New year insights for agency relationships with Lee McKnight

Speaker 1:

It doesn’t matter what kind of an agency you run. Traditional, digital, media-buying, web-dev, PR, whatever your focus you still need to run a profitable business. The Build a Better Agency podcast presented by Light Label IQ will show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. Let us help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want down the road, sellable. Bringing his 25+ years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. Welcome back to another episode of Build a Better Agency. Glad to have you here. We’re back in our normal cycle now where we have some guests with us most of the episodes. Thanks for tolerating my January, I just want to talk to you all by myself, kind of wild hair. Hopefully that was helpful to you, but anyway let me tell you a little bit about what we’ve got going on today. Before I tell you about our guest I do want to remind you that the Build a Better Agency summit is coming up May 24th and 25th. If you are an AMI member, so you’re a gold associate member, a virtual peer group member, a live peer group member, you are eligible to attend the AMI family day on the 23rd. That is an afternoon of panel discussions and then we’re all going to go out for dinner together, but you’re all invited to Tuesday and Wednesday, which are the main days of the conference.

We’ve got amazing speakers who are going to talk about topics like how do you re-invigorate your agency in terms of the way we think, big ideas, innovation. How do you build a community around your agency to support and grow your shop? How do you overcome imposter syndrome? How do you build wealth outside of your business? What should you be thinking about in terms of building up your agency’s value in case you ever want to sell it? All kinds of different topics. We’re going to have keynote presentations, we’re going to have breakout sessions, and we’re going to be back with what was one of the most popular things we did last year which were the round table. Imagine you and 8-10 other agency owners sitting around the table with an expert on taxes or cash flow or media buying in 2022, or leadership development or succession planning. You get to pick the topics and there’s going to be a subject matter expert sitting at every one of those tables ready to answer all of your questions and connect with you.

We would love to have you. The conference is in Chicago. We’re super excited about it. We’re going to do some fun things too. On Tuesday night we’re going to go back to the Flight Club and we’re going to combine alcohol, appetizers, and darts. What could go wrong? We’re just going to have a great time learning from each other, connecting with one another, making new friends, making new connections, making new partnerships. While all of that bubbled up last year and I expect it to bubble up again this year too, so we would love to have you.

All right, so let me tell you a little bit about our guest. Lee McKnight is no stranger to most of you. He’s no stranger to the podcast. He is one of the leaders at RSU US. As you know, they work alongside small to mid-sized agencies to help them with their business development program, but they do a lot of research and they do a lot of thought leadership that is really, really good, and so if you’re not following them you need to. The reason I asked Lee to come back right now is one of the pieces of research they do every year is they go out and do a really extensive research project where they talk to both marketers, CMOs, business owners, people who are buying marketing services and agencies, and they ask them some really fascinating questions.

One of the things I love about this report is not only do you hear what the CMOs are thinking and you hear what the agencies are thinking and anticipating, but you can compare and contrast how they each see the world, which is really insightful. As soon as the report came out I knew I wanted to get Lee back on for us to dig through some of the data and insights that they had, and so that’s what we’re going to do today. Without further ado, let’s welcome Lee McKnight to the show and I have a lot of questions so I want to get right to it. Lee welcome back to the show, thanks for coming back.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah thanks for having me Drew. It’s great to be back.

Drew McLellan:

One of the things that you guys do is that you do a fair amount of research.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Your latest study just came out, and I thought the information and the insights for agencies were really fascinating, so hence you’re back again to share with us what you learned. Give everybody a sense of the magnitude of the actual study, who’d you talk to, when did you talk to them, and then I have a ton of questions.

Lee McKnight:

Sure, yeah, yeah, and again, thanks. We have been doing this report, and it is the 2022 New Year Outlook Report, that’s the official swanky title.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I love it.

Lee McKnight:

We’ve been doing it probably since, not probably but since 2010. We’ve got some nice historical data every year that we can put against the newer data, right. Why this report typically gets some good play, and ideally is helpful for agencies, especially small, mid-sized firms out there, is we are serving marketers and agencies for this one, and it’s the only one that we do that for, right. Of the agencies we went out to, I’d say 85% are small and mid-sized firms, and that’s typically who, because much like yourself, that’s who we work with typically. Marketers it was a little more all over the map but still come in with mid-tier type of companies, some larger ones as well, against both our databases. That’s some of that background. We fielded the survey in December of ’21, so that’s the back drop in terms of, and as you said, just realized it about three weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah right, yeah, so because you have the historical data and because we have been through the craziest time, I think, in any of our personal or professional lives-

Lee McKnight:

Agreed.

