Senior Consultant
Adrian has worked in all aspects of new media from business development and marketing communication to business consulting and technology development and deployment.
As a senior business executive, he has worked with many of Australia’s largest corporations on a variety of Internet, digital media and e-business projects, including the adoption and rollout of the Telstra ‘multi-variate’ Memetrics XOS1 platform, the introduction of XOS into the Commonwealth Bank and other major assignments for Northern Territory Travel Commission, Integral Energy, TAB Corp., Deliotte Consulting and CSR Bradford. And over the last 4 years he founded, developed and brought to market Australia’s largest creative portal for photographers and artists – Gekko Images. As a Senior Consultant with TrinityP3, Adrian brings a wealth of new media experience combined with a wide range of online marketing capabilities.
Contact: adrian@trinityp3.com
How to ensure the price of your advertising production equals the quality delivered
When you pay top dollar, you expect the highest quality.
In television production, the delivery of quality is a subjective and often nebulous concept and one that is often used to drive up the cost of production with negligible improvement in value.
There have been numerous examples of where budgets have had the latest, and therefore the most expensive camera equipment, where a suitable less expensive version was available. Like the director who wanted the latest high speed film camera to shoot talking heads to camera in a studio. Or the producer who loaded the quote, but presumably not the truck, with every lens available. Or the director who still insists on shooting film and then allows stock shoot ratios of 500:1.
So here are a few ways to ensure your budget delivers every cent in quality on the screen.
Defining quality
In many discussions about production quality, the production house will justify costs with the comment “Doesn’t your client demand the very best”.
This retort usually ends the conversation as the implication is that every production needs to be the highest quality. For the production house the measure of quality is not the effectiveness of the execution in achieving the marketing objectives, it is achieving the highest possible production values, which means using the latest technology, embracing the latest techniques, allowing time to experiment, being able to cover multiple shoot options as insurance if one of these “new” techniques fail and having the latest equipment.
What they are really saying is “Doesn’t your client demand the very latest and therefore most expensive”. The answer to this should not automatically be yes, because each of these is adding cost, but is it adding value?
A culture of spending
There seems to be a culture within the TV production industry of using (and using the client’s money to pay for) the latest equipment and/or technology whether it’s required or not.
The people that benefit from this culture of “the latest” are the equipment hire facility who hire out the top of the line stuff, the production house who get to mark up the top of the line stuff and the technicians who get to use the top of the line stuff. So there is a strong lobby to maintain this culture.
The knowledge to know better
Some agencies are often complicit in this culture as often agency personnel don’t fully understand some of the technical aspects of production and post-production – whether there is actually any “value add”.
When confronted with the question “Doesn’t your client expect the very best” they have to nod in agreement, and are often coerced into using high-end hardware to keep the director and production company happy, and is in many cases, over and above their client’s expectations and needs.
The expansion of this culture relies on the client’s and sometimes the agency’s ignorance and production pre-ambles full of esoteric jargon and unfathomable technical terms.
So how do you discourage this culture? By having someone “on-side” that:
- understands the technical aspects of production
- understands the jargon and who is not intimidated by the technical gobbledygook
- asks the right questions at the right time on the client’s (and by default the agency’s) behalf.
Instead of simply advising clients on their production costs we manage their production costs for them. After all, the director has his producer to look after the interests of the production company. The Creative Director has the agency producer to look after the interests of the agency. So why shouldn’t the advertiser have a producer to look after the interests of the client.
It is very common in North America and Europe and is becoming increasingly so here.
Thoughts?
What’s all this bull about agency billings? – A misleading measure of agency performance
Many people in the media still use media billings to indicate the size of the account or the size of the agency. Check out Mumbrella, or AdNews, B&T or even The Australian and The Financial Review. Even overseas, Advertising Age in the USA and Campaign in the UK use media billings.
Yet these media billing measures are irrelevant and misleading when discussing the size of accounts or the size of creative agencies. So why, when there are more relevant measures in the industry, are the media still obsessed by media billings?
