Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

As you might expect from someone who pitches an alternative approach to clients, I have strong views about challenging traditional media channels and priorities.

It never ceases to amaze me why we sometimes persist with a formula, no matter how well rooted in historic performance or current research, which simply takes what we spent last year and tweaks it up. Or in the case of the last year, down.

Nevertheless, with our clients, most of whom are typically spending £1-30m per annum in support of a brand, there is normally enough cash to go around. They can cover off all the basics (guidelines, internal launch, channel comms, PR etc), and after this core, the old approach used to be a question of whether to devote this % or that % to TV, events, DM, web etc.

Over the last few years, the mix has changed, and over the last 18 months, there have been some irreversible 2012-scale seismic disturbances.

Bye bye lots of TV, broad channel comms, and print. Hello social media, reinvestment in product and design, and (especially digital) PR.

However, the core components survive.

But when we look at how agencies spend their own marketing budgets, there don’t seem to be so many tried and tested formulae.

How should a design business organise its £250k spend between its own promotional and reputational priorities? How much should a PR business spend on its own PR? Indeed this raises another point: agencies can actually be very poor at doing for themselves what they preach so passionately to clients. Phrases like “look at the shoes of cobblers’ children” and “physician heal thyself” come to mind.

I’d argue in fact that most agencies should NOT do their own design/PR or indeed any marketing in-house:

1. if you build web sites and fully integrated online platforms for major global companies, are you really best placed (and most cost effective) to produce your own 10 page “creds online” effort? Surely you can do what is required technically, but are you really good at B2B channel comms which may be the key skill to get your agency known?
2. can you really be sure you will get the optimal service and priority as an internal client versus “real clients paying real money”
3. can you really be objective about your business, and distil out of your own culture, heritage, people, clients and products the essence of your brand?

Or actually, are you better off getting an independent agency to do this for you?