The Birth of the Big Little Agency

Why good partners empower our future

Much has changed in the advertising industry, from the way relationships are formed to the available technologies and methods of communication. As the world gets more and more connected, it can feel much smaller or a whole lot bigger. It really depends on how your agency has adapted.

The way things were.

Big agencies were born out of media. TV, print and radio media drove most of the revenue and growth of the world's most famous ad agencies. Under that umbrella, agencies ballooned to become monsters. As they grew, and the landscape changed, they added services to their roster in an attempt to service their clients’ every need. Despite having the resources, connecting all the pieces has been notoriously unsuccessful. As digital started to disrupt the scene, the agencies started to add department after department. The job was getting done, but the advent of digital and the ability to really put data behind your marketing efforts led to bigger questions… how well are we doing? Is our media performing? What does an impression yield? Do all my efforts support each other?

This marked the beginning of the end for big traditional agencies. Now, by big, let’s not get confused with profitable, or successful… just big. We're closing the chapter on the days of 1,000 people under one roof attempting to service all of a client’s marketing and advertising needs.

So, what happened?

Digital happened. Digital killed the super-agency. For decades, we had the Madmen style TV, radio, and print agencies – and they knew their domain cold. They could offer discounts on media because they bought in such volume and they had great creative to help bring your short, concise, thirty-second message to life… made total sense. They also had an audience that was very easy to target and very easy to reach. We’re talking pre-Netflix, pre-podcasts, hell, pre-internet! We all knew where all the people were… they were in front of their TV or listening to the radio. Serve up a message your audience likes, during the programming your audience consumes… message delivered. Easy peasy.

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Then… BOOM.

The internet was born and with it, the advent of digital advertising. Even today, after all these years and all those digital shops, bought up and “integrated”, by the large traditional firms, most of the big guys still have a reputation for not “getting” digital. Why is that? How can that be? For the most part, it’s because of leadership. Their C-suite went from being masters of three things and believing sincerely that all could be accomplished through them to not understanding ten or more and many refusing to try. Couple that with those ten evolving so quickly that you face a new landscape every year/quarter/month. This is how small digital shops were born. They quickly popped up as small shops full of specialists within whatever was the hot new digital discipline… As Search developed, we got search agencies, same for social, development, Inbound, content, Apps and on and on and on. Similar to how microbrews all over America have put a hurtin' on the Anheuser Busch's of the world, so too have these digital shops changed the playing field of the Ad Agency; but the new space came with its own issues…

Splintering, Specialists and “Gurus”, oh my!

Times had changed and client needs began to differ radically from what they had been only a few years prior. Suddenly, advertisers lost the control of information delivery. Consumers no longer needed to see your ad, to then find out what store to go to to get the things they need and want – Now people were “googling” things and all the information they could ever want was available, at their fingertips. Meanwhile, in the agency boardroom, “wait, what’s a Google?!?" Of course, for all the inherent confusion, there were lots of ad folks compelled by the new world who were digging into building better websites, doing the “googling”, exploring social media as it developed… We started to see entire new disciplines of advertising come to life that the bosses and the clients just didn't understand… yet. The bosses and clients knew they needed them… just not why or exactly what they were doing, how to monetize it or whether it was effective. What’s a "like" worth? What value does engagement provide? Can we quantify it?

All these specialists were great and necessary for adapting to the new environment, but they brought with them their own problems. Now, rather than managing one agency for all your needs, the client-side marketer had to manage five to ten relationships. Not only that, but each agency was working in a silo and viewed the others as competition. No matter how well each shop performs in their discipline, the clients aren't getting the full power of all their efforts because the efforts aren't cohesive and synergistic. Shouldn't your social ads be promoting your content marketing efforts? Of course! And your PPC… is it tied to landing pages that convert?

Soo… What’s the new model and why it is better?

Where are we now? A few of us have realized that the sum of the parts is far more powerful (and profitable) than fighting each other for scraps. We’ve learned how to play nicely together, on a national and international scale while maintaining efficiency and expert knowledge across a much larger playing field. Now, we partner. By partner, I do not mean we play nice with another agency our clients force us to work with. I mean we (our agency) have established our own long-term relationships wherein we have fully functional, intermingled departments that play nice together. We work as one, managing the parts and connecting all the efforts, we make it all come together smoothly for our clients. Now, they just need to manage one relationship and focus on reporting GROWTH. We manage the rest. Now they’ve got the performance of disciplined specialists with deep experience working across many disciplines cohesively with their partners to amplify results. It’s the new team.

Think of your network of Doctors. Your primary care is affiliated with a number of specialists – each one great at a very specific discipline. You wouldn't hire a foot doc to fix your spine, right? No matter how great she was when helping with your foot pain. You probably would take her recommendation for a doctor she trusts and likes to work with — a doctor who she finds is an excellent, reliable and a top performer. Perhaps their specialties and a handful of others work together to treat all your issues? Exactly! All you need to focus on is communicating with your primary care doc. And if your primary care doc isn't doing a good job of managing all these moving parts for you… you need a new agency (see what I did there???).

The partnerships don't stop with other agencies, we carefully align with the best of the best in platforms and related services such as HubSpot, Google, Salesforce, Wistia and more. These partnerships can be very powerful, for them, for us, and most importantly, for our clients. HubSpot is probably the best working example. We are a HubSpot partner agency and with that comes support, resources, training, dedicated staff and oh yeah, a great tool! Most platforms provide a tool and some training on how to use it, but that’s about the extent of it. A good partner invests in their partners, and HubSpot goes all in. As they build their business, they use their massive resources to help us build ours. For example, we recently took part in Dan Tyre’s sales training boot camp wherein, HubSpot's top performer happily dedicated eight weeks to train our team on all the best practices and tools he and HubSpot have put together while building a billion dollar business. These are the tools and tactics Dan himself uses every day. The key message in his training? Help more. Not sell more, it’s help more. Forget "always be closing", Dan’s mantra is to "always be helping". How can I help you/your company? And help HubSpot does. They provide training for our clients; they help to train our staff, not only on the tool or methodology… but how to effectively handle client relationships, how to report success and how to hire within our growing agency. HubSpot even assigns dedicated staff as a part of our team. Think about that – they have full-time staff, like my friend @edileo, ready to help us with research, provide resources, hop on calls and take part in meetings. On a number of occasions, Evan has helped us by sending along resumes for folks with skills he knows we’re looking for, or even leads that fit our agency. It’s really like having an extension of our team sitting under HubSpot’s roof. All this gives small agencies like ours, the growth resources of a much larger organization, enabling us to hire better, train better, sell better, service better and ultimately grow better than we would be able to do all alone. The sum of all these parts? The birth of the big little agency.