Media billings
Before the dismantling of media accreditation, advertising agencies provided media and creative services and were largely remunerated on a combination of media commission of 10% and a service fee of 7.5%.
Therefore when discussing agency remuneration or the value of a particular advertising account the media billings was an indication of not only the total turnover for the agency, but also the revenue based on the “standard” commission and fee.
Of course, even in those times, the advertising industry, like the movie industry, was prone to exaggerating budgets as a way of talking up the significance of a win. Or deflating the billings to deflate the significance of a loss.
Non-media billings
Before the dismantling of the media accreditation system, there was a move away from the mark up for print and electronic production. Retail clients were the first to start remunerating their agencies on page rates for catalogues instead of the costs plus mark up.
In fact one prominent retail agency at the time generated more revenue from catalogue production than they did from media. When asked to provide their billings they would take their print revenue and multiply it by 5.7 times to project it as media billings and then add it to their actual media billings.
Therefore a media budget of $10 million and a print production budget of $2 million would multiply up to be $24 million in billings. Or what about a direct marketing client who spends $10 million on direct marketing and less than a million on media, and is declared to have media billings of $58 million?
Misleading the market and themselves
How many times have you read in the trade press where an account moves from one agency to the next and the incumbent declares a significantly smaller loss than the winner declares as their gain.
Or how many times do you read that an account is worth millions of dollars in media billings when the AdEx media spend for that brand is significantly less.
Now most advertisers would prefer that no-one knows the financial details of their activities. But this doesn’t stop the advertising agencies and the media obsessing about it, even though it rarely reflects reality. In fact some people have made a career doing little more than counting these billing wins and losses.
Retainer based on resources
Today most agencies, media included, are remunerated on resource or direct salary costs, multiplied by overhead and a profit margin rather than the budget or spend.
Perhaps a better measure of an account size is the number of resources of FTEs? (Full time equivalents). This is a direct measure of the costs and complexity of an account and their advertising. That’s why when negotiating an agency contract we spend so much time and effort getting the resources and associated costs right.
So if you are interested in knowing how big a particular agency is, don’t ask them about billings, as you never know what you will get. Instead ask about the number of employees. From this you can fairly accurately project their revenue and profitability.
Media complexity sees a rise in proprietory agency tools but how do you assess value?
The use, application and output of the myriad of software tools and technological aids to better media strategy and implementation has become an essential aspect of the media agency’s armoury.
In new business pitches, touting these well developed and attractively presented pieces of software that promise to provide the highly developed and financially optimised solution to your next campaign brief has an almost irresistible allure for many marketers.
Every major agency group has devoted significant expense and expertise on a global basis developing bespoke tools and technology designed to provide their clients with the edge over the competition.
But are these tools just presentation fodder? Are they really applied to your business on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis in order to add value to each and every recommendation?
Tool or Trap?
In many cases, the ability to apply the technology relies heavily on the availability of raw data to drive the application. Most modelling tools, for instance, require ongoing ad or brand awareness to compare with alternative media lay-downs. No awareness data – no model.
Consumer insight and understanding are the core of most sophisticated recommendations today but unless the appropriate data is available through the syndicated Morgan or Nielsen databases (expensive in their own right on a category basis), it will require access to either bespoke agency data or specially commissioned research to find out anything really useful about your consumer and then apply it to the media consumption for your next campaign.
Cornucopia or plenty of nothing?
Many advertisers are either unaware of the range of technologies available to them or simply unsure of just how the alternatives might apply to their business. Sometimes media agencies like to encourage a little mystery around their expensive proprietary tools because it adds to the perception of their sophistication and the ‘added value’ they bring to the table.
Answering the questions
Based on our many years experience in this area, specialising in reviewing agency process and resources, here are a number of ways of ensuring the agency’s tools are appropriate, available and applied to your business:
- Seek a comprehensive presentation from the agency outlining all their tools and technology and how they apply it to your business.
- Make sure any descriptions in this area are clear, delivered in everyday terms and comprehensively illustrated by examples or case studies.
- Review your own data sources and the media briefs and objectives set for your campaigns and consider if they provide a good basis for a ‘technological’ solution.
