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Is Anyone Interested in Investing In Your Advertising Agency?

Peter · August 14, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Is Anyone Interested in Investing In Your Advertising Agency?

Sorry. Probably Not.

But, D on’t Shoot Me. Rethink Your Agency.

Way back in 2013, I wrote about Bend, Oregon’s specialist ‘advertising agency’ G5. I wanted to show you, Ms. Agency CEO, that there are advertising agency business models that actually:

Attract high-margin clients

Are more efficient than your project-based approach

Are category specific. This is their pitch: “G5 simplifies digital marketing by delivering best-in-class sites, search, and social for Apartments, Self Storage, and Senior Living properties.”

Are unique in a world of me-too agencies

Leverage the power of marketing tech to help clients and grow your bottom line

And… increase agency valuations. You do wnat to sell someday, right?

Way back in 2013 you had to take my word for it. Not anymore. I was right.

G5 Raises $76 Million Investment Led by Peak Equity Partners

From the Portland Business Journal:

Digital marketing firm G5 has raised $76 million from a private equity firm.

The figure is the largest Oregon investment round this year. According to investment research firm PitchBook, the next highest round was $22 million for the New York and Portland-based biotech firm Schrödinger. Urban Airship raised $21 million and Jama Software raised $20 million.

The Bend-based company offers a digital marketing platform for the apartment, self storage and senior living market segments. Peak Equity Partners, which is taking a majority stake in the company, led the round. CEO Dan Hobin declined to name other investors in the deal.

Portland Business Journal.

Here is a bit from the press release:

BEND, Ore. (August 12, 2015) – G5, the leader in maximizing digital marketing effectiveness for the property management sector, today announced the closing of a $76 million investment led by Radnor, Pa. based Peak Equity Partners, a private equity firm focused on the enterprise software market. The investment enables G5 to build on its ten year history of growth and innovation by accelerating feature development of the G5 Marketing Cloud – the most innovative, scalable, and up-to-date digital marketing platform in the property management sector.

From my 2013 blog post:

G5. A Little Digital Agency That Kicks Butt

When the digital agency G5 was launched in Bend Oregon in 2005 (my agency Citrus had offices in Bend and Portland), I wondered if their SEO oriented business model was going to succeed. As you can see, it did.

G5 is, if anything, a highly focused agency. They chose not to be one of the thousands of “full-service” agencies that are designed to meet virtually any client’s needs and ultimately wind up with a somewhat mushy sales proposition and inefficient business model.

G5 provides software and services directly to the large national property management sector which includes multifamily, senior living, self-storage and student housing. They call their service Digital Experience Management (DXM) and they offer an audacious promise: they promise that they will deliver client properties “within the first five organic SERP listings on Google.” In the active property management category, having a high SERP is a promise that can’t be refused.

G5 works it. In addition to their original SEO service, G5 now offers suites of services that include a Discovery Suite (SEO / SEM): Reputation Suite, Conversion Suite (websites, lead tracking, applicant screening), Retention Suite (CRM) and the Insight Suite (analytics.)

These targeted services allow G5 to pitch a compelling benefit story to prospective clients. Take a look at G5’s Solutions page to see how a set of services can be applied to multiple clients in each of their target categories. Like efficiency? This pitch can be repeated over and over.

What Works?

Category specificity and expertise.
A focussed and efficient new business pitch.
An audacious promise and an unequivocal value story.
A set of core services that can be resold across an entire category.

Add Central Oregon’s outdoor lifestyle and you have a profitable, smart, narrowly focused agency staffed with national talent that gets to live 25 minutes from great skiing. That’s Mt. Bachelor in the background.

Four Reasons For Advertising Agencies To Want A Car Account

Peter · August 14, 2013 · Leave a Comment

… And One To Help Go Get That Car

As an addendum to my Advertising Week Social Club “Dreaming of a Car Account?” interview with Nielsen’s Ian Beavis, I offer some more thoughts on why you should go after a car account.

Big Bucks

Not that you didn’t know this but these guys spend big bucks. According to Kantar Media, in 2013’s first quarter alone, automotive manufacturers spent $1,971 billion and $1,381 billion respectively on manufacturer and dealer advertising.

According to Ad Age, General Motors spent $3.59 billion on advertising last year while Toyota spent $2.86. For contrast, Hyundai and Kia spent only $776 million and $1.26 billion.

Big Media

Again, no surprise that auto accounts use all types of media, which offers agencies of all stripes the opportunity to customize services for manufacturers and dealers. According to Ads24’s most recent Path to Persuasion (P2P) Wave 4: Automotive (passenger cars), “Usually, the most effective media mixes include media formats that play differentiated roles across the Path to Persuasion.”

Big Noise

Just as a reminder… Has anyone not seen Audi’s “Prom”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANhmS6QLd5Q

Or, Volkswagen’s “The Force” (with 58 million YouTube views)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

Or, Kia’s “Hamster Rap”?

Or… Chrysler and Eminem?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc

Big Love

Toyota has been with Saatchi & Saatchi (nee Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample) since 1975. Car accounts are hard to move.

“A car account always has been a rite of passage in the world of agencies,” said Jon Bond, co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners. “It’s like being a made man in the Mafia, but … today, you can get whacked the next week.”

Big Need

Two of the more interesting questions and answers from my interview with Ian Beavis, EVP Automotive at Nielsen and ex auto CMO point to the fact that agencies can find a wedge service into auto accounts. Go for it boys.

