This App Pairs Brands Like Coca-Cola and Starbucks With the Perfect Agency

Brand marketers: Tired of being flooded with agency pitches? There's an app for that. Today, Agency Spotter, a site that matches marketers and agencies, is launching a mobile app with the goal of making it easier to find an agency. Agency Spotter claims that 10,000 to 25,000 marketers visit the website, which launched in 2013, every month, and that more than 12,000 agencies are on the platform. The site includes big creative shops and digital agencies like JWT, GSD&M, Razorfish and R/GA as well as specialty companies such as Fueled, which makes branded mobile apps. Marketers who have used Agency Spotter include Coca-Cola, Carlsberg, Starbucks and Unilever. Agency Spotter's CEO and co-founder Brian Regienczuk told Adweek the idea for the site came from working on both the agency and brand side, including a gig as Coca-Cola's director of global design from 2008 to 2010. "One of the reasons I built this was to help marketers and my colleagues from small, medium and big brands around the world who were wasting hundreds of hours trying to figure out who they should be talking to on the agency side," Regienczuk said. "Like TripAdvisor or Yelp, our goal is to represent the landscape of agencies and design firms around the world." The free app and website lets brands type in criteria for their campaigns including budget, location and the services they want. People can then search through agencies' profiles and portfolios and create a list of their top picks. Once a brand has zeroed in on an agency, clicking a "contact" button on the site connects the agency and client. There's also an option to call or connect via LinkedIn. There's a paid version of the site that lets agencies pay to promote their services within the top two rows of search results, similar to how a search ad works. The service costs $750 to $4,000 a year, depending on how much an agency wants to promote its listing. To help marketers quickly find what they're looking for, each agency listing is capped at five core services, forcing them to keep their pitches to the point. "It's on them to tell marketers what they're great at—not just because they say they're a full-service and can do everything," Regienczuk said. "That's one of the ways we're leveling the playing field. Some of the small and medium-sized agencies out there are extremely competitive, if not better in some instances, than some of the bigger players. What we've heard from marketers is that they already know Ogilvy or one of the other big agencies. What they don't know is who is No. 20 to 30 on the top agency list." To get the word out about Agency Spotter, the team visits cities and cranks out online content about the agency world, including interviews with agencies and guides to the best companies in specific cities. "We have people on the site looking for one-off projects that are $10,000 or $250,000," explained Regienczuk. "Then we also have people who we'll do a little hand-holding with have bigger budgets, so $1 million, $20 million, that are usually the bigger brands looking to hire an agency of record or they have a huge initiative or they're doing a big rebranding."

Performance Marketing

This App Pairs Brands Like Coca-Cola and Starbucks With the Perfect Agency

Agency Spotter boasts 12,000 agencies on its platform

Lauren Johnson

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Lauren Johnson