- Make sure that every recommendation the agency makes is accompanied by a rationalisation that clearly describes the tools and data sources used – compare this usage to the ‘menu’ presented in their tools and technology expose.
Case studies on the mistakes advertisers make with their TV advertising productions
In the 12 years we have been assessing and reviewing television productions there have emerged three common ways advertisers drive up the cost of their television productions. Unfortunately, in almost every case, the advertisers concerned were unaware of the impact their processes and behaviours were having.
1. Outcome expectations
Imagine you are building a house. Would you give the architect a budget to work with? Would you outline your expectations in style and function? Or would you just let him go creatively crazy and hang the expense?
Implications
If you brief your agency give them a budget and tell them you want them to stick to it. Tell them all of the objectives you want the commercial to achieve. Tell them all of the ways you are going to use it, where, for how long, and on what media.
Case study
A client gave the agency a $300K budget and a brief to ‘lift creativity’. The agency interpreted that as ‘lift the budget’. Following three months of creative development, concept testing and international approvals, the agency presented a big idea with a cost of over $600K.
2. Making changes
Imagine walking into a house you are having built and telling the builder you want to move a wall here or add a room there. In the building industry these are known as ‘extras’ and are a rich source of profit for the builder.
Implications
The same applies for the television production industry. Once the production commences, (ie after the final pre-production meeting) every change costs you money. If you make changes and it doesn’t cost you money, then you know the agency and/or production company has built plenty of contingency into the cost.
Case study
A client briefed their agency to develop a television campaign and nearing the completion of post-production announced the packaging had changed significantly. The cost of including the new packaging added 20% to the total production cost.
3. Approval Processes
Imagine turning to the builder once the house was finished and saying, “Well. I guess it’s time to get council, electrical, plumbing and planning approval”. Especially when you know most of them will want changes and one may reject the overall plan altogether.
In extreme cases, clients have been known to race to and fro to the agency to make changes as they go through each level of final approval.
Implications
Each set of changes costs money. Worse still, the agency gets to know this is your preferred process, so they hide a cost contingency in to cover it. Either way, you pay big.
Case study
A client negotiated very competitive rates with their agency for their television production. However, in an audit of the tv production costs it was found that the company was paying up to 100% of the original production cost in changes. The agency knew the client’s approval processes were impractical and enjoyed the profits last minute changes brought with every production.
Solution
We have a number of ways to help advertisers achieve maximum value for their television production budget including:
- Production Training for Advertisers,
- Benchmark Production Cost Assessments
- Production Cost Estimates
- Production Management
Value based agency remuneration considerations for direct response and retail advertisers
I had an interesting conversation with a client in early December last year as they had contacted me to discuss their media and creative requirements to meet their business growth objectives in the coming year.
What made it interesting was the fact that the client thought of themselves as retailers as they were the customer facing division of a truly vertically integrated business that started with the manufacturer and ended with the customer purchase and installation. But in fact within minutes of meeting with them it was clear they were actually quite a significant direct response business.
At the same time I was in discussions with a retail client who has entered into a customer database loyalty program and e-commerce solution and is having difficulty reconciling the investment in loyalty and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with their traditional retailing business model based on reach and frequency and co-operative funding.
Here I had a brilliant direct response business (they even managed their own in-bound call centre in house) who thought they were retailers and a retailer who could not understand how to integrate customer relationship management into their retail model.
It was time to help them define, or perhaps re-define, the business they were in and assist them in finding the right tools and resources to deliver against those business models.
Turning off the retail and turning on the direct response
They had been using media, primarily TV, press and some digital to drive reach and frequency against a broad segment of home owners (the product was for the home). The agency was on a traditional media commission based on the fact they had reasoned that if they were successful they would spend more and therefore the agency would do more and therefore should be paid more.
The problem was that the agency found ways to do less as a way to generate more profit from the spend and when leads fell the client invested more media budget trying to generate more leads and in the process was driving up cost per acquisition (CPA).
