Forrester: Agencies Need to be booted (oops, re-booted)

ED NOTE: (oldie but a goldie) …sign of the times when we refer to things approximately 1 year old as oldie. Attention crash is apri pro.

I continually find myself reviewing and looking for a date, is this relevant, what is the context? when and who said it? I still think content is king but without context the value is marginal IMHO.

Anyway, reboot is more like it an I have recently accepted (more like parachuted into) an agency that has gone from being on fire (Nero fiddling kinda of on fire) to “hot” on fire!!… so back to finding the right  mix of acceleration fuel and adult supervision.

P.S. glad to have connected with a Mr. AAron Man; most recently CEO of Relevant Mind (technology platform that translateslistening into influence insight). Not sure he has flown around in a platinum, titanium rocket suit but I still like the IronMANN nickname. Class act and smart. Maybe virginia there is a Santa Claus after all.

Back to re-booting… please keep an eye out for the “new & improved” MarketingWorks Social Marketing Agency, coming to IMAX in a freshly digitally remastered form.

Forrester: Agencies Need to Reboot

Feb 8, 2008

-By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Forrester Research believes today’s ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections.

In a new report, the research firm paints a grim view of the current state of advertising, which it believes is in “a world of hurt” because consumers are tuning out the messages the industry is predicated on producing. Instead, it believes shops need to be organized around communities, not disciplines. What it is calling “the connected agency” would not only know certain communities but also be active members of these groups. Pushing messages would give way to encouraging voluntary engagement, and ongoing conversations would replace time-based campaigns.

“I can’t say there’s an agency now that’s the agency of the future,” said Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst and co-author of the report.

The research firm is certainly not the first to assert that agencies haven’t kept up with changing consumer habits and technology. Accenture in November said the shift from analog to digital media is catching shops flat-footed.

In Forrester’s view, a simple fact is driving the need for wrenching change in how advertising agencies are structured: consumers increasingly do not trust marketing messages. Instead, they rely on advice from friends and others in their various communities to make product decisions, while using tech tools to tune out ad messages they deem irrelevant. On top of that, consumer media choice has made the notion of a “captive audience,” other than during some sporting events, a thing of the past.

“I don’t think agencies are going away,” Kim said. “They’re going to be the ones that help marketers to communities of mutual interest.”

He anticipates agencies made up of community members — moms, for instance, helping Procter & Gamble play a constructive role in communities of other mothers.

Since marketers will continue to focus on results from their marketing, particularly as digital media makes it easier to track, advertising agencies would get geekier, Forrester believes.

Despite these changes, Forrester said creative and media agencies are still built around the mass model: to either produce messages or distribute them. Digital agencies have gone farther, in Forrester’s estimation, in centering their businesses around “interaction,” but it finds them lacking in the branding skills of traditional shops.

Clients are finding their agencies wanting. Forrester quotes one marketing exec calling agencies “a necessary evil,” rather than a strategic partner to grow his business. Another complains, “Most senior ad execs appear more comfortable with conventional channels, which they claim are ‘integrated’ because they have tacked on a Web site.”

“The first step [agencies] need to take is with digital integration,” Kim said, adding that the organization of agencies around specific skill sets is the root of their problems.

Stupidity Marketing

STUPIDITY

http://blogs.influencer50.com/newsletter/2009/01/lead-generation-is-the-inevitable-end-goal-of-influencer-marketing/

Marketing Directors will still face an increasingly challenging environment in which to deliver ROI.
Having spent time over the years working with many Marketing Directors, I see two different types. In addition to the smart and the not so smart are the ones running ever faster just to stand still, and those aware that just doing more of the same simply isn’t working anymore.
You would think that with the ability to measure everything when you do online marketing, many companies would do so.
Not so say McKinsey consultants – while 91% of the marketing executives who participated in the McKinsey digital-advertising survey (06/08) reported that their companies were advertising online, 80% said that their companies allocate their media budgets by using subjective judgments or by repeating whatever they did the year before.
Amazingly 50% were using click-through rates to measure effectiveness of their online direct response ads. And only 30% considered the offline impact of online marketing.
Surprisingly (not), those who were measuring the impact of online marketing were more satisfied with digital marketing than those who did not, and 55% of them (compared to 43%) were cutting their spending in traditional media in order to increase their spending online.
It is amazing how many marketing departments are still not accountable for results…sigh…
What tends to differentiate them is their collaborative engagement with the key stakeholders from sales and the other key business functions. The always relevant “acid test” questions:
a) How do we sell more?
b) How do we fill the pipeline with quality leads?
c) How do we improve our conversion ratio?
d) How do we accelerate the sales-cycle?
Articulating everything they do in terms of the impact on the top or bottom line value to the business is the leader’s responsibility.
What the smart Marketing Directors do is ask the Sales VP where their best leads have come from in the past. Typically this is not from advertising, nor from direct mail, or events, but where leads have been referred from those movers and shakers in a particular marketplace. These are the people listened to by prospective customers because they’re respected, trusted and usually pretty independent. These leads enter the pipeline in the first place because the sales or business exec has a relationship with one of these influencers, or is in some way networked to them.
This doesn’t happen by accident. Most Sales VPs and CEOs of successful companies intuitively map out those key players who define their marketplace — the people most influential with their customers and potential prospects. They tap into their networks and existing relationships to source quality leads, create awareness and advocacy amongst the people that most matter — in a word, the Influencers.
But nobody’s network is endless and although this will produce significant initial results it will provide diminishing returns over time. Enter the smart Marketing Director who understands this and realizes that broadening and deepening the relationships with the current customers is the best and most effective ROI of all. That’s Influencer Marketing.