TrinityP3 Blog - Trends in Strategic Marketing Management

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Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by TrinityP3 Founder and Global CEO, Darren Woolley. Each podcast is a conversation with a thought-leader, professional or practitioner of marketing and communications on the issues, insights and opportunities in the marketing management category. Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media and commercial communications professionals.

Kylie Ridler-Dutton is a Senior Consultant at TrinityP3 and a specialist in agency search and selection. Here she chats with Darren regarding the agency search and selection process and the considerations required when planning and managing a successful pitch process for a wide range of agency types including creative, media, digital, social, PR, technology suppliers and more.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and we’re back in Sydney, after a short trip to London and New York, and in Sydney I get a chance to sit down with Kylie Riddler-Dutton, who is affectionately known at TrinityP3 as the Riddler. And we’re having a chat about pitching because in the last few years that Kylie’s been with us she’s been leading most of our pitch processes so welcome, Kylie.

Kylie:

Thanks for having me—I’d much rather be meeting in New York or London.

Darren:

Let’s organise that for next time. But I should say welcome the Riddler. Pitching; it’s not a major part of our business but it is quite an important part of the business, isn’t it?

Kylie:

Well it’s certainly something I don’t see going away from the industry anytime soon and it is a massive part of a client’s budget so something to take quite seriously.

Darren:

Procurement are running a lot of pitches these days, aren’t they?

Kylie:

Obviously, a lot of pitches are run by procurement but the pitches that we are consulted and asked to participate in are often directly with the marketing department but they also see a lot of value in (if procurement do have to be involved) actually having us consult with the procurement department directly as well so we work with either.

Why do marketers pitch their agencies?

Darren:

What have you found from your perspective have been the major reasons for pitching because there seems to be a lot of pitches, a lot of media pitches at the moment? There seems to be some pitches to consolidate content and creative. What do you think’s driving that or what are the reasons people are going to market?

Kylie:

I think there are many different reasons. It does depend on the client but it also depends on the current environment so a case in point would be media. Yes, we have seen a lot of media pitches over the past 12 to 15 months for obvious reasons in the market place.

But not only that, with media and changing technology and content requirements etc, there has been a need in clients to sit up and look at their current relationships and current skill set in the incumbent agency they have. With creative agencies, it can be that procurement require a three-year contract for a renewal.

Darren:

Sometimes it feels like three months.

Kylie:

However, often it can be that there are issues with the incumbent agency. So, actually what we would recommend to the client before we do kick off on a pitch process is we would like to go in and evaluate what the issues are with the incumbent.

A lot of the time we can overcome those issues. However, it also helps to bring into the current pitch whatever the issues are with the incumbent to ensure that we don’t get that with the new partner.

Darren:

Because that would be the problem, wouldn’t it? You go through the process, which can take anywhere from eight weeks to twelve weeks or even a little bit longer sometimes and all you end up with is either the incumbent and the same problems you’ve always had or you choose a new agency and you still end up with the same problems.

Kylie:

That’s often because the client works in the same way too. We have had pitches where you end up with a new partner and then the client walks away and expects that new agency to act like the old agency and they wonder why they’re not getting what they used to get.

So, a lot of the work that we do, post-pitch, is also engagement activities, or transition activities if it is a new relationship from the incumbent. We can help there. But that’s often the bit where we get called back in and asked to sort out some issues with new relationships. Continue reading “Managing Marketing: The importance of an insightful and robust agency search & selection process”

Posted in agency remuneration / compensation, agency search & selection, interesting observations, marketing procurement, Podcasts, strategic management | Comments Off

The 3 hottest digital disruption discussions at IBM’s Watson Summit Australia 2017

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Anton Buchner

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This post is by Anton Buchner, a senior consultant with TrinityP3. Anton is one of Australia’s leaders in data-driven marketing. Helping navigate through the bells, whistles and hype to identify genuine marketing value when it comes to technology, digital activity, and the resulting data footprint.