The first thing we recommended was moving to a DR Media agency with a Value Based Remuneration Model where 100% of the agency fee is based on sales and a bonus for reducing the CPA. In this way the agency was completely aligned to the business objectives of driving sales and reducing costs.
Turning the retail focus from product to customer
Meanwhile over at the retailer, they had millions of dollars invested in a traditional retail media program of catalogues with TV and press support all funded from supplier co-operative advertising dollars. In fact, you would not be surprised if this was actually a profit centre for the business which is common in retailing.
The problem was that while there has been infrastructure funds for the database and the e-commerce platform there was no funding model for the marketing of the same. The agencies on the roster had typically been selected or negotiated to a low cost position, with page rates, minimal retainers and discount hourly rates, to minimise cost and therefore maximise margin on the co-operative funding. There was no funding model for the agencies to activate the CRM and no internal funding beyond the initial investment.
The CRM and e-commerce created an opportunity to appoint and then develop a direct payment model for a database / behavioural marketing agency. This was based on a Value Based Remuneration Model with the agency being paid out of the additional co-operative funds being generated by the addition of new direct response channels in the retail model.
eDM based on database customer analytics generated significantly higher ROI for the retailer and the supplier. The problem now was that the suppliers wanted to move more of their funds from the traditional catalogue driven model, which could threaten the viability of this profit centre.
Retail and Direct Response both benefit from Value Based Agency Remuneration
Traditionally retailers have focused their agency remuneration strategies on cost reduction as a way to minimise cost of business and maximise revenue. But for direct response clients and retailers moving to more accountable CRM models and e-commerce strategies there is an opportunity to achieve greater accountability and alignment with your media, creative and digital agencies using a value based compensation model.
Let us know if you have tried this approach and what issues you had to manage by leaving a comment here.
Ten tips for managing advertising production costs more effectively
It is interesting that 12 years ago when I started TrinityP3 (Simply P3 then) that the majority of our work was in Production Benchmarking and Management. In fact some of our earliest clients still think of us as production consultants. Today, production makes up less than 15% of our business regionally, but in the past 6 months we have had an increased number of major advertisers come and enquire about production cost assessments, especially television and digital production.
For regional and global advertisers there are a number of opportunities to uncouple or unbundle production to one of the global production companies like Tag and Freedman International.
But for local clients and international clients looking for delivering efficiencies and savings there is much that can be done on a local market level. But before you race off and start looking at strategic and structural production solutions, it is important to make sure you have got the basics right, which is why I created this presentation on Slideshare.
It is not that surprising the interest in managing production costs. After media, the next biggest advertising expense marketers and advertisers are responsible for is advertising production: – Television, digital, internet, social media, cinema, newspapers, magazines, outdoor, radio, direct mail and more.
The problem for most advertisers is that this area of expenditure is often shrouded in terminology that is confusing, technical and potentially misleading.
We find that the top 4 reasons marketers end up paying too much for advertising production are:
- Poor planning
- Lack of understanding
- Not enough time allowed
- Complex and convoluted approval processes
So in the presentation you will find my ten tips for managing advertising production costs more effectively. What are yours?
12 trends in strategic marketing management for 2012
This first appeared as a guest blog in BizCommunity in South Africa and can be seen in full here.
2012 will be a year of solving the conundrums of marketing complexity. The world sitting in a now familiar state of uncertainty, with debt crisis, stagnant established markets and emerging growth markets, and continued pressure to deliver increasing returns. In the face of this uncertainty and continuing increase in fragmentation and complexity, marketers will need to develop more flexible responses to deal with a range of conundrums.
1. Chasing growth and maintaining share
Global marketers are looking for growth in the emerging markets, often funding this investment at the expense of maintaining or defending their existing markets. The conundrum in 2012 is getting the right balance between the two because under investing in established markets opens opportunities for competitors which could erode the funding required to penetrate the growth markets.
2. Knowing as many customers and as much about them as you can
Customers are no more diverse than before, it is just now they have a voice and power of numbers. Before, marketers could treat them as an amorphous group or segment. But now the individuals within that group can and do connect and share and flex their muscles. The continuing conundrum this year will be how to continue to reach a mass while being able to connect with the individuals within that group in the way they want.
