Do determine what you need: Do you need someone to lead or someone to follow? A firm that can develop a strategy or an expert at execution? Someone to challenge your thinking?
Do notice the advertising that you admire: Look for campaigns that you think are smart or creative and find out who did them.
Do initiate a conversation: Send the agency partners a letter, an email, or give them a call. Spend a few minutes on the phone together and you'll get an immediate sense of chemistry and interest.
Do narrow your list to two or three agencies and spend time at their shop: Meet their teams. Experience their culture. Initiate conversations with people in each department.
Do invite the agency to your place to review a handful of case studies: Keep in mind that you're not looking to see if they have good outcomes to report (all of them do) but to understand the thinking behind how they arrived at their solutions.
Monday, August 27, 2007
5 Don'ts When Hiring an Ad Agency
Don’t limit your search geographically: Keep in mind you're looking for the correct fit; restricting your search from the outset to a defined geographic area is unnecessarily limiting.
Don’t screen out agencies based on size: Talented people at the helm of small agencies are likely to have more experience than mid-level staffers that would be assigned to your account at a big firm. Services not offered by the agency can be outsourced. It's the attention and ideas that matter.
Don’t make industry experience a requirement: There is a cross-pollination of ideas gained from working across a variety of industries. If you want something different, go with somebody different.
Don’t ask for speculative work: Spec creative can artificially inflate the appearance of an agency and often overstate true capabilities. The best agencies won't do it.
Don’t let a spreadsheet make your decision: A checklist or some sort of tracking may be helpful, but don't go so far as to develop a scoring system and award your account to the agency with the highest average. Not every element on your list will be of equal value and a score sheet can easily introduce an impressive-looking, but false, equation into the decision.
Don’t screen out agencies based on size: Talented people at the helm of small agencies are likely to have more experience than mid-level staffers that would be assigned to your account at a big firm. Services not offered by the agency can be outsourced. It's the attention and ideas that matter.
Don’t make industry experience a requirement: There is a cross-pollination of ideas gained from working across a variety of industries. If you want something different, go with somebody different.
Don’t ask for speculative work: Spec creative can artificially inflate the appearance of an agency and often overstate true capabilities. The best agencies won't do it.
Don’t let a spreadsheet make your decision: A checklist or some sort of tracking may be helpful, but don't go so far as to develop a scoring system and award your account to the agency with the highest average. Not every element on your list will be of equal value and a score sheet can easily introduce an impressive-looking, but false, equation into the decision.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
