Not doing enough research into your clients?

August 29th, 2007

Right, a bit of time away from the paid links debate. I have just finished Dave Pasternack’s ‘Dave to ad agencies: Do your homework or get out of my office’ article on DMNews. Whilst I did start reading it awaiting another anti-seo rant - I did have to say I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of what he said (however I will hasten to add I didnt agree with the over-generalisation of SEO’s as a whole as a bunch of sheisters)

The article has come around as a result of a recent study by the Intelligent Business Group, a UK-based marketing think tank and provided an interesting critique of most advertising and marketing agencies primarily in the US. However the main discussion point from the report was just (in Dave P’s words) “out of whack todays advertising industry is.”.

Other interesting findings were as follows:

• 100% of respondants stated that the ability to provide insight into their customers was one of the most important factors - in order words the decision making process went beyond the ability to create mind blowing artistic work and creative, with agencies being seen as partners with significant expertise of the marketplace as a whole
• 85% believed that agencies didn’t do enough research before making their pitch. Even more suprising, 61% went as far as saying that they believed agencies did absolutely no research at all prior to pitch

Dave says the next bit far better than I can

“Can you imagine this situation occurring in any other professional field? What would you do with a doctor or lawyer who walked into your office to solicit your business, uttered a bunch of smooth verbiage, but couldn’t answer even the most basic questions about your legal or medical situation? Chances are you’d toss this charlatan out of your office within 60 seconds. And yet clients and I’m talking about Fortune 100 clients tolerate this behavior from ad people. If anyone’s looking for the reason why so many accounts churn or why so many CMOs last only a few months in their jobs, you’ve found it.”

However it is a shame that the article then descended into an over-generalised critisism of the search industry, however I will add that some of his critisism, unfortunately does have some validity. Internet marketing despite having come along way in the last couple of years is still very new, and personally I would suggest the advertising industry as a whole is still learning how people react/use the internet and thus how to most effectively target customers. lets not forget, the television industry probably has over 50 or so years on the Internet, and print even more, so there are definite learnings to be made.
However I will end on the following note - surely its how we as advertising organisations (whether online or offline) learn from such reports, and apply to this to our working lives will determine how effective we become. This is not a one-way process though, and I would suggest that both client and advertising partner have to work more closely together, in order to understand each other for any campaign to fully realise its potential.

To read Dave’s full article, please click here

Entry Filed under: News and Views