Do you find yourself avoiding your ad agency’s calls because you’re tired of another combative conversation? Or worse—do they fall in line with everything you say, leaving you and your campaign completely uninspired?
Face it. Your partnership with your ad agency shouldn’t feel like an uphill battle. If it does, it might be time to declare war. Here are three challenge points to consider that’ll help you determine if you should go to war with your ad agency or on your ad agency:
Does your ad agency put skin in the game?
Is your ad agency risking anything by working with you? Meaning, when you win, do they win? Probably not. For them, it’s often a win-win situation despite how well (or poorly) campaigns perform—they get paid no matter what. So the question remains, how do you create a scenario where winning is a mutual benefit? The best way to do that may be to find an ad agency who is willing to make a meaningful—(and best-case scenario) monetary—investment in your campaign.
Hold your ad agency accountable.
It’s easy to sit in a room and talk about the hypothetical success you’ll have from your ad campaign; it’s much trickier to make good on those promises. That’s why you need to hold your agency accountable for their actions and performance.
Are you challenging them with truly measurable goals? What benchmarks are in place that allow for objective outcomes? This is where direct response marketing campaigns have a leg up on traditional branding campaigns. Identifying truly measurable metrics (like the redemption of a particular offer) is much easier when you can directly attribute the action back to the media channel. Whereas branding campaigns are more like eating your vegetables; you know they’re probably good for you yet you don’t know exactly how it directly affects you in a positive way (A.K.A. It’s much harder to figure out what campaign efforts actually made consumers convert).
We’re all experts in our opinion. But at the end of the day it’s about the measurable results that you and your agency should be able to agree on together.
Determine if your ad agency is divergent.
Are you working with agency partners who can challenge your thinking and won’t just be yes-men? One of the best benefits of hiring an ad agency is working with a team of creative thinkers who will stretch and mold your ideas into amazing things. They’ll collaborate with you, but they should also bring concepts to the table that you would have never thought of yourself. If looking at your agency partners is like looking in the mirror, you should ask yourself if you’re really going to get the perspective that you need to grow and to be successful.
At Marketing Architects, we’ve asked ourselves how we can not only create win-win scenarios for both our clients and ourselves, but also provide completely fresh campaign concepts with measurable metrics of success. And we’ve come up with the perfect solution for all three.
First of all, we are the only performance marketing agency that bets on our clients’ growth. We believe in putting skin in the game, so we cover the cost of creative production for our clients through the life of each campaign, starting with the testing phase.
We also insist on being held accountable by working with our clients to create specific, measurable metrics to track success throughout campaign life cycles. And as far as being divergent? We’re not afraid to get waaaay out of the box with our ideas. And with over 20 years of aggressive real-world testing, we know how to take firecracker concepts and make them boom.
Don’t wave the white flag on your ad campaign just yet. Instead, give Marketing Architects a call and we’ll help you win your marketing battle.
