Agency Leaders: Stop Rescuing Your Pitch Team
You’re a senior agency leader and your agency is pitching a prospective client. Imagine your account lead answering a prospect’s question. The answer is good, but you know you could make it better. You jump in with a clarification. Then you add some context, offer another example, and answer the follow-up yourself. You are trying […]
The solution to Martech problems is not more Martech
The companies making the most money per employee use less programmatic technology than the ones losing to them. Every industry studied. No exceptions. Frans Riemersma of Martech Tribe analyzed 988 real-world tech stacks across 49 martech categories. He compared the top 30% of companies by revenue per employee with everyone else. Programmatic produced the most […]
Your Agency Doesn’t Need a Better Pitch. It Needs a Better Insight.
A better-looking pitch deck cannot fix a pitch that fails to solve the prospect’s problem. Before you polish the next pitch, ask whether your strategic insights have actually changed the way you understand the client’s challenge. Suppose a prospect says, “We need more leads.” Your team could immediately begin discussing paid search, landing pages, content […]
Agency “Outcomes” Claims: Strategic Agency North Star, or BS?
Outcomes are all the rage. And they should be. C-Suites, boards and owners demand them. And marketers are expected to deliver them. Marketing investments are precious and strong results are necessary. Agencies everywhere have gotten the message! Many are reacting by talking about outcomes and making a wide range of claims. That is a very […]
Is our CMO minding the store?
The WPP-Sony warning for marketers By now, your CEO has probably read about it. Former WPP executive Richard Foster’s amended complaint, filed in August in New York State Supreme Court, alleges that Sony ran its own forensic investigation into WPP’s media operation and concluded the holding company was operating a “global crime scheme.” The filing […]
What’s the perfect way to kick off a pitch?
How to make your pitch opening more prospect-friendly Agency pitches have a universal problem: getting off to a good start. We see hundreds of agency pitches each year, and most fail to stand out or capture the hearts and minds of the prospective clients. Many agencies are just too eager to get in and sell […]
What’s the $4 Billion Media Oversight Failure?
Every day it seems that marketers are more and more focused on marketplace measures of the performance of their marketing investment. MMM, MTA, ROAS, incremental studies, lift studies, etc. The C-Suite expects proof of performance and marketers are scrambling to prove that their budgets are working. Unfortunately, countless marketers are not holding themselves and their […]
What questions are the big Holdcos dodging about Principal Media?
Here are 16 of them! There is a lot of press about Principal Media operations of the big Holding Companies. Experts like former Ebiquity leader Nick Manning, the ANA’s Bill Duggan and the fine folks at Digiday, Mi-3 and AdExchanger have covered the ground pretty thoroughly. And despite all of that knowledge and mental muscle, […]
How to write proposals that win
Your agency is terrific, but your proposals aren’t. You have a talented team. Your work is smart. Clients love you. You get asked to write proposals. Despite all that talent and success, your proposals simply aren’t winning enough new business. Maybe you aren’t winning enough, or winning the big ones, or winning the ones you […]
Are the Indies Really Growing?
There is a comfortable story making the rounds: independent agencies are having a moment, the holding companies are in decline, and the future belongs to nimble, founder-led shops. You’ll read about it in the advertising trade press. Countless consultants selling services to independent agencies proclaim it loudly on LinkedIn, at agency conferences and on their […]