Have a new marketing project?  Need new perspective? I recently managed an agency search for a major healthcare system in the U.S. They had an agency they liked, but felt they needed some fresh perspective to support the launch of...

The agency search pitch can be a tricky thing.  If you don’t play it right, you won’t get what you need to help you effectively evaluate the firms you’ve brought in to vie for your business. The best thing to...

It’s true that breaking up is hard to do…no matter who’s (or what’s) on the receiving end of the break-up. It’s particularly never any fun when it’s a marketing agency.  Just like a real romantic relationship…it started strong…it looked so...

If you’re a marketer and you want a new agency, you can’t just sit back and do nothing and expect prospective agencies to give you great work during a final pitch presentation. I was talking with one of our new...

Recently presented to 15 marketing agencies at a CLOSE meeting in San Francisco. CLOSE meetings are for Omnicom agencies and this particular meeting had about 15 different agencies in attendance. The purpose of CLOSE meetings is to give each of...

I’ve seen it too often…during my 10 years as a CPG Marketer…during my 10 years working in the Agency world…and now as the head of a National Agency Search Firm: Lack of Alignment Clustering Up a Search for a New Agency...

Not too long ago there was a shift in power between retailers and marketers. The shift was driven by the fact that retailers owned the space and they muscled it up.  Marketers had little say, and in the end what they were...

We are at a cross road in the digital space. There are agencies that know where this world is going and there are those that are playing a game of digital 101 and aren’t very effectively taking their clients to...

At this year’s Mirren Agency New Business Development Conference, I learned that many mid-to-small agencies aren’t getting the attention of the “traditional/old school” search consultants. It appears that most of these agency search consultants tend to only focus on bigger agencies...

Many agency search firms use what’s commonly called the “cattle call”…no, I’m not referring to the practice of getting a boat load of agencies to submit RFIs early in the process. I’m referring to the “mass conference call” where all...