You CAN afford a creative advertising agency

| August 31, 2011



Business is competitive enough for companies of all sizes. Competing for a share of the marketing landscape is even tougher. Especially if you’re a medium-sized business fighting against the big guns. You probably think your budget is too small to get professional marketing services from an advertising agency

Not true.


Advertising agencies aren’t just for big business. While major client accounts may be their bread and butter, creative agencies typically love working with smaller businesses. The big brands provide a healthy stream of revenue to agencies, enabling them to hire the multitude of skillsets and resources required to produce anything asked of them. But an agency’s bottom-line is balanced and more secure when they work with smaller, local brands. As is their creative output.

Sometimes these smaller clients can be referred to as ‘challenger brands’. They’re the companies that are willing to zig when their larger competition zags, have a personality that has a greater chance of getting noticed, and will embrace being different.

This is what creative agencies want.

Working on a challenger brand is more rewarding. The process can be smoother, the work more creative and success rate higher. Both the client and the agency can get noticed from such work – everyone’s a winner. There is also immense satisfaction in an agency knowing they were part of a brand’s success and growth from small to medium or medium to large. Agencies want to go on the journey with the client because their stock in trade is not just creativity, its creatively helping businesses be bigger, better, faster.

If you have a marketing budget of some sort, then you’re in the market for a creative ad agency. But don’t go knocking on the doors of the big agencies just yet.

When I used to work at one of the world’s best-known agency names, it was not uncommon for a business owner to walk in off the street and ask to see “whoever is in charge” because they’d managed to grow their business from a few grand into a half-a-million dollar turnover. To them, that sounded like a large piece of business, so they headed for the largest agency in town. In reality, they probably had a marketing budget that was less than $50k for the year and with a little research they could have found one of the smaller creative agencies that would better serve their needs.

Instead of focusing on the size of the agency, businesses should consider the work of the agency. Its skillset and ethos.

And agency’s website should always be the first place to look. Usually, it will contain a list of the agency’s clients and samples of their work. In the client list, there’ll likely be some big household brand names, but there should also be some smaller companies you’ve never heard of.

Don’t be fooled by big brand names and your impression of their budgets. Big brands often ask their agencies to produce advertising, campaigns and ideas with budgets less than you might think.

Our biggest clients (some of the biggest names in the world) occasionally ask for creative marketing solutions on budgets as little as $15k. To a Creative, that’s a not an impediment. It’s a challenge.

Now, before all the entrepreneurs run down to an ad agency with their cheque book in hand, understand this: as a business, an agency can’t survive on $15k jobs alone.

Plan ahead. Work out what your company’s marketing budget and objectives are for the entire year and approach an agency with this package as a whole. They will be able to look at the best way to slice up your annual budget, advising on timing plans, media channels and schedules, and a range of activity to give you (and them) the best value for money.

It has to be what’s known as a “fair value exchange”. Businesses pay creative agencies in exchange for their expertise in developing advertising and marketing. This fee is negotiable if the agency sees other opportunities in working with your brand beyond the mere financial. I you can’t give an agency lots of money, then give them lots of freedom to create great work for your brand.

Medium-sized challenger brands with a good story to tell and a little bit of money to help get the job done, have enough to get a creative ad agency interested. After all, a $100k marketing budget this year, could be a $500k budget next year.

Matt Batten is the Creative Director at First 5000 member Wunderman. Under Matt’s leadership, Wunderman has produced several world first ideas and technologies, collected an array of trophies. Matt was named Creative of the Year 2010 in the Asia Pacific Region at the Digital Media Awards in Beijing and had the honour of being selected as a Cannes Lions juror in 2011. At the 2008 Australian Direct Marketing Awards (ADMA), Matt collected more trophies than any other Australian creative and was a finalist for the Grand Prix award. In his previous role at Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney, his volume of creative work brought that agency from a mere two finalists at ADMA in 2007 to being the most awarded agency in 2008. Matt is also a member of the Australian Society of Authors, but never finds the time to finish any of his several ‘great’ novels. Maybe this year.

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