An agency is like Prego Spaghetti Sauce
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
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Hi Marjorie,
I think you are 100% accurate with your assessment of the agency business. But, I am worried that agencies stretch the truth a bit when it come to their capabilities. Just one for instance – many agencies say they “do sports”, yet no one that works in the agency actually has any experience in sports. So they try to create makeshift sports strategies and creative with zero know how. I feel that if you are touting that “it’s in their” it should not be an artificial ingredient.
I think that small businesses and corporations alike should be a bit more selective in choosing a specialty service from an agency. It’s very rare that there is a true one stop shopping option that holds up to the claim “it’s in there”. The folks charged with securing agencies, to handle specific scope of services, need to be more thorough in their selection process. This all being said, I am a firm believer of “don’t do it yourself, if you do not have the expertise, hire an expert”.
My opinion has nothing to do with the fact that no self respecting Italian would ever eat sauce from a jar.
Love your tweets.
My best,
Lou
Hi Lou! Thanks for stopping by.
You raise a very good point -we struggle with this on the agency side as well.
I can only speak for the agency where I work – if we are contacted by a company who is in a business we do not have expertise in, we are upfront about that. We talk. We ask questions. We research our butts off (this is where my Library Science/academic background is helpful). We contact publications, we look for associations, we look for competitors, and we present that information as the foundation. And we are honest. If there is stuff we don’t know, we say, “Hey, you might want to tweak this or refine that.”
We believe very strongly in collaboration with our clients. We don’t believe that we have all the answers, and no one is going to be as close to a product or an industry as the company who is making that product for that industry.
Duly noted re: the spaghetti sauce 🙂 haha 🙂
Speaking of sports…
…the agency I used to work for once handled a huge campaign for a client that was sports-related. I helped manage and execute the digital side of it, and it was an absolute nightmare for me. I didn’t know anything about college basketball and I was often frustrated.
However, I wanted to make sure the client received the best execution from our team possible, and eventually had to talk to one of the VP’s about the situation. I let her know that having me handle the digital end would be difficult, as I didn’t understand the lingo of basketball, or the dynamics of it. Though she was frustrated with me, she realized I was right, and co-assigned someone who did know about basketball to handle the digital end with me, helping make it a success.
So, yes, people in agencies sometimes won’t know how to handle a specific genre, but if you have a team who works well together, and is honest and communicative about their skills and expertise, an agency can still make a campaign a success—even if they don’t know a single thing about that genre.
Just one example of course. It couldn’t gone the other way and been an absolute disaster, ha.
As Marjorie pointed out, it’s important for agencies to be honest about what they feel they can, and cannot do. I have to be honest and say that I felt our agency was in over their heads on that particular campaign. Luckily we pulled it off, but it could’ve gone either way.
After nine years working on the “client side,” for 19 I worked at small b-to-b agencies. I’ve formed an opinion based on walking both sides of the street.
Agencies, when they’re run by smart, honest people (a handful aren’t and tarnish the standing of the rest), offer clients two important capabilities they cannot find elsewhere, no matter how hard they try.
One is depth of bench. When a client needs to plan and execute a large-scale, multifaceted, “seamless,” time-sensitive campaign, there’s no better partner than an agency.
Two is creative thinking. Agencies are magnets for intelligent, talented marketing-oriented folks who, by and large, simply won’t work on the client side (the pay is too low, the subject matter is too boring and, often, the corporate culture is too stodgy).
Thanks Bob – interesting that you’ve been in both seats. I don’t know if that would make me feel my job was easier or harder on the agency side 😀
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