Why the agency model is broken
There are four issues the marketing industry needs to talk about, and resolve, before it can move into the next phase of transparency, says agency director Richenda Vermeulen in this guest post.
Recently, Lorraine Murphy, managing director of The Remarkables Group made the announcement that her business would be pivoting away from influencer management, citing many problems in her industry, including duplication of effort, lack of transparency and inconsistent measurement.
As founding director of a strategy agency, I too have seen what happens when best practice is ignored. It would be easy to say that Lorraine’s experiences are not in step with the wider industry, but when report after report after report confirms this, it’s clear that there is a problem.
Marketers, we need to talk.
We need to talk about wasted media spend
When it comes to measuring the impact of advertising dollars, digital provides one of the clearest ways to measure ROI. But too often we see thousands (sometimes millions) spent on campaigns with inordinately high bounce rates..
If the agency model is broken I dread to think what we would say about the Publisher model…
I know that the following phrase might have been coined to easily around in the past few years, but here are my 2 cents.
‘Transmedia Storytelling/Branding’
As Mark Ritson mentions, find out what the actual objectives of the client are (CNA). Once the objectives are set, look at the media channels that will help convey their specific message. Using the strengths of each medium you can create an experience world where the consumer can enter from multiple angles, yet still experience the message that the client wants to relate. Obviously there is a lot more behind just this simple statement, but once we switch from trying to pull brands to digital and more into creating a brand experience for their consumers, we will be better off.
Lots of truth here. Since you begin referencing the influencer marketing world, a minor point is that a high bounce rate is not a negative. Low time on content is bad. Low % of visits from your target market is bad … but people driven to your content from social/digital and not hanging around to view other pages on the destination site is fine. It may mean they clicked on to the brand’s target page 🙂
Tech has become so damn complicated that you need to treat marketing like software development. Not only you need a plan, but a plenty of discipline deliver it.
Before even considering a solution a company should have a solid plan in place.
An agency should help put this together, and if they don’t have the resources to do so they should get a consultant involved.
An idea here too: before signing up with Marketo or ExactTarget, why not build a prototype with a low-cost platform? One that delivers 75% of what the enterprise solutions do but at a fraction of the price.
100K is a year for a solution that under performs is painful. On the positive side, it helps companies realize that a) digital has become a complex beast, b) they probably need more resources and c) need to work with an agency that has been through the same pain themselves.