Relying on hope – to find a better marketing agency if your current agency is falling down isn’t the best strategy. Looking at agencies without a clearly defined scope of what you’re after is no way to find your next,...
As the head of company that services agencies (by helping them find new business) I know how painful it can be for an agency that is involved in a search to not make the final cut. They pour their hearts...
Let me start by reminding all of you marketers what the world of today’s CMO looks like: According to a recent Wall Street Journal article: Chief marketing officers’ average tenure in their posts held steady last year at 40 months,...
Independent agencies are on the rise. The future favors independents over agencies tied to big networks. While there was a day, in pre-pandemic times, when size seemed to matter. Not going with a larger, networked firm seemed to mean that...
You may have heard some buzz recently about “the disappearing CMO”. In case you haven’t, the sentiment is that the term “marketing” is outdated as a catch-all term. In addition, the responsibilities that once fell to the CMO are now...
Is how they look today a foreshadowing of how they will operate tomorrow? I believe that what you see at any point during the agency evaluation process…is what you’ll get if you bring them on board. This is one of...
The Challenge Document. The Challenge Document is a document we use during agency searches during the final stage of the review. At that point, we’ve narrowed the list down to a group of (typically) 3 final agencies for the marketer...
There’s a line we like to cite when talking about, or even to, the agencies that we deal with. “At the end of the day, all agencies do the same stuff.” Surprising to hear from an agency search firm? After...
In the world of marketing (and business at-large, for that matter), it’s a long-held truth that bigger is nearly always better: big revenue, big accounts, big names…you get the big idea. When it comes to marketing agencies, I say, “let’s...
We have been helping marketers find new agencies since 2010. All of the searches we have run have some common threads to them. Spending levels Most of the marketers we represent are mid-to-small spend marketers that either don’t have the...