Levitan: A final question. Agencies have a hard time creating a competitive agency brand positioning. Any insights and advice you can give to the agency world on how to be distinctive in this highly competitive category?

Beavis: You rarely hear of an agency being a business solution provider, as it just doesn’t sound cool or creative. A good agency solves a client’s business issues and is a partner. Very few qualify and even fewer truly embrace this challenge.

Levitan: What are the current digital hot buttons at car companies?

Beavis: Quality lead generation and follow up. It is the top priority with all OEMs

So, be smart, be distinctive, be a problem solver… get going.

Ad Agencies: Follow The Mobile Advertising Money

Peter · June 17, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Advertising, design, PR and digital agencies are always searching for the next pot of gold. Determining which revenue pot to aim for (I know “pot” sounds kinda awful) is part of business development planning. As we move deeper into the digital age, we need more tools and insights to help us figure out the best plan and agency structure to meet our client’s rapidly evolving needs.

eMarketer, with their daily charts and information, has been a very insightful guide for business planning. For example, they called the future of mobile advertising fairly early. Some smart and increasingly successful agencies figured out that mobile could be their future and built an agency around delivering mobile services.

Radel Artida of Staff.com, a global recruitment platform, recently sent me the infographic posted below that shows the IT jobs with the highest pay. I think that it could be used by agency planners to help determine where the money is and is going. The fastest growing categories for IT professionals are mobile development (with Android jobs up 129% and iOS up 190%), cloud computing and gaming. Website development continues to grow, however at a slower pace.

My bet continues to be on mobile. Here’s an idea: I suggest that agency managers start to think through having a thought-leadership program that explores and explains the mobile space for their clients. This serves a couple of purposes. It would force a mobile-lite agency and its staff to begin to learn about the mobile advertising platform, it positions the agency for the increasing move to mobile and it starts to build some mobile SEO honey for the agency blog. It is also a powerful business development strategy.

8 Vine Ideas For Ad Agency New Business

Peter · June 11, 2013 · Leave a Comment

I’ve written about the opportunity for an ad, digital or PR agency to leverage the growing awareness and use of Twitter’s Vine, its short-form (as in 6 seconds) video service that runs on iOS and Android, as a new business tool.

I suggested that there has to be an ad agency out there that sees the potential of becoming the first 6-Second ad agency. No, you don’t have to shut down your other services. Just create a Vine division. I think that this could take about 2 hours. Hey, your agency’s new business program probably needs something new to talk about.

Well, here is more fuel. Vines are now shared more often that Instagram photos.

From Memeburn: “According to insights from Twitter-certified analytics partner Topsy the number of Vine posts shared on the site passed the number of Instagram posts late last week, just days after the previously iOS-only Vine launched on Android. It’s an interesting trend, considering the fact that Vine has a much smaller user base than Instagram — it has just 13-million registered users against Instagram’s 100-million active users.For all I know, an agency is doing this.But, I bet that there is still room to grab this tool and run with it. Here are a few thought starters.”

So to help you get going, here are:

8 Ideas For Using Vine For Ad Agency Business Development

Write about Vine on your agency Blog.
Write a Vine (and video marketing) white paper and send it to current and prospective clients.
Run a micro-information-oriented Vine Twitter strategy. Do 3 to 5 Tweets a day for a couple of weeks and watch the stats.
Create a Vine Pinterest site. Think “Best of Vine.”
Do some sample Vine “ads” for client types.
Hire a local comedian to do 6-second comedy skits for your agency.
Get your Vine out: do Vine local reviews of anything: products, services, bars, clubs, bands, dogs, cats (people love dogs and cats.)
Do a Vine about everyone in your agency and add it to your website.

I could keep going but… I’ll save more ideas for my agency clients.

Oh, just in case you need a bit more info, here is today’s infographic.

Does Your Advertising Agency Know Google’s Matt Cutts?

Peter · May 21, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Chances are, and this is the interesting part, if you work in advertising or digital design or mobile marketing there is a good chance that you do not know who Google’s Matt Cutts is. You should because he is one of the most powerful people in global marketing and advertising.

Matt is the head of the webspam team at Goggle. That means that he controls some of the more important methods that Google uses to rank web pages. He and his team can make or break your SEO plans and strategies via updates like Panda and Penguin to Google’s search algorithms (here is some history from SEOMOZ.) Is this really that important? Is it important that your agency is listed high in a Google search for your keywords (i.e., “advertising agency Atlanta” or “storytelling social media agency”)?

Sorry for this Duh but I want to make a point… Is the SEO work you are doing for your clients well rewarded and wouldn’t be if they were served up on page 4? While I understand that you may leave SEO up to an expert, I think that it’s wise to actually have some understanding about the Google team that decides how Google ranks web pages.

Here is a video from Matt on what is coming up. Yes it is way esoteric. But so are many of the elements of digital marketing.

If you’d like a quick take on Matt’s video pointers, visit The Short Cutts for, well, short cuts.

Since early 2009 Google’s Matt Cutts has recorded a superhuman number of videos to help struggling site owners understand their site in search. While the videos are great, sometimes the guy just needs to get to the point. With that in mind we’ve done the hard work and watched every Matt Cutts video to pull out simple, concise versions of his answers: The Short Cutts!

I may not be a SEO specialist but I have been building websites that rank high and drive organic traffic for 18 years. If you need some high level strategic insights into how to integrate your business development strategy with smart SEO…. well, give me a shout.