Every spring, I put together a list of trends that I think agency owners need to be tracking.  I present this content at the spring meetings of the AMI owner peer groups and then later in the summer/fall, I share the trends with my podcast audience (2019 part one and two).  I just finished the deck last week and presented it for the first time today. One of the trends that we talked about that has really gathered steam is the idea of embedding an agency employee into the client’s work environment.  Many agencies initially offered it to keep a client from taking work in-house but what they’ve discovered is that it’s an amazing biz dev strategy.  Remember that 60-70% of your new business goal should come from existing clients and this is a smart way to trigger some of that growth. I don’t have one agency in my world that has an embedded employee that isn’t reporting client growth, new opportunities with other divisions within the company and a strengthening of the relationship.  It’s definitely a winning strategy for the agencies that have implemented it. Now that I’ve had a year of studying it from afar, I have some thoughts on best practices around this growing trend.  It is not without its pitfalls, if you make some wrong turns. This is a premium product — having your AE on site in their environment so price it accordingly. Think long and hard about who you choose to embed. It’s easy for them to begin to feel more like your client’s employee than the agency’s employee.  You want someone who is very committed to the agency’s success. Do you allow them to work onsite at the [...]

I am wrapping up two weeks of workshops and I am so gratified that AMI gets to offer these educational experiences. Yes, I love that we help agency owners and leaders get smarter and succeed faster but what I love even more is the energy that happens when agency people are together. It’s such a relief to be in a room where people have actually walked a mile in your shoes. An attendee asked me, “what do you enjoy most about these workshops?” and my honest answer was — “I love watching the connections happen. It’s wonderful to watch people discover they’re among their own kind.” This can be an insular business. We hold our cards close to the vest, we don’t talk about our struggles and we wonder if we’re the only agency struggling with the issues that plague us. Being with people who understand your world is good medicine. It’s invigorating and inspiring. And for many agency owners, it re-fills your energy bucket for a long time. Everyone left the workshops with a notebook full of new ideas (and a few stop doing items) and a little more pep in their step because they’d learned and laughed together about their shared reality. Whether it’s AMI or some other resource — don’t go on your own. Surround yourself with people who not only understand your world but want to actively participate in your success. You will learn more and have a posse of people who will celebrate your wins, commiserate with you on the tough days and be the first ones to offer help when you hit a challenge.   This was originally published in the weekly AMI newsletter.  To subscribe, click here.

Agencies have one of the hardest jobs in business today. There’s the obvious of managing client accounts, but also uniquely building your own brand, not to mention pipeline, quick-turning proposals, staying on top of ever-expanding technology, and even your own employee experience and agency culture. But while the list keeps growing, budgets and resources keep shrinking.  We’re at a tipping point, where the skills of an agency owner and your staff are more about the ability to find opportunities, solve problems, drive change, and deliver growth than just tactical execution. Clients expect agencies to become more strategic in their partnerships. Unless you’re perfectly fine always competing on fees, it’s time to look at the bigger ecosystem of how to collaborate and introduce ideas that help your clients’ (and your own) business succeed, while expanding our influence. The Innovation Crisis According to McKinsey, 84% of executives say innovation is critical for their business, yet only 6% are satisfied with their company’s innovation performance. While the past decade has brought an undeniable focus on technology and processes when it comes to innovation, conversations grossly lack the third element that the savvy 6% of executives understand—people.  The demand on marketers for critical thinking and more creative work has spiked, but most are at a loss at what to do. So where do they turn? Their agency.  Corporate leaders often look at creativity and innovative thinking as a value to post on a wall, flexible ways to work, or a physical attribute of office space. A key indicator of the likelihood of organizational success is effective collaboration. It’s a skill that can and should be taught, yet few internal to a brand are capable of doing it.  Again, where [...]

There are three main options for agencies looking to add programmatic advertising to their list of client services: in-housing, outsourcing to an ad tech vendor, or partnering with an agency that specializes in programmatic. Each has its own unique benefits and drawbacks for agencies to consider. Below, we compare all three options before sharing our recommendation of the single most important factor to keep in mind when making your decision on how best to implement programmatic for your agency. Pros & Cons of Programmatic In-Housing Programmatic in-housing is trending up as programmatic itself continues to grow by leaps and bounds. According to the IAB, less than 20% of brands have brought programmatic advertising fully in-house as of 2021, but many have tested bringing a few programmatic capabilities under their own roof while partnering with another agency on the more robust elements of programmatic campaign management. “Given the complexity of programmatic, there is one issue that brands, agencies, and tech providers share concern over, and that is the recruiting, training and retention of talent,” the IAB’s 2020 U.S. Report on Programmatic In-Housing explains. “Programmatic talent will remain in high demand for the foreseeable future.” For large brands with the financial means to compete for that talent and license, learn, and integrate the programmatic ad tech that goes with it, the benefits of programmatic in-housing include:  Complete control over your digital ad supply chain. Fewer touchpoints between the client and the team running their ad campaign. A dependable long-term solution for all future programmatic campaigns. That said, the primary drawback of in-housing (and the most relevant aspect for most small-to-mid-sized agencies to consider) is the expense, particularly with talent in such high demand already. The complexity of [...]