- Mark Dolliver

NEW YORK Chief marketing officers are less than enthralled with their ad agencies, to judge from a survey conducted for Epsilon by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media.

Released today (based on polling fielded in October),the poll found relatively few CMOs saying their agency of record exceeds their expectations in such areas as price (9 percent), return on investment (12 percent), client service (23 percent) and "knowledge of my business" (24 percent).

Much higher numbers of CMOs said their agency "meets" expectations in these areas, though the approval was well short of unanimous even by that middling standard. For instance, 62 percent said the agency meets their expectations for knowledge of the client's business and 64 percent said it does so when it comes to client service.

The same poll asked the CMOS to say which marketing efforts they would never outsource. Atop the list (cited by 34 percent) was strategy and planning services, followed by customer relationship management (31 percent), customer database warehouse (29 percent), e-mail delivery system (22 percent) and data mining (18 percent).

You'd expect it to be a buyer's market these days for marketing talent, given all the layoffs the profession has endured. But the survey also found 39 percent of CMOs dissatisfied with the availability of qualified candidates for marketing jobs, including 6 percent who are "very unsatisfied." Just 5 percent said they're "very satisfied" with the talent pool for new hires, with most of the rest merely "somewhat satisfied."