Today in Self-Promotional Research Items, don’t get too comfortable with any of your existing clients.
Business intelligence firm Advertiser Perceptions — like you’re gonna click on that — allegedly interviewed more than 500 marketers representing 90-plus percent of America’s top 100 advertisers over the summer. How did they get these CMOs to take time out of their busy schedules to fill out a digital form? We have no idea!
The results are not surprising so much as overwhelming. Here are the percentages of participants who say they plan to launch the following sorts of reviews at some point over the next 12 months:
- Creative agency 66%
- Search marketing agency 65%
- Media agency 64%
- Digital agency 61%
Next, these are the answers participants gave when asked what they value most when deciding which agency to pick.
So they want to sell shit, don’t care about your data and don’t really seem to mind if you lack experience in their market.
These thinkfluencers also admitted to some shortcomings of their own rather than blaming everything on their agencies: 40 percent said they don’t share sales data, and 48 percent don’t give you guys “meaningful KPIs in order for them to be successful.” This is especially odd given that “results” are the ultimate goal of such partnerships, see above.
Finally, 48 percent of those involved agreed that “The industry is changing so fast now, it’s unclear how agencies will be viable in the future.” The higher up they were in the client organization, the more likely they were to answer yes. But their response, based on this survey, is to look for even more agencies in the presumed hope of getting the impossible equation right. It’s almost like they don’t really know what they’re doing at all even though they’re sometimes good at getting up on a stage and convincing tens of people in the audience to call them valuable.
Don’t freak out, though: just hire Advertiser Perceptions and your job/business/corner office will be safe! They do seem like more of a media agency thing, though, don’t they?