Your plan to win Ad Age Small Agency of the Year

ad_age_small_agency_of_the_year

Many Ad Age Small Agency of the Year winners have gone on to enjoy incredible success.   There are so many potential benefits from winning Small Agency of the Year. The agency’s reputation grows! Team morale swells! The phone rings!   Given the importance of the award to building a small agency’s reputation, many small agency owners […]

How Marketers & Agencies can win the tissue session

Tissue-Session

The tissue session is often a key step in a competitive agency review. This guide will help agencies and marketers properly prepare for and get the most from their tissue sessions. “Tissue Session” is a term that originated long ago, prior to the digital age. Creatives – generally Art Directors – would use tracing paper […]

Drive better work (and win more business) with strategic insights

Drive better work (and win more business) with strategic insights

The best campaigns and the biggest account wins often are driven by the best strategic insights. This is a simple truth we see day in and day out in our work with agencies and clients. Unfortunately, compelling insights are rare these days, and many agency and client teams are ill-prepared to develop the insights that […]

How agencies and clients can make the most of agency references

References Check

An agency’s references are an important and often underappreciated aspect of an agency review.  This would seem obvious! Unfortunately, for many agencies and some clients, it is not. Some clients don’t check agency references when they run their own reviews, and some agencies do a poor job of selecting or prepping their references. And some […]

A Valentine for Marketers & their Agencies

marketers and agencies

At Mercer Island Group, we LOVE marketers. We LOVE agencies.  And we LOVE to help them succeed. The marketing and advertising world is a tough, tough business. We are lucky to be able to serve marketers and agencies and we are incredibly thankful to the people, their brands and agencies. With so much gratitude in […]

The crucial role of dialogue and creative listening to achieving great strategy

The crucial role of dialogue and creative listening to achieving great strategy

Great strategy is hard to come by and hard to create. When things go well, it can be magic. It can be the foundation that campaigns like “The World’s Most Interesting Man” and “Snickers Satisfies” are built upon. When things go wrong, the “work”, the people and the business suffer. What’s the special alchemy that […]

Meeting with a prospect? The magic way for agencies to start a meeting.

Meeting with a prospect? The magic way for agencies to start a meeting.

We talk with agencies every day. Since we manage so many agency reviews on behalf of clients, agencies often want to talk and present us with their capabilities. They want to be sure they are on our radar. It makes sense. And we appreciate it. It’s part of our job! To best represent our clients […]

Agencies: Please don’t lead with your tools

Agencies: Please don’t lead with your tools

We review numerous agency presentations annually, and we consider it a great privilege to witness the expertise of talented individuals discussing the clients we hold dear. There are, however, occasional missteps that hinder the potential bond between the agency and the prospective client.  One prevalent issue is when agencies devote an excessive amount of pitch […]

Making magic from data with Grace Kite

Magic Numbers

By Steve Boehler with special guest Dr. Grace Kite How can marketers and their agencies use data to better serve their businesses? One key foundation of successful modern marketing is a deep knowledge of data and how to make data science better serve our understanding of customers, competitors and markets. Yet few marketers are well […]