One or Many

Thanks to my bro for catching this article.

Excerpt that caught my eye:

“Mr. Berger complained about a remark Mr. Liodice had made in a recent article in the trade publication Adweek, saying that marketers are often better off hiring multiple agencies rather than entrusting their entire accounts to one agency. Mr. Berger said that causes agencies to spend “too much time thinking about what their own competition is doing instead of the clients.”

Hmm. So Mr. Berger, who represents a group that many ad agencies belong to doesn’t like the comment from Mr. Liodice: the guy who represents a group that is made up of the agencies clients.

How odd. What Mr. Berger is really saying is that despite the agency’s size and controlling power over a client, they instantly get paranoid and distracted when another agency is in the picture. How pathetic. Typically marketers don’t hire two agencies to do the same piece of business. With that in mind, what exactly is it that these big boys are worried about?

It’s been my experience that when a massive agency “controls” the account and exist in the same “family” of companies as another agency that performs totally different work, they still freak out and hate each other until they’re blue in the face.

That’s why the big agency method is full of crap and they’re laying off so many people nowadays. They have lame ideas from burned out people, they’re not terribly motivated to do great things because they know they have the client in the bag, and they’re full of themselves when the work is mediocre at best.

Ever wonder why a place like Crispin Porter is doing so well? It’s not because they have a lazy, burned out staff who churns out lame ideas on a yearly basis.