3. Matching, making and managing channels
Everyone talks about owned, bought and earned media. But marketers struggle with getting the balance right. The conundrum appears to be to go for reach with the traditional bought media with little budget for investing in owned and earned, or invest in owned and earned media for greater engagement at the expense of reach. Striking the balance is difficult but in 2012, a “test and learn” strategy will provide the answers.
4. Working globally and locally
The idea of the global village is a reality with universal Internet connectivity. But it is a village of multiple communities and cultural diversity. Global and multi-national marketers are confronted with the conundrum that what they do in one market will be shared across all. Therefore in 2012 there will be an increasing need to have a consistent global strategy with aligned and localised implementation.
5. Having customers “Do” or “Know”
Traditional advertising has been focused on awareness. But following awareness is engagement. “Tell me how” is one thing. “Show me how” is another. But let me “do it for myself” is engagement. The conundrum is how to strike the balance in investment between driving awareness and engagement to meet expectations.
6. Small ideas or a BIG idea
You load up your advertising with the big idea, you aim it at the target audience and you fire. And you keep doing it until you run out of firepower – usually budget. But now fragmented targets require a more granular approach with an on-going “test and learn” process is replacing the old campaign model. The conundrum is that most marketing strategy (and its funding and execution) is campaign driven and so 2012 will be a year of transition.
7. Mobile for reach or engagement
The conundrum is not mobile or not, as any brand wanting to engage customers needs to think mobile (It is the main access to internet in emerging markets). The conundrum is how. With so much opportunity for reach and engagement, too many have failed using the mobile for awareness and there has only been nominal success in brands using mobile for engagement. But in 2012 that will change.
8. Collaboration or alignment?
To embrace complexity requires collaboration both within the organisation and across the organisations engaged. But the conundrum is that collaboration requires alignment. But aligned to what? Corporate objectives? CEO vision? Brand? Sales projections? The customer? The first step to creating collaboration is to agree what is it you are collaborating on and to what outcome. Internal and then external alignment.
9. Who owns digital?
Digital is not just the all-pervasive platform of marketing. It is the same across the whole of the business world. Websites, social media, and other external communications meet internal finance systems, inventory control and logistics. Nowhere is this more obvious than e-commerce. So the conundrum is who owns digital? This year the CMO, CIO and the CFO will become new friends for every company embracing social media and e-commence.
10. Pay for results or value but not costs
Much of the cost of advertising is simply a cost. The cost of media. The cost of agencies. The cost of production. But with the increased pressure on marketing and advertising cost, the conundrum is how do we move from this cost based approach to a value or results based model. It is no longer acceptable to be a cost of business, but for marketing to be an investment, this year we need to stop thinking about costs and start focusing on value and the return on investment.
11. Social media is in-house and out-house
While traditionally many organisations outsource their communications needs to specialist agencies, social media is causing a rethink. In-house or out-house? With the opportunity to engage your customer in a conversation it is not just a marketing channel, but also a customer service tool, a reputation management function and a customer relationship management application. So is it in-house? And if so who owns it? This conundrum needs to be answered this year.
12. Who is responsible for CSR?
The customer is talking about you. And not just your products and services, but the way you manufacture them, the way you treat suppliers and employees, the environment and in fact all aspects of your business. But it is not just another channel to be managed. The conundrum is how do you make Corporate Social Responsibility everyone’s responsibility.
What conundrums are you facing or dealing with at the moment? Why not share them here with a comment and lets see if we can solve them together.
To see this as a guest blog on BizCommunity in South Africa click here.
What is the industry benchmark cost of producing a television advertisement?
The perennial $64,000 question. Or in many cases a damned sight more. The fact of the matter is that it usually costs whatever the budget is that has been assigned by you – the client. In many instances, it costs more.
How often do you brief your agency to provide a TV concept within a given budget, only to have the estimates on the approved concept come in at 5%, 10% or even 50% higher? Or, how often do the estimates come in within a few thousand dollars of each other and within the budget? Does this really equate to the actual cost of the TV production?
