How to hire an ad agency

We continue our ad industry bashing festival with a look at a post about nonprofit marketing campaigns at Cause-Related Marketing: Evaluating Your Cause-Related Marketing Campaign--Agency, which says:

... the job of the agency isn't to be clever for the sake of being clever. The agency's job is to help create a campaign that works, that is a campaign that sells.

That's the ultimate assessment for an agency. Did they bring value that made the campaign more effective? Or did they bring creative that won cheers from their peers and yawns from the nonprofit's constituency?

All this should go without saying. Sadly, it doesn't.

Cleverness, wordplay, high-concept design, and twenty-something edginess don't work in nonprofit marketing. And here's the deep, dark secret: Those things don't work in commercial advertising either! They just aren't persuasive. Unfortunately, it's the way many ad agencies work. Again and again, nonprofits get sucked into this way of thinking. And waste tons of money without accomplishing meaningful goals.

You don't have to drink the ad agency kool-aid.

If you need to use the services of a general ad agency, find out if they have any experience working with nonprofit marketing. If they don't, send them away. Quickly. Even if they're offering their services pro bono.

If they do, look at the agency's work. Is it relevant, or is it cool? Did it accomplish what it set out to do? Did they even bother setting clear goals and then measuring success? If you don't get good answers to these questions, run, don't walk, to the nearest exit.

If, when they talk about themselves, it's all about how cool they are and how many awards they've won, or is it about their clients and measurable results accomplished?

Not all ad agencies are bad. But you're going to have to search to find the good ones.

See also It's not a popularity contest.

Technorati Tags: advertising, ad agencies

Comments

[Sherri Garrity]

Jeff, you have hit the proverbial nail. The message has to support the objective and not the other way around. Unfortunately many people fall for ad speak and become putty in the hands of agencies who have a wall full of advertising industry awards that are based on snazzy creative that the average person could not recall. Try this test for fun: print out a list of logos, taglines or slogan without the company name. Then try to identify the company behind the creative. Even industry insiders get most of them wrong!