What do chess players, Tour de France cyclists, and a 13-year-old programming prodigy have in common?

Well if you’re intrigued, then please read on.

But first, a bit of context

In 1987, Deep Thought, a computer designed to play chess, defeated British chess master David Levy. However, it was then easily beaten in a two game match by Gary Kasparov, the Soviet Grandmaster and World Chess champion.

The development team was subsequently hired in 1989 by IBM and evolved to a new name Deep Blue – a play on IBM’s nickname Big Blue.

After redevelopment, Deep Blue played Kasparov in 1996, and came out of the blocks firing, winning the first game. However, Kasparov went on to win the overall 6 game match.

But finally, in 1997, after more heavy upgrading, the world was stunned when Deep Blue won the final game, to take the 6 game rematch against Kasparov.

In doing so it became the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

The machine was subsequently dismantled, and IBM put together the DeepQA team, that focussed on creating the Watson computer system, a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language.

Watson was named after IBM’s first CEO, Thomas J. Watson.

And in 2011, Watson (in the form of ten racks of ten Power 750 servers) competed on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Winning the first place prize of $1 million.

Fast forward to 2017

Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Data, Internet of Things (IoT) and Security have all merged.

So I was interested to attend IBM’s Watson Summit Australia 2017 in Sydney recently to see their view on digital disruption – and how businesses are changing the way they interact and engage with customers in terms of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence, and data stories.

There were some great speakers, as well as case studies, covering concepts such as blockchain, IT as a service, chat robots using tone analysers, and a revolutionary viewing experience for Tour de France fans using cyclist speed, energy, acceleration, location, gradient and previous rider history plus results data.

Here are my top 3 hottest digital disruption discussions from the Summit:

Continue reading “The 3 hottest digital disruption discussions at IBM’s Watson Summit Australia 2017”

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How TrinityP3 is helping marketers restructure their marketing for the future – three case studies

Posted on August 14, 2017 by TrinityP3 Consultants

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The market is changing and becoming ever more complex, and therefore business and marketing strategies are changing to meet the challenge. But while strategies change, often marketing structure remains largely the same.

At best, companies will make capability additions where needed, simply adding to the legacy structures of the past. Others will vacillate between centralised and decentralised structures and variations in between. What is often required, however, is a rethink and re-evaluation of the marketing structure against the strategy and the requirements of that strategy.

The approach we take is a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis – allowing us to examine the current resources and marketing investment to determine the challenges and opportunities – and then a design thinking approach to develop a series of structural opportunities for consideration.

Here are three case studies for marketing structural alignment projects we have delivered, or are in the process of delivering, for clients across a diverse range of categories and all with unique challenges, meaning that there is rarely a cookie cutter outcome.

Case Study 1:

Client Category: Corporate

Challenging Problem: The client’s marketing function was decentralised and operating across eight different business divisions. Budgets were fragmented, processes were inconsistent, and multiple campaigns and initiatives were being created independent of each other. The marketing effort involved more than 120 marketing FTEs working with an agency roster of almost 100.

Creative Solution: Over the course of the engagement, TrinityP3:

Identified the main marketing requirements of the organisation, matched these to the existing skill sets across the marketing teams and recommended key structural changes;
Created, developed and helped to implement a partially centralised marketing structure which still allowed business unit flexibility where required;
Designed and implemented a uniform campaign development process, including an Engagement Agreement across all marketers and key agencies
Benchmarked the FTE levels required to manage the marketing activities effectively, and worked with HR to implement changes;
Developed and implemented an output-based cost model for all campaign elements and collateral deliverables;
Managed the reduction of the agency roster from 100 to 15, designed and introduced a clear working model for the new roster, and ensured that all agencies understood their roles, areas of expertise and responsibilities
Introduced a print procurement methodology and managed a tender process to reduce printing costs by more than 25%

Timeline: The work was completed over ten months

Result and feedback: The marketing function has moved from decentralised inefficiency and waste to a highly efficient, partially centralised model closely matching the specific marketing requirements of the organisation.

