Manhattan Marketing Maven

Ridiculously Rating the Digital Agencies

Imagine that at the height of a recession when digital agencies were beginning to muscle traditional agencies by attracting bigger media spending and getting a bigger voice in strategy, you set out to help clients differentiate and understand the strategic and executional capabilities across the field.

Then imagine that you only really looked closely at the top twelve biggest players, didn't talk to any independent clients, relied entirely on agency interviews and propaganda and then rated them all excellent or really strong by producing a magic quadrant where the scrum was all bunched in the upper left segment.

Would this have any value to anyone or would anyone plunk down $1749 to read the detailed report?

This is how Forrester created the new Forrester Wave:US Interactive Agencies -- Strategy and Execution, Q3 2009. 

Written by a former media guy with no senior management or client side management experience, Sean Corcoran, this is a laughable bogus exercise masquerading as strategic consulting. If the methodology represents Forrester's standard research and analytical approach cancel your subscription and run don't walk away as fast as you can. 

This is a half-assed attempt to extend their services and influence into the ad agency world. It's a world that barely tolerates search consultants who do a similar half-assed job without all the faux consulting rhetoric, artificial constructs and pedestrian graphics.  

In a field acknowledged to be relatively undifferentiated where agencies make almost identical claims and offer equivalent, if not exactly similar services, starting with only the top agencies billing more than $100 million who added 5 or more clients in the last year and offer 7 of 9 stated services skews the field from the get go. Interestingly my alma mater, Digitas, the biggest US interactive agency, opted out of this silliness and was rewarded with a gentle mealy-mouthed non-endorsement endorsement intended not to piss them off.

Basically these guys talked to each agency and collected their propaganda. They quizzed 3 of each firm's favorite clients. Then they established 39 evaluation criteria in three big buckets -- client offering, strategy and market presence. Then they ranked each agency. Although the mean score of 4.3 out of 5 suggests how useless this exercise was. 

They all make the same claims. They all offer offer the same services. They all have marquee clients. And they all have impressive staffs. Now they all score roughly the same. Would you ace DraftFCB because their 3.0 on strategy doesn't measure up to R/GA or Sapient's 4.80? Garbage expressed in 3 digits is still garbage. 

Buried in the blab or implied in what is not written are several truths about the current state of digital agencies. Here's what I culled:

Analytics is being used as a differentiator. As data becomes more important for driving campaigns and connecting marketing to business results, the size, quality and usefulness of analytical teams can distinguish one agency from another. In real life, this is much more rhetorical or aspirational than real for clients.

It's not about services but solutions. In a field where parity reigns the component services are much less important than how an agency marshals them to achieve client business results. There's no easy way to measure or compare this kind of performance but its the meat that clients look carefully for in every pitch.

There's damn little breakout creative. Clients and customers have sophisticated visual expectations set by heavy multi-channel and multi-media use. They expect eye-popping cool imagery and punchy copy in many formats. For agencies this is table stakes. With jaded clients and customers, even B2B customers, its particularly difficult to sustain creative claims. That's why ignoring smaller, younger more organically digital shops destined these "results" for irrelevancy.   

You can't escape heritage. Each agency started out specializing in something. R/GA was a traditional creative boutique. Ogilvy was a traditional and DM global network. Rosetta was an database analytical consulting shop. Rapp and Wunderman were direct marketers. Over time they added people and services. The extensions are a mixed bag -- some great, some not-so great. In some cases the old guard has been replaced. In other cases the original leadership, mindset and perspective still govern how they operate and go-to-market. Some get it and some are still trying to figure out what channel and creative integration are all about. Finding the point of origin and assessing the value and quality of the add-ons over time is critical to understanding what each agency is really good at and how well they can organize, orchestrate and deploy divergent skill sets and personalities to help a client achieve their goals.  

Clients looking to hire a digital agency could use a tool to help separate hype from reality and to undertake a savvy, nuanced comparison of personalities and services. 

This goofball "research wave" aint it. 

Crowdsourcing Marketing Research

What if somebody used social media techniques to gather research about the adoption of social media by marketers? Wouldn't it be cool and provocative?

That's the premise behind the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report instigated by Christina Kerley and produced by Equation Research with the participation of many marketers in framing the questions and 1469 respondents representing clients, agencies, consultants, vendors and non-profits. The survey, fielded between June 3 and July 2, 2009, is believed to be the first time the community both crafted the questions and the answers to figure out what's going on.

And while the technique is novel, the results are not. They are predictable and practical.

The survey found that there is a "boundless enthusiasm" for social media and widespread experimentation but there is no consensus on what it is or how best to use it. Is this news to anyone?

Some believe social media is media. Others see it as a distribution or communications channels. Still others see it as a concept or a consciousness about how brands engage their customers. But with 59% of respondents currently using social media it's fair to claim that social media --however its defined-- has reached critical mass.

The biggest names with the biggest traffic (Facebook & Twitter) and established tactics (online videos and blogs) get the most play. Though most marketers are using more than one tactic, often in tandem with each other. Most respondents reported playing around with 5-7 social memes usually in the same time frame though its not clear if or how they are synchronized or syncopated. 

These activities account for approximately one-third of current marketing spend; slightly higher in smaller firms. It's a fair bet that in a sustained tight economy, these lower cost, buzz-oriented media will continue to grow as a percentage of overall marketing allocations. Social media have significant "promise" for the near term future along with other low cost-high return tools like search engine advertising, outbound e-mail and PR.

Mobile media has less traction than social media probably because its perceived to be intrusive, complicated and technically challenging. Easily a third of respondents are content to sit on the sidelines and wait-and-see what happens. 

The data confirms what anyone paying attention could surmise. The technique -- drawing together the marketing community to build a research agenda and then field the survey is cool.

B2C marketers are more aggressive experimenters than their B2B counterparts and smaller firms are quicker to embrace these new tools than larger, more bureaucratic organizations. For many inertia and the usual reasons why not (no plan, no budget, no strategy, no risk appetite, no metrics) are the barriers to adoption.