The cost of the television commercial is driven by the concept itself and the marketers budget. The budget is set by the marketer based on the level of investment and the potential return like this spot for Hahn.
What drives TV production costs?
The first driver is the concept itself. There is always a minimum production cost for producing a commercial, but theoretically, there is no upper limit. Often, the agency and film company will arbitrarily continue to add enhancements, contingencies and experimentations into the process, thereby driving up the cost – if there is no set upper limit.
What drives the upper limit is your budget or at least the upper limit of what the agency believes you are prepared to pay. This will be based on either the stated budget, or in the absence of this, previous budgets for similar executions, the level of importance which you assign to the campaign, your level of experience in such matters, and a range of ‘mitigating’ circumstances.
So what’s the solution?
At the outset, set a firm budget – before you brief the agency. This should be calculated based on:
- The projected ROI
- The planned media budget for the first year or phase of the campaign
- The category in which you conduct your business
- The strategic importance of the particular task
TrinityP3 has comprehensive industry benchmarks for assisting you in setting realistic budgets based on these factors. Having established your budget, you should have your proposed productions cost benchmarked at the concept stage.
Once your agency has responded to the brief with the concepts you are considering for approval, but before investing any more time or money in concept research or testing, contact us and we will provide you with an independent and qualified assessment of the cost of producing one or all creative concepts.
Our quantified and qualified estimates are provided within 48 hours of receiving the creative concepts and normally cost less than 1% of your production budget – a worthwhile investment in anyone’s language.
But more importantly, it is invaluable in ensuring you have a realistic expectation of the real production costs. It enables you to control costs without compromising the quality or integrity of the concept before final sign off, which results in an avoidance of unforeseen budget overruns once production has commenced.
In short, you know precisely what you’re up for up front and you are able to minimise any unforseen financial variations.
Better agency pitch practices for better client / agency relationships
I feel like I am constantly seeing reports and articles about the flaws of the advertising agency pitching process. A common theme of these articles is the fact clients often select agencies based on their creative potential but usually fire them for relationship and service related issues.
So how can you ensure your pitch process builds the foundations for a solid long-term relationship?
TrinityP3′s top 5 tips on pitching for the long term
1. Have a clear understanding of what you want
What may seem the most obvious is often the most overlooked in the rush to get the pitch progressing. It is worth really defining what you are asking the agencies to solve now and what briefs you may have after the pitch is over.
2. Plan it more like a test drive than a date or beauty parade
Whilst pitches have roughly had the same format over the years, it is important to determine the level of input you require from your agency after the pitch and build this into the pitch process. If you require regular strategic input and insights from key staff at the agency including creative teams, we suggest a day long workshop with each of the short listed agencies to ascertain the chemistry not only in personality but in the solving of marketing problems.
3. Who is paying, you or them, because no one wants to split the bill
Regardless how great the creative solutions and how well the chemistry is going, if you don’t ensure you negotiate a framework that allows you to get the service you need at sustainable rates for both your business and the agency, the relationship is likely to fail over discussions that detract from the core business objectives. It is also important to keep the performance criteria simple enough to be measured.
4. Be clear and up front in what you want and expect
Be clear in how you plan to run the pitch and how you plan to work after the pitch is over. In any relationship that fails, it’s usually confusion over expectations that are the cause.
5. Be prepared to spend the time to really get to know each other
The average pitch can require 600 – 800 internal head hours. As you are selecting a partner to help achieve key business goals it is worth allocating the time upfront. It is also important key decision makers have the time to consider the agencies properly and not get caught up in the administration of the pitch.
These are mine.
What do you suggest?
Leave me your suggestions as a comment here and lets see if we can expand the list to ten!
TrinityP3’s Top 10 most popular strategic marketing management posts of 2011
2011 was a challenging year for marketers everywhere. We worked with many of our clients both regionally and globally discussing and addressing a wide range of issues including: marketing agency search, agency compensation, agency selection, agency contracts, business strategy alignment, advertising process improvement management, client agency relationships, supplier performance management and production cost benchmarking.