The agency roster – now 85% smaller – allows for a proper concentration of marketing spend with fewer, better connected and more committed agency partnerships.

Substantial cost savings – upwards of 25% of annual A&P – have been achieved through implementing an effective and efficient marketing structure, introducing print procurement efficiency and marketing process improvements, implementing an output-based cost model for all deliverables and ensuring more appropriate agency engagement within a right-sized roster model. Continue reading “How TrinityP3 is helping marketers restructure their marketing for the future – three case studies”

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Losing pitches, part 2: a further 7 ‘less obvious’ reasons why agencies lose pitches

Posted on August 11, 2017 by David Angell

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This post is by David Angell, TrinityP3 General Manager and Head of Media. David has extensive commercial and media experience gained through a fifteen year career in media agencies, which he uses to help drive optimal results for TrinityP3 clients.

I recently wrote an article about some of the less obvious reasons that an agency, after all the hard work involved, can end up losing a pitch.

Well. After thousands of reads, shares and a number of comments (most of them made privately to me, as is the norm with this sensitive topic) it seems that the article generated some interest – whether you agreed with the content or not.

Of course, whilst account pitching appears simple – get them in for chemistry, give them a brief, get some costs and make a decision – and hey presto! – if it’s run well and properly evaluated, it’s actually pretty nuanced.

The resultant complexity means that ‘8 reasons’ was never going to fully cover it. Given the interest in the first article and never one to let a good thing go to waste, I thought you might like some more of the same.

As before, I’ve attempted to make what follows about the ‘less obvious’. All are based on direct experience, opinions or learnings I’ve had either on the agency side, or the consultancy side.

1. The agency relies too heavily on ‘insider’ people or knowledge

Sometimes an agency will be selected to pitch as a ‘captain’s pick’ – in other words, because a relationship is held at management level from a previous life. Where possible, agencies will also favour pitch team individuals who should make things a shoe-in – an account director who handled the client in a previous successful period, a creative who produced an award winning ad for the client a couple of years back, or maybe a media trading lead who has just joined from the incumbent.

The assumption is that these people are already liked, a known quantity and will possess knowledge that puts the agency ahead of the curve. I’ve seen this fail for a number of reasons, one being mismatched perception where the agency person thought he or she was liked, when in fact this wasn’t the case.

More interestingly, even if the individual is loved, the client will sometimes see a greater level of knowledge, or a familiarity with its business and working process, as an absolute disadvantage, in context of the fact that it wants a completely fresh approach, untainted by the past. Be sure of your ground, consider the brief carefully and ask the right questions before putting too many ‘old’ faces in the room.

2. The incumbent presents something unbelievable, in context of the current relationship

Continue reading “Losing pitches, part 2: a further 7 ‘less obvious’ reasons why agencies lose pitches”

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How many agencies is too many when it comes to roster size?

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Darren Woolley

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This post is by Darren Woolley, Founder of TrinityP3. With his background as analytical scientist and creative problem solver, Darren brings unique insights and learnings to the marketing process. He is considered a global thought leader on agency remuneration, search and selection and relationship optimisation.

This is the fourth in a series of one minute videos that address one of the many complex challenges facing marketing, media and advertising today. The Golden Minute series is an attempt to prove Albert Einstein right when he said “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple”.

But he also said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. So we will leave it for you to judge. Please let us know here if there is a topic you would like us to cover in a Golden Minute.

A very common complaint we hear is “How did I end up with so many agencies?” usually closely followed by the question “How many agencies should I have?” And while Nathan Hodges has answered this comprehensively here, it is interesting that marketers often find themselves with way too many agencies on their roster either because they have inherited a roster that is out of control or it has grown organically right under the nose of the marketing team.