Drew McLellan:

… what were the surprises?

Lee McKnight:

Yeah. There were several. I’m happy to report, and course we’ll see how it all plays out, so much of this is prediction-based. You know what? I’ll start with the maybe negative first, because all the rest is pretty optimistic.

Drew McLellan:

Okay, all right.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah, one that was interesting, and it could end up being a positive thing for agencies, but we asked, one of the questions was, of both agencies and marketers, okay for agencies, “What do you think your clients in terms of non-marketing spending, investments in the business, what do you think that’s going to look like?” Then asked marketers a question about themselves. Only 21% of marketers said they would somewhat or significantly increase spending on non-marketing activities as we’re rolling into the new year. When we say that non-marketing meaning things like personnel, tech, could be R&D, could be product development, but last year in this survey it was 49%, the year before it was 77%, so a huge drop. What does that mean? Well, for us we thought it could be a negative for agencies. If they are slowly down product development, for example, and things like that, does that mean we’re going to see things drop off, because-

Drew McLellan:

Right. What trickles down to us?

Lee McKnight:

Exactly. We had talked about, just like before we came on, last year certainly a lot of what we saw with agencies coming out of that first year of COVID was, not for all, but a lot of organic growth from existing clients, fantastic. Going into this year, does this stat I just mentioned play into maybe some pull-back from those clients that you have now and some of that organic growth? On the flip side, and does that also mean well could they then be relying more on some of their in-house type agencies for example?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Lee McKnight:

For us, we’ll take the glass half full where okay, maybe that’s a lot of opportunity for you though, right, because if they’re pulling back on some of these, is that another place for your agency to fill in because they’ve now pulled back on some of these different areas?

Drew McLellan:

Right, right, yeah. Well I think one of the pendulums that swings is, and we’re going to talk about in-house agencies in a second, but one of the pendulums that swings in our world of course is how big a department does a client have in house? Pre-COVID, boy everything was pushing towards in house. Agencies were reporting and we were seeing in our research how often agencies were losing work to in house agencies, or grabbing to co-exist. Then I think COVID hit and what we’re seeing is companies aren’t abandoning their in house shops, but they certainly have thinned the herd there, because that was an expense item on their ledger. I think agencies, the pendulum has swung now where the in house agencies are smaller, less robust, less able to handle the volume of work that they used to handle, which is a great opportunity for agencies but one of the things that I took away from your report was in house agencies are not going away and we need to learn how to play nice.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah. Since we went there, I was interested to hear from your own research, and I know all the agencies that you’re talking to on a consistent basis. When we got our report and we saw that in house agencies were actually on, were waning, and you’re right, they’re not going anywhere for sure, in December that same month AdWeek had put out, and I mentioned this in a post, that in house agencies were actually increasing. I thought, “Well that’s an interesting dichotomy,” and I pointed, and I think everyone watching, listening, excuse me, knows that those kind of stats are probably coming from the much larger firms, and the larger companies. I think the small and mid-sized firms, what we see and what our report also pointed out, it was 63% of marketers said that they expect the amount of work managed in house will decrease somewhat to significantly, it won’t change at all in ’22.

Last year the number was 36% in this survey. That’s a big decrease. That’s a positive for agencies, right, in that sense, more work coming your way, but you’re exactly right though. That’s not a new thing. Agencies have had to co-exist with these folks for awhile, but that was one of the optimistic, absolutely, that’s fantastic because we saw the same thing with that pendulum pre-COVID of, “Man there’s a lot of work sticking in house,” and that’s rough. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Drew McLellan:

It will be, but one of the things that I think sometimes we lose the optic of around the in house shop is a lot of times they’re hiring the outside agency for what we think of as the higher ticket items, the strategy, the ideation, all of that, and then the in house agency does a lot of the production work that honestly we have a hard time getting paid well for anyway.

Lee McKnight:

Good point.

Drew McLellan:

I think if you go into the in house agency relationship with that mindset of, “We are the outside counsel, and yeah you’re going to do the paperwork but we’re the ones who are going to help you set strategy, we’re the ones who are that outside perspective that you need to really create new ideas and new opportunities.” That’s where you can charge a better premium revenue, or rate, than the, “We’re resizing an ad 12 times.”

