I have just been reading a report of a speech by agency CEO Brian Weiner that was written by Jodi Harris for iMedia Connection. It seems that Brian like so many in our industry have identified the problem facing our sector, but is his remedy correct? I’ll leave you to decide. For my part, I firmly belive that the model for the agency of the future is well established already. I started my Full Effect Company twenty years ago and today it exactly matches the needs of today’s clients.
We focus on “integrated marketing” and don’t, as so many who use the term do, limit our horizons to “integrated communications” and call it “marketing” – that’s just sellotape marketing.
We place the brand at the centre of the organisation, adapting core communications skills to build powerful brand communities, comprising lasting customer relationships that massively improve efficiency, which is the single thing that separates commercial success and failure.
We are not only media neutral, but address all the issues that influence the success of an organisation in a single end-to-end strategy, because that’s the only sensible way to work. Marketing services firms with traditional structures and practices can’t do this.
We have a defined way of working that is nothing like any agency I have come across and a network of independent experts covering the total range of marketing (not mere marketing communications because that just doesn’t work) disciplines who come together in infinite permutations to deliver the appropriate formula. Traditional agency structures can’t do this and are forced to deliver compromised solutions.
Even from the modest sample of comments on the iMedia piece, it seems that I am not the only one to have cracked this, although I am probably one of the early movers and today I advise agencies around the world as they develop their own models and take them to market. The millions of dollars in incremental billings that my agency clients have won as a result are testament to Full Effect Marketing and the undoubted opportunities that are emerging in the new world economy. So I certainly agree with Brian Weiner on one point – there are tremendous opportunities right now for marketing services firms that “get it” … largely because there are so many that don’t!
Michael Weaver
March 4, 2010