If you are a child of the 80s, or if you had a child in the 80s, you likely remember the series of commercials for Prego spaghetti sauce. Various people come in to the kitchen and their worlds are shaken as they realize that their wife/mother/grandmother is making spaghetti with a jar of spaghetti sauce instead of sauce from scratch.
The tagline for the ad campaign was “It’s in there.” “It” referred to all of the good stuff you would expect to find in your homemade spaghetti sauce.
I was thinking about that ad campaign today and realized that the same tagline could be used if agencies were to rally together to explain to the world why agencies are beneficial (not that I’m biased or anything). Here are some ingredients that you might ask about if you are looking to engage in marketing.
Public Relations: It’s in there! Our agency has a very strong PR capability that includes list-building, list maintenance, and tracking where and when news releases are published.
Media Placement: It’s in there! Independent media buying firms exist, but the advantage with an agency is that media buying can get sauteed with other facets of your marketing campaign. This enhances the recommendations you’ll receive. Also, while a media placement firm may be able to place space anywhere, they likely do not bring to the table the same amount of industry knowledge or research that an agency can bring.
Web Design/Development: It’s in there! We are fortunate to have our own “web guy,” but we are also able to talk to clients about their needs and network to find people who have special expertise such as database programming. Because we also can work with clients on other facets, we are aware of what kinds of traffic will be driven to the site and how the new site will fit into the overall marketing plan.
Social Media Consultation/Implementation: It’s in there! As I have mentioned often in this blog, I am out here to learn so that we can serve our clients at the highest level of quality possible. In our particular case, we offer a proprietary service called ClayComm2.0 that includes research, Social Media “listening” programs, and program implementation.
Right now, there are a lot of experts (whether they really are or whether they are self-proclaimed I will leave to you). There’s nothing wrong with that, but I would toss out there that while pasta with fresh tomatoes is really good, and while pasta with fresh tomatoes and some oregano is really really good, a pasta sauce with all of the good stuff is pretty darned enjoyable. An agency can provide that kind of holistic marketing approach, and in doing so, we cut down on the numbers of individual companies or experts with whom you need to work.
Whatever you might need in your marketing world, hey, it’s in there.
Just don’t eat us.
Image by lisa crosdale. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/genitort