Lee McKnight:

Right? Yeah no, fair point. That’ll be one, and as I’m talking to agencies the same way you are, that is pointing out so far. Now we’re not super deep into the new year, but we’re getting some of that feedback, again from small to mid-sized agencies that, “Yeah we’re seeing some of that work leave in house.” We talked about this too, part of that is COVID, and part of that is just hiring. The hiring issue is rough all around. I think obviously both those factors are playing in to decrease that.

Drew McLellan:

Right, no doubt, yeah.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah. What else? Sorry, go ahead.

Drew McLellan:

No go ahead. What were some good surprises?

Lee McKnight:

Good surprise. Another one was just marketing spending was interesting because 73% of agencies and 68% of marketers, and by the way they are never this aligned, ever in the survey, not a shock to hear, right? The one time when they are, it’s probably the stat where we really want to see it, and that is they believe that marketing spending will increase somewhat to significantly this year. Now 68% of marketers in our survey this year, last year that was 41%, so talking about loving seeing that. Now again, we’ll see how it plays out, but those kind of predictions, and again in house plays into it too. That’s all good news as far as at least the stat in and of itself.

Drew McLellan:

Well and what I love about that is what it suggests, perhaps this is my own interpretation, but I think in 2021 we were still coming off of all of the, “I have no idea what’s going to happen next with COVID,” yada, yada, yada. Some people wore a little more cards to the vest, whereas now I think people are like, “Okay I sort of get how this is going to play out. We’re going to have some variations and blah, blah, blah, but business has to go on. Work has to go on. We’re getting back on planes, so it’s time for us to get back into marketing our products and services. We have to focus on sales this year.”

Lee McKnight:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah and I can’t imagine, knock on wood, my desk here, we’re not going to see that play out. There’s probably two other big stats that were optimistic and/or interesting, and this is one I really wanted to get your take on. Specialization, which I know is something that you consistently talk about, and I know we do too to an extent. I’ll get pushback sometimes, “Look we’re generalists and we’re doing fine. I’m tired of hearing about we need to be…” Hey-

Drew McLellan:

“And by the way, the only way I survived COVID was because I was a generalist. If I had been a travel agency, I’d be out of business.” That’s now the new nuance of that justification, yeah.

Lee McKnight:

Oh yeah, for sure. With this report what was interesting is, and I’ll go back three years. We asked the question of, to marketers, “Are you more likely to look for a specialist agency than a full-service agency?” Three years ago 52% of marketers said, “Yeah, specialization.” 60% last year. This year it’s 68%. It’s continually going up, that they’re more likely to look for a specialist agency versus a full-service agency. I’m not surprised, and while there’s nothing I can say when I’m talking to an agency that is a generalist where, “Look we’re doing well.” I can’t argue with that if they are, but I’d say at the same time, I like to point out that specialist doesn’t mean that you are a farm agency, for example, or that’s all you do, but I still tell them, and I firmly believe, because we see it and hear it from prospects and marketers, that they do want to see that you’re an expert in that sense, and that you have a specialization of some kind. It doesn’t have to be laser-focused.

Drew McLellan:

They don’t believe that you can be an expert in everything, because you can’t.

Lee McKnight:

Exactly. Thank you.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, yeah.

Lee McKnight:

Preach it.

Drew McLellan:

In our most recent survey what we saw was the exact same thing, an increase. It was interesting because the larger the client budget, the more specialization mattered to them. If you want smaller clients with smaller budgets, which I think does align with a lot of the generalists, they tend to serve the local butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, people within two or three hours geographically of where they are, because who’s going to drive by 12 generalists to get to another generalists? But what we saw in our research was A, the clients were more likely to work with an agency more than 200 miles away from them if they’re a specialist, and B, the bigger the budget, the more important specialization was for them.

Lee McKnight:

Okay.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Lee McKnight:

Interesting, interesting. Yeah that’s a nice compliment to that stat.

Drew McLellan:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lee McKnight:

Yeah and I think, I don’t want to make too much of that. I think agencies generally understand that, but I always think it’s interesting when we bring it up because it gets some hackles on some of those.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely, absolutely. I get it. It’s a little counter intuitive.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Instead of talking to 20 people who all have big bags of money, now I’m only going to talk to two people who have big bags of money. I mean I understand the math.

Lee McKnight:

Sure.

Drew McLellan:

But what I’ve seen, and I know what you’ve seen too in your work, the sales cycle is shorter, the relationship is deeper, and the budgets are healthier when they’re specialists.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah, fair point.

