If the horse and buggy never gave way to the car…

That’s what today’s marketing industry is like. Even though the vast majority of marketing dollars are spent in the digital space, traditional marketing firms have convinced the business world they are still necessary in order to achieve sales growth. But if you really think about it, they aren’t. Not at all. All they do is “middleman” digital marketing, “middleman” TV advertising and charge sky high fees for developing creative like ads and videos. But let’s break that down, shall we?

Excellent video and ad creation are done by very inexpensive freelancers thanks largely to the millennial generation. These men and women prefer to work for themselves instead of being “bossed around”. They leverage technology to reduce production time and therefor, they charge less, make more and are more profitable than cumbersome firms. As far as TV, Radio and newspaper advertising is concerned, traditional agencies merely take a cut to book the slots; something all the media outlets will do thus saving you money (they do it for most agencies anyway). They are all hungry for ad revenue so they will give you far more for far less with a little negotiation. Print is the same way. The printers offer agency commissions to incent agencies to steer print their way. Use a freelancer for the ad and pocket the agency commission.

“We charge extra if you help”

As for digital marketing, rely on experts. I have a sign in my office that applies to traditional firms we work with that reads, “We charge extra if you help”. The point is that every single campaign we’ve been involved in with the dinosaur agencies, we have to test and prove that traditional messaging doesn’t work in our space. Why? Because we utilize segmentation and therefor require a much more specific message to each segment we endeavor to reach. Period. The days of crafting a one-size-fits-all message and getting real penetration are dead. Gas up the dingy, Fredo. Also, agencies have relied on steep discounts to drive results in the last few years. I’m not a big fan of training an entire customer base to wait to buy until it’s cheap. But that’s how traditional firms use digital, it seems. Plus, they usually have huge mark-ups for our services. Again, it goes back to the buggy giving way to the car. 

To summarize, old school firms will either advocate irrelevant traditional marketing channels, deploy 5-year-old digital technology or worse, and/or middleman the hell out of everything. All under the guise of being the “agency of record”. That truly cracks me up. My clients look at results and if we fail to produce, we are the agency of yesterday. That’s the way it should be and it’s time for the horse and buggy manufacturers to give way to the car, in the marketing world…