The answer to the right agency roster size

At the risk of being accused of being a typical consultant, it depends. But generally the size of the roster should be somewhere between one agency and the minimum number of agencies required to deliver all of the capabilities you need and no more.

Continue reading “How many agencies is too many when it comes to roster size?”

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Ad Agencies: Prisoners of a Creative Past

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Michael Farmer

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This post is by Michael Farmer, Chairman of TrinityP3 USA and author of Madison Avenue Manslaughter: an inside view of fee-cutting clients, profit-hungry owners and declining ad agencies, which won the Axiom Gold Business Book Award for the best marketing / advertising book of 2016.

Who needed “hands-on management” when revenues were high and automatic, workloads modest, TV dominant, creativity celebrated, brands growing, agencies respected, employees well-paid, parties outrageous and clients long-lasting? Creativity was the foundation of agency success, and to nourish creativity, management got out of the way, lest its intervention destroy the magic.

“A creative agency needs to operate like an ant colony,” declared Kevin Roberts, former CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, “where every ant knows its job and has the freedom to do it. As long as we hire and inspire the right people, to do the right thing … our agency should grow and our creativity should flourish.”

Activist CEOs are not needed. Belief in creativity is all-important. “Anything is possible,” goes the Saatchi & Saatchi slogan. Slogans are an important part of ant-colony management.

The assumption is that loose management is good for creativity and tight management will kill it. “Bain & McKinsey stuff would kill our creative capability,” said Roberts. “I believe in hiring Mad Men rather than Math Men.”

Agencies did not manage Scopes of Work during the Golden Era, and they do not manage them today. If they managed or influenced anything in the past, it was their clients’ spend on media, from which agencies derived a 15% commission. Remuneration was exceptionally high relative to agency workloads. Why worry if a client asked for additional work? They’ll need more media spend, and we’ll make more money! Out-of-Scope work is a good thing! Encourage it!

Today, of course, the world is upside down. Fee revenues are low and declining; workloads are high and rising; brands are stagnating, agencies are treated dubiously as commodity suppliers; employees are paid badly, and client relationships are short and uncertain.

As for agency senior executives, they yearn for the good old days, and they continue their loose management practices. Does this make sense? Should they start to worry about those pesky Scopes of Work? Should they spend time reviewing Account Lead performance, acting like executives who know something about Peter Drucker’s leadership principles?
Continue reading “Ad Agencies: Prisoners of a Creative Past”

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Managing Marketing: Reviewing the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference in San Diego

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Darren Woolley

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Lyndon Brill, Senior Consultant at TrinityP3 and Darren discuss the sessions and topics that captured their attention at the annual Advertising Financial Management Conference, this year in San Diego, USA. Covering everything from Block Chain, to Transparency. Bot Fraud to Compensation and more.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and we’re here in sunny San Diego. My guest and I have just completed three or four days at the ANA Advertising, Financial Management Conference and my guest is Lyndon Brill, the brilliant Lyndon Brill who is a senior consultant and financial expert at TrinityP3. Welcome, Lyndon.

Lyndon:

Hi, Darren. It’s good to be here in San Diego.

Darren:

It was actually quite a good few days, wasn’t it? It’s a good conference, the Advertising, Financial Management Conference, isn’t it?

Lyndon:

Yeah, it certainly is and I think especially with all the transparency issues that have been in the market over the past 12 months, it’s really interesting to see where the industry’s moved as a body and where we’re heading into the future.

Darren:

This was your third year, wasn’t it?

Lyndon:

Yeah, that’s correct. My first one was Phoenix a couple of years ago and then we went to Florida last year and now we’re here in San Diego.

Darren:

One of the reasons why I started coming to this is while there’s a lot of marketing / procurement conferences, this is probably the only one I’ve found anywhere in the world that has the agencies, the marketers, the vendors, and procurement all in together—it makes it quite a unique opportunity to find out what’s going on.