Drew McLellan:

Again, your business, your agency, you get to do what you want and if being a generalist and serving a broader array of clients keeps things interesting for you, or you love being apart of your local community and that matters, more power to you. There’s nothing wrong with it. You get to decide. You just need to know the facts of what you’re deciding.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah, yeah I love that. There’s the quote for sure. Another one that was a little startling but I think at the end of the day agencies now, several years into this, I would like to think have adapted, but just in terms of the in-person conferences and trade shows, that a pretty steep drop with marketers year over year from the past two years. Last year we asked if they attended in person and what we saw was marketers last year, 65% saying they attended one to five of those.

Drew McLellan:

Of a live event?

Lee McKnight:

Yes, of a live event, a live event, in 2020. In ’21, dropping from 65% to 32%, which is not a huge shock, right? Let’s think about this. Yeah of course, because oh my god, we were back and forth-

Drew McLellan:

[crosstalk 00:18:17] getting on planes.

Lee McKnight:

Exactly. I think one of the things in the first year of COVID, you saw some of those agencies from a new business standpoint who were depending on the networking, the in person, the shows, and it was a pretty big slap to that face. That stat doesn’t, I’m not as concerned because I think agencies have adapted and I would be shocked if we didn’t see throughout the rest of this year, I hope, knock on wood, those kind of numbers increase, but I think that’s definitely agencies understanding that as far as business development goes, you’ve got to have strong in house selling folks, or we know the networking, we can’t depend on that like we used to. I think they generally, well they have to know that now, right?

Drew McLellan:

I want to dig into that. I want to take a break and I want to come back and I want to hear from you what you are seeing that is being successful for agencies who aren’t hopping on planes, and aren’t doing the in-person networking and door knocking that they did pre-COVID. Let’s take a quick break and then let’s talk about how you’re seeing agencies successfully pivot that. Then I want to get back to some data, but let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back.

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All right, we are back with Lee and we’re talking about their most recent report. It’s an annual report. They’ve done it for gosh, 12 years now. I know a lot of you follow all of the content that RSU puts out and I’m sure you’ve seen the report, but we’re sort of drilling down into some of the things that agencies need to hear from that report. Right before the break Lee was saying that, no big shock, that the attendance both on the marketing side and on the agency of in-person events in 2021, obviously, was lower than it has been historically. I think we’re starting to see, anecdotally I know my agency folks, a lot of you listeners, you’re back on planes, you are back at trade shows and you’re really gearing back but I also think one of the silver linings, perhaps, of COVID, was that a lot of you had to learn how to sell when you couldn’t sell face to face. I would love to hear Lee, from you. It seems like just because COVID is waning doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep some of these good sales practices going.

Lee McKnight:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

What were you seeing that was successful, that agencies were doing well when they couldn’t hop on a plane and show up at a trade show, or get on a plane and go see a prospect in person, and what is working?

Lee McKnight:

Yeah absolutely, and just a final note on that though, I will say agencies in that stat were not near as much of a drop. Agencies have been ready to go. Here’s the plug for, yeah I know your conference is coming up and we’re excited for that. I know the agencies I’ve talked to are like, “Lets get to Chicago,” so yeah I think, yeah. That’s why I think that’s going to be a positive sign I hope in the future.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, yeah, me too.

Lee McKnight:

I think what agencies had to adapt to, certainly, was okay now the networking piece, that’s all gone. I think what’s surprising to a lot of agencies, and where we found success, and this was not be a commercial for us but I will just point out that some of those tools that agencies fought, and I just had a conversation this week with one, that was thinking about coming on board with us. They’re like, “Look, the phone obviously doesn’t work anymore. If there’s any kind of mailing component that maybe we might have done in the past, that’s not working.” I had to say, “Well hold on actually, that’s 100% not true. A lot of the tools that we had in place in terms of inside sales absolutely are effective.” Now we had to adjust. For us as a company, and reaching out on behalf of our agency clients, the messaging, of course you had to be sensitive, and there was so, I mean you know-

Drew McLellan:

Right, all the nuances, yeah, right.

Lee McKnight:

We all went through it. Now it’s evening out a bit, right, but one of the things was, like they say, “Well the phone, how does that work anymore, because people are all working from home.” I’m like, “No, absolutely.” In fact, we had more people picking up the phone, believe it or not, over the last two years than in years previous. Now part of that, let’s just be transparent, part of that may have just been, “Okay I’m stuck inside here.”