These issues often became the basis for blog posts throughout the year and it is indicative of the commonality of these issues that the blog posts were widely read and shared.
It is most interesting to see the topics that received the highest reader interest. Below are the top 10 blog posts for 2011 in descending order of readership.
Click the titles or images to read the full post.
10. Advertising agencies can demand to be paid for ideas and resources but where is the value?
This started out as a response to the column Robert Morgan, Chairman of Clemenger BBDO has in AdNews. Agencies talk about the value of ideas but the problem is that often agencies and advertisers have two very different ideas on what is the value of an idea.
9. Top 10 tips for fostering collaborative agency solutions
A call from a client in the dairy industry asking me if I have any practical suggestions on how to foster collaborative relationships between their various agencies. At the start of last year I spoke at ISBA in London on this and presented the ABC of developing collaborative advertising environments, and this became the follow up to that presentation and our client’s request.
8. The right media strategy is more important than the right price
This is something we have been discussing for years. The obsession for many marketers and procurement has been the cost of media. We see media agencies do battle with each other trying to prove they can buy media cheaper than their competitors. But there is a fundamental truth and that is no matter how cheap the media, it is wasted investment if it is strategically wrong. Right?
7. A blueprint for reducing your advertising production costs
There are many metaphors bandied around marketing and advertising, mostly tired old sporting and military ones, but when it comes to production there is much to the said for the comparison to building and construction. For the past 12 years we have been assessing and benchmarking our clients advertising production costs across television, radio, cinema, digital and print. There is a presentation on this you can check out here.
6. 10 tips for renegotiating your agency remuneration
For 18 months I was in irregular discussions with a client who decided that he would handle his annual agency negotiations. He contacted me six months prior to them needing to be finalised, which was a positive sign, but decided that following our discussion he could handle them himself, contrary to my advice. More than a year later they still were not finalised so I sent him these tips. Obviously many people found them helpful.
5. Defining the scope of advertising agency services to determine agency compensation
I am often surprised by the number of marketers that ask if we could benchmark the level of agency remuneration and have little or no idea what the agency had actually delivered for the fee. It appears that many marketers are challenged by determining and defining the scope of work to be delivered by the agency, so this post helps to do that.
4. Top 10 considerations when selecting a new media agency
There were quite a lot of media agency tenders this year and time and again I found myself advising clients on what they should be considering when selecting a new media agency. I think one of the major issues with media is people often believe they have a clear understanding of media but can find themselves out of their depth on the details.
3. Why your agency may not be your best solution for digital strategy alignment
Investment in digital continues to outgrow all other areas of advertising, yet this year we found that many marketers were still taking a quite traditional view of their digital requirements. Many believed that their existing agencies were best placed to handle their digital needs, driven by the belief that this would “integrate” digital into their marketing strategy. The issue is what is your digital strategy and who is best to manage it?
2. Top 10 Questions to ask a strategic marketing consultant before you engage them
On January 14, 2012, TrinityP3 was 12 years old. Happy birthday to us! Twelve years ago we were the new kids on the block and since that time we have built a reputation for innovative, strategic and professional solutions to increasingly complex marketing management problems. But at a time when every person to be made redundant from an agency appears to hang up a consulting shingle, it was worthwhile defining what questions you should ask. Clearly many people agree.
And coming in at Number 1:
1. The Top 10 Most Common Ways Marketers Waste Money
This was a presentation that I put together for a client a couple of years ago. Early last year I was asked to do a talk for a client about ways of improving advertising process efficiency. I looked up the original presentation and on reviewing it found that highlighting poor performance in getting the basics right was more interesting than simply restating the basics. You can see the whole presentation here on Slideshare or as a video on YouTube.
As you can see, most of the posts come from clients contacting me and discussing issues they may have. So if you have an issue or a problem you want to discuss let me know and it may well be something many other people are thinking about.
Or if there is something you would like me to write about, leave a comment here.
Who knows, it could make this year’s Top 10.
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