Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

Ad Agency CEO

Is Your Agency Going To Wipeout? Stop Being Complacent.

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Advice From An Advertising Agency CEO – Learn How To Ride The Waves

So, how is the agency world doing? Are you guys happy? Worried? Running smart advertising agency business development programs? Have a big new business pipeline? Not?

I recently asked one of my advertising agency owner friends what he thought was going on in the advertising agency world.

Here are his answers and my comments. Note, I changed his name and the mega-agency network his agency is a member of to protect his brand.

Insights from an advertising agency CEO:

I called a couple of my XYZ Network colleagues (the ones I like) to gauge what’s going on with their business (pretending that I’ll be going to the annual meeting, which I won’t be).

Then I was at the ANA’s AIMM (multicultural and inclusive marketing) think tank meeting at P&G and asked people what they’re doing about new business and agency business, in general, this year, how it was going and all of that.

Everybody was BUSY in 2018!

Lots of new business happening, more work than they could manage so their focus veered away from biz dev, most not using biz dev folks or other advisors as they have in the past because they’ve been included on RFPs and or winning organic business. This is from a couple of general market XYZ Network agencies and a mix of agencies at the AIMM meetings (only 100 people in total invited so good opportunities to have these conversations).

However.

There are concerns at the agencies that this won’t last; there is a lot of talk about a recession, or at least a slowdown, coming in the next few months. They are asking themselves, should they hire up or hold off or keep working in the business instead of on the business? So, it’s good, really good now for most of the agencies I talked to but there is also fear about what’s ahead.

Advice for ME from the CEO guy:

A thought for you – why don’t you do a blog about these last 2 years that have been pretty good for agencies and how to prepare now for what might come? Just a thought – I don’t want to pretend I know what’s best, but it was an emotional topic for all.

And, it sure seems that many agencies have forgotten to run their sales program.

My advice for you? Stop advertising agency insanity:

Get back on your advertising agency business development surfboard and find the big wave.

I have counseled agencies, agency clients and on this extensive blog, for six-plus years about a simple fact: your agency is going to get fired (by small project clients and your largest client) and if you haven’t been proactively working on filling your new business pipeline every day you are insane.

Both at Saatchi and my days as an agency owner, I rode the big exciting waves of good new business wins and have felt the pain of that gnarly “your fired” call from the client.

The ONLY solution, that is both a business and an emotional cure, is to have that 24/7 business development program running.

Your Advertising Agency Will Get Fired

Take a read of my recent blog post — Your Agency Will Get Fired  It speaks to the inevitable and offers some help to reduce the pain by bringing new clients in the front door.

 

 

Your Advertising Agency Will Get Fired

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One of the tenets of my business development system is the understanding that your advertising agency will get fired by virtually every one of your project work and AOR clients. This means that you better be out there finding your next set of clients because your current clients will sooner or later walk out the back door.

To get even more painful, we all need to get over the disastrous track record of agencies that wait till they get fired to get fired up about running a new business/sales program. The standard, awful, message is that the agency was too busy working on its current clients to run a solid business development program. You know, the horrible saying… “we are like the shoemaker who can’t make shoes for his kids.”

I’ve written in the past about why advertising agencies get fired – right here. This post expands on that review. But first, here is a key finding I wrote about a couple of years ago:

Why do advertising and digital agencies get hired and fired? A key reason for getting fired (other than the new Marketing Director’s need to look active; and an agency’s failure to keep up with the rapid pace of change) is very often the very same reason clients hire agencies in the first place…

It has a lot to do with interpersonal chemistry according to Darren Woolley of Australia’s TrinityP3, a leading global advertising agency search consultant and client advisor. I love this point: “It’s all about the relationship.”

Why You Will Be Fired & How To Stop It

There has been a bunch of research about the primary reasons that clients fire agencies. While getting fired is somewhat inevitable, I think that agency management must be very cognizant of the reasons and manage their agency and staff accordingly.

The smartest, most aware agencies get fired less frequently. 

Let’s walk through the reasons you will get fired. I’ll be brief because I believe that most of these can be managed down without a huge effort.

It’s Much About KPI’s and Return On Investment

I counsel all of my agency clients that return on investment, the client’s investment in their marketing programs must yield a positive and calculated sales return on every dollar they spend. Obvious, right? That said, it is amazing to see how many advertising agencies cannot calculate ROI based on a client’s KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). Some agencies do not even ask about key performance metrics. [Read more…] about Your Advertising Agency Will Get Fired

Would You Buy Your Advertising Agency?