Lyndon:

Yeah, it does. It’s certainly important to understand both sides of the story so if you’re coming at it from a marketer perspective or an agency perspective, as an industry we’ve all got to work together and it’s the reason I think it gets such strong support from both sides of the relationship. It’s a great event and it’s always addressing topics that are important to both units going forward.

Pre-conference session on compensation and more

Darren:

So it was actually the first day, the pre-day. The one topic that really stood out to me was David Beals from Jones, Lundin, Beals and Partners; he’s been doing their agency, compensations, trends, and best practices survey for the ANA for years but there were some really good insights from that as far as compensation (I prefer to say remuneration). One of them was the rise again of the commission.

Lyndon:

Yeah, you’ve got to vet how the survey was completed because I think the rise of the commission is slightly confused, I think from creative relationships certainly the retainer or value-based remuneration is taking a strong-hold but the rise of the commission really relates to programmatic trading desks and their relationship with their media agencies being compensated or remunerated by the marketers.

Continue reading “Managing Marketing: Reviewing the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference in San Diego”

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Struggling with your strategy? Try the Costanza Maneuver

Posted on August 2, 2017 by Darren Woolley

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This is the third in a series of one minute videos that address one of the many complex challenges facing marketing, media and advertising today. The Golden Minute series is an attempt to prove Albert Einstein right when he said “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple”.

Much of the consulting work we do with marketers and their organisations involves aligning structure and process to the strategy, be it marketing structure or agency roster structure.

Of course to effectively deliver this work requires a clear articulation of the business and marketing strategy, which can be a challenge to find. Not because there is not strategy. On the contrary, there are often too many strategies. But also there is often confusion over the strategy and the objective(s).

Confusing objective and strategy

I was sharing this challenge with my friend and colleague, Shawn Callahan, Founder of business story telling company Anecdote and author of the award winning book “Putting Stories to Work”.

At the time he had just finished reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy Bad Strategy and had been reflecting on the nature of strategy. This is because part of the work Anecdote does is to help organisations get their strategy to stick using business storytelling.

Shawn agreed that it is easy to get objective and strategy confused, especially when the objectives are more general and not specific or measurable. Such as to be market leader, or to become more customer centric, or to be a thought leader.

Now you may say that they are all clearly objectives, but I have had all three of those offered to me as the strategies marketers were working with. But Shawn had developed a simple way to distinguish an objective from a strategy he called the Costanza Maneuver.

Life according to Seinfeld’s George Costanza

Continue reading “Struggling with your strategy? Try the Costanza Maneuver”

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“Creativity” Versus “Improved Results”: The Paradigm Needs to Change

Posted on July 31, 2017 by Michael Farmer

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Ad agencies and advertisers are victims of the belief that “creativity” is the basis of their current relationships, and that “more creativity” will give them more of what they need.

Ad agencies have promoted “creativity” since the days of Bill Bernbach, more than 50 years ago, when agencies were at the top of their game. Advertisers, as their clients, continue to hire agencies for their perceived creativity, provided costs are rock bottom.

However, “creativity” is no longer delivering improved brand performance or increasing shareholder value. The search for more creativity is making victims of agencies and CMOs alike — neither lasts very long in a relationship. It’s time for a new paradigm. The “Creative Paradigm” is out of date. It’s not working.

Changing the mindset of an industry is difficult, especially when the industry has a long record of success that has shaped the attitudes and behaviours of generations of executive leaders.

When things go wrong, executives look to the past for lessons, and they think “we need to get back to basics. The problems we’re having today are the result of our abandoning core principles. We need more of the kind of creativity that built this organisation and created enduring brands.”
Continue reading “”Creativity” Versus “Improved Results”: The Paradigm Needs to Change”

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Do you remunerate or compensate your agency?

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Darren Woolley

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This is the second in a series of one minute videos that address the many complex challenges facing marketing, media and advertising today. The Golden Minute series is an attempt to prove Albert Einstein right when he said “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple”.

