Archive for October, 2009
AgencyLand – nearly broke and we need to fix it
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s becoming extremely difficult for a medium sized UK agency to actually make enough money to stay afloat. Factor in a desire to produce creative and effective work (and of course, the two things are connected) and it’s a seemingly impossible task. Why?
1) Work has massively shifted from contracts and fees to projects and tendered rosters. With every single project having to be competitively pitch/tendered for, the opportunity to charge the kind of management and creative fees that a business needs to develop and evolve (rather than merely survive) aren’t there. Price is now such a significant element of the tender appraisal process that you can’t afford to charge the sort of money you really need to keep moving onwards and upwards.
2) Many clients now seem to lack basic marketing skills and knowledge. I was a bit taken back the other week when I had to explain to one of my VIP clients what the difference between retailer press and trade press was. This seems to me to be down to a combination of spreading staff too thinly across sales and marketing functions and/or categories, putting staff with category but not specialism experience into senior roles and allowing senior staff without a marketing background to override strategic marketing recommendations whenever they see fit. Which brings me nicely to…
3) …the mantra Think Global, Act Local seems to have been replaced with Think Global And Query Everything Local, Then Act Global Anyway. See my rant about European Marketing Managers for more details.
4) Thanks to the current economic climate, in my experience every pitch seems to necessitate a pitch list of a dozen agencies and every tender has anywhere from 30 to 130 firms going after it. The economics of this just don’t add up – if the value of an average (outside London) marketing pitch is £250,000 and an agency could expect to make, say £50,000 in revenue off that, twelve agencies each spending £10,000 worth of time and resources to pitch doesn’t add up. Because the law of averages states that they’re only going to win one pitch in twelve, thus spending £120,000 to win £50,000 of revenue. I oversimplify. But you get the point.
So the agency model is, if not broken, then severely cracked.
Got any ideas about how to fix it?
I can’t predict the future, but I’m fairly sure about Staycationing, Staying In and Savvy Shopping
I keep being asked at work to have a stab at predicting consumer attitudes and behaviours in three, six or even twelve months time. Since no-one seems to be sure whether we are in a W or V shaped recession, this is a tad challenging to say the least.
I am fairly sure about a few things:
- When economic recovery does appear, it will be mild
- Gordon Brown will try very hard not to call an election until the economy (and with it, consumer confidence) picks up a bit
- But conversely, the election itself might be the catalyst for consumer confidence in new beginnings
- We will still be Staycationing next year, but sales of overseas holidays will be up on 2009 as the Staycationers that got rained off fly away in search of guaranteed sunshine
- Staying In will still be the new Going Out in 2010, but the ‘dine in for £10’ type offers will start to focus on ‘semi scratch’ cooking rather than ready meals
- Christmas 2009 will be all about Savvy Shopping – holding out until the retailers give in and start their sales early, searching online for discount codes and the best deals, practical present giving – and trying hard not to stick it all on the credit card
What do you think?
Just another day-in-the-made-up-life
Without wanting to sound like Little Miss Negativity, I’m getting a bit sick of all of these unreal day-in-the-life ads that have been popping up recently.
Because obviously, Miss Consumer must so naïve that she’ll buy into not-quite-real diaries and photoshoots, where they just happen to mention how fabulous product X is.
The Schwarzkopf Live Colour XL ad (if you watch any music TV you’re bound to have seen it) is a great example, where three suspiciously attractive looking ‘friends’ have their hair colour changed as part of a makeover day.
Then there’s last year’s Ford press ads with a musician bloke who was having a lovely time driving to all his gigs round the country in a Ford and the ‘handwritten’ diaries that crop up in the back of women’s magazines showing how a vitamin supplement or bio yoghurt can help a busy girl get the most out of her hectic week or why working for the RAF is such fun.
I was struggling to find visuals to make my point, then this week’s Radio Times contained a prime example for the Peugeot 3007, showing Mrs Ben Fogle having ‘Just another multi tasking day’. Seriously, that was the headline:
Rant over. Perhaps I should rename the blog ‘and another thing…’.
