Here's the replay of the October 2021 AMI member only webinar examining the 2021 Agency Edge research data. https://youtu.be/kiGJ5wHU5lo Download the AMI eyes only executive summary here. Access the visualization data here.
At Agency Management Institute, we are often called upon to help agency owners plan their next steps when it comes time to sell. This may lead to the owner wanting to hand the reins to a current employee that has proven to be the right person to take over owning and running the agency. There are challenges that the seller has to contend with, but there are just as many challenges, and mistakes, the potential buyer needs to keep in mind. […]
Many smaller agencies get enamored with a job candidate with large agency experience. They can drop some great brand names and tell some amazing stories. But, can they be successful in a smaller shop?
There is no shortage of advice on how to be a better agency leader, but much of the advice out there is esoteric or theoretical. The ideas are grand, but a solid, tangible game plan is rare. Without clear steps to take, old habits and behaviors easily return before these new ideas have a chance to create lasting change. […]
When your agency takes a position of authority, one of the elements you need to bake into that equation is your point of view. Every expert has a lens through which they view the world or a truth they hold as a focal point of how they serve their audience. Your agency needs a point of view that differentiates you from your competition and demonstrates the depth of understanding you bring to your work.
If you’ve found this article, you probably already know that programmatic advertising is growing—fast. In a few short years, the share of digital ads run programmatically has skyrocketed from zero to 85%, and it continues to climb year over year, particularly as COVID-19 has hastened the shift toward all things digital. Without offering programmatic as a service, your agency may be missing out on what has become a massive slice of the $172 billion digital advertising pie. That said, the implementation of new and complex programmatic technology coupled with the emergence of new media channels like CTV/OTT, digital audio, and digital out-of-home is a challenge most advertising agencies don’t have the resources to tackle on their own just yet. Still, clients are increasingly expecting the option as digital advertising becomes increasingly synonymous with programmatic. In this post we’ll explain why most clients already expect their agencies to offer programmatic, what adding this service to your own agency’s repertoire entails, and how agencies can most easily add programmatic advertising to grow their revenue in 2021 and beyond. The Digital Transformation of Client Expectations In many cases, the traditional advertising methods agencies have relied on for decades are becoming less effective by the day as the world shifts to digital. Post-2020, U.S. consumers are spending more time online per day than ever before. Programmatic advertising allows your clients to get more bang from their digital media budget through robust ad targeting and data sets that work together to avoid wasted ad spend. Because of its improvements to campaign efficiency and scale, the vast majority of digital ads are already run using programmatic advertising technology. The programmatic industry has its own unique challenges to address as it grows, [...]
At Agency Management Institute, we have repeatedly found ourselves in the position of helping agency owners figure out their exit strategy. Ideally, we’re talking about this many years before they’re ready to execute on whichever outcome makes the most sense for them and their agency. The typical scenarios are: Just making a fantastic living off the agency until you’re done and then closing up shop. Others want to sell to an outside buyer. But for many, the ideal scenario is to sell the agency internally to someone they’ve been grooming as a successor. This is often where we come in to assist. […]
As agency owners begin to think about creating an agency that they can sell, one of the easiest ways to make the shop more attractive to a buyer and more valuable is to build a consistent new business machine inside the agency.
Like it or not, our clients expect us to be ahead of the curve. They’re counting on us to keep learning and evolving our services to keep up with the constant motion that our industry (and culture) is experiencing. How are you and your agency doing that? An interesting way to assess if your agency is staying current is to evaluate your offerings. Ask yourself these questions: What product/package or service are we offering clients today that we didn’t offer a year ago? How have we refined/improved some of the products/packages and services that we did offer a year ago? Have we evaluated them to make sure they’re still on point? Where has our knowledge base increased in terms of audience, sales, technology, or marketing trends? If we got called to provide a speaker for a conference called “Where marketing is going” who would we send and what would they say? Who in our shop is learning something new and how are they transferring that knowledge to the rest of the team? What’s next in terms of my own learning (topic, method of learning, etc.) I’m hoping your answers pleased you. If you struggled to answer some of these questions or don’t like the answers, then maybe it’s time to examine your agency’s commitment to lifelong learning. How are you communicating to your team that you expect them to keep growing and learning? How are you supporting that effort, not just financially, but also in terms of setting the example, teaching what you know/learn, celebrating people’s growth, etc. One of the aspects of our business that I love the most is that we get to keep learning. We need to know so much about our [...]
An agency’s success or failure is reliant upon the owner’s leadership skills to a certain extent. There are many elements that ultimately create an agency’s legacy, but the strength of the leadership is one of the cornerstones that holds it all together. Most teams are built with people who have come up and through the agency world, so by the time they step into a leadership role, there’s a risk that they’re doing it the way everyone else has done it. If you want to have a next-level agency, it might be worth the effort to reexamine and sharpen your leadership approach. […]
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