Drew McLellan:

Yeah right, “I’m lonely. I’ll talk to anybody.”

Lee McKnight:

Hey look, not to take anything away from our sales people, but there probably was some of that, in all sincerity. What we realized was look, don’t discount any of these channels because these phones are getting, they’re being passed on to sales, and you have to be, part of our outreach, as it should be with any agency, you got to be respectful. You’ve got to alternate those platforms. Yeah it’s not just the phone, and I think one of the things that we saw success with, excuse me, was, especially with email which is still a valid tool but we all know how crowded that is, is just you’ve got to be as transparent as you can.

I hate to use the word authentic, because god it’s overused, but there is some truth to it where if you’re going in trying to be tricks-y, and there’s nothing wrong with experimenting with subject line, for example, but at the end of the day you’ve got to show them your value immediately out of the gate. “This is why I’m reaching out to you. You’re not a name on a list. Sincerely we are experts in this space.” Going back to that specialization, right. “Here’s why there’s value in initially talking to us.” You’ve got to have those multiple touches but for what never changed, and what I’d say to agencies now that are trying to do it internally, you’ve got to alternate those channels and you have to use them all.

Drew McLellan:

Agree.

Lee McKnight:

Yes phone, yes social. Yes the mailing component, which is part of what we do because it’s such an un-cluttered space.

Drew McLellan:

I was going to say I think so many agencies dismiss mail, and certainly with COVID they’re like, “Well they’re not in the office.” They’re still getting their mail.

Lee McKnight:

They are, they are. Absolutely they are.

Drew McLellan:

It’s just not piling up in a mail room for two years.

Lee McKnight:

They 100% are, and while that seems like an antiquated notion, to your point to a lot of agencies, look it’s one tool in the toolbox and I’m not just making this up for my own gain here, but we sincerely, a couple weeks ago, got an email that one of our clients, that the prospect sent to them saying, “Okay I got your mailing piece. I was really impressed. We do not get things like that anymore.” I’d totally point out to agencies listening that it’s one channel that’s underused. Yes, you’re right. Part of what we did have to change was we would typically send out a mailing piece first as a warmup and letting them know it’s coming. We would flip that and try to see if we could see where they were, but at the end of the day, to your point, regardless they’re going in and they’re getting their mail.

The other point was for agencies, it can be tough but if you’re getting all this organic growth and you are doing well, it is absolutely the time to invest in some of the tech that maybe is going to be helpful and not just sit there and gather dust like a lot of agency CRMs. We certainly rely on our tech stack to make our processes as efficient as possible, and you can get pretty excited about the shiny things. I know that you have talked about it and we have talked about it too. You’ve got to find your core, what’s really going to help you and what are you spending money on that maybe you should trim some of that fat. This is a great time now to make sure that you’re investing in some of those tools, the basic tools that are going to help you with email deliverability for example.

I think LinkedIn is another area that folks can use well but man it’s getting clobbered. I think we’ve talked about that in the past. With the cold selling and the junk, but I still think if you were more transparent… It’s interesting, we just did a challenge with a couple of agency folks this past week where we did six posts a day on LinkedIn for a week, and that was brutal. I even had a bank of content like you could do that, and I know you post fairly frequently, and it’s a lot of good value-added content. I don’t know how you do all the video you do, by the way, but for them it was a little bit tougher because they didn’t have that bank.

Even so, it was interesting the ones that were a little more personal. That’s not a shock but on LinkedIn I always feel a little bit, I don’t know, that’s not really the place to do that. The ones that were a little more personal got a lot more attention. Sorry, that was a long answer to your question.

Drew McLellan:

No, no, no but it’s interesting because A, you’re right LinkedIn is getting junked up and that’s disappointing because it was the one clean channel. B, at the end of the day it is relationship selling and so being a little bit more exposed, if you will, about who you are and what you’re about personally as it relates to the work you do and who you do the work for, I think actually is a way for people to go, “Oh I can connect with that. I can understand that.” It just feels, to me, like particularly post-COVID, people are looking for, agency clients are looking for a relationship that is not as transactional, and that… Maybe it is back to the, “Lonely, I’ve been sitting in my house for two years so I just want to talk to somebody,” but I think a lot of agency clients really do now recognize that their agency partner can be that thinking partner, can be that safe place for them to confide big ideas in that maybe it doesn’t feel safe inside the corporation to talk about, and they’re not going to do that if they don’t have any sense of who you are and what you’re about.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah I agree. It’s interesting what ties nicely into this, just going back to the report for a minute, is we’ve asked the same question for years and years about, specifically to marketers, “Do you actually…” We don’t say, “Actually read,” but, “Do you read agency-created content in any form?” Every year it’s gone up. Last year it was 73%. This year it was 77%. That’s huge in my mind. For agencies, I know during COVID, especially in the beginning, a lot of them said, “Okay now we’re going to do this,” and so many did and a lot of them have fallen off a bit, some haven’t, but it’s worth it. I know you have to find your own rhythm and you can’t be putting out six posts a day, which I will not keep doing by the way, there’s no way that’s happening, but they’re reading it.