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If You Put Your Advertising Agency Up For Sale… Would You Buy It?

I could turn the important question, “Would you buy your advertising agency?” into a long blog post. But, good news, I won’t. I’ll get to the point.

I just finished listening to Kara Swisher interview Khosla Ventures’ partner Keith Rabois – On The Future Of Innovation In Silicon Valley on Recode Decode.

Wowzer… is this guy smart and opinionated. Please listen to this interview. I also follow him on Twitter – @rabois.

This is his investment criteria. If you applied it to the sale of your agency, would you buy you?

What is anomalous? (As in, deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected.).

What “secret” is the company predicated on? What could this be?

Could this be one of the most important companies on the planet?

What is the accumulating advantage?

Can the founder attract the talent requisite to achieve the vision?

Why do we have a comparative advantage?

These are really tough questions. Especially if you think that advertising, PR and design agencies can’t generate meaningful differentiation. But, they can.

Are you working on that?

Will you ever sell your advertising agency?

I sold mine. It took a very strategic effort to build value a year plus ahead of that sale. If you want to sell your agency, even a couple of years from now, you need to build it for a sale.

Ask the big question… “Would you buy your agency?” If the answer is no. Well, its time to rethink your offer.

I have written more about selling an agency: Will you ever sell your advertising agency?

 

Cures For Poor Advertising Agency Profits

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Cures For Poor Advertising Agency Profits

I work to provide cures for low advertising agency profits. That is my specialty. I do not get many calls from super successful, as in high-margin agencies unless they are very very hungry to expand.  I LOVE those call from the relentless.

Here Is A Key Question

Within the range of the business questions that I use at the start of an agency business development assignment, there is one simple, but revealing question:

Why do you run your advertising, PR, digital agency?

This question generally yields a somewhat standard answer…

The marketing communications industry (advertising, digital marketing, PR) is fun.

No surprise here. Marketing hits many sweet spots including working with a wide array of clients and their issues (great for advertising people with ADHD); delivering marketing that drives sales is fulfilling; the daily use unique skills; being paid for creative thinking; working with fun people; it beats owning a dry cleaner shop. I don’t usually get told that people make a pant load of money. For most ad shops, those days are (unfortunately) over.

Super high-profit days are in the past due to the move to fee-based compensation; absurdly competitive price cutting; the art of giving services away for free; incessant cost-cutting; increasing workload; increasing advertising platforms; staffing issues; the commoditization of services; claiming the impossible to own “we are creative”; not zeroing in on the most important client need of all… business results.

OK, OK, Enough!

Elemental Cures To Grow Advertising Agency Profits

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Is Saying Fck (You Know What I Mean) Cool?

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Can you say ‘fck’ in your B2B marketing?

(Before I start, a side note… I originally had the URL: www.peterlevitan.com/issayingfuckcool  I now know that Google does not like the word Fuck – so I took out the “U” from any Google heat seeking search missile.) We’ll see if this post gets indexed now. See at the bottom of this post for an article about Google’s no-mas potty-mouth.)

I have a client, a brilliant agency client in the data-marketing space. A real data scientist. He grows brands leveraging the best of Adobe and the Google Marketing Platform (here is how Google describes the GMP):

Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help you plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Google Marketing Platform helps you deliver more relevant and effective marketing, while ensuring that you respect your customers’ privacy and give them control over their data.

Data marketing rules. But, he has a problem. He only aims to work with clients that really want to leverage data to grow their business. Apparently, it is difficult to find the clients that actually GET IT. That said, he gets lots of inquiries. However, many are either poor leads for many reasons (many need lots of training) or are not willing to take the multi-month plunge/commitment to work into a very successful data-driven program.

‘Fuck’

Last week we discussed the use of the word ‘fuck’ to arrest attention and to help cull out the serious leads from the explorers. In this case, can you say ‘fuck’ on your home page? Essentially, something like this (just an example)…

We Are Looking For The Best And Brightest Clients That Want To Fucking Kill It Using The World’s Best Data-Marketing.

I pointed to Gary Veynerchuck as an example of a media personality that uses ‘fuck’ a lot to, yup, help cull out the serious leads from the explorers. It is difficult to paraphrase Gary but his mantra is hey, get the fuck on board the digital train.

Find Your Active Words

This is not a long blog post on the use of challenging words. But, I do want to make that point that you might want to consider actually telling the people that visit your home page that you are looking for the right fucking clients. The use of the word might even net you the balls to the wall clients that you want.

If the ‘F’ word scares you… just try having some attitude.

Oh, the Google article:

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs.