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TRY LOOKING IN THE MIRROR
www.youcansleepwhenyoudie.com - November 16, 2009
Retailers are jumping ship in record numbers. They’re tossing out incumbent agencies and shopping for new ones, even going to “a creative shootout strategy between a roster of agencies” (check out the below article). In the past few months, Wendy’s, Volkswagen, Microsoft, Zappos.com, General Motors, Taco Bell, Wrigley’s and dozens of others have put their accounts into review or have hired new agencies.
Why? Agencies today are making major missteps that are costing them clients – missteps that could easily be avoided if these agencies would wake up and use good business sense. For one, many agencies don’t embrace retail. They never have and they never will. Whether they think it’s below them or they just don’t get it, they refuse to think of themselves as “selling stuff.” The retail world is cutthroat and unforgiving. If you’re not generating sales on an everyday basis, you’re finished. Memo to ad agencies: Your job is to sell stuff! Deal with it.
Many agencies cause their own doom by not acting quickly enough. The traditional 9-to-5 business day hardly exists anymore. We are expected to put in extra hours and to be accessible 24 hours a day. If that’s true of the rest of the world, imagine how that translates to the world of advertising! Our clients have to meet their numbers on a daily basis. That’s right…a daily basis. We have to be ready and able to respond and adjust at the drop of a hat, or quicker. Time is money in this business, and we can’t afford to waste either. (At least not if we want to stay in business.)
Almost every agency out there claims to have its clients best interests at heart – seems like a no-brainer. But if you look around, it’s obvious that most agencies are more concerned with trying to create work that makes the agency itself look good, regardless of whether it does anything to advance the client’s business. I mean seriously, what’s up with all this recent talk about agencies entering “fake work” into awards shows? Are you kidding me? These agencies are too blind to see that a successful client equals a successful agency.
While these clueless agencies are scratching their heads trying to figure out what went wrong as they get abandoned by loyal clients left and right, I’ll know exactly what happened. No finger pointing here, ladies and gentlemen. The cold, hard truth is that these agencies have no one to blame for their destruction but themselves.
Written by Jordan Zimmerman |
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