This year we asked a little bit differently. “What platform are you reading it on?” Not shockingly LinkedIn number one by just a huge percentage. It’s important, I think, if you’re creating content and you’re putting it on your site, agencies, you’ve got to build it and they will not come. They might, but they won’t.

Drew McLellan:

Right, right, no they don’t, yeah, yeah.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah. You’ve got to get it out there.

Drew McLellan:

At least they won’t in the beginning. After awhile I do think you build up a following and people will subscribe, or however they have to access it, but in the beginning I think you have to provide value, value, value, value in their space, which again is going to be rented space, LinkedIn, or Twitter, or wherever you want to do that, before they’re ever going to walk in your house. It’s sort of the equivalent of if you want to go on a first date with somebody odds are you don’t invite them to your house first. They’ll be like, “No thanks. That’s creepy. I’m not doing that. I’ll meet you in a coffee shop, but I am not coming to your house.”

Lee McKnight:

That’d be weird.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, it would be weird. I think that’s sort of the equivalent for us is that we have to be really present and accessible, maybe that’s a better word than authentic, right, because you’re right I think we [bantee 00:30:06] those words around, or transparent, but I’ve always found that the agency owners and the agency’s content gets the most engagement, and actually gets people to raise their hand and say, “I’m interested in doing business with you,” is when the people feel accessible, they feel real. You’re like, “Okay I have a sense of who you are and I think we might be a good fit.”

Lee McKnight:

Yeah I 100% agree and I think we’re seeing more of that in the agencies that have managed to put a little more of that personal vent in themselves into either their content or the pitch. Actually just this morning a couple, an agency in New Jersey that was about to go into a pitch. It’s interesting as far as, I haven’t talked to a lot of firms about this recently. They haven’t done an in-person pitch, which is not a shock, in a year. I don’t know why it’s just Midwestern, but there’s a lot of those clients who have been pitching in person now for awhile.

Drew McLellan:

Are Midwesterners?

Lee McKnight:

Yeah. I don’t know why that’s any different. The ones in Jersey are like, “Oh my god we haven’t pitched in person in three years.” I have no idea what the correlation is there, or what I’m trying to say but it’s just interesting.

Drew McLellan:

Actually you’re right. Now that you say that, that’s right. My Midwest, and again we’re talking US-centric here, but my Midwest agencies were much quicker to get back on planes. I had some agencies, depending on the state they lived in, that never shut down during COVID. They just stayed in the office, right?

Lee McKnight:

Yep.

Drew McLellan:

They were just like, “This is business as usual.” My East and West coast agencies have been much more reticent about traveling, face time, all of that than the heart of the country for sure. I don’t know what that means about them personality-wise-

Lee McKnight:

I’m not either.

Drew McLellan:

… but it sort of fascinating.

Lee McKnight:

It really is, and the reason I brought it up besides the fact that it is kind of interesting is that this group in Jersey seems to have done a pretty good job even with that virtual pitching, of letting some of that personality come through. I’ve seen, they’ve shown me some of the things they’ve done that they’ve recorded. I know that’s a struggle man for some folks. It’s just weird. Again, we’ve all gotten used to it to a certain extent, but you can definitely see, and this is I think, “Wow Lee, really?” But, those ones who just take to it, and the other ones who are just like, “Man you probably should have someone else in the agency be doing this.”

Drew McLellan:

Right, right. I had an agency tell me the other day that they did a pitch and on the client side everybody had their video off, so they were literally talking to black boxes.

Lee McKnight:

Oh no way.

Drew McLellan:

I was like, “That is brutal.”

Lee McKnight:

That is. That’s rude also.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah right, I agree. I thought it was really rude.

Lee McKnight:

Yeah that’s-

Drew McLellan:

Because you know they’re answering email while you’re talking.

Lee McKnight:

Totally. They’re