In a recent Adweek article, they discuss a study that indicates 40% of marketers do not trust their media agency.
Partnership trust has declined 11% over the past two years. This is not only a problem for agencies, it’s also a problem for their marketing partners.
Without trust, productivity suffers and performance suffers – on both sides.
The other fundamental problem is that there is a view that media agencies act as transactional vendors, and not strategic partners.
Without sound strategic thinking in the world of media planning and buying, your brand will suffer.
While this doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be some measure of “take” had by a media agency, I’ve seen some marketers set up relationships that are purely retainer based without any commissions pulled from the buys.
This allows the marketer to extract as much value-added thinking and activity out of their media agency as they can – and as much as the media agency wants to give.
Concerns among marketers relative to their agencies continues to center on areas such as how their agency manages rebates and how it makes money.
Concerns also exist relative how their agency trades with media vendors and how agency groups’ buying and sharing deals work.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the only difference this year compared to previous year’s survey is that clients are now more concerned with how their media agencies manage and use their consumer data.
They are less concerned with how much access they’re provided to innovation and thought leadership.
In the article, it talks about how both sides (agencies and their marketing clients) want to build trust. While that’s all good…hard to do when it has been broken down.
So the best thing to do might be what some of our clients have done…started over.
If you feel like you’re not getting the attention you deserve, you aren’t getting the reporting and analytics you feel you deserve, it might be time to look.
If you aren’t getting much beyond buys and don’t really know how effective those buys are, it might be time to explore a new partner relationship.
We recently picked up a couple of searches centered on the media planning and buying space.
Partly for the reasons described above and partly because they feel like their media agency isn’t keeping them ahead of the curve.
Too much of the marketing client bringing ideas to the agency versus what should be, the other way around.
So if you’re feeling like a change is needed for your brand/your business, drop us a line and we would be more than happy to talk through your situation to see if we can help.
We can be reached at msneider@rswagencysearch.com.
