget is usually one of the largest in the company P+L.

Forcing the Agency to work with people who are not trained to manage it

This flows naturally from the point above. If the people managing the agency relationship do not know how to write a proper brief, how to evaluate creative work and provide clear and actionable feedback, then they are making the garbage in, garbage out mistake. They cannot reasonably expect the agency to do great work while the marketer works to sabotage and undercut it.

Not paying the agency fairly

Squeezing agency compensation has been a thing for the last twenty years. Marketers have somehow concluded that you can get great work from more junior, less talented people who are overloaded with work, all in an advertising environment that has never been more complicated. Strangely, this thinking only applies to paying for an Agency. They would never, for example, believe that they could buy a Ferrari for the price of Corolla. Yet, this is precisely what they try to do with the Agency.

Blaming the agency if the advertising does not have an immediate impact on sales

While everyone understands the need to hit objectives, it is an undeniable reality that most advertising does not have an immediate impact on sales. Many would argue that performance marketing, the most effective short-term sales driver, is only accelerating a future sale with a pricing incentive. Given this reality, expecting the agency to perform magic and then blaming them when it does not happen, is unfair. The agency may be blamed and replaced but the underlying problem is not on the agency’s side and no other agency will be able to resolve it.

Assuming that the agency is responsible for fixing all problems in the relationship?

And here we get to the most typical mistake. Whenever a problem appears the default is that it is caused by the Agency and so, must be fixed by them.

The Advertiser/Agency relationship requires both sides to work together to achieve a result that neither can obtain alone. They need to move beyond the “us” vs “them” and get to a “we’ mindset. This can only happen when the advertiser acknowledges his responsibilities and holds himself accountable.

These are the five most typical advertiser problems that cannot be solved by the agency. Expecting them to do so will provide no solution for either side.

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