Clients – can’t live with (some of) them, can’t push them off a cliff
Following a few rather trying client meetings recently, I went home and unburdened myself to my aforementioned lifetime-in-retail Dad. He talked me down from my slightly hysterical state by saying that the way he’d always seen it, in retail it was all really a game and in the end (no matter how difficult the customer), if you got their money, you’d won.
He added that if a customer was really obnoxious, as the owner he could always palm them off onto a member of staff who was on commission and therefore likely to be a bit more tolerant.
But how could this work in AgencyLand? When you’ve already written a quote and received a purchase order for a project, you’ve technically got the money, but the joys of accommodating and/or challenging the client’s every whim are still to come. Without the end ‘sale’, the satisfaction has to come from a job well done (creatively, effectively) – which means fighting to do The Right Thing in the face of some erm, challenging client opinions.
And somehow I don’t think I’d get away with redirecting my more challenging clients back to the care of the New Business team…
I’m giving GIVe the thumbs down
I’m having a couple of days off and went to the local big shopping centre/ mall/ retailtainment destination Meadowhall today. Incidentally, having sat through a lot of local shopper focus groups over the years, I can report that most people round here call it MeadowHell…
Aaaaanyway, Meadowhall had a shiny new branch of GIVe open, so I popped in to have a look. GIVe is the brand new retail offering from George Davies, the man behind Next, George at Asda and M&S’s Per Una. There is a philanthropic element to GIVe in a percentage-of-profits way, but the G stands for George, the IV for his fourth womenswear brand and the e for the online element, apparently.
I had really high hopes for GIVe as a new source of smart-clothes-for-work and some of the items on the GIVe website looked lovely but once inside the store I was really disappointed.
The fabrics were obviously of good quality and the shop floor staff were very smiley but the actual designs were Far Too Fussy, like the worse excesses of Per Una (womenswear brand venture #3). I’m sure there were probably some lovely basic pieces hidden in there somewhere, but all the middle aged frill and fuss (or if we’re bring kind, ‘embellishment’) gave me unpleasant flashbacks to fashion crimes I found inside a mail order catalogue aimed at women of a certain age when I was trying to reposition it.
I was out shopping with my Dad, who spent all his working life in fashion retail and his opinion was that the shopfit was so basic, off the shelf and modular that they could clear out the stock and fixtures overnight to empty the unit if they had to. Which doesn’t really inspire confidence either…
The evidence. I rest my case.
September’s Posts of the Month (vote me!)
My post a brief message for European Marketing Directors has been very kindly nominated by Charles for Post of the Month for September over at Only Dead Fish.
My post shares illustrious company with:
How To Be A Better Brand Planner by Julie Cottin
This is Not The Time For Big Lazy Brands by Helge Tenno
Why Not Take A Moment To Define Success Before You Pursue It by Alex Bogusky
When The S**t Hits The Fan, It’s Time To Innovate by Alan Moore
Kate Moss & Me by Neil Perkin
Is Social Media Measurement Really Meaningless? by Michael Litman
They’re all well worth a read and if you wanted to vote for me, here is where to do it… :)
The Joy of driving? Not sure that belongs to BMW
I’ve been trying not to write this post for a few weeks. You see, I really wanted to love the new BMW campaign, all about joy.
I really like BMWs. They’re in my blood. I’ve got a little one. But I didn’t buy it because it made me joyful. And getting into it to go to the office does not make me want to burst into the halleluiah chorus.
My car makes me feel safe, protected, cosseted against the world and I get a tiny kick out of putting my foot down on the M1. It even makes me a little bit proud that I spent a lot of time wading through powerpoint and sitting in boring meetings to pay for it. But I can’t say that Joy gets a look in.
The new X1 ad states that ‘Joy is going where the mood takes you’, hence you need something that will go off road. Expect that makes the entire 4WD category joyous, not just Beemers.
I think I will actually have to buy an X1 next time as my 1 series is totally incapable of coping with snow, ice, gravel, grass or anything else that isn’t smooth tarmac. Which isn’t very joyous either.
