I recently read the article "Marketers making far fewer agency hires, AAR finds" with interest. With a career ingrained in business development roles, I have a warm place in my heart for the pitch process and the thrill of the win.
It’s this affinity for the pitch that drives me to consistently be on the pulse of the ebbs and flows of the industry as it relates to new business, and to challenge the premise of this article.
Undoubtedly the statistics demonstrating that new business pitches are down (or flat) across all sectors of the marketing industry is factually correct based on the AAR’s data. But the commentary, and in fact the title of the article, is an overgeneralisation that I believe doesn’t actually reflect what’s happening.
As the owner of an agency that specialises in digital marketing and innovation, I’m experiencing a different reality to the one suggested. In fact, if anything we’re seeing an increase in new business activity.
The decision to hire a new agency is just not coming through the traditional channels as frequently anymore. Rather, we’re seeing a significant increase in two types of "new" new business processes.
The first trend: Let’s date first
With traditional advertising or media, assessing the best partner for your brand is naturally suited to pitching. There’s a thrill of the chase and every client knows this, with agencies pulling out all the stops to land a new client and trump rivals.
As the owner of an agency that specialises in digital marketing and innovation, I’m experiencing a different reality to the one suggested. In fact, if anything we’re seeing an increase in new business activity.
But the differentiation of one agency to another is largely based on strategic prowess, creative quality and the all important chemistry.
Now think about digital.
While strategy, creative and a positive relationship are all still critical, you throw complexities surrounding the evolving digital landscape and technology innovation into the mix.
This means it becomes much more of a balance between cracking the brief and demonstrating the skills and processes for delivering the solution.
This sort of skill and chemistry is only really understood by working together. So more clients engage us for an initial project without any pitch, and if successful the relationship builds from there.
The second trend: Blurred lines
Blurred lines are driven by the pervasiveness of digital and data across client’s businesses, and the evolution of who is responsible for driving digital change within our partner companies. The opportunity for a digital agency to pick up a new piece of business isn’t necessarily through a marketing or brand director.
There’s a plethora of new stakeholders holding significant digital innovation budgets who are leading the hiring of new agency partners in the development of new products, services and platforms.
This type of work tends to fly under the industry radar as it rarely runs through intermediaries and is often not glamorous enough for the industry press.
At AnalogFolk, we’re incredibly proud of our new business record. In the past three years we’ve built a thriving content marketing specialism, a world-class product and service design team and a successful data intelligence unit by attracting new clients that have helped us more than treble our revenues in these areas.
Sure we still participate in our fair share of formal pitches, but we have certainly seen a trend away from this process as well. So I would argue that there are not fewer agency hires, just fewer agency pitches.
Bill Brock is the founder and chief executive of AnalogFolk.