I blame Google for this. After all everyone in marketing and media seems to be blaming Google, so I am getting on the bandwagon too. But not for the reason you think. It is the whole search algorithm.

It is just that we have spent more than 17 years perfecting the calculations of agency fees or agency remuneration from the multitude of outputs from a scope of work. But our clients in the USA will be searching for agency compensation, not agency remuneration. In fact in the UK they will be searching for agency remuneration and in Japan it is compensation.

There are two types of people in marketing procurement, those that talk about agency compensation and those who refer to it as agency remuneration. So why the difference?

Those that speak the Queen’s English say remuneration (that is with the m before the n) and those from the USA say compensation.

In actual fact the two words do have different definitions, which you can read here. Continue reading “Do you remunerate or compensate your agency?”

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How much time do you waste in meetings per week?

Posted on July 26, 2017 by Anton Buchner

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It’s strange how the universe works. Or maybe it was an amazing algorithm predicting my behaviour.

Having just completed a marketing team assessment project for a client where one of the findings was meeting overload, up popped this Infographic by Oisín Grogan, The $200 Million Business Coach:

It’s a lovely flow diagram of how to decide on the importance of your meeting contribution – neatly phrased as, Why Am I Talking, or W.A.I.T.

However I’d like to pull back a step, and ask whether you actually need to have the meeting in the first place.

Plus discuss whether a whole lot of meetings can be amalgamated or prevented to give back time to focus on your business.

Here’s another infographic by Oisín Grogan that succinctly challenges you to think why you are having meetings:

Time has become a major focus in our new economy. Whether it’s businesses becoming more agile, automating, integrating artificial intelligence, or consumers wanting to interact quicker, time is becoming a central theme in management and consumer circles.

Everyone is saying they’re busy. So it’s no wonder that Oisín released his infographic. If you can reduce meeting times, or ensure that conversation is focused, then it will save time.

How much time are you wasting in meetings?

Continue reading “How much time do you waste in meetings per week?”

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Ad Agencies are Just Like Cruise Ships

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Michael Farmer

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We don’t see many Big Ideas any more. Content may be king, but content is forgettable, millions of tiny ideas in a million different places. Can anything new be said about a product? Or an industry, like the advertising industry?

Well, I’m not a creative — more like a dreaded management consultant. Nevertheless, here’s a cross-industry Big Idea, free for the asking: Ad agencies are just like cruise ships! Don’t dismiss this out of hand. Read on!

Unlimited portions. Cruise ships offer all-inclusive drinks and all-you-can-eat buffets, just like agencies with their Scopes of Work. Well-fed customers are happy customers, it is thought. There’s nothing better than coming back for seconds and not having to pay. Besides, it’s too complicated to account for food on a per-customer basis. Better to load up the serving line and let ’em come ’til they’ve had their fill. Build in the cost, if you can, in the all-inclusive price. Be known for all-you-can eat. You can cut the quality, but never the quantity. Whatever you do, don’t lose the customer.

Big fixed costs. It costs a lot to keep a ship afloat. The ship must be on the move, filled to capacity with fee-paying customers who want nothing more than to be entertained, fed and amused until their next big cruise. An empty stateroom is lost revenue and uncovered overhead — completely unacceptable. Fill up the ship! Do what you must to keep it full and on the move! If you’re an agency, sell those man-hours, even if they’re for crappy projects.

Discounting. Discount if you must, even if the discounts don’t quite cover the free booze, unlimited meals and SOW deliverables. Watch out, though, for over-discounting and attracting the wrong kind of customers. Once you get the reputation for being low-priced and down-market, you’re stuck — you can’t inch your way back to premium pricing. Ad agencies know this from their experience — many agencies are “commodity suppliers” paid at commodity rates. All they can do is sell man-hours at any price to cover fixed costs and deliver profits.
Continue reading “Ad Agencies are Just Like Cruise Ships”

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Managing Marketing: The concept of social media for sales in B2B relationships

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Darren Woolley

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Tom Skotidas is the Founder and General Manager of Skotidas Consulting Group, specialising in social and digital demand generation. Here he talks with Darren on the power of social media to generate sales and revenue as well as build business reputations and relationships.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today we’re going to be having a conversation about where the rubber hits the road because I’m lucky enough to have Tom Skotidas here who is a B2B marketer and a social selling expert. Welcome, Tom.

Tom:

Great to be here, Darren.

Darren:

It’s interesting for me because a lot of people are inclined to think of B2B as the poor end of the marketing mix. It really bugs me how B2C and brand advertising is seen as the sort of lead and B2B is the poor cousin. Why is that?

Tom:

When we say, ‘a poor cousin’ we usually mean it receives less budget, a lot less budget than B2C marketers get, and also when you work with B2B marketers you find that most of the budget they give you, as an agency for example, is campaign based or quarterly based rather than over 12 months as a retainer.

So, the reason for this poor cousin status–there are a few, but probably the biggest one is B2B marketing and organisations in general are seen as sales focused, sales team focused. And it’s the sales team and the sales leaders that are seen as the heroes of the business and the marketers range from well-regarded all the way down to the department of arts and crafts or colouring-in department.

Darren:

Yeah, very much a support role to the sales team because the sales team is (in most organisations) where the money actually hits the till isn’t it?

Continue reading “Managing Marketing: The concept of social media for sales in B2B relationships”

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When is the right time to apply the Golden Rule in marketing?

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Darren Woolley

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This is the first in a series of one minute videos that address one of the many complex challenges facing marketing, media and advertising today. The Golden Minute series is an attempt to prove Albert Einstein right when he said “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple”.

The first time I wrote about the Golden Rule was five years ago, back in 2012 in an article on media kick-backs and rebates. I first heard about The Golden Rule back when I was Creative Director at JWT and was asked to judge the Times Advertising Awards for Chinese Language Advertising in Taiwan.

It was there that one of the other judges was joking about the “Golden Rule” being an ancient Chinese philosophy. He said it was even older than Confucius. The Golden Rule being that “the man with the gold made the rules”. It resonated that an ancient, traditionally feudal society would believe that money and power define the rules, unlike a modern democracy, where the people have the power to make the rules, right?

It was a concept that stayed with me and which I have applied particularly to media and advertising in recent years. I have since found out it appears to be a much more recent saying attributed to everyone from actor Tyler Perry to the cartoon strip the Wizard of Id by cartoonists Brant Parker and Johnny Hart.

The Golden Rule in Agency Rosters

For more than ten years, a common complaint we have addressed from our marketer clients is “Why can’t our agencies just work together?”. At the end of last year the CMO at Australia’s largest telco was complaining that media and creative agencies don’t talk anymore. The difference being that Joe Pollard, who has had a career as a marketer and agency side, understands the importance of the Golden Rule when she goes on to says “its something that I absolutely enforce now I am back on client side”.

Continue reading “When is the right time to apply the Golden Rule in marketing?”

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Agencies Struggle with Declining Prices

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Michael Farmer

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Since 1992, the average price for creative agency deliverables has declined by 70% in today’s dollars, according to my research [1] for Madison Avenue Manslaughter.

Nevertheless, agencies have managed to deliver growing profit margins for their owners throughout this 25-year period. How was this possible? Are agencies still “fat,” as many procurement executives believe, or have they starved themselves to generate profits in the face of declining prices?

To generate growing margins, agencies had to cut costs per deliverable at a rate greater than the 70% price decline. J Walter Thompson was earning a 4% profit margin when WPP bought it in the late ’80s. If it is now generating the required WPP profit margin of 15-20%, it had to bring down its costs per deliverable by at least 85% in constant dollars.

This is true for other agencies, as well.

Here’s how it happens:
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