In Forrester’s blog today, Sean Corcoran discusses his company’s new report that rated the top interactive agencies based on their strategy, current offering and execution.
Those agencies getting gold stars and consideration as leaders in the space were R/GA, VML, OgilvyInteractive, Sapient Interactive, Wunderman, Razorfish and Organic while Rapp, Rosetta, AKQA and DraftFCB finished close behind. The few major points that one can take away from Forrester’s latest Wave is that leading interactive agencies and their leaders have reached a level of maturity, their budgets are expected to grow over the next five years and their industry peers consider them to be “competent.” So, it’s basically analogous to hitting puberty.
Forrester even suggests a few key steps to help agencies add some shine to their portfolios.
“-Get your ship in order first: “Interactive marketing” means a lot of things, if you have your objectives and even an overall digital strategy in place then it will be much easier to give clear direction to your agencies.
–Know the agency’s heritage: While many agencies have successfully expanded their expertise in new areas, we find that most agencies are strongest in their heritage (in their “DNA” as one senior agency exec recently said to me). For instance, R/GA is still great at design and innovation, Sapient is still great at technology and Wunderman is still great at direct marketing. It helps to match their heritage to your needs when evaluating agencies.
–Set clear roles: If you have your objectives and strategy set and you know your agencies’ capabilities, you should then be able to set clear roles for each agency partner to help eliminate the agency infighting.”
With the top two rungs of interactive shops now compiled and filed, we can only speculate how the other 20 or so agencies